THE JOINT IS JUMPING

Ann Widdecombe's plan for UKP100 fixed penalty fines for possession of
even the smallest amount of cannabis looks today like a piece of
political roadkill in the race for the future leadership of the
Conservative party.

But whatever the complex motives that lay behind the decision of seven
top Tories to come out yesterday and admit they had smoked dope, we
should thank Miss Widdecombe for helping-however inadvertently -
finally to break the political taboo against having a grown-up debate
about drugs in Britain.

Now at last cabinet ministers and shadow ministers might be able to
talk about cannabis and ecstasy as drugs that are less harmful than
alcohol and tobacco without being hounded by the media until they are
in danger of being driven from public life.

It happened last year when Mo Mowlam dared to agree with Sir David
Frost that it might, just might, be an idea to have another look at
our drugs laws. It was also that taboo that drove Tony Blair to
denounce a Police Foundation report within an hour of its publication
in Maech this year. It dared to argue that the penalties for
possession od cannabis in Britain - the harshest in Europe - do more
damage than the drug itself, especially sending people to prison, as
we still do in their hundreds each year.

But that was in the days when the old Thatcherite ortodoxies still
held sway in the Conservative party. Only last year Norman Tebbit felt
able to respond to a call from the Rev Ken Leach (a man who has worked
with the victims of drug abuse for more than 35 years) for the Church
of England to back cannabis legislation with the demand that anybody -
repeat anybody - involved in the drugs trade should be executed.

The last Conservative criminal justice minister, David MacLean, once
similarly dismissed all the arguments about drugs by saying that when
he was at university the people who smoked cannabis were weedy,
pathetic creatures while he got on with his more muscular life in the
territorial army.

Now the younger generation in charge of the Conservative party are
prepared to admit that they shared a spliff at college. As the shadow
forein secretary, Francis Maude, put it: "Like many of my generation,
it was quite hard to go through Cambridge in the seventies without
doing it a few times."

At last some politicians, with the Liberal Democrat leader Charles
Kennedy in the forefront, are prepared to recognize that 6m people in
Britan have been casual or regular users of cannabis and that more
than 40% of children have tried it by the time they are 15. It is a
fact that many newspapers, including the Daily Mail, have recognised
for some time, even though it has not prevented them from attempting
to crucify any politicians who dared to acknowledge that there is
little point in criminalising such a large section of the population.

It was interesting, however, that when the Police Foundation report
came out in March the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail were
noticeably far more liberal in their treatment of its arguments than
were Tony Blair or Jack Straw. Its proposals were fairly
straightforward. It recommended ending the threat of imprisonment
faced by more than 110,000 people each year for possessing cannabis,
ecstasy and LSD. It suggested that cannabis was less dangerous than
alcohol or tobacco and should be regraded as a class C drug - warnings
and cautions for possession but no criminal record - and that ecstasy
and LSD should be reclassified from class A, the most dangerous, to
class B.

This thinking is based on the idea that it is the health-related
dangers of drugs, rather than the fear of being harshly punished that
finally turns people away from regularly using illicit drugs. "The
most dangerous message of all is the message that all drugs are
equally dangerous. When youjg people know from their own experience
that part of the message is either exaggerated or untrue, there is a
serious risk they will discount all the rest," said the Police
Foundation enquiry chairman, Lady Runciman.

That enquiry include two senior serving police officers, Denis
O'Connor, now chief constable of Surrey, and John Hamilton, chief
constable of Fife. Not all senior police officers agree. The current
Metropolitan commissioner, Sir John Stevens, maintains a tough line.
But there is sufficient serious opinion among the senior ranks of the
police to give a government that advocated such a policy of
"depenalisation" - effectively decriminalisation - sufficient support
to announce such a change without the sky falling in. Tony Blair
quickly learned that the idea of marching drunken louts to the
cahpoint to pay an on-the-spot fine was doomed without police support.
Ann Widdecombe found herself similarly cut adrift when the police
denounced her policy for being too tough last week.

The police in Britain are not prepared to support the legalisation of
cannabis but are prepared to see a radical change in approach. Blair
and Straw should realise that the political taboo on cannabis has been
broken and announce it is time for our drugs laws to be brought into
line with the rest of Europe.