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UK: Rosie Boycott: A bad drugs policy that still wrecks half a million lives

Rosie Boycott

The Independent on Sunday

Saturday 27 Oct 2001

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In truth, I never thought it would really happen. I never thought this
government would even begin to relax the drugs laws. At least not so
quickly and with such a broad reach - a first move that not only proposed
that cannabis be declassified from Class B to Class C, but also opened the
door for patients to obtain the drug on prescription.

Four years and four weeks ago to this day, when the IoS launched its
campaign to decriminalise cannabis, the attitude of the Labour Party was
one of extreme hostility. Alastair Campbell said we were middle-class
journos acting out our student hippy days from the safety of Canary Wharf.

Even fellow hacks had a good laugh at our expense. I well remember meeting
the late political correspondent Tony Bevins at a party at that year's
Labour Party conference and being told that it was sheer madness: Labour
would never, repeat never, do anything of the kind. At a lunch that same
week, Gordon Brown did not disguise his sympathy for what we were doing,
but it was clear that Labour's fear of Middle England and the Daily Mail
was just too overwhelming for such a move to be countenanced.

But I never doubted the wisdom of what we were doing, nor could I ever
forget just how popular it was with so many people. And not just, as Mr
Campbell put it, with ageing hippies. Letters of support from policemen,
teachers, prison wardens, doctors, academics and parents - not to mention
their dope-smoking off-spring - filled our mail bags every day.

Virtually every message was the same: at last, someone is seeing sense.
Finally, we were acknowledging the madness of a law that says that while
tobacco and alcohol kill and are freely available, cannabis does no harm
and is banned. Hardly any letters, e-mails or phone calls came in
expressing opposition. We had touched a popular nerve.

The Government, in its early phase, was so keen to be seen to be hip and
radical - remember all those meetings with pop stars at No 10? Behind the
scenes, it was nothing of the sort. The Home Secretary, Jack Straw, was
proving himself as blinkered and as reactionary as any of his Tory
predecessors. Any relaxation in the law seemed an increasingly remote
possibility.

We marched, we organised a rally at Westminster, we petitioned - but all to
no avail. Week after week, the paper highlighted stories of people whose
lives had been ruined because they were caught in possession of a bit of
weed. Some wanted it for their own pleasure, others needed it to relieve
the symptoms of multiple sclerosis. Still the Government would not budge.
We held the law up to ridicule, comparing the dangers of drinking alcohol
(Westminster is stuffed with bars) with puffs of dope.

We knew the Government was littered with hypocrites; we knew, unless they
really were sub-human, that some of them must have smoked (and inhaled) and
enjoyed it, in their youth. No, they persisted, not them.

Suddenly, without warning, the current Home Secretary David Blunkett has
put aside Mr Straw's jack-boots and donned some comfier sandals. Even
Labour insiders seem bemused by the proposed change. As far as I am
concerned, this is one of the most popular announcements they've made in
years. But dread fear of Middle England still grips ministers. So they
snuck out the news of reclassification under the cheering that accompanied
the IRA's momentous decision on decommissioning, or was it true that Mr
Blunkett had been planning this for a couple of weeks?

I'll leave the theorising about Mr Blunkett's political motives to others.
Maybe it was - just for once - a sane act by a decent bloke which in one
swift move has shaken up and opened up our antiquated drug laws, paving the
way for some good, honest talking at last.

Last year, cannabis related offences reached the 100,000 mark. At a
minimum, each case takes up three hours of police time. So at a stroke, the
proposal will liberate the police from this tiresome and pointless
activity. He is asking his advisors to investigate new regulations
governing medical use, so a wheelchair-bound MS sufferer is no longer going
to face prosecution for growing marijuana on the kitchen windowsill.

But, Mr Blunkett, you will have to go further. One of the main arguments in
our campaign was that dope was not, in any chemical sense, responsible for
encouraging people towards harder drugs. That is as daft as saying one
glass of wine turns a teenager into a vodka-guzzling alcoholic.

Buried in the middle of this extraordinary announcement was the almost more
extraordinary news that doctors are to be encouraged to start prescribing
pure heroin for addicts, a progressive and humane decision.

But wider policy on hard drugs is still a mess. The dealer who sells you
the dope (still an illegal act) is also the criminal who'll sell you
cocaine or heroin. And the criminals are only interested in one thing:
money. The safety and well-being of the user matters not one bit: harder
drugs mean bigger profits. This connection will only be broken when the
sale and the possession of cannabis is fully legalised.

Even in Holland, which declared in 1976 that people would not be formally
prosecuted for possession of small amounts of cannabis and then widened
this softening of the law in 1980 when the sale of cannabis at coffee shops
was introduced, hasn't resolved this problem. It is true that - contrary to
the spin put out by anti-drug campaigners - the Dutch now have fewer people
using cannabis than we do, fewer drug related deaths and a less serious use
of hard drugs. But this crazy anomaly still exists. You can smoke it, but
your dealer is a criminal. Can you imagine such a ludicrous state affairs
existing with the supply of alcohol?

This lunacy is very, very dangerous. As Nick Davies pointed out in his
brilliant Channel 4 series Drugs laws don't work, deaths from hard drugs
like heroin are largely not from the heroin itself, but from the substances
that unscrupulous dealers mix with it: anything from talcum powder to
strychnine. Right now, we live in a world where the substances responsible
for more misery, wasted lives, broken families and deaths are completely
out of government control. They are in the hands of a small, vastly rich,
incredibly powerful group of drug barons who have grown obscenely wealthy
on the product of so much human misery, and illegality.

Prohibition has not just failed to stem the supply of drugs into our
society: it has actively fuelled it. In 1968, there were fewer than 500
heroin addicts in Britain. Today, the Home Office says that there may be as
many as 500,000. Think of that in terms of human sadness, and weep.

When the IoS campaign began, I was passionately against ever contemplating
the idea of legalising harder drugs. Now I am not so sure. While the
supply, content and control of drugs still remains in the hands of
criminals who don't give a damn about the health and safety of our young
people, we are living with a crisis of our own making. And this will carry
on until the Government finally has the courage and sense to seize control
of this vast, lethal and unbelievably lucrative industry.

There is only one way to do it. Drugs have to be legalised and controlled.
Otherwise, the sorry state of affairs that now exists on the streets of our
country will only get worse. Sorry, Mr Blunkett, one day you'll have to go
even further. For all of us. Please don't wait too long.

Rosie Boycott was editor of the Independent on Sunday from 1996 to 1998

 

 

 

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