HIGH SOCIETY

When it comes to illegal drugs, it seems as a nation we're engaged in
double-think. Tony Blair's Government is pursuing a zero-tolerance policy,
yet Noel Gallagher gets invited to Downing Street. Official Britain just
says no, yet mainstream business is courting the stoned pound.

It's lunchtime at the Action on Crime Conference at the National Motorcycle
Museum in Birmingham and delegates are braving the howling wind of the
courtyard for a much-needed smoke. Inside, in a quiet corner of the
reception area, Keith Hellawell, the Government's amiable anti-drugs
co-ordinator - or "Drugs Tsar" - is explaining the dangers that "soft" drug
users face. "They could well be causing trouble for themselves
psychologically," he tells me. "If you've met some of them, they're zombies…
couldn't be described as anything else… zonked out with the long term use of
it…"

Hellawell, who later in the afternoon will give a keynote conference speech,
Tackling Drugs to Build a Better Britain, continues to talk about how those
psychological problems might be passed onto children, the possible physical
health risks associated with cannabis and his determination to do something
about it. Earlier this month Hellawell announced that he would by urging
teachers to stop describing drugs as "soft" or "recreational" as it
encourages children to experiment with cannabis and ecstasy. A national
advertising campaign to discourage the public using them will follow.

But despite the Drug Tsar conjuring up images of cannabis "zombies" and Tony
Blair insisting last year that the government would "fight against the evil
of drugs", the reality is that more people from all age groups are using
more illegal drugs than ever before. And they are becoming mainstream. The
Prime Minister had no problem sharing a laugh with Noel Gallagher, the man
who said drug-taking is no more unusual than having a cup of tea, at Number
Ten. Last year, a national newspaper, the Independent on Sunday, ran a
high-profile campaign to legalise cannabis. And, most surprising of all, big
business is merrily using drug imagery to fuel its advertising campaigns.

So doesn't Keith Hellawell ever feel that he's got the nation's youth
sticking two fingers up at him? "I'm a positive individual," he says,
laughing.

Despite the government health warnings, drug culture has entered the
mainstream to the extent that illicit turn-ons such as cannabis,
amphetamines and Ecstasy are no longer confined to the trendy end of club
culture. They've gone high street. And even the Drugs Tsar himself
recognises that recreational drug use in Britain is becoming all-pervasive.
"Yes, I think what we are finding is the normalisation of drug taking," he
admits.

The statistics demonstrate that he could hardly say otherwise. According to
Home Office figures almost half the population of Britain aged between 16
and 29 has either smoked a joint, taken speed, dropped an "E", supped magic
mushroom tea or tripped on acid. The Government's estimates also reveal two
million regular cannabis smokers of all ages, and seven million people have
tried it.

These figures are widely regarded as conservative. An estimated 300 million
illegal drug deals a year take place in London alone. New independent
research based on a five-year study of ordinary young people from
conventional families in the Northwest shows 64 per cent or their sample
trying drugs by the age of 18. Ten years ago this figure would have been 20
per cent at the most. The authors estimate that there are now anything up to
1.8 million drug experimenters in the 15-19 age bracket alone.

"Young people say they can get hold of any drug, any time," says Howard
Parker, one of the co-authors of the book Illegal Leisure. "They won't talk
about it because their parents will think they're going to die. But in our
survey we found their drug-taking wasn't street corner or sub-culture
behaviour."

As dance music and clubs have moved mainstream, so have the drugs - to the
extent that the two are now pretty much inseparable. For youth culture read
drug culture. The stereotypes of the infecting junkie, the mad-eyed raver
downing Ecstasy and collapsing, the city whizz kids with bleeding noses, or
the bonged-out hippy no longer apply.

