GOING DUTCH?

A Police Foundation report is about to recommend major
changes to Britain's drugs law. The government should respond without
delay.

The most far-reaching inquiry into drugs legislation for a quarter of
a century will call next month for the decriminalisation of cannabis
use and a fundamental shake-up of Britain's drugs laws. The findings
of a committee set up by the Police Foundation, an independent
research body partly funded by the Home Office, will provoke
controversy and put pressure on the government to rethink its approach
to drugs.

The committee is not an official body, but it is widely seen as a
quasi-Royal Commission, set up with the tacit approval of the
government. There are two chief constables among its members, and its
sectariat includes former Home Office officials. The inquiry is
chaired by Lady Runciman, a former member of the government's Advisory
Council on the Misuse of Drugs. It has spent two-and-a-half years
examining the current state of the law.

The committee has concluded that the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act is
arbitrary and inconsistent, and imposes heavy demands on the criminal
justice system to little public benefit. Its most controversial
recommendation is that possession of cannabis should never attract a
prison sentence, but should instead be subject to fines or other
penalties. At present possession of cannabis can be punished by up to
seven years in jail. The latest Home Office figures on sentencing
indicate that about 500 people were imprisoned in 1997 for possession
of cannabis. And yet trade in cannabis and its use is an entrenched
part of British life - as Jack Straw, the home secretary, well knows.
His own teenage son was caught offering to sell cannabis to two
reporters a couple of years ago.

Though removing the threat of prison for possession of cannabis is
technically described as "depenalisation" rather than
"decriminalisation", it would inevitably be viewed as moving Britain
towards the more liberal Dutch approach. Cannabis is freely available
in the Netherlands for sale in "coffee shops" in small quantities.
The cost of five grammes, the maximum amount that can be legally
purchased, is about ?11.50($19), enough to make about a dozen
cigarettes. Britain will not go this far, since possession of
marijuana will remain illegal even if the committee's recommendations
are accepted. But "depenalisation" of soft drugs in Britain would be
likely to lead to tacit acceptance of the sale of cannabis - much as
the police currently allow brothels to function under the guise of
massage parlours, even though allowing premises to be used for
prostitution is illegal.

The committee will also call for significant changes to the classes
and schedules of controlled drugs. The current act fails to
distinguish sufficiently between hard and soft drugs. At present
Ecstasy, a derivative of amphetamine, is grouped with heroin among the
most dangerous Class A drugs, subject to the heaviest penalties for
misuse. But 500,000 people are widely estimated to use Ecstasy each
weekend in clubs. The report recommends that it should be downgraded
and treated like cannabis as a soft, relatively harmless drug.

The report is also expected to call for a significant relaxation in
the prohibition of the use of drugs such as cannabis for medical
reasons. And it believes there should be a revision of the fuzzy
border between supply and possession. Under two grammes of cannabis,
it suggests that possession should be treated as a minor civil
offence. Above two grammes, there could be a charge of supply, but
the committee is expected to stress that the law should distinguish
between social and commercial supply. Some of its members are said to
be appalled by cases in which teenagers have been sent to prison for
supplying a small group of friends with a single tablet of Ecstasy
each.

Many of the committee's recommendations would bring the law into line
with police practice. "Sending a drug addict to prison is like
sending a drunkard to a brewery," one expert noted. Nearly half of
all drug offences already attract merely a caution. And simple
possession of soft drugs is rarely prosecuted. Edward Ellison, a
former head of Scotland Yard's Drug Squad, argues: "There is no
evidence that a repressive policy on drugs works."

But other police officers disagree. As a result, the zeal which drugs
offences are pursued can depend on chance, or the policies of
particular police forces. Two Cambridge care workers, charged with
allowing their clients to deal in hard drugs in a day centre, were
recently imprisoned for four and five years.

The government's response to the committee's report is likely to be
cautious. Tony Blair, and Jack Straw, believe that the time is not
ripe for radical reform. Other ministers, such as Clare Short, the
secretary for overseas development, believe privately the law is
"barking mad". With a general election approaching, the government
will probably play for time, possibly by referring the issue to its
own advisory council. A measure of its current hawkish position was
the home secretary's outright rejection of a recent report by a House
of Lords select committee, which recommended that marijuana should be
made available for medical purposes.

Public opinion appears, however, to be moving in favour of fundamental
change. A recent MORI poll found that 80% want the laws against
cannabis relaxed, and only 17% believe that possession of cannabis
should be illegal as at present. Mo Mowlem, the minister responsible
for co-ordinating the government's drug policy, claimed this week that
considerable progress had been made since the appointment of Keith
Hellawell, a former chief constable of West Yorkshire, as "drugs
czar". But there is little evidence that the government's policy is
making inroads into drug-related crime. At least a third of crime in
urban areas is drug-related, and nearly half of all house burglaries
and thefts from cars are committed by drug users.

Britain continues to have a worse record for illicit drug use than any
of its European neighbours. A study of all 15 EU countries by the
European Monitoring Centre for drugs found that three times as many
young Britons aged 15-16 said they had experimented with Ecstasy as
French or Germans. Young Britons were also much more likely to have
used hallucinogens and amphetamines and to have abused solvents.

The theory that a more permissive approach to soft drugs leads many to
experiment with hard drugs has not been borne out in the Netherlands.
That country has a lower prevalence of hard-drug addicts per head (1.6
per 1,000) than France (2.4), Britain (2.6), Italy (3.0), and
Switzerland (5.0). If young adults wish to use soft drugs, argue the
Dutch officials, it is better that they are not exposed to the
criminal sub-culture surrounding hard drugs. Hence the famous coffee
shops of Amsterdam. The Dutch Aid-prevention programme, with its
distribution of free needles and extensive treatment programmes, also
compares well with those of other countries. Nearly 40% of Aids
victims across Europe are intravenous drug users, compared with just
over 10% in the Netherlands. (END)