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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Leak caused Labour to get cold feet
Alan Travis The Guardian
Thursday 29 Jan 2004 The cabinet first agreed to relax the penalties for cannabis possession more than 30 years ago, but the then home secretary, Jim Callaghan, took fright after a leak to the Guardian and overruled his colleagues, according to recently released official papers. The state papers show that in 1970 the Labour government came close to fixing a maximum UKP200 fine for cannabis possession after a revolt by a "student faction" in the cabinet. Instead, with the government facing a general election, Mr Callaghan decided to "kowtow to public opinion" and fixed the maximum penalty of five years in prison and an unlimited fine for unlawful possession that has lasted for 30 years until today's changes. The 1970 cabinet minutes also confirm that the original decision to classify illegal drugs into three classes, A, B and C, was based on political expediency rather than any scientific assessment of their harm. Indeed, the Whitehall minutes also show that a former minister, Richard Crossman, was right to claim in his memoirs that, on the issue of relaxing the penalties for possession, the cabinet had split between those who had been students and those who had not. The minutes to the cabinet's home affairs committee show that the decision to create three classes of drugs followed a successful internal cabinet revolt by the graduate faction. Mr Callaghan had provoked the revolt after he proposed a two-tier system of hard and soft drugs, with cannabis listed as a hard drug, alongside heroin. The proposals were heavily criticised. "The home secretary was asked to consider adding an intermediate category of controlled drugs to which cannabis could be added. In an echo of today's arguments over David Blunkett's remarkably similar proposal to relax the penalties for possession, the minutes record that most of the cabinet took the view that "a sharp distinction between the penalties for possession of cannabis and heroin would discourage users of cannabis from experimenting with the more dangerous drug". Mr Callaghan conceded and agreed to create an intermediate class B for cannabis, with a maximum UKP200 fine for first offenders. But a leak of the plan to the Guardian's John Ezard under the headline "Cannabis penalties to be eased", disturbed Mr Callaghan and the prime minister, Harold Wilson. They overruled the student faction and backed a maximum five-year penalty for cannabis possession. --=======3A88762E=======--
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