OPED: IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE TO JAIL DRUG DEALERS

MY FIRST instinct yesterday when I read Lady Runciman's suggestion
that penalties for the possession of soft drugs should be relaxed was
that it sounded very sensible.

Quite a few of my friends take cannabis, and I would hate to see any
of them go to prison for it. Nor do I think that they deserve to. If
they are doing any harm to anybody, after all, they are harming only
themselves - although they may also be upsetting their near and dear.
(As it happens, I do think that those of my friends who have smoked
large amounts of cannabis over a number of years have done themselves
considerable harm. They become more dim-witted and boring as every
year passes.

But they are grown-ups, and that is a matter for them.)

And, anyway, it now seems to have become perfectly respectable for
eminent public figures, from President Clinton to Mo Mowlam, to
confess to having smoked the odd joint. There may be lots of reasons
why we would like to see these characters driven out of office, but
hardly anybody says that their criminal use of drugs in their youth is
one of them. If most people are prepared to forgive the President of
the United States and the British Cabinet enforcer for having taken
cannabis, then why should the law go on demanding that less important
people should go to prison for the same offence?

I also felt instinctively that Lady Runciman, who chaired the
independent inquiry into the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, was right to
say that the penalties for dealing in drugs should remain very stiff.

Like most of us, I am revolted by the very thought of the criminal
gangs who prey upon the weaknesses of others and depend for their
living on pedalling products that undoubtedly cause a great deal of
misery.

Indeed, everything that Lady Runciman wrote seemed at first to have
the ring of common sense.

I particularly agreed when she said: "The most dangerous message of
all is the message that all drugs are equally dangerous.

When young people know that the advice they are being given is either
exaggerated or untrue in relation to less harmful drugs, there is a
real risk they will discount everything else they are told about the
most hazardous drugs, including heroin and cocaine." How wise she was,
I thought, to recommend that possessing less harmful drugs - such as
cannabis, ecstasy and LSD - should cease to be punishable by
imprisonment. (No letters, please, from parents whose children have
died taking LSD or ecstasy. I know that these drugs can be lethal, and
I grieve for the bereaved. But there are mercifully few of them.) How
wise of Lady Runciman, too, I thought, to say that those who dealt in
drugs of any sort should continue to arouse the full fury of the law.

Those, as I say, were my first reactions to Lady Runciman's report -
and I suspect that a huge number of others will have felt the same. It
was only when I sat down to write this article that doubts began to
creep in. And the more I have thought about it, the more I have become
convinced that Lady Runciman's recommendations offer us the worst of
every possible world.

In my own youth, I supported the decriminalisation of all drugs. I
knew from my own very limited experience that cannabis was not half as
dangerous as adults made it out to be, and I suspected that the same
could be be said for most other illegal drugs.

It was not so much the drugs themselves that were addictive, I
thought, as the personalities of those who took them. I knew some
people who had taken quite a bit of heroin, but found it easy to give
up (although others, of course, were completely ruined by it).

I was also strongly persuaded by the argument that decriminalisation
would cut the crime rate, in the way that the end of Prohibition in
the United States flattened the crime wave in Chicago. As long as it
remained illegal to own or sell narcotics, they would be very
expensive, and extremely lucrative to the criminals who sold them.
People would go on burgling and mugging to pay for them, and the
criminal gangs who supplied the drugs would go on attacking each other
to preserve their local monopolies.

I suppose it was fatherhood that changed my mind about drugs. I knew
in my heart that if there was one thing that I wanted for my children,
it was that they should never become drug addicts.

I decided that everything I had believed before was mere youthful
posturing.

If fear of the law helped to persuade my sons against dabbling in
narcotics, then as far as I was concerned, drug-taking should remain
illegal. That was how I felt until yesterday, when Lady Runciman came
along with her report.

Now she has made me feel that my youthful posturing was absolutely
right.

Here she is, telling my children on the one hand that it is not so
very wicked to take cannabis, ecstasy or LSD (not wicked enough,
anyway, to merit prison). So the law, if her recommendations are
accepted, will hardly discourage them from dabbling.

On the other hand, she is telling the drug-dealers that they are very
wicked indeed.

So her recommendations will do nothing to counter the "prohibition
effect". Dealing in drugs will remain a violent business for criminal
gangs, drug prices will remain high and people will continue to steal
to pay for them.

How, anyway, can you say that it is all right to buy something, but
not all right to sell it? It just doesn't make sense.

If it is not so very wrong to smoke cannabis, then why is it so very
wrong to sell it? It would be perfectly rational to say that buying
and selling it are equally wrong.

But that is not what Lady Runciman is saying.

I am now coming round to the view that narcotics are not so very
different from alcohol, and that they should be treated in the same
way by the law. People do terrible things under the influence of
alcohol - and there must be a great many more alcoholics than drug
addicts in Britain. But very few suggest that alcohol should be banned.

Most adults can drink without getting into fights or smashing up cars.
Some cannot, and those are the ones who should be severely punished by
the law - just as anybody who harms others while under the influence
of drugs deserves to be penalised.

It is right that the sale of alcohol is regulated, and that children
are protected from it. But the consumption of alcohol has been a part
of civilised life since man first invented wine. Decriminalisation
would be the first step towards civilising drug-taking. Perhaps the
Victorians had it about right when they saw drug-taking as a vice, but
accepted it as a human weakness as long as it did nobody but the
drug-taker any harm. I am increasingly convinced that Lady Runciman
has got it all wrong.