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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Artistic licencing
Ruaridh Nicoll The Observer
Sunday 15 Dec 2002 Permissive Edinburgh is years ahead of London I'm not sure what the English vice is supposed to be these days - it can't still be flagellation - but it wasn't what I was looking for as I wandered mournfully around Soho with a friend from abroad one recent Sunday night. 'Next year it will be different,' I said as we gave up looking for a drink. 'Tony Blair's bringing in 24-hour licensing.' The news that Westminster plans to rework the English and Welsh licensing laws, lifting restrictions that have been in place since Lord Kitchener worried about his munitions workers in World War I, should mean that London is finally able to shrug off its maiden aunt's image in the world's family of great cities. I did wonder though, as I took the train north, where it will leave Edinburgh. Always a haven for the hedonist, Scotland's capital has long been the closest thing that Britain has to a properly licensed city. A look at the damage wrought by last weekend's fire in the Cowgate shows how much the capital lives late at night. At least five of the venues affected were places where much of the best of our comedy, music and theatre played late at night, with alcohol fuelling its reception. Although the laws were changed for the whole of Scotland in 1976, Edinburgh embraced them as the historically progressive city it is. It has also allowed lap-dancing in its 'pubic triangle', set up prostitution tolerance areas and licensed its brothels. It even seems possible that former Rebel Inc editor Kevin Williamson will get the nod to open his proposed cannabis cafe next year. A noticeably different view holds sway in Glasgow, where the city has struggled with curfews and restrictive licensing. Tellingly, Williamson says that he would never try to open a cannabis cafe in the west. 'Glasgow's living in the Dark Ages,' he says. 'It has that oppressive religious thing.' It's certainly true that with the new laws in England and Wales and cannabis tolerance on the streets of Lambeth, Glasgow's determination to crack down on lap dancing clubs and its raids of saunas, begin to looks old-fashioned. Councillors' talk of the degradation of women seem judgmental and moralistic when faced with their east coast counterparts' discussion of health and safety. In Scotland's central belt, the shades change from paternalistic socialism in the west to enlightened liberalism in the east. Yet in this tricky world of city politics, everyone has a limit. A paternalism came, almost unintentionally, from the mouth of Williamson himself. Explaining the need to remove cannabis from the family of illegal drugs so that it no longer leads the young to the bad crowd of heroin, cocaine and ecstasy, he made a laughing aside that he wasn't about to open a cannabis cafe in West Pilton. Even self-confessed libertarians such as Williamson see a difference between legalisation and pushing it to the poor and depressed. This seems a pity to me, because relaxing these laws isn't about appearing a party capital to tourists. Opponents of Edinburgh's leniency use Amsterdam as an example of a modern Gomorrah that needs to be avoided, a point supported by the Dutch city wondering whether to buy up all internet names using the word 'Amsterdam' so it could promote its art rather than its arse. If caught sober at the wrong time, most residents of a soft city will flinch; Edinburgh can be an intimidating place at the height of Saturday night when crowds surf home on the rivers of vomit that flow off the Mound. But to see Amsterdam as Gomorrah is to miss a city filled with much of what is best in the world, its people embracing the relaxed laws with an ordinariness that reeks of culture. They tolerate a red light district that roars to the sound of drunken Brits on stag nights so they can live as they choose in a social city that creates art. In the old days, having lax morals could be faintly glamorous, creating a Berlin of the 1930s, say, or a New York of the 1950s. Now, with cheap airline tickets, progressive laws create a depression which sucks in weekending drinkers from the more moralistic places who get smashed, try to snog the locals and give the better cities a bad name. Prohibition is not the way to deal with the downsides of excess. After all, Italy, with its 24-hour drinking, escapes these problems. Rather, it would be better to calm those depressions. It is absolutely right that local authorities should be able to deal with vice laws as they see fit (and an outrage that Westminster reserved powers over drug legislation), yet it will always be impossible for cities such as Edinburgh and Amsterdam to see the true effect of their liberal policies if they are immediately punished by every leary lad who lives in less tolerant societies descending on them with beery intent. The Cowgate fire took the roof off too much of the capital's old town, but it did reveal the artistic endeavours going on in just one small section of the city, a culture almost certainly fed by Edinburgh's permissive laws. The success of liberalisation in the south isn't just important for Scots caught dry-mouthed in London, but also so that the permissive cities of old can go forward without becoming theme parks for people unwilling or unable to behave so badly in their own cities.
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