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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: End this reefer madness
Paul Flynn The Guardian
Monday 27 Oct 2003 Since 1971 all British governments have been charging towards harsher prohibition of all illegal drugs. Perversely, our anti-drug laws, trumpeted as the "toughest" in Europe, have created the continent's highest rates of drug use and deaths. David Blunkett's response to the home affairs committee's call to match drugs laws to the public's perception of drugs harm is a pipsqueak. But it is courageous in halting and reversing 32 years of abject cowardice by successive governments - whose answer to failing prohibition was always even more prohibition. Before the 1971 clampdown, the UK had fewer that 1000 hard drug addicts. Now it's 280,000. Cannabis was never used here recreationally until it was prohibited. Symbolically, it's important this week to reclassify cannabis possession from Grade B to C. But it will still be a criminal offence, arrestable and imprisonable at the discretion of a police officer. This leaves the door open to the intimidation of individuals, discrimination against racial groups and postcode injustice. The scalding criticism of Blunkett's announcement last year forced him to row back. The penalties for dealing or producing class C drugs will become 14 years, what they already are for cannabis. So while classification will be changed, the punishment stays. Stupid new laws have also been suggested, such as allowing cannabis users' houses to be confiscated. But even this modest proposal has excited the hysterical prohibitionists with urban myths, old and new. First into the fray is Tory Graham Brady with the potent pot alarm. He said contemporary cannabis is 30 times stronger than the stuff consumed by baby boomers in the sixties. If it were, users would get so high they would have to be scraped off the ceiling. Certainly, hydroponic cultivation has increased the levels of THC (tetrohydro-cannibinol, the drug's active ingredient) by between 1% and 4%, the New South Wales drug centre concludes. Using the heads of the plant instead of the leaves can increase THC levels two or threefold at the most. But users reduce their intake to account for this. Today's potent pot fable is the equivalent of the "reefer madness" scare of the 50s. The home secretary was moved by pleas from the bereaved relatives of hard drug addicts in evidence to the home affairs committee and elsewhere. They testified that damning all illegal drugs as equally perilous contributed to the deaths of their loved one. When their children discovered that warnings about the hazards of cannabis were exaggerated, their fear of hard, addictive drugs was reduced. There is a great gulf of credibility between government propaganda and the perceptions on the streets. This week's first step, which would help give some credibility to government campaigning, should be to reduce the futile and expensive persecution of the millions that use a drug that is no more dangerous than alcohol or tobacco. Instead, they should now warn of the dangers of cannabis but emphasise the immense health gain through ingesting it in any way other than smoking. The only way to collapse the evil, irresponsible black drugs market is to replace it with a legal one that can be licensed, police and regulated. Our drugs laws have multiplied the UK's drug crises. On Wednesday, Tony Blair will discover he has a reverse gear. It will eventually lead us to reduced drug deaths and crime. - Paul Flynn is MP for Newport West
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