TIME TO TAKE POT LUCK

COMMENTARY: The Law On Cannabis Is Not Working. Mr Blair should accept this
and consider legalisation, says Allan Massie

IN A speech on the rejection of the Reform Bill, the Liberal clergyman
Sydney Smith compared the efforts of the House of Lords to block the
progress of reform to the attempts of a Mrs Partington to keep out the
Atlantic with a mop, during a great storm at Sidmouth in 1824. This
prompted a famous cartoon by (I think) Cruikshank in which Mrs Partington
was given the features of the Duke of Wellington, the most obdurate
opponent of parliamentary reform.

Mrs Partington is still with us, though now she wears the features of Tony
Blair or Jack Straw as they try to push back the incoming Atlantic of drugs
with their little mops.

Alternatively, their conduct of the war against drugs resembles Hitler's
conduct of the war on the Eastern Front.

Barbarossa has failed, the Battle of Stalingrad has been lost, but still
demented orders are issued from the bunker forbidding any withdrawal. And
yet the retreat goes on, the war is being lost. It is being lost because it
has become unwinnable. Does anyone seriously suppose otherwise? Presumably
Mr Blair and Mr Straw do, for they propose to intensify the war. They have
appointed a new commander, ludicrously styled a czar. Don't they remember
what happened to the last czar of all the Russias?

We know how the war-song goes. Cannabis (which, incidentally, was made
illegal only in 1928) is bad in itself. Furthermore, cannabis addiction
leads to addiction to harder and still more harmful drugs such as heroin
and cocaine (I am not quite sure where ecstasy fits in the catalogue.)
Therefore to decriminalise or legalise cannabis will open the door to new
horrors.

Now, this may or may not be true. There is certainly no inevitability about
it. That is obvious. It is more than 30 years since cannabis became a
fashionable drug in universities, 30 years since the young Bill Clinton
smoked a joint, but famously (or feebly) did not inhale. Though Jack Straw
spoke out against drugs even when he was president of the National Union of
Students, I should be incredulous if anyone claimed that there was nobody
in Mr Blair's Cabinet who had experimented with drugs in their dizzy youth.
I should think several did. But I would find it equally hard to believe
that any Cabinet minister was now a cocaine or heroin addict.

Nobody of sense denies that prolonged and intensive smoking of cannabis is
harmful. It makes people goofy and incapable of concentration. It destroys
their ability to work, and their ability to relate intelligently and
sensitively to other people. That is to say, it is damaging in much the
same way as prolonged and intensive drinking of alcohol is damaging. But
"recreational" smokers of cannabis don't reach this condition, any more
than recreational drinkers of alcohol do.

There is another side to addiction: it is not necessarily altogether
harmful. It damages, but it may also enrich - if you survive it, and escape
from it. I speak as one addicted, not only to caffeine and nicotine, both
of which I still use because, though they may damage the health, they do
not derange, but also to alcohol, from which I now abstain. Addiction can
lead to self-knowledge; the struggle against it can strengthen you. I have
known a good many alcoholics; some of my best friends were drunks. Some of
them are, sadly, dead. I don't regard that as a reason for banning alcohol.
Some have survived, and many of these are stronger and better people as a
result of the experience. I suppose the same may be said of recovered drug
addicts.

Concerning drugs, we are in a state of mental and moral confusion. On the
one hand, most of us recognise that the present law is not working.
Estimates of the number of regular users of cannabis can be no more than
guesses. Some put the figure as high as two million. I have no idea whether
this is about right or wildly wrong. What is obvious is that the present
legislation puts hundreds of thousands of otherwise law-abiding young
people on the wrong side of the law. This breeds (since the law is so
difficult to enforce) indifference to law itself, and contempt for it too.
It leads them to think of the police as their enemies - even though it is a
law which, I suppose, a good many policemen and policewomen themselves
break. The mental and moral confusion reaches right up to the top. Even
without asking how many of our judges, fiscals, advocates and legislators
have themselves dabbled with drugs, if only in their youth, we may still
shake our heads in amazement at the spectacle presented by our Prime
Minister, Mr Having-it- both-ways Blair. One week he appoints a czar to
lead the war against drugs; the next, as it were, he invites rock stars who
openly parade their use of drugs to his celebrity parties at Downing
Street. It is grotesque. It would make the most solemn cat split its sides
with laughing.

Some will call this hypocrisy. I am not so unkind. I say it is merely an
example of the mental and moral confusion which Mr Blair finds himself in.
He can't be blamed for that. We are, most of us, in the same boat.

That is why it is imperative that, as this newspaper and Sir David Steel
have recommended, Mr Blair sets up a Royal Commission to examine the case
for and against our present drugs laws, and to consider whether cannabis at
least should be legalised. Note that I say "legalised". The worst possible
decision would be merely to decriminalise cannabis. Decriminalisation would
leave supply in the hands of the dealers, who also deal in other, more
immediately dangerous drugs; and who have the incentive sometimes to be, or
to pretend to be, out of cannabis, or out of good quality cannabis, in
order to lure their clients on to experiment with harder drugs.

Legalisation, however, removes supply from the criminal world, and hands it
over to licensed vendors. It makes it possible to control the quality of
cannabis they sell. It makes it possible to tax the drug, as alcohol and
tobacco are taxed.

The Royal Commission, having examined all the evidence, might recommend
that the law stays as it is. That would satisfy many parents, few of whom
hand their sons or daughters a joint as they might hand them a can of lager
or a gin and tonic. It would justify the Government's continuation of its
"war against drugs", however unlikely victory in that war may be.

But it would be a mistake. There is little point in a law which is so
difficult to enforce and which manifestly runs counter to what so many
think justified. In this respect our drugs law differs from other laws
which may be hard to enforce. Drunk drivers, rapists and murderers may all
experience guilt; someone copped for possession or even supplying of
cannabis is unlikely to do so.

In these matters I am a liberal. The Government should trust the people.
Individuals should be permitted to go their own way, even to the hell of
addiction. A Royal Commission might decide otherwise, but it would be good
if it advised Mrs Partington-Blair and Mrs Partington-Straw to put their
mops away. Nannies belong in the nursery, not in Downing Street.