THEY REMEMBER THE 60S, BUT IT WAS SOMEONE ELSE SMOKING

Mo Mowlam's fellow 60s children were last night relaxed about her
revelation that she had used cannabis during her student days.

But the former wild ones were not exactly rushing to join the queue behind
the cabinet minister to confess the same thing. Just because you remember
the 1960s, they contended, it doesn't mean you weren't there.

Asked whether she had ever taken drugs, Edwina Currie, the former Tory
health minister (17 in 1963), said flatly: "No I didn't. I've never even
smoked a cigarette. If that's the best they can cook up on Mo Mowlam then
she must be doing something right."

As a pupil at the Liverpool Institute for Girls, she spent a bit of time
flirting with Steve Norris who, along with Paul McCartney and George
Harrison, attended the boys' school.

But as the Beatles went off to cannabis and LSD-raddled fame and fortune,
Mr Norris plunged into the drug-free drudgery of Worcester College, Oxford.

"I am very lucky - I am just too old to have been in school or university
when drugs were about, so I can honestly say no I didn't," said Mr Norris,
18 in 1963.

Attempts to pose the question to the BBC's two director-generals, Sir John
Birt and Greg Dyke, were met with a flat "I am unable to offer any comment
on that at all" from a corporation spokesman.

John Humphrys, presenter of Radio 4's Today pro gramme and a 20-year-old in
1963, said: "None of your business, in short."

But he added: "I can't quite see why we should be excited as to whether
somebody puffed on a spliff at the age of 20 or not. I'd be slightly
surprised if most students hadn't. In fact I'd probably treat with a
certain scepticism any 40- or 50-year-old who'd been to university and said
they'd never so much as had a puff on a spliff."

Tony Blair, a mere 10 in 1963, dabbled in rock music at Fettes and St
John's College, Oxford, but - as he said before becoming Labour leader -
"didn't get into drugs". William Hague was a child of the 1960s only to the
extent that he was born in them (1961). Home secretary Jack Straw (17 in
1963) not only did not take cannabis at Leeds university but actively
campaigned against it.

The former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown, asked if he had ever
taken drugs, once testily told a student interviewer: "I do not accept the
validity of the question."

But an increasingly tolerant attitude to cannabis among prominent people
was illustrated by a survey which revealed that, of 81 MPs from the 1997
intake who replied to a survey, 22 had taken illegal drugs. One, David
Prior - now Tory deputy chairman - said then: "I associate my experience
with drugs - soft ones - not with Mick Jagger or Aldous Huxley, but with
passing my law degree and working in a bank. You can wear a pinstripe suit
and be utterly conventional and still roll a joint."

Mr Ashdown's successor, Charles Kennedy, has called for a royal commission
on drugs. Simon Hughes, the Liberal Democrats' home affairs spokesman (12
in 1963) repeated last night that he had taken drugs when a lawyer in
London, the last time in about 1980. "It was some time ago and it happily
came and went fairly quickly. Like Mo I found it not of any great interest
and certainly with no addictive affects."

Mr Hughes said Ms Mowlam's revelation would actually help the debate. "I
hope that by Mo making the statement she did the government are not so
absolutist about not wanting to talk about changing anything. The fact it
happens to be the person in the cabinet office in charge of drugs policy
gives more credibility, particularly with users, than the blank 'nothing to
do with us, we musn't touch it' approach."

The publicist Max Clifford said it did not matter if people such as Mo
Mowlam had once used cannabis - and even that it would hardly matter if
people in her position did so nowadays.

"I know people that take it. I know politicians that use it - so what? To a
lot of people it's a form of relaxation and if you are under tremendous
pressure, if you find something that doesn't harm you or anybody else then
good luck to you."

Mr Clifford, 20 in 1963, said he had plenty of access to drugs in those
days but had never taken them. "I suppose I never thought I needed it. Most
of the people I represented took cannabis and other drugs - everyone I have
ever dealt with, from Joe Cocker to Jimi Hendrix. Some of the time there
was almost like a cloud in the office."