BRITONS MAKING ARGUMENTS TO LEGALIZE MARIJUANA

LONDON -- The dam burst last weekend. There had been cracks in the
concrete of consensus and growing trickles of dissent for some time, but
suddenly the issue of legalizing the use of cannabis (marijuana) is on
the table in a major country -- and an English-speaking one, at that.

In Spain, Italy, Portugal and Switzerland it is already practically
impossible to get arrested for buying or using 'soft drugs.' In the
Netherlands, users may buy up to five grams of cannabis or hashish for
private use at 1,500 licensed 'coffee shops,' and they are opening two
drive-through outlets in the border town of Venlo to cater to German
purchasers. Even in Canada, Conservative leader and former prime
minister Joe Clark is openly calling for the decriminalization of
cannabis. But that is still far short of what Sir David Ramsbotham, the
outgoing Chief Inspector of Prisons, suggested last Sunday in Britain.

"The more I look at what's happening, the more I can see the logic of
legalizing drugs, because the misery that is caused by the people who
are making criminal profit is so appalling and the sums are so great
that are being made illegally. I think there is merit in legalizing and
prescribing, so people don't have to go and find an illegal way of doing
it," he said.

You will note that he said "drugs" not just cannabis, and that he talked
of "legalizing and prescribing," not just decriminalizing. Most British
politicians are afraid to go that far in public yet, but over the past
week former home secretaries Lord Jenkins and Lord Baker and outgoing
British "drugs czar" Keith Hellawell have all called for a debate on
decriminalizing so-called soft drugs. And the new home secretary, David
Blunkett, has given his support to a local experiment in the south
London district of Brixton, where police will simply caution people
found with cannabis. No trial, no criminal record.

Others, like Mo Mowlam, until recently the minister responsible for the
Labour government's drug policy, and Peter Lilley, former minister for
social security and Conservative deputy leader, are now going further.
"It strikes me as totally irrational to decriminalize cannabis without
looking at the sale of it," said Ms. Mowlam. "It would be an absurdity
to have criminals controlling the market of a substance people can use
legally."

Mr. Lilley began by quoting a recent study in the respected medical
journal The Lancet, which concluded that "moderate indulgence in
cannabis has little ill effect on health, and decisions to ban or to
legalize cannabis should be based on other considerations." For Lilley,
banning cannabis is indefensible and unenforceable in a country where
far more harmful drugs like alcohol and tobacco are legal and he went
the distance in accepting the implications of legalization.

Magistrates should issue licenses to local shops for the sale of limited
amounts of cannabis to people over 18, Lilley said. Like tobacco, it
would be taxed and carry a health warning -- and the tax yield on an
estimated annual British consumption of 1,500 tonnes of cannabis a year
has been calculated at about $23 billion if the cannabis were produced
and marketed in exactly the same way as tobacco, enough to cut the
standard rate of British taxes by five per cent.

That is a pipe-dream, of course. Many people would grow their own, and
given the pre-existing black market, too high a rate of taxation on
cannabis would simply push consumers back into the hands of the private
dealers. Most experts think the highest practical rate of taxation would
be around $3 to $4 per gram (against a production cost of around $0.75),
which would yield a mere $7 billion or $8 billion a year in extra tax
revenue. But it would also cut law-enforcement costs -- and it would
keep ordinary cannabis users out of contact with hard-drug dealers.

As Lilley pointed out, "By making cannabis illegal, it is only available
through illegal sources, which are the same channels that handle hard
drugs. So we are forcing cannabis users into the arms of hard-drugs
pushers." When senior Conservative politicians start talking like that,
you know the wind has changed, and British opinion polls support it.

Opposition to legalizing cannabis has dropped from 66 per cent to only
51 per cent in the past five years, and the nay-sayers are
overwhelmingly in the older age groups.

It is a welcome outbreak of sanity, and even mere decriminalization in a
major English-speaking country would have a profound effect on the
debate in the United States, the heart and soul of the prohibitionist
movement. But actual legalization of cannabis in Britain is unlikely
because the U.S. government strong-armed all its allies into signing
three international conventions in the 1970s and 1980s that define
cannabis as a dangerous drug.

To break out of those treaties would involve a larger effort of
political will than any government with many other items on its agenda
(like persuading the United States to ratify the Kyoto accord on climate
change and to honour the ABM treaty) would be willing to undertake. So
millions of individual Britons may benefit from the decriminalization of
cannabis and an end to harassment, but the potentially large social and
tax benefits of outright legalization are likely to be lost.

The bigger problem, however, is that even most British advocates of
decriminalization or legalization are too ignorant or too timid to
extend the same argument to 'hard drugs' like heroin and cocaine - the
kind that lead you into a life of crime and destroy your body and mind,
if you believe the drug warriors.

The whole policing experiment in Brixton, which is the entering wedge
for decriminalizing cannabis in Britain, is being justified as a way of
freeing up scarce police resources to tackle the problem of hard drugs.