LET'S BE ADULT ABOUT THIS

Politicians will just have to bite on the bullet--dope will be decriminalised

When Olympic officials decided last week to give errant snowboarder Ross
Rebagliati his gold medal back, the cheers drowned out the boos. It was a
minor scandal involving a minor sport, but it spoke volumes about the
world's shifting relationship with its favourite illicit drug.

A decade ago, Rebagliati would have been ostracised regardless of whether
cannabis was on the list of his sport's banned substances.

What's changed today is that our attitudes towards illegal drugs are
becoming more sophisticated and discriminating. After thirty years of
research into the harmful effects of cannabis, there can be no hidden
dangers left to discover. We know that it is plain nonsense to regard
cannabis as a performance-enhancing drug, just as it is a myth to think the
substance rots the brain or leads inexorably to harder substances.

And despite the anti-dope propaganda that circulates in the US, most people
are thankfully well aware that no great social disaster has befallen the
Netherlands, where cannabis has been sold openly in coffee shops for years.
It would take a perverse mind to twist the data from Amsterdam into a
argument for continued prohibition (see The Dutch experiment).

While no sensible person believes cannabis is totally safe, even police
chiefs back moves to decriminalise the drug. Only the politicians still
seem irrationally terrified by the idea of any relaxation in the law: they
think they can continue in the old way, lumping all drugs together.

Before anyone decides what decriminalisation should mean in practice,
however, we must take a hard look at every aspect of cannabis, from its
long-term effects on the brain to the social effects of legal reform. If
there is to be change, how far should we go? At one extreme, we could go
Dutch, at the other, we might decide to do little more than rationalise the
existing legal penalties and allow doctors to prescribe marijuana to people
with serious illnesses.

And if reefers are to be doled out on the NHS, for example, what
information should go on the side of the packet? Or should we wait until
researchers have figured out how to put cannabis into aerosol devices?

Such complexities are why Britain's House of Lords was right to defy Home
Secretary Jack Straw recently and launch its own inquiry--and why US drugs
supremo Barry McCaffrey was right to commission the US National Academy of
Sciences to report later this year on the harmful as well as the medicinal
effects of cannabis.

Conversely, the pressing need for an open debate about cannabis is
precisely why the WHO was so wrong to bow to political pressure and expunge
from a recent report an informative if controversial comparison of the
harms caused by different drugs including alcohol (see our news section).

Of course, ever since the splendidly named Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of
1894, independent panels have been politely saying that the evils of
cannabis have been exaggerated--and politicians have been politely ignoring
them. Change is looking more possible now because the forces pressing for
legal reform come with unprecedented levels of popular support.

In Britain, Tony Blair and his Cabinet can always discard the opinions of
the House of Lords, but they are fools to ignore opinion polls in tabloid
newspapers which suggest a majority of the nation is now in favour of legal
change.

And the US government may have already met its Waterloo on the dope issue.
In recent months, it has been locked in a bitter and futile dispute with
the states of California and Arizona which have independently ruled that
doctors should be allowed to prescribe marijuana with impunity. Even in
America, threatening vulnerable patients and their doctors with legal
action is no vote winner.

Something will have to give, and the best bet is that California and
Arizona will triumph in the end. If they do, it will be the beginning of
the end for outlawing marijuana because where the US government goes, the
rest of the world will quietly follow.

None of this, of course, means cannabis is as safe as some of its advocates
claim. But neither, as our special report shows (see A safe high?), are the
opposing claims of the world's biggest funder of research into marijuana to
be taken at face value.

Campaigners and pressure groups can be forgiven for trading propaganda, but
we should expect world famous scientific organisations like the US National
Institute on Drug Abuse to evaluate honestly the research that has been
done.