JUST SAY NO TO THE ANNUAL SUMMER DRUGS DEBATE

Point of view

Francis Wheen

I t is an old and enjoyable summer ritual, as predictable as the invasion of
Stonehenge on Midsummer's Eve or a defeat for the English cricket team. A
public figure suggests that cannabis ought to be decriminalised - or, at the
very least, that a committee of eminent persons should be allowed to brood
and cogitate on the subject. Grateful for any distraction during the silly
season, MPs and tabloid editors work themselves up into a state of foaming
apoplexy. Then the whole thing is forgotten again for another year.

So far as I can discover, the tradition began in July 1967, when such
well-known revolutionaries as Jonathan Aitken, David Dimbleby and Brian
Walden signed a full-page advertisement in the Times calling for a review of
the law on cannabis.

The same old pantomime has been acted out at regular intervals ever since.
In September 1994, for instance, the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard,
claimed that the Liberal Democrats were "unfit for public office" because
their conference had proposed the establishment of a royal commission on
soft drugs. Even Charles Kennedy, the party's outgoing president - outgoing
in every sense of the word - thought it necessary to chide delegates for
their "frivolity".

Five years on, Kennedy himself is in the line of fire for suggesting that,
er, a royal commission might be a good idea. "Charles Kennedy clearly has
yet to learn how a responsible party leader should behave," fumes the shadow
home secretary, Ann Widdecombe. Not to be outdone, a Downing Street
spokesman informs us that "Tony Blair is against decriminalisation of
cannabis and sees no value in a royal commission."

In one respect, Blair is right: why go to the trouble and expense of an
official inquiry when the job has already been done? All he needs to do is
reprint the voluminous report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, set up in
1893 at the behest of the British government to consider whether cannabis
should be prohibited in India. Although the descriptions of drug use in
colonial Madras and Mysore may be inapplicable to Britain at the end of the
20th century, the general conclusions are impressively timeless and
universal.

The commission's seven members took their duties very seriously indeed,
interviewing 1,193 witnesses from all over the country. Far from damaging
one's health, they found, "it has been clearly established that the
occasional use of hemp in moderate doses may be beneficial" - a point
confirmed by recent medical research. (Widdecombe would be shocked to learn
that Queen Victoria took cannabis to ease period pains.) They noted that
hemp was used "to give staying-power under severe exertion" - particularly
by wrestlers and musicians, palki-bearers and porters, dhobis and
nightwatchmen, mendicants and pilgrims. Did the drug weaken one's character?
"The commission are of the opinion that [its] moderate use produces no moral
injury whatever." Nor did it cause insanity.

What of the alleged link between cannabis and crime? "The general opinion is
that hemp drugs have per se no necessary connection with crime," the
commissioners reported. "It is true that some witnesses assert that habitual
consumers sometimes spend more than their poverty renders reasonably
possible, and are then tempted to commit petty thefts . . . The same is
true, however, of any unwise expenditure beyond what one can afford, and of
any extravagance which intensifies poverty." Just so. In recent years there
have been many cases of scratchcard addicts who rob or embezzle to finance
their habit, yet the Government still regards the National Lottery as a
wholesome institution.

"When the basis of the opinions as to the alleged evil effects of the
moderate use of the drugs is subjected to careful examination, the grounds
on which the allegations are founded prove to be in the highest degree
defective," the commission concluded, after an exhaustive review of the
evidence. "Total prohibition of the hemp plant for narcotics, and of the
manufacture, sale, or use of the drugs derived from it, is neither necessary
nor expedient."

This may explain why Messrs Blair and Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, won't
permit a similar inquiry into their assertions that law reform will provoke
an epidemic of crime, degeneracy and reefer madness. They are secretly
afraid that, as in 1893, it would come up with the wrong answer.