LET'S END THE REEFER MADNESS

Amelia Hill on legalising cannabis

BROWNIE Mary, the woman responsible for the recent transformation of
America's drug laws, died last week. The 77-year-old grandmother was an
unlikely catalyst for the partial legalisation, in 1996, of marijuana in
California, but her influence forced a revolution that we in Scotland have
yet to confront.

Mary Jane Rathburn was a strikingly ordinary woman who lived alone in a
small flat in San Francisco. She retired, at 60, from her job as a waitress
and began baking cakes for the young men dying of Aids in her local hosptal.

To this day, no one quite knows when Mary began lacing her all-American
brownies with marijuana but over the l7 years she visited the hospital, her
culinary treats became something of an institution.

Inevitably, however, she was rumbled: police outside her home identified
the pungent fumes floating down from her kitchen window and Mary found
herself facing criminal charges. But she wouldn't give up. Eschewing the
complex pros and cons of the drugs debate, Mary applied good old-fashioned
common sense to the argument and continued baking her trademark gifts.

Mary's case attracted a huge amount of public attention when it came to
court and as her tale filtered down through Californian society, it became
obvious that even the staunchest rnembers of the blue-rinse brigade found
it difficult to condemn someone using marijuana to ease the pain of the dying.

In a wholly unexpected but welcome development, the state responded to
public opinion and softened its stance. When they eventually eased their
laws three yearsago, enabling doctors to prescribe marijuana to patients
for pain relief, Washington, Oregon, Arizona and Nevada soon followed suit.

But the success of Brownie Mary was essentially hollow because an earlier
federal law proscribing marijuana continues to ensure that doctors and
patients using the drug for medical purposes can still be arrested and
imprisoned.

Mary's tale is a perfect example of the snakes-and-ladders politics that we
have perfected here in Britain: despite the heat generated by various
headlines, no politician in a position of power has the stomach to fight
the good fight.

Cannabis is classified as a Schedule 1 drug in this country, restricting
its use to drug research, and the Scottish parliament will have no
opportunity to question this - it lost the battle to make its own mind up
when Westminster realised the vote-winning potential of an SNP-Lib Dem
alliance fighting on a pro-legalisation ticket.

Nevertheless, drugs have been earmarked as a key election battleground: the
call by one of Scotland's most senior police officers last Friday in favour
of the legalisation of cannabis was merely the latest in a long line of
geyser-like spurts that have characterised our peculiarly British way of
dealing with the issue - explosion followed by retraction and/or silence.

Bold statements such as those of deputy chief constable Tom Wood are either
followed by retractions or are overshadowed by concrete proof that the law
has no intention of easing up: the pro-legalisation campaign was rocked by
the Sentencing of Eric Mann to one year's imprisonment by Swansea Crown
Court three weeks ago for using cannabis to alleviate the pain caused by
his severe arthritis.

Despite the evidence of its own independent advisors, the government
continues to justify its ludicrous positon by telling us that cannabis must
remain illegal in its natural state until analyses, taking five to 10 years
and leading to the development of synthetic, expensive forms of the
substance, have been carried out.

The government claim to be so concerned for our well-being that it is
prepared to criminalise and imprison us for using a drug that study after
study has shown to be considerably less dangerous than alcohol.

But this zero tolerance approach is far more dangerous than the drug
itself: smoking a spliff is not a slippery path to smoking crack cocaine.
And criminalising young people for indulging in this harmless relaxant of
choice devalues the anti-drug message and undermines the trust young people
have in official drug warnings.

I was arrested for possession of cannabis when I was 15. Caught rolling a
joint in a park outside my house with a friend, I was given a temporary
criminal record and locked in a cell for eight hours with a drug dealer,
who consequently became my boyfriend. But far from being terrified by the
experience, the event brought home to me the lunacy of a legal system which
condones alcohol and tobacco while demonising cannabis, ranking it
alongside heroin and crack cocaine.

After my sojourn in confinement, I briefly tested the water of a more
serious drug culture alongside my new-found boyfriend. The novelty soon
wore off and my drug-addled boyfriend faded away but it was at that point
my teenage rebellion could have turned into something far more destructive
and illegal than a quiet smoke in the park.

Almost 30,000 Scots were charged with possessing or supplying cannabis last
year, all victimised and criminilised to no purpose and for no reason other
than political cowardice. It is time to look anew at this problem and
Scotland has a golden opportunity to do so: we must reject our current
unworkable drug laws which, as they stand, do far more harm than the drugs
themselves.