WE'VE GOT TO FACE IT, BRITAIN'S GONE TO POT

It is odd what one may be remembered for. In the 1960s and 1970s I wrote
many hundreds of leading articles as Editor of The Times. They covered such
subjects as the Biafra war, joining the Common Market, the astronauts'
journey to the Moon, the miners' strike and a number of general elections.
One of them is more often quoted than all the others put together. That is
the leader "Who Breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?" which helped to get Mick
Jagger out of prison on a minor drugs charge.

The quotation from Alexander Pope must have helped. "True wit is Nature to
advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." Pope
is the journalist's best friend among the poets, unrivalled at expressing
common opinions with uncommon energy.

On June 30, 1967, Mick Jagger, in the early flush of the success of the
Rolling Stones, was sentenced at West Sussex Quarter Sessions at Chichester
to a fine of UKP 100 and three months' imprisonment for being in possession
of four amphetamine tablets. Keith Richards was fined UKP 500 and given one
year's imprisonment for smoking cannabis. A third man, with whom they had
been staying, received a longer sentence for possessing heroin. Jagger had
bought the pills, quite legally, in Italy, but they were prescription drugs
in England.

The next day, July 1, the Times leader was published, arguing that this was
"about as mild a drugs case as could ever have been brought before the
courts" and that the normal penalty for a first offender would have been
probation. Jagger, we considered, should not be singled out for harsher
treatment because he was a celebrity. He was let out on bail, and the Court
of Appeal quashed the sentence.

World in Action then invited me to interview Mick Jagger in the company of
a leading Jesuit, the delightful Father Thomas Corbishley, an Anglican
bishop and a former Home Secretary. Jagger turned out to be a libertarian,
in contrast to the Beatles, who then belonged to the soft Left.

He used arguments which might have come straight out of John Stuart Mill.
If he prefigured anything in British politics, it was the libertarian
aspect of Thatcherism, which emerged ten years later.

In an interview with The Times, he expressed his view on cannabis: "I think
pot's more respectable than ten years ago; much more chi-chi. I don't see
what's wrong with going on trips. I don't see what's wrong with not going
on trips either. It's up to me to pick the things I want to do and I will.
What I do with my consciousness is my business."

I suffered then, indeed I suffer now, from having belonged to one of the
last student generations before pot reached our universities. My
contemporaries confined their use of drugs to alcohol and tobacco. I
remember in 1970 having lunch with Reggie Maudling, who was then the
Conservative Home Secretary. I said to him that it was absurd that he
should be administering the law on cannabis and that I should be writing
Times leaders about it when neither of us had ever tried the stuff.

He later sent a message to me, saying that he asked the department, and
they had replied that if we made any such experiment, they would have no
alternative but to arrest us and charge us with a criminal offence.

"Home Secretary and Editor of Times on Drugs Charge." That would have made
a good court case. I have remained wholly innocent of any personal
knowledge of pot. Indeed, for a long time I thought the French must be
widely addicted to cannabis, because I was unable to distinguish between
the smell of pot and that of Gaulloise cigarettes.

In 1967, I saw the strength of Mick Jagger's libertarian argument, but I
felt that it was a mistake for people to play around with personal
consciousness. I still do believe that. Alcohol is also a strong
consciousness-altering drug, but human beings have had several thousand
years of experience of it. Cannabis was then a new drug to the West, and in
the East it had a disturbing reputation for causing long-term mental
deterioration. My father's generation had spoken of hashish-addicted
beggars in the streets of Cairo, "mere wrecks of humanity".

I have not changed my view that cannabis is a bad drug, as is tobacco, or
alcohol in excess. It plainly has a demotivating effect, which can spoil
lives. It seems to be at least as dangerous as tobacco in terms of cancer
and circulatory diseases. It has been associated with inducing dementia. It
stays in the body for a long time. It can affect the judgment of drivers.

If cannabis did not exist in our culture, no sane person would want to
introduce it.

Nevertheless, cannabis use has now become endemic. Cannabis has also now
become very cheap. According to a report in The Independent on Sunday, the
price of a joint has fallen to just over UKP 1, less than that of a pint of
beer. Both Customs and the police have in recent years adopted a "softly,
softly" approach, which has resulted in a steep fall in seizures. From
today cannabis will be partially decriminalised in Lambeth. People found in
possession of the drug will be given only a formal warning. Apparently
almost half of British teenagers will have smoked pot by the time they
leave school. That is not a good state of affairs, but it exists under the
present legal prohibition.

There are many disadvantages to the present policy, which might be
acceptable if it were effective, but are not acceptable now that it has
completely broken down. The criminal prohibition of cannabis turns
otherwise law-abiding people into criminals; it is unenforceable in
Afro-Caribbean communities, and leads to avoidable racial conflict with the
police; it puts money in the pockets of local and international criminal
entrepreneurs; it prevents cannabis being regulated or taxed; it makes it
harder, rather than easier, to protect children; it has prevented the
effective dissemination of knowledge about the real risks to human health.

Even though cannabis is a potentially dangerous drug, prohibition has not
proved to be the answer.

Keith Hellawell is described as "Britain's first drug czar", a title which
might have been designed to ridicule him. He used to believe that cannabis
necessarily leads on to hard drugs. Clearly that is not true. Sometimes
teenagers smoke pot and end up as heroin addicts; for that matter, they
sometimes smoke cigarettes and end up as heroin addicts. But they also
often smoke pot and then stop. Some people have smoked pot as teenagers but
can be found 20 years later drinking real ale in the back room at the
Marquis of Granby.

Now Keith Hellawell has discarded the gloomy doctrine that pot is the first
step on the path that leads to the eternal bonfire. All one can say is that
sometimes it is, and sometimes it is not. Now he says: "I do not believe it
is a gateway drug." Yet the "gateway" theory was the one strong
justification left for the policy of criminal prohibition. If cannabis is
not a gateway drug, it is no different in principle from alcohol or
tobacco, both of which are potentially dangerous recreational drugs which
some adults will take the risk of consuming.

It is now 34 years since the Jagger trial. Even then, the contemporaries of
the Rolling Stones, who are now in their fifties - older than the Prime
Minister - did not accept the strictures of the police and the courts. It
shows the remarkable rigidity of our society; that authoritarian policies
can be maintained so long after they have first been challenged and so long
after they have completely broken down.

In terms of law, cannabis should be treated more or less like tobacco,
another long-term killer drug.

The trade should be regulated and taxed; it should be conducted by ordinary
private companies, in competition with each other; advertising should be
prohibited; there should be health warnings on the packets. As with
alcohol, there should be measures to stop people driving under the
influence. It should remain a very serious criminal offence to sell
cannabis to children below a certain age.

This is now the only way to impose some degree of social control of a drug
that is available everywhere in Britain. If independent adults choose to
mess up their minds with pot, that is their business. It is not for the
Government to prohibit to adults lifestyles which do not directly damage
other people.