THE DANGERS OF DRUG USE AREN'T AS SIMPLE AS ABC

Once again, the government's ABC classification system for illegal
drugs is in the news as the government rejects an appeal from the
Science and Technology Committee to review the place of individual
drugs within the system. This time, though, the issue is not whether
cannabis should be moved from class C back to class B but the broader
question of whether the whole system needs to be revamped.

Part of the trouble with the present classification system is that it
does so much more than identify the dangers of different drugs. It
also sends out a powerful message about which drugs the government
regards as most serious. Not surprisingly, cocaine and heroin are up
there in class A and cannabis is down there in class C.
Unfortunately, cannabis also happens to be the illegal drug that is
used most widely and the one most heroin and cocaine addicts actually
started with. If you put cannabis in your category of lowest harm,
almost inevitably you are giving out the message that users need to
worry about it rather less than the other drugs, and almost
inevitably you are undermining your drug prevention efforts in the process.

But does it actually make sense to try to differentiate between the
harm associated with different drugs in this way? Even at a glance,
one would have to say that the harmfulness of any individual drug
depends largely on the age of the person using it, the amount of the
drug used, the situation in which it is used, the way it is used and
the other drugs it may be used with. These are the infinitely
variable elements of the matrix of harm associated with illegal
drugs, but they run counter to the idea of placing any given drug in
any given category of harm. Nobody, for example, would reg ard a
single cannabis joint smoked by a 10-year-old in the same way as a
single cannabis joint smoked by an 18-year-old. But that is exactly
what happens when you seek to place individual drugs in a
classification system that ranks the harms of different substances.

The other problem with the ABC classification system is that it needs
so much care and attention. Take cannabis, for example.

There you are, happy that the drug is categorised class B, when your
Home Secretary tells you he is minded to move it to class C. You look
at all the evidence and take advice from all the experts and you
recommend that, yes, indeed, the drug should move from class B to class C.

You do all that and then you watch the media and others give
prominence to the stories of high-strength cannabis that is now
available, and you read the latest research, which shows you that
some users experience serious mental-health problems as a result of
their cannabis use. You weather all the criticism that you made the
wrong decision when you recommended reclassification in the first
place, and then you have a new Home Secretary who asks you to look
again at your earlier decision to reclassify the drug.

You do all this with the best of intentions but with the nagging
feeling that most of those who are using the drug could not care less
whether it is in one category or another.

The classification of drugs into classes A, B and C does not need an
overhaul: it needs to be dropped in favour of a recognition that all
of the drugs involved have the capacity to cause serious and
long-term harm to the user, his or her family, and the wider
community. We should stop trying to weigh the harms of one drug
against another and focus instead on developing an approach to
prevention treatment and enforcement that applies equally to all drugs.

In Sweden, they don't operate with a classification system for
individual drugs. Instead, they have developed a zero-tolerance
approach to all illegal drugs. It turns out that the level of
cannabis use in Sweden is one-fifth of that in the UK and its heroin
problem around one-tenth of our own. The trouble with a
zero-tolerance approach to illegal drugs though is the fact that it
just sounds so, well, in a word, intolerant.

In the UK, we may feel we have a more enlightened system of drug
classification, differentiating between substances in terms of their
levels of harm. What we might actually have is a situation analogous
to the conductor of an orchestra carefully balancing the horn section
against the woodwind section, against the string section, when, in
reality, the concert hall is all but in flames and nobody is actually
listening to the music. Perhaps what we need is a good deal more
intolerance of all illegal drugs.