DON'T LEGALISE DRUGS

Black Leaders Fear That Lifting Prohibition Will Harm Their Communities

Well, that's it then. When Peter Lilley calls for the legalisation of
cannabis, you can rest assured that pot smoking has become a non-issue even
in the shires.

The retired colonels and their memsahibs must be passing round joints with
the sausage rolls and warm Chardonnay as they tut-tut about the state we're
in. Lilley's call comes hot upon the heels of David Blunkett's own signal
that he may be going Dutch on drugs.

The Home Secretary has given the go-ahead to a pilot project in the
legalisation of marijuana: police in Lambeth will issue a meaningless
'formal warning' to those found in possession of the drug. If this
laid-back policy proves successful, there's no reason why it should not be
adopted all over the country.

But if the legalisation of cannabis is a given, what about hard drugs -
coke, ecstasy, heroin? For the white metropolitan middle class, the path is
clear: legalise the whole lot. Prohibition is ludicrous, they snort.

A few lines of coke are just fun, they sniff. After all, cigarettes kill
you and alcohol distorts your perceptions - yet both addictive substances
are legal. Drop the ban, they cry: it's the only way to get rid of the
criminal elements who are growing rich off black-market dealing.

Make drugs legal, they urge in the City loos: only then can you ensure
their quality. (As opposed to the street stuff that gets mucked up - often
lethally - with paracetamol and drain cleaner by unregulated dealers.)

Legalise drugs, they screech in the Oxbridge quads, and you can sell them
over the counter with an appropriate information packet that will keep the
amateur or occasional user from overdosing - or failing to get high.

This, at least, is the liberal middle-class consensus. But step into a
Baptist church service in south London, and you'll hear the Afro- Caribbean
minister exhorting his all-black congregation to 'beware the demon drugs'.

Listen to parents filing out of PTA meetings in Brixton, and they splutter
with anger at the chattering classes' talk of legalising cocaine. The
minister, parents, and just about all black community leaders are in
agreement: drugs wreak more damage among their children than among those of
the white middle class. To promote their use through legalisation is to
conspire to hold back black kids.

Class A drugs may be equally popular among white and black youths. But you
don't need to live on a sink estate or attend a Baptist service to see that
snorting a few lines of coke at a nightclub is a very different thing from
smoking crack in the stairwell of a council block.

For the young, white, middle-class graduate who came out of university
straight into a white-collar job, life can accommodate a bit of coke. For
the young professional who uses his Gold American Express Card to cut his
Colombian marching powder on the coffee table of some trendy bar, his
cocaine habit is just that - a habit. It is not his life.

When he's put away the card, wiped the table-top clean with an index finger
he'll then rub along his gums, he can go home to his comfortable pad and,
possibly, fragrant partner and cherubic children; he knows that the
following morning he's got the office to go to.

Any coke-taking is sandwiched in between commitments that keep the drug in
context, and its user accountable. This user also has a gym membership to
keep fit (and sweat off all toxins), trips abroad to look forward to, and a
zillion gizmos to keep him amused.

He may have a bad nose day, or may find himself hacking and spitting a
great deal, but on the whole, cocaine is a prop in stress-busting rather
than the purpose of his existence. The only hitch is that the stuff is
illegal - though he sees with great glee that more and more of his elders
with similar tendencies (or with children who fit that bill) are lobbying
hard to overturn prohibition.

But imagine if he were a young black graduate. He's aspirational but wary,
for he knows that the odds are stacked against his finding a proper job:
statistics show that black graduates are three times less likely to find a
job than white counterparts.

Unemployment means poverty: home is no haven, and even the mentoring scheme
whereby he volunteers to help neighbourhood kids doesn't occupy him full time.

He may enjoy a network of family and friends, but he can't quite overcome
the feeling that he's excluded from that other big network out there, the
one which provides work and looks after its own. The crack cocaine he
smokes gives him an exit from all this.

As a result, it grows ever more important, the focus of his efforts, the
centre of his world. The only deterrent right now is that it is illegal -
and because of this, expensive.

The youth knows that a police record will turn his slim hopes for a job
into no hope; he also knows he must limit his intake, because he can't
afford more. Remove these constraints and the temptation of
chemically-induced escapism proves irresistible.

No wonder that black leaders have been noticeable for their silence in the
debate on the prohibition of Class A drugs. They see a softening of the
line on coke and crack and heroin as a surreptitious way to condemn their
young to a glazed-eyed, numb-nosed underclass.

Indeed, as Trevor Phillips, deputy head of the Greater London Authority
puts it, 'We're unequivocal about this: it's wrong. The only people who
talk about lifting prohibition of hard drugs are those who've never had to
worry about their eight-or nine-year-old son being given UKP 100 to "take
this package for me over there" - thus learning that if he wants the
Mercedes or the gold chain, here's an alternative to study and work.'

Phillips and others must be grinding their teeth in rage at the all- white
snort-snort, sniff-sniff complicity that they face: here is a plot to
legalise the pastime of a few privileged folk at the price of young blacks'
achievement.