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UK: Dame Ruth's patience rewarded

Valerie Grove

The Times

Friday 26 Oct 2001

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WHEN the Runciman report appeared in April 1999, recommending 81 changes in
the drugs laws, Jack Straw, who was then Home Secretary, would have none of
it. Ruth Runciman sat back and waited with a patient shrug (she comes from
the same Johannesburg stock as Helen Suzman, the anti-apartheid campaigner).
She is used to playing a long game and was confident that a change would
eventually come. This week, David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, accepted
two of her recommendations - reclassifying cannabis and relaxing arrest for
possession. Only 79 to go.

Overnight, cannabis shed its forbidden-fruit allure, as a cartoon in the
Evening Standard on Thursday reflected. A gang of fiftysomethings in
twinsets and carpet slippers were seen sprawled on sofas passing round
joints, while a young dude of about 18 moaned into his mobile: 'Somehow it
doesn't feel cool to be stoned any more.'

Viscountess Runciman of Doxford, who prefers to be called Dame Ruth, the
title she earned herself, is needle-sharp, tall and lean, with humorous
eyes. For the past 25 years, Home Secretaries seeking a redoubtable
committee chairman on drugs, Aids, or mental health, have sent for
Runciman. Why her? She has no idea. She read history (twice: at
Witwatersrand, in South Africa, and Cambridge), which left her
'over-educated and unemployable'. As a mother of three she had volunteered
for Citizens' Advice work. In 1974 Roy Jenkins appointed her to the
Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs. She knew nothing about drugs. 'But I
worked very hard at learning.'

Chairing the working group on Aids and drugs in the 1980s, she suggested a
radical policy based on harm reduction, as opposed to moral absolutes. The
same pragmatism governed the Runciman report, which concluded that the war
against cannabis was unwinnable. 'The eradication of drug use is neither a
sensible nor an achievable aim. The aim must be to reduce harm, which is
why I was so pleased the Home Secretary used those words.'

Her committee of health and legal specialists, academics, and two chief
constables met monthly for more than two years, for tough, all-day
sessions. 'The hardest thing I've ever done,' she said. 'Everyone had to be
prepared to put aside their most deeply held convictions.' She is adamant
that they were objective, unswayed by personal experiences, even though, as
parents, most may have confronted drug use in their children.

'When we launched the report, I was asked if I had ever taken cannabis
myself. I replied: 'I'm so old I wasn't even young in the Sixties'.' She is
65. 'I don't think one needs to have speeded in one's car to have a view
about the dangers of speeding.'

When Mr Straw rejected her report, many wondered if it was anything to do
with his pot-smoking son, whom he marched to the police station. She does
not know. 'But the Home Secretary does make the climate of the Home Office
and there is obviously fresh thinking there.'

Mr Blunkett has the advantage of knowing how far the report gained instant
public approval, even from The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the
eight Tory Shadow Cabinet ministers who that year admitted drug use in
their youth after Ann Widdecombe's call for zero tolerance.

Since then, police in Brixton, South London, have been running a non-arrest
experiment, which, Dame Ruth said, could have come from the pages of the
report. 'It means the gap between what the law says and what the law does
has narrowed, and allows the police to target their activity on dangerous
drugs.'

Not everyone welcomes Dame Ruth's influence. Baroness Greenfield, the
Oxford pharmacologist, quotes the Dutch Health Ministry, about 'a
generation who crawl out of bed in the morning, grab a joint, and don't
know what to do with their lives'. But Dame Ruth questions that. 'I would
like to know her source. Our committee were impressed by the Dutch. Their
population of addicts is stable and ageing: they do not seem to be
recruiting large numbers of young people to hard drugs as we are.'

Dame Ruth's preferred expert evidence comes from Leslie Iversen, author of
The Science of Marijuana, who advised the House of Lords select committee.

'Nobody is suggesting for one moment that cannabis is a harmless drug. This
is not what the debate is about. It is about relative risk, and ensuring
that our young people believe what we tell them.

'We risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater if we tell thousands of
young people, who smoke cannabis occasionally, that one joint will blow
their mind. They can see that it is not so. If we then tell them that
heroin and cocaine are seriously addictive drugs, why should they believe
us?' Their research discovered that in deterring drug use effectively, the
law comes way behind health risks. 'So a law classifying drugs in order of
relative harm must be accurate, up-to-date and medically meaningful. The
consensus among addiction specialists was astonishing: in all cases
cannabis was well down below alcohol and tobacco.'

Obviously, if alcohol and tobacco were introduced tomorrow, they would be
far more restricted. 'But you don't start with a tabula rasa (clean slate),
you have to deal with society as it is, and try to make constructive
progress.' Dame Ruth does not sit in her house in St John's Wood, North
London, in a haze of contentment about cannabis use. 'It is becoming
increasingly clear that regular users can become dependent. And we know
that cannabis can exacerbate underlying or pre-existing psychotic states.'

Plenty of anomalies remain, including the fact that allowing premises to be
used for smoking cannabis has become a drug-trafficking offence. 'In terms
of harm reduction, we think it's more important to make sure young people
are advised about the short-term risk, for instance, of driving, and the
long-term risk of dependency.'

Dame Ruth is not abandoning the subject: she will now chair the NHS Mental
Health Trust covering Brent, Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea. It is
typical of her that she relishes the challenge of delivering mental health
services to half a million people in a huge area beset by issues of
immigration, asylum-seekers and substance abuse. She is encouraged to have
a Home Secretary who is open to fresh ideas. What Tony Blair himself
thinks, Dame Ruth can only guess.

 

 

 

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