ANTI-DRUGS MINISTER MOWLAM ADMITS SMOKING MARIJUANA

Mo Mowlam, the Cabinet Office minister who heads the Government's anti-drugs
campaign, reignited the debate on legalising cannabis when she admitted that
she once smoked marijuana as a student.

She came clean when she was questioned about newspaper claims that she had
smoked the drug during her days as a postgraduate student at Iowa state
university. "I tried marijuana, didn't like it particularly, and - unlike
President Clinton - I did inhale," she said. "But it wasn't part of my life
then, and that's what happened."

Ms Mowlam, 50, who studied in the United States in the early 1970s after
earning a degree at Durham university, said she did not believe that her
admission made her unfit to head the Government's hardline anti-drugs
strategy.

"I will continue to fight hard against the drugs that can kill people, like
heroin and cocaine," she said. "I will continue to say to young people, as I
have done for the last two months in the job, that taking drugs is not
within the law and is not a credible thing to do in your life." Ms Mowlam,
who described herself as a "child of the 60s", was forced to speak about her
experimentation with drugs after a former student at Iowa recalled seeing
her handling drugs at a party.

The former Northern Ireland Secretary has made no secret of her wild days
as a student at Durham in the late 1960s. She told one interviewer: "I
suppose I was pretty wild. I was a child of the 60s and did everything that
went with that."

She is unlikely to suffer any political damage from her admission.

Jack Straw, the Home Secretary who takes pride in his squeaky-clean
behaviour as a student at Leeds in the early 60s (and who even took his own
son to the police after he was accused of supplying cannabis), praised her
for being honest. "Good for Mo in making this clear," he said. "One of her
very great strengths is her integrity, and if people have smoked cannabis in
the past, far better to say they have."

The Government's drugs tsar, Keith Hellawell, said: "I think we've got to
stop this idea of witch hunts and pointing the finger. The debate needs to
be at a much higher level than that. If there continues to be a label on
people - you know, 'you are a bad person if you ever took drugs' - then
we'll never move forward."

Even the Tories made little attempt to capitalise on the admission. Andrew
Lansley, a shadow minister, said: "I appreciate that it is important for Mo
Mowlam to answer questions about her past. But it remains true that the
important thing is not her past experience but that she now continues - with
us - to stress to young people in particular the dangers of experimentation
with and use of drugs."