Today's average drug takers are very average. They will be people like the
on-in-three junior doctors who use cannabis, as reported in The Lancet
medical journal recently, or the four traffic wardens from London's Camden
Town caught smoking cannabis in their lunch hour last year. They'll be
footballers ("Players are turning out on cocaine, cannabis and all sorts of
funny tablets," remarked Ron Atkinson when he was promoting his book A
Different Ballgame last year), they'll be fishermen, builders, hairdressers
and stock-brokers (identified last September as likely users of amphetamines
at the first annual conference on stimulants).

Even when Blue Peter presenter Richard Bacon was caught snorting cocaine,
the affair was met - despite his inevitably losing his job - with sniggers
rather than scandal. DJ Chris Evans famously demanded on his Virgin Radio
show that the BBC should reinstate Bacon or "get rid of everybody else who
takes cocaine".

It may be likely, in any case, that schoolchildren listening to his
programme wouldn't receive similar punishment. One school head, Alan Wright
of the ?5,000-a-year Bolton School, said: "We became increasingly concerned
that if we were to expel them [drug takers] on every occasion, we would not
be fairly reflecting present times." Other heads, of course, might view it
differently.

"It's mainly about young people experimenting and taking drugs because they
are good fun," says Mike Linnell of Lifeline, Manchester's pioneering
narcotics information and advice service. "Some will get into problems, but
most will come to no harm. They're taking drugs as part of their leisure
activity and are normal in any other way." They are also very unlikely to
get prosecuted. The odds of getting arrested for smoking cannabis in the UK
are currently 50,000 to 1. According to Lifeline's research, users will know
about the dangers of their drug of choice , will come from a functioning
family and will either be in work or in further education. Many now believe
that addiction is linked to a variety of environmental and social factors
which the Government's New Strategy is talking about addressing through
treatment programmes rather than punishment.

Perhaps the biggest shift of all is that today's recreational drug users
also tend to have large disposable incomes. They've become a new market
which big business is eager to tap. And big business tends not to miss a
trick.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) which monitors print and poster
advertising, and the Independent Television Commission (ITC) are receiving
an ever-increasing number of complaints about the drug connotations in
promotional campaigns. British cycle manufacturer Raleigh recently had an ad
running on hoardings and in magazines for its new Max Zero G model. Among
others in the series, it showed a girl riding a bike underwater with an
elephant swimming above. "What's she on?" screamed the wording. Some great
psychedelics perhaps.

"No, absolutely not. A drug connotation was not our intention, and
definitely not something we could or would condone at all," insists Dave
Edwards, group product manager at Raleigh. "For us it was purely a
double-meaning - "What's she on?" as in what's she riding and, secondly,
because she's in an extremely unusual situation." The ASA did receive
complaints, but gave Raleigh the benefit of the doubt.

Bring on Unilever, one of the world's biggest corporations and manufacturer
of family products such as PG Tips and Persil. Its parent company, Lever
Brothers, was one of numerous outfits which sent a representative to a
Business in the Community anti-drugs conference just before Christmas. One
of its brands, Faberge, is currently pushing two perfumes on to the
club-culture market. The first, Addiction "pour homme" was promoted with a
series of ads in glossy lifestyle magazines based on the theme of the "First
Signs of Addiction : High temperature. Mood swings. Loss of appetite.
Dilated pupils. Trembling hands. Dreamlike state."

Their second perfume is Fusion, which was promoted by an advert showing a DJ
holding out a piece of paper folded into the shape of a cocaine wrap. When
unwrapped, the paper reads : "Fusion - the only thing worth sniffing in a
club", with a sticky label which, once peeled back, revealed white,
cocaine-like powder that smelled of the perfume.

"The advert communicated a clear anti-drugs message," says a Fusion
spokesman. "It was intended to promote the fragrance but was in no way
intended to condone illegal activity." The ASA concluded that "the use of
words and images closely associated with illegal drugs were likely to be
seen to condone illegal drug use."

