COMMENT

Cannabis campaign Drugcrazed fiends? That's you and me

A serving police officer argues that targeting the rave scene is just a
ploy by the force to improve its 'hit rate'

AS A serving police officer I am often asked whether I think the law
relating to cannabis should be reviewed. My answer has always been an
unequivocal yes. The law is a nonsense. It is impossible to enforce, and
even if it were possible, it would be immoral to do so.

I have served on an inner London division for nearly 10 years and have
witnessed the damage caused to, and by, the victims of drug addiction. Hard
drugs are not romantic. They destroy and debase lives and those who deal in
them should feel the full weight of the law levelled at them. I have also,
far more frequently, witnessed the damage caused to people's lives by the
abuse of alcohol and yet this drug, claiming the lives of tens of thousands
every year, is given the official stamp of approval.

What I have never seen, and never expect to, is a 19yearold prostitute
selling her body by the side of the road to fund her next 1/8th of hash.
Nor have I been called upon to attend a flat where a hashishcrazed dope
fiend has beaten their partner to a pulp and trashed the furniture . It
doesn't happen.

So, where are these scourges of society that Keith Hellawell, newly
appointed tsar in the war against drugs, has declared to be his targets?
Are they lining the backstreets of King's Cross, scratching themselves raw
while waiting for their "man"? Are they occupying some Trocchi underworld
of candles and cockroaches? Who are they, and how will we know them when we
meet them?

The chances are, if you fall between the ages of 13 and 60, you know the
answers to these questions because they are your friends and family, your
children and their friends, you and me. There are no telltale signs, no
track marks or pocked faces, and they rarely come to the notice of the
authorities as a direct result of their taste for what, by all credible
accounts, is a fairly innocuous drug. I know this and you know this and,
more pertinently, so do Keith Hellawell and his paymasters. This is why he
has stated his intention to target the rave scene. It is easy pickings.

If the police stop and search a sufficient number of young people at the
weekend they are bound to discover that a proportion of them are carrying
illegal drugs, and cannabis will inevitably be among them. Continue to do
this for a season or two and the police "hit rate" is bound to climb
through the ceiling, but to what avail? It is a thin line between
legitimate targeting of known criminals and sending your men out on fishing
expeditions, and what Mr Hellawell is proposing is to take a giant step
over that line.

An average of between 90,000 and 95,000 people are arrested annually for
drug offences and this, by any yardstick, is an impressive haul. The scale
of this figure supports the mediaenhanced fears of the parent class that
we are being overrun by dope fiends. It also permits the apologists for law
and order to blame the rising tide of reported crime on the degenerate
users of these drugs. We have been told so many times that these fiends are
responsible for vast amounts of crime in order to feed their habits that it
is beginning to look like a selfevident truth.

Once we have established that the majority of crime can be directly linked
to drug use and are seen to be winning substantial battles in the war
against drug users it must stand to reason that similar victories will
follow in the war against criminality. To pursue this argument requires a
large dose of credulity on the part of the public and not a little blurring
over of the facts by the Home Office and its police representatives.

The cost, at present, is levied against more than 80,000 otherwise
lawabiding citizens every year, who are dragged from grace and branded as
criminals. Not because they have hurt anybody or because they have stolen
or damaged property, not because they need protecting from themselves but
because they have chosen, in their private moments, to flaunt an
unreasonable, impractical and unenforceable law. We would achieve as much
credibility if we were to target and prosecute every taxi driver who failed
to carry the required bale of hay.

As a teetotaller I have always maintained that I would prefer to know that
my children were smoking cannabis than drinking alcohol, and I know that at
least one of my children enjoys a social smoke with his friends. This is
fine by me, the only serious reservation I have is that he might be
unfortunate or foolish enough to get himself arrested. If I was not a
serving police officer I would gladly join them.

The fact remains that the law creates more victims, damages more lives and
sows the seed for more fear and anger among the public than hard drugs ever
could. The only time I arrested someone for possession of cannabis, it all
but ruined his life. A 17yearold Asian, he resisted when he was escorted
to the van and was further charged for assaulting police: a far more
serious offence than that for which he had been arrested. He ended up in
jail, where he attempted suicide.

The lobby for change in the law in now huge. Any political party that
ignores this is insane, and any police service that chooses to do the same
is sailing dangerously close to policing unlawfully.

The police service has a statutory duty to police the population but only
with the consent of the people, and the position that Mr Hellawell has
adopted calls into question whether or not this is being done. We are
frequently directed to compare our crime rate with that in the US, but
perhaps Mr Hellawell would do well to do the same. If he was chief of
police in a MidWestern city and insisted on enforcing a law with such
disregard for the wishes of the people, he would be in danger of being
voted out of a job at the next election.