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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Reclassifying cannabis
Simon Jeffery The Guardian
Wednesday 24 Oct 2001 The government is to reclassify cannabis in an effort to cut the amount of time police spend dealing with petty crime. Simon Jeffery explains Is cannabis now legal? No. The home secretary, David Blunkett, has, however, made it a class C drug - putting it on a level with controlled substances such as tranquillisers and steroids. What does that mean in practice? Police will no longer be able to arrest anyone caught smoking the drug. Most people caught in possession will face no legal action, although the maximum penalty will be two years in jail (reduced from five). To prosecute, police will be required to produce a court summons; few will bother. Is this decriminalisation? No. Cannabis use will still be a criminal offence. The penalty for possession with intent to supply (dealing) is to be cut from 14 years in jail to five, but - unlike straightforward possession - police will still be able to make an arrest. This means that when the proposals are in force, expected to be early next year, it will be an arrestable offence to supply cannabis but not to possess it. How many people are arrested at present? The number of those dealt with by the police for drugs offences involving cannabis doubled from 40,194 in 1990 to 86,034 in 1997, after Michael Howard, the then home secretary, announced he was tripling the maximum fines. Since Labour came to power the numbers arrested for possession have stayed near the same level, with more than 81,000 arrested for possession in the 12 months to March 2001. Why the changes? Despite the arrest rate, cannabis possession is regarded by many senior police officers to be a trivial offence - nevertheless it consumes an estimated 74,000 man hours a year in London alone. The proposals are intended to free up police time to concentrate on more serious crimes and harder drugs. Has this been tried before? Since July, police in Lambeth, south London, have not arrested those in possession of cannabis but confiscated the drug and given a formal warning, a step down from a caution. The process lasts around 10 minutes (as opposed to four hours for an arrest) and allows officers to maintain their authority while focussing more of their attention on serious crimes, such as gun violence or crack cocaine use. It is too soon to know the long-term successes or failures of the policy. Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan police commissioner, supports reclassification as a means to cut down police hours spent arresting people for cannabis use. What about medical use? Some multiple sclerosis and cancer patients say that cannabis eases their suffering. Although the drug has been used in medicine for thousands of years, doctors were banned from prescribing it by law in 1971. Mr Blunkett has signalled he is ready to licence cannabis as a pain killer. What about harder drugs? Mr Blunkett also provided official encouragement for doctors to prescribe heroin. The idea is that if the most hardcore heroin addicts have access to heroin legally, they will not go to dealers. Prescriptions from doctors could bring many heroin addicts into touch with the treatment system, where they could progress to methadone. There are now more than 200,000 heroin users in Britain, compared with little more than 1,000 registered users in the 1970s.
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