HARD LAWS LEAD TO HARD DRUGS

Cannabis is no addictive life-wrecker, Mary Ann Sieghart says. But its
illegality can draw young people into heroin use

It's official: cannabis wrecks lives. So says the Home Secretary. So says
William Hague. And how does the Tory leader know? He saw the drug "wrecking
the lives" of many of his fellow undergraduates at Oxford.

It is the sort of assertion that you tend to accept - unless you know
otherwise. I was at the same university as William Hague, in the same year,
studying the same subject. Most of the people I knew at that time smoked
cannabis. None of their lives has been wrecked by the drug. Indeed, every
single one of those friends has since prospered.

Several are now entrepreneurs, worth millions; there is a clutch of
well-to-do barristers; an actor and a novelist who are both household
names; several investment bankers, and more than a handful in the media.
One or two are Tory MPs, but I won't mention their names. Most have
children and lead enviably stable, professional lives.

About half have grown out of smoking pot. A few still do so regularly; most
of the rest do only when offered it, usually at weekends. I know of four
who smoke joints every evening. But even they are extremely successful in
their fields. Far from sapping their motivation, the drug acts as a
relaxant after a hard day's work.

I do not deny that cannabis has its casualties. So does alcohol. Any drug
will do its worst to those who have addictive personalities. Some people
can do nothing in moderation: if they drink they have to get blind drunk;
if they smoke dope, they have to get wrecked. People who roll a joint in
the morning and are stoned all day are as sad as those who wake up and pour
themselves a brandy. But we do not ban alcohol because a small proportion
of those who drink abuse it. The same logic should apply to cannabis.

Those who are natural addicts will anyway shift from one drug to another.
Heroin addicts who manage to give up know that they dare not touch a drink,
for that drug may enslave them as surely as the previous one did. If
cannabis casualties were denied access to pot, they would simply escape
from the world via a different route. What wrecks their lives is their
addictive natures.

But do soft drugs lead to harder ones? At Oxford, there were indeed other
drugs around: speed (to help students through essay crises), LSD, magic
mushrooms, cocaine for the seriously rich. Some people took these
experimentally and recreationally. I can't remember anyone having a serious
"problem" with them, although one rather bluff rower had an acid trip that
expanded his mind rather wider than it was used to being stretched.

Until our third year, drug-taking seemed to be a pretty harmless
occupation. It livened up people's evenings and weekends, but did not
affect their work. Then one of the dealers started selling heroin.

And suddenly a small group of otherwise lively, talented undergraduates
fell under its spell. My brother and I, who had seen heroin destroy the
lives of some London friends, became the most proselytising of preachers,
trying to persuade others not to touch the stuff. We had only limited
success.

Heroin is the really dangerous drug. One boy I knew died of an overdose.
All but one of the rest gave it up, and now lead perfectly successful
lives. (Oddly enough, so does the junkie.) But it took a chunk out of their
early adult years, and left scars that will never completely fade.

This is the drug that undoubtedly wrecks lives. The only reason why some of
my friends encountered it, though, was because they had to go to an
underworld drug dealer in order to buy their relatively harmless cannabis.
If anything acts as a gateway to dangerous drugs, it is the illegal status
of pot.

This illegality also has a distorting effect on the picture that most
people have of drug-takers. They encounter only the casualties, the
equivalent of alcoholics: those who smoke cannabis in moderation and lead
unwrecked lives are reluctant to advertise the fact because the law has
criminalised them.

But, if Mr Hague had moved in different circles at Oxford, he would have
discovered that "social" pot smokers, like social drinkers, are just
normal, respectable and well-adjusted members of society - no different,
indeed, from him.