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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Drugs turn the brains of politicians into marzipan
Simon Jenkins The Times
Friday 23 Jan 2004 Opinion Warning. Drugs can seriously damage your political health. They induce hallucinations of potency and fantasies of control. After prolonged indulgence, acute moral confusion can ensue. Politicians suffering from obsessive timidity begin to lose touch with reality. Their brains get like marzipan. Withdrawal is agony. Nothing better illustrates this syndrome than yesterday's row over the reclassification of cannabis. The row has brought out a rare best in the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, and a worst in his old foe, Michael Howard. Under Tony Blair, all contributions to political debate begin with a mind-numbing platitude. If speaking on Iraq you must start: 'I, of course, believe Saddam Hussein is a vicious, genocidal monster who killed millions of innocent children.'On penal reform you must begin: 'I believe that nasty, sadistic baby- killers and mass murderers should be locked away for life meaning life. Likewise on drugs, you must declare them evil or no one will listen. All drugs affect the brain and are likely to be harmful. For certain vulnerable young people cannabis can induce addiction and may correlate with mental illness. I served for two years on the 2000 Police Foundation committee on drugs law and have no doubt on this. Cannabis is best avoided. May we now continue? Classification under the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act was a modest attempt to grade illegal narcotics by relative harm. This was to guide the police, the courts and the public. A Home Office committee, composed not of dopehead hippies but of reputable doctors and pharmacologists, watches the science and reviews the classes. Opinion has long held that Ecstasy, of which millions of tablets are consumed each year, should not be in Class A alongside heroin, but in Class B. Meanwhile cannabis should not be in Class B with amphetamines but in Class C. New and more powerful cannabis variants such as skunk may merit Class B, but the more reason for accurate class differentiation. Advice has been ignored. Fear of the right-wing press has prevented Home Secretaries from reclassification in the light of evolving science.This inertia continued even after the Mail and Telegraph groups argued for change in the late-1990s. Politicians thought the 'signal'sent by reclassification would be worse than doing nothing. As a result the classes are now absurd and ignored. Mr Blunkett has finally decided to reclassify cannabis, yet has achieved almost nothing. Before doing so 'presumably to head off the right wing 'he quietly altered the penalties attaching to Class C, making them similar to Class B. Possession of cannabis thus remains subject to arrest and imprisonment. So Mr Blunkett has the worst of both worlds. People think he has gone soft on cannabis when he has not. Cannabis remains illegal. The only difference is public confusion and variations in local police guidelines. Controlling youth consumption of drugs is no different from controlling adult consumption of nicotine (which should be Class B) or alcohol (which should be Class A). Both are governed by knowledge, market price and availability. Since all may be harmful all should come under state regulation. Drugs do not at present. The collapse of regulation resulting from the failure of the 1971 Act has led to a boom. Nothing demonstrates this more glaringly than that Britain's most intensive group of drug users are inside Her Majesty's prisons, care of Mr Blunkett. It is incredible that he and his forebear, Mr Howard, dare to lecture parents on family drugs discipline when they could not restrain their charges despite having them under lock and key 24 hours a day. The hypocrisy is stupendous. Experts now say that cannabis is more freely available in Britain than anywhere in Europe, while prices are tumbling. Drugs are on sale in every city-centre street, club and school lavatory. A lie must therefore be nailed. To support the status quo is no longer to be anti-drugs. It is to tolerate a trade in which dealers are free to extend the 10 per cent hard drugs market into the 90 per cent cannabis one. To support the status quo is not only to support anarchy. It is to appease a raging hard-drugs culture. Sixty per cent of the prison population is now 'drug-related', 90 per cent in the case of women. The cost is staggering. While the drug demand of some middle-class children may be slightly restrained by fear of the law, this effect is swamped by the prevalence and profit of illicit supply. Drug distribution touches every aspect of the urban economy, so much so that many poorer districts would suffer acute hardship were drugs to go on legal sale. The drugs economy is the single biggest handicap to social cohesion in Britain. It blights law and order, family policy, mental health, truancy and gun control. By seducing consumers from highly taxed alcohol and cigarettes, drugs lose the Exchequer billions. Nor can public opinion or the press be blamed. Both now widely support reform of the 1971 Act. Parents want their children educated about drugs and treated for them, not sent to prison and ruined for life. Drugs must some day be legalised and controlled. In the meantime, policy must at least make sense. The Conservative Party demands that the drugs advisory committee no longer consider aligning penalties to harm, only to politics. The party flirted with sanity under William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith. Now it is telling millions of young people that a Tory vote is a vote to put them and their friends in prison. They might prefer Mr Blair's top-up fees to that. Mr Blunkett this week decided to spend UKP1 million on advertising against cannabis. A similar sum is being withdrawn from the Government's school-based anti-drugs campaign. As The Observer revealed last week, half the 150 drugs advisers of which the Government boasted two years ago are being laid off. They have lost their publicity value. The media are to profit by UKP1 million and the schools to lose. Most Britons under 45 have experienced cannabis and seem to regard it as a hazard of youth. Most Britons over 45 cannot handle the subject.They are torn between wanting drug users hung, drawn and quartered and finding it incomprehensible that their own otherwise normal offspring should be 'criminalised'by the law. Jack Straw as Home Secretary was a ferocious criminaliser. But he raced to the police station and grovelled when his own son was arrested on a drugs offence. Most European states have more successful drug policies than Britain. The Netherlands has over a decade of experience with 'executive legalisation' and now has lower cannabis consumption than Britain, as well as declining heroin addiction. Different policies apply in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Portugal, but all are experimenting with solutions that wholly elude Britain. The global drugs trade kills far more people than terrorism. Yet it receives scant priority. The Wests regime change in Afghanistan may not have stamped out al-Qaeda but it liberated the opium market which the Taleban had ruthlessly suppressed. Ninety per cent of Britain's heroin now comes from that country. The street price has fallen 20 per cent in a year. Meanwhile, 60 tonnes of home-grown cannabis in the form of Sativex, to relieve sufferers from cancer and multiple sclerosis, are waiting in the stores of GW Pharmaceuticals. Ministers must overcome a state of frozen political terror for them to be put on sale. Mr Blair's radicalism is a sham. He appointed a drugs czar but found his mere presence an embarrassment and sacked him. Such political taboos are not new. They once embraced gin-drinking, homosexuality, prostitution and off-course betting. My parents were appalled at the thought of a betting shop on every corner. It would surely lead to 'addiction'. Somehow they got over it. The same must be done with drugs, all drugs. They must be removed from criminal distribution and their sale controlled and taxed like nicotine and alcohol. Such a proposal is not ideal, merely vital. Drugs must be harder to get and more expensive. Serious addicts must be brought under supervision, as with heroin before 1971. If prices rise and demand is curtailed, consumption will fall. That is the only way in which government can reduce public harm. Until then this hugely profitable market will continue to boom. No amount of posturing, law-making or reclassification will make the slightest difference. simonjenkins@thetimes.co.uk --=======76F8625C=======--
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