NEW SOFT LINE ON DOPE WILL BRING US CRIME AND MISERY

Millions of parents and their children have been betrayed this week by
people who ought to know better. An apparently serious report from a
grand-sounding body has urged that our anti-drug laws should be weakened
rather than enforced.

We have a serious epidemic of drunkenness among the young. The attempt to
stamp out cigarettes has been a pitiful failure. Now this group of eminent
citizens wants to make it easier for the next generation to fry their
brains with dope and pills.

The Government has rejected the report, but that does not mean it will not
have an effect on chief constables and courts, as well as in all the homes
where these issues are debated nightly. It should be ignored as the
partisan rubbish it is.

For the "Police Foundation", which produced the report, has no official
connection with the police, as it confirmed to me this week. Its panel, far
from being a sort of unofficial Royal Commission embracing all views, ruled
out anyone who thinks that the use of illegal narcotics is immoral and wrong.

Its chairman, the liberal Viscountess Runciman, was selected partly because
she had "no association of any kind with any absolutist ideological or
religious movement or position on the drugs issue". In other words, she was
known to be open to the arguments of those who want the penalties against
drugs softened.

Members of her committee were selected on similar grounds. A spokesman for
the foundation said they had to be "not wedded to any one pre-stated
position on either extreme of the drugs debate".

As far as this "Police Foundation" is concerned, it is "extreme" to believe
that illegal drugs should remain illegal, and that the laws of England and
Scotland should be rigorously upheld.

In a letter to me, the foundation said: "We understand that you are arguing
that the foundation and Lady Runciman failed to include a member with an
acknowledged absolutist moral position on drug prohibition. This is true".

Its report argues that the drug laws are not working, which is so. However,
it is not toughness that has failed, but the very defeatism which we are
being urged to continue. Ever since the Sixties, liberal courts and police
forces have taken an ever more feeble line on punishing drug users. Serious
enforcement of the law has not failed. It has been found to be difficult,
and not tried. This is a stupid mistake.

Cannabis, like all intoxicating drugs, weakens the brain's moral centre.
So, at the same time as it creates a need for money to buy it, it makes
users less fit for work and more likely to break the law. "Depenalisation"
would increase burglary from homes and thefts from cars.

The much-lauded relaxation of the law in Amsterdam produced a fourfold
increase in cannabis use among teenagers and turned that city into Europe's
crime capital, according to Dutch authorities. When Alaska decriminalised
the drug, it had to reverse the decision because of the rise in crime and
social problems.

It is seriously dangerous to health. Regular use is more likely to result
in devastating mouth, tongue and jaw cancers than smoking ordinary
cigarettes. It can trigger schizophrenia where it is latent. It weakens the
memory and produces paranoia. It lingers in the body for days, because it
lodges in body fat. Post-mortems on truck and train drivers involved in
fatal crashes in the US show an increasing number of them had been using
cannabis.

Would you want the driver of your child's bus to school, the surgeon who
operates on you, the pilot of your holiday jet, the driver of a speeding
fire engine, to have been smoking dope even two days before you put your
future in their hands?

The panel also wants to downgrade LSD and Ecstasy. Shop doorways and mental
wards are peopled with those whose minds have been unhinged for ever by
LSD. But we are only just beginning to discover the long-term damage
Ecstasy can do to the brain. I predict an epidemic of mental illness and
worse among the generation which has swallowed this chemical garbage. How
can we tell our children it is a minor matter to play with their minds in
this way? Would we let them go out and scar and smash their limbs for fun?

Parents have lost far too much of their authority over their children. This
report and its authors have weakened parents still further. If the great
and the good say that dope and pills aren't seriously wrong, the argument
will go, then why shouldn't we take them?

As for the chorus which says that alcohol and tobacco are worse than
cannabis, that may be so, and if they had just been invented, wise people
would oppose them. But they are a part of our culture which cannot now be
removed. How can this be an argument for welcoming a third danger into our
midst? On the contrary, it is a warning that we have quite enough perils
among us.

In the ruined lives, the smashed families, the misery of crime, and in the
stupefied, passive, loutish, criminal society that wide-scale semi-legal
drug abuse will create, we shall see the fruits of this weak and lazy folly.