The examples go on. Sony Computers got famously slapped around its joysticks
last year by the ASA for a Playstation poster campaign which read "Powder, I
need powder, my body aches, yells, screams for powder…" The ASA was
concerned that the advert "which was so likely to be seen to condone illegal
drugs" had been used at all. And if there are any lingering doubts about
whether drug culture has not moved off the streets, Watches of Switzerland
has just been reprimanded by the ASA for an advert that appeared in GQ
magazine plugging its ?500 to ?2,000 range of Baume & Mercier "Hampton"
watches. It featured a bishop smoking what looked like a joint.

"We would say that the bishop was smoking a loosely rolled cigarette,"
argues Sarah Sowton, marketing manager for Watches of Switzerland.

Isn't that a little dubious?

"I'm not going to comment on that," she says. "We were just trying to create
something that was funny, quirky, contemporary and fun."

It was certainly fun, but the company had to withdraw the advert after the
ASA condemned it as "likely to be seen to depict and condone illegal
drug-use."

ASA spokesman Chris Reed agrees that the body is dealing with more and more
similar cases. "We've seen an increase in the kind of advertisements that
allude to drug use - either directly or indirectly," he says.

On TV, with its much broader audience base, the references tend to be more
subtle - a hint of trippy imagery, a soundtrack by a rave band, a snippet of
the latest club slang. In the past few months, the ITC has investigated
complaints about the American Express Blue Card campaign and the Rover 200
commercial showing the woman with the wild painted contact lenses.

Lewis Blackwell, editor of Creative Review, believes that most companies
know exactly what's going on with their advertising campaigns. "It's
unlikely that they're just going to sign up for something they don't
understand," he says. "They want to be provocative and controversial but as
soon as there is any comeback, they're not going to acknowledge it because
that's too dangerous. Advertisers are wise guys, and they're keen to exploit
the drug-culture thing - that's their job."

The print adverts tend to appear in lifestyle magazines that have dived on
board the drugs bandwagon to keep in touch with the tastes of their own
readers. And although the fashion industry that's their lifeblood has come
under fire for promoting "heroin chic", it would appear to be unrepentant;
last year designer Andrew Groves upped the ante when his models sported
dresses made of razor blades and strode down a catwalk dusted with white
powder.

"We do at least one drug feature a month," says Michael Hogan, editor of Sky
Magazine, published by EMAP Metro. "Our readers are not people who live in
Soho and wear different sunglasses every day, they're just kids who are
interested in popular culture and what's happening. They probably take an E
every weekend and smoke a bit of marijuana. Drugs are now part of the mix in
young people's lives." The same approach is taken by IPC's Loaded and
countless other magazines.

Big business is not unnaturally trying to reach this market through cheeky
advertising. And it is also trying to associate products with the culture
through what's known as "edge branding" - sponsorship of the hippest clubs,
magazine pages, bands and festivals.

Similar tactics are evident elsewhere as First Choice, the family-holiday
people, also run twentysomething package tours to "mental" Ibiza and "the
totally on one" resorts in the Greek Islands, or the alcopops people give
their bottles pseudo-rave names such as "Chill'in", or the Body Shop
promotes its new THC-free Hemp range by the use of the cannabis-leaf logo.

Meanwhile, a stroll down the main shopping street in Manchester will take
you to HMV where you can purchase The Joint Rolling Handbook (Expert
Edition) for ?5.99 or a "Legalise It" postcard subverting the Misuse of
Drugs Act, 1971, with the phrase "Consumption of controlled drugs on these
premises will be tolerated."

"In no way would we actually want to promote the use of drugs. That's very,
very clear," says HMV's spokesman Gennaro Castaldo. So what about the
postcard? "It's important that we keep in tune with our customers," he says.
"If they have a particular culture, we can't be alienated from that. It's
not really our role to tell people they shouldn't buy this, or do that."

