IS TONY BLAIR TURNING A BLIND EYE TO CANNABIS? TOMORROW IT BECOMES
VIRTUALLY LEGAL IN PART OF LONDON...

The unmistakable whiff of cannabis hung over a bustling street market
in Brixton, south London as Michael, leaning casually against a wall,
took a long draw on a joint.

A little less brazenly, in a grimy stairwell a few yards away, a
group of young men huddled together with hoods pulled over their
heads puffing on roll-ups emitting the same giveaway smell.

From tomorrow even minor precautions will be unnecessary, as cannabis
smokers in Brixton will be free to light up under the nose of a
police officer and escape any form of punishment.

Police in the London borough of Lambeth - which includes Brixton -
are trying a controversial experiment. For the first time in Britain,
the possession of cannabis will effectively be "decriminalised".

Officially, possession of a class B drug such as cannabis can still
lead to a five-year prison sentence. In reality, its use is so
widespread that police believe there is no longer any point in trying
to stop it.

Instead of arresting cannabis users, officers in Lambeth will
confiscate the drug and give a "formal warning" on the spot. This
will not result in a criminal record.

Commander Brian Paddick, in charge of policing in Lambeth, says that
issuing a warning rather than a caution will save valuable police
time - up to 10 man-hours per arrest - and free his officers to
concentrate on harder class A drugs and more serious crime.

Michael, 32, who smokes up to seven joints a day, likes the new
liberal approach. Although he has often smoked in public, he has been
careful to avoid the police.

"A lot of people smoke dope around here," he said. "But it's mostly
under the carpet because it's a lot of hassle being taken down the
nick. But if all they're going to do is tell you off, people will
feel much better about it. There's nothing like smoking a joint and
drinking a can of Guinness in the park on a hot, sunny day."

If the Lambeth pilot scheme is deemed successful when it is evaluated
at the end of the year, it "may well" be adopted across the whole
Metropolitan police area, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Tim Godwin
confirmed last week.

Explaining the experiment, Godwin cited "all the underlying problems
around drug supply and drug use in London".

He said: "There are definitely some people, more so among the young
community, who probably don't agree with the drug legislation. As a
result some of the class B drugs are very frequently found by
officers in London and as a result they spend an inordinate amount of
time processing these people.

"We are not sure that should be our priority. Our priority is to make
the streets safer. It's about focusing on class A drugs, the hard
drugs, focusing on knives, guns, street robbery and burglary and to
maintain our efforts to disrupt that sort of criminality.

"If we take officers off the streets too often to deal with these
lower-end offences such as possession of a small amount of cannabis,
then we are being denied the opportunity to do the other stuff."

So does this mark the beginning of a new, softer line on drugs in
Britain? Officially, Downing Street says no. "We have no plans to
decriminalise or declassify cannabis at all," a spokeswoman said.

David Blunkett, the new home secretary, says, however, that the
Lambeth experiment fits in with his avowed intention to target
traffickers and class A drugs such as heroin and ecstasy. Even Keith
Hellawell, the anti-drug co-ordinator who has been sidelined by
Blunkett, no longer argues that cannabis necessarily leads to harder
drugs.

When Labour was elected in 1997 the rhetoric was "zero tolerance" of
drugs. Jack Straw, who was appointed home secretary, took a hard line
on cannabis, especially after his son William was cautioned by police
for selling 10 UKP worth to an undercover newspaper reporter in a pub.

The prime minister appointed Hellawell as the first drug czar amid
much fanfare in January 1998. A former chief constable of West
Yorkshire, he was tasked with drawing up a 10-year national anti-drug
strategy.

Both Hellawell and Straw vehemently opposed the recommendations of an
inquiry into drug policy reform by the Police Foundation, which
included downgrading cannabis from a class B to a class C drug. Class
A and B drug offences are "arrestable". Possession of a class C drug
does not appear on a criminal record.

Hellawell and Straw argued that downgrading cannabis would send out
the wrong signals to young people and encourage them to take drugs.

What Lambeth police have effectively done, however, is to accept the
Police Foundation proposal to make cannabis a class C drug.

Blunkett's apparent endorsement of this softer line on cannabis may
be born of necessity as police concentrate their resources on
tackling the more harmful hard drugs.

The daunting scale of this task was revealed last week when Sir John
Stevens, the Metropolitan police commissioner, admitted he was losing
the battle to stem the flow of hard drugs into London.

Despite a series of high-profile operations to sweep dealers off the
streets - in one, 1,600 were arrested - they were just as quickly
replaced.

