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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Editorial: A rightly deposed tsar
The Guardian
Saturday 04 Aug 2001 Leader Keith Hellawell lost his way in Whitehall It was a defensive farewell. It needed to be. In a succession of interviews this week, Keith Hellawell, the departing drugs tsar, asserted he had not been a failure and insisted Britain's anti-drugs strategy was "the envy of the world". Both assertions, alas, are wrong. Ironically, Keith Hellawell made a much bigger contribution to drugs policy as a chief constable - in Cleveland as well as West Yorkshire - than as the government's chief anti-drugs campaign coordinator. In his former role he was the first to set up a specialist drugs squad, but was also ready to consider radical options like the decriminalisation of cannabis, and to remind politicians that young people enjoyed the drug. In the second, he became the lapdog of a government that has insisted on maintaining a hardline stance on drugs. The UK has the harshest anti- drugs laws in Europe, while still maintaining the highest consumption of soft and hard drugs. Instead of challenging ministers about these contradictions - or even supporting his immediate and more liberal political boss, Mo Mowlam, who wanted clearer separation of soft and hard drugs - the drug tsar never forgot who appointed him to his Cabinet Office post, Tony Blair. Hardline became Mr Hellawell's middle name. His biggest failure was his rejection of last year's national commission on drug misuse - on which sat two chief constables. This documented the degree to which the 30-year-old current British law no longer reflected scientific, medical or sociological evidence. He lined up with ministers in rejecting the idea of reclassifying drugs according to their harm and paid far too little attention to the wide variation between police forces on their cautioning policies. By the time the new home secretary, David Blunkett, sidelined him, he was a sad and peripheral Whitehall figure. He leaves a strategy which still places far too much emphasis on police and customs and far too little on treatment and education.
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