BRITAIN'S ANTI-DRUG CHIEF MOWLAM SMOKED CANNABIS

LONDON (Reuters) - British cabinet minister Mo Mowlam, recently appointed to
head the Labor government's anti-drug campaign, admitted Sunday she had
smoked marijuana as a student.

``I tried marijuana, I didn't like it particularly, and unlike President
Clinton I did inhale,'' Mowlam, 50, said after British newspapers reported
she smoked the drug when studying in the United States in the early 1970s.
The Sunday Telegraph newspaper said that a fellow student at Iowa State
University, where Mowlam studied politics, had seen Mowlam with a cannabis
cigarette in her hands at a party.

In an interview with Sky Television, the former Secretary for Northern
Ireland, said the incident would not compromise her new position as
coordinator of the government's drug policy.

``It happened in America, it was something many people experimented with,''
she said. ``If I had bought it, sold it, used it frequently it might have
done, but I didn't.'' Britain's Conservative party has seized upon Mowlam's
admission, just as Republicans criticized President Clinton, who admitted to
smoking, but not inhaling marijuana during his 1992 presidential campaign.
As well as her anti-drug role, Cabinet Office Minister Mowlam's duties
include ensuring that government policy is implemented. ``Anyone who takes
responsibility for leading our policy against drugs should themselves be
able to say with conviction and from personal conviction that one must just
say no to drugs,'' said Andrew Lansley, Conservative Shadow Minister.

Britain's government has taken a tough stance against drugs, but a report
partly funded by the Home Office is expected to call for the
decriminalization of cannabis and a shake-up of the country's drugs laws.
Mowlam and her team will respond to the report by the Runciman Committee, a
quasi-Royal Commission, when it releases its findings next month. At
present, possession of cannabis can be punished by up to seven years in jail
in Britain but long sentences are rarely imposed.

The latest Home Office figures indicate that about 500 people were
imprisoned in 1997 for possession of cannabis.

A recent MORI poll found that 80 percent of Britons supported the relaxation
of cannabis laws while only 17 percent believed that cannabis should remain
illegal.