HIGH TIME WE BOWED TO LOGIC ON SOFT DRUGS

A POLICEMAN once told me that he'd be doing more good for society if he
could arrest people for carrying Swiss Army knives or a crate of Special
Brew rather than cannabis. The first is a potentially lethal weapon in
the wrong hands.

Let lads drink too much of the second and you end up with nasty fights in
pub car parks and football grounds.

But cannabis wasn't lethal, no matter who carried it. Users were docile,
not violent. It was ironic, he thought, that any crime connected with
cannabis - turf wars among dealers, mainly - stemmed solely from its status
as an illegal, Category B drug.

For years, however, successive governments have timorously ignored logic
when it comes to the "cannabis problem". They have followed a policy of
prohibition, even while gleefully spending the taxes generated by the sale
of those far more noxious and damaging poisons, mind-bending alcohol and
lung-clogging nicotine.

They would prefer us not to wonder why, given that Britain and America have
the world's toughest anti-drugs policies, we also have the world's worst
problems with addiction and crime. Ministers buried their heads back in the
sand this week, too, after the influential Police Foundation suggested
softening laws on cannabis, Ecstasy and LSD. Ministers rejected its
recommendations, even though the report reached the same conclusions that
are as clear as the nose on all of our faces - that current laws aren't
working and police waste too much time on soft drugs.

But when even the most conservative of Right-wing commentators, as they did
this week, nevertheless come out in favour of an experiment with legalising
cannabis, you wonder how long the Government can hold out against logic. It
is a pity, in a way, that the Police Foundation bundled cannabis into the
same report as Ecstasy and LSD, thereby comparing a natural substance
smoked and eaten for centuries, often to relieve a variety of medical
symptoms, with chemicals whose long-term effects on the body are uncertain.

It's hardly surprising the Government ran scared.

But the report's conclusions on cannabis were unequivocal: "By any of the
major criteria of harm - mortality, morbidity, toxicity, addictiveness and
relationship with crime - [cannabis] is less harmful than any of the other
major illicit drugs, or than alcohol or tobacco." In a recent issue of the
music paper NME, the best-selling author and convicted cannabis dealer
Howard Marks weighed in to the debate on legalising drugs.

There are, he said, four ways in which you could distribute cannabis.

On medical prescription, as happens with Valium and Viagra. Through
licensed premises, as in the case of alcohol and tobacco.

In High Street outlets, such as supermarkets. Or through organised crime.

"Quite why this Government consciously opts for the fourth option," he
wrote, "is beyond me." And increasingly beyond the rest of us, too.