Stevens's report to the Metropolitan Police Authority concluded that
the operations - which led to seizures worth 2.3m UKP - had no impact on
street supplies or on crime. More thoughtful and innovative policies
had to be found, he said, including targeting "social users" and
stepping up international efforts against producers.

IF, in their efforts to tackle hard drugs, the police turn a blind
eye to cannabis, what will the consequences be? In the Netherlands,
all drugs are still technically illegal but cannabis is openly sold
in designated "coffee" shops.

The Dutch argue that if cannabis is tolerated, its users are not
exposed so readily to pedlars of hard drugs.

According to the Police Foundation report, the population of
"problem" drug takers addicted to hard drugs has been contained and
the average age of addicts has risen to over 30.

By contrast, in Britain the number of problem drug takers has
increased and the average age has lowered, with the largest group
aged under 21.

In America, despite a "zero-tolerance" approach to drugs, cannabis
use continues to rise. During 1998, 18.7m people - 8.6% of Americans
over 12 years of age - admitted to using it. Conversely, the war on
cocaine and crack cocaine appears to be working. Last year there were
an estimated 1.5m chronic cocaine users compared with 5.7m in 1985.

This is attributed to a prolonged nationwide advertising campaign
aimed at young children and to the "recriminalisation" of drugs in
many areas that had seen social collapse.

If the British government is persuaded to liberalise its drug policy,
ministers will also have to consider any possible health risks.

A recent study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (Nida) in the
United States concluded that long-term effects of cannabis use
included the destruction of nerve cells in the hippocampus - the part
of the brain that is crucial for learning and memory. Scientists have
also found signs that lung tissue is damaged by cannabis smoke.

Researchers are examining the possibility that long-term cannabis use
may create changes in the brain that make a person more at risk of
becoming addicted to other drugs such as alcohol or cocaine.

Although there are no definitive studies on whether cannabis use
leads to harder drugs, one study by Nida estimated that the risk of
using cocaine was 104 times greater for those who had tried cannabis
once than for those who had never tried it.

This used to be the type of statistic Hellawell cited as drug czar.
Only last November, he said research from New Zealand had convinced
him that cannabis was a "gateway" drug. He now puts a more complex
interpretation on such evidence.

"I do not believe it's a gateway drug," he told The Sunday Times -
and his analysis laid bare the contradictions of the drugs debate.

"The evidence from New Zealand is that if someone smokes a joint of
cannabis a week they are 60 times more likely to be involved in
harder drugs than those who do not use it at that level," he said.
"That is one piece of evidence. That does not mean that everybody who
smokes 50 joints a year will automatically be involved in hard drugs.
That does not mean that everybody who is on hard drugs started with
cannabis."

From the start, his strategy called for the war against class A drugs
to be prioritised. In his annual report in two weeks' time, he will
reveal an increase in seizures of class A drugs; a reduction in
reoffending by drug-misusing prisoners after treatment; and a fall in
prisoners testing positive for drugs from 24% to 14%.

Hellawell also stepped up drug education in schools. Two recent
studies show the proportion of schoolchildren who admitted taking
drugs has fallen sharply. Research by the Schools Health Education
Unit in Exeter indicates that the proportion of boys aged 12-15 who
tried any illegal drug dropped from about 33% in 1996 to 20% in 1999,
and the proportion of girls from 30% to just over 20%. This drop
followed a steep rise in drug-taking from 1987.

Another survey of 15- and 16-year-old pupils in more than 200 schools
showed the use of drugs such as ecstasy, cannabis and solvents fell
for the first time in 30 years. This survey, by Dr Martin Plant of
Edinburgh University, showed that from 1995 to 1999, ecstasy use
among boys fell from 14% to 6% and from 11% to 6% among girls.
Cannabis use fell from 60% to 45% among boys and from 47% to 37%
among girls.

Hellawell points out that he has met every target set for him in his
3.5 years in the job. He is hurt and bitter at being sidelined by
Blunkett into an ill-defined "international" role. He believes he was
the victim of a whispering campaign by "dark forces" - "ambitious
young political advisers" whom he declined to name - who wanted
ministers to take credit for drug initiatives.

It may just be that Blunkett genuinely wants to take sole control of
co-ordinating drug policy and feels uncomfortable with Hellawell's
previously uncompromising stance on cannabis.

What is clear, however, is that, although drugs permeate the country,
there is no clear policy on how to deal with them. The smoke signals
from Brixton indicate muddled thinking in government.