A stone's throw from HMV, Hermans Hed Shop mixes drug taking and skateboard
gear, while around the corner Buzzin Budz Seed Bank, Britain's first shop
openly selling and stocking legal cannabis seeds, has just begun trading.
"The day we opened the Manchester Evening News ran the story on the front
page and by the afternoon we were swamped out, everyone thought the glorious
say had arrived and they'd make cannabis legal," recalls the owner, Dave
Stevenson. "When I first told the local bobbies what the shop was going to
sell they said "As long as it's not a sex shop, that's sound." I just can't
see the Government's problem with cannabis. The laws were set in place by
people brought up before the Second World War."

In the meantime, education is coming from friends' experience and the
Internet, with its thousands of unrestricted pro-drugs sites. In
cyberspliff-land you can send a "virtual toke" postcard, find out how to
make opium tea from the Junkie Homepage, or download the Ganja Farmer game
for free (you have a 20mm machine gun atop your 1969 VW minibus and blow
away anybody and anything that tries to mess with you or your herb).

But you can also nose in on discussion groups or write in with problems.
Rather than see an official drugs-education officer, young drug-takers can
contact the Oracle of Buddha himself in the High Times site, or send an
e-mail to ecstasy.org. The people running these sites have been there,
swallowed it and lived to tell the tale. The Health Education Authority's
website www.trashed.uk doesn't stand a chance.

I put it to George Howarth, the Home Office minister responsible for drugs,
that any information the Government puts out can't be anything but out of
touch. "It's necessary because drugs do damage people, even so-called
recreational drugs," he says. "Secondly, I think that as people grow older
they recognise that drugs can lead to serious problems."

But is the Labour Government in danger of losing credibility and alienating
the huge numbers of people under the age of 30? "It might do at specific
times with specific young people," he agrees. "But in the generality of
things, they'll probably move through the stage and will appreciate the
message when they come out of it." Even so, that message is given out in the
context of the Government inviting pop culture - i.e. drugs culture - into
No 10 to trade off their cool.

High-street magazines including the music title Mojo have featured stars
smoking joints on their covers, while even Britain's oldest newspaper The
Observer had a travel supplement cover story this month featuring convicted
drugs-smuggler Howard Marks smoking ganja in Jamaica. (Marks' autobiography,
incidentally, has sold more than 200,000 copies.) Sun readers, despite the
paper having come down firmly against the legalisation of drugs in its
editorials, voted two to one in favour of legalisation.

A Radio 1 poll last year showed 84 per cent of their listeners wanting the
right to use drugs. And an embarrassing survey by the official Drugs
Enforcement Administration (DEA) in the US concluded in a three-year study
of 40,000 American "winners" - successful business executives, lawyers,
scientists and civic leaders - that 71 per cent had experimented with
controlled substances. It didn't fit to well with its "Do drugs and you'll
be a loser" message. "It goes against everything we know about drugs," said
the DEA head researcher Howard Tobin. "There is clearly something at work
here we don't understand."

The problem the Government now faces is how to enforce anti-drugs
legislation in the face of criminals making huge profits from drug use that
is tacitly accepted by huge sections of society. "The Government adopted my
findings on crack and heroin, so when I do that sort of work I'm OK," fumes
Illegal Leisure author Howard Parker. "But when I'm talking about
normalisation there's a lot of tutting and frowning because the Government's
saying there's no need for an independent enquiry into the Misuse of Drugs
Act." Parker is also angry that before his appointment, Keith Hellawell, if
not openly for the legalisation of drugs, was one of the few police chiefs
open to the possibility - "We should think the unthinkable," he said.

Government policy at the moment is to maintain the status quo. I put this
point to Hellawell that this weekend thousands, if not millions, of young
people will be taking drugs, probably without coming to any harm, almost
definitely without being arrested. Is that really a problem? "I think it
is," he replies. "It's a crime…I wouldn't feel comfortable if my children or
grandchildren used it; I wouldn't want them to take the risk."

Many parents or grandparents will feel similarly. But if current trends
continue, young people taking the risk are fast becoming the majority. And
business has got their number.