"JOINT RESPONSIBILITIES"

PENELOPE DENING on the scandal of the British Minister's son caught in the
cannabis deal, the tabloid headlines and society's hypocrisy about the drug

A new parlour game, launched on Christmas Eve by the Daily Mirror, has
enlivened many an English dinner table this Yuletide. It's called Name The
Cabinet Minister. Given a series of clues - male, "household name", "key
lieutenant", son of 17 - the aim is to discover the identity of the new
Labour, new Dad, Cabinet Minister who frog-marched his son to the local
police station after the editor of the Mirror telephoned to tell him that
he'd been caught selling cannabis to one of its reporters. The boy was duly
arrested.

At 17, Master X is of course a minor and the Mirror has assured readers
that it had no intention of identifying the parent. In giving the go-ahead
to the Mirror reporter (female, sophisticated, blonde) to befriend the
impressionable youth and persuade him to sell her some cannabis resin it
simply intended, it says, to offer a salutary warning to the father. Hmmm.

However this week the tragicomedy (tragedy for the family, comedy for the
rest of us) has descended into farce.

First a few facts. The amount of cannabis involved was tiny, a "ten bag"
(less than a gram). According to my son this is the smallest amount you can
buy, so named because it costs £10. Second, the boy wasn't carrying the
stuff himself but had to get it off a friend waiting in the pub car-park.
(Less dealer, one suspects, than young lad impressing glamorous older woman.)

A friend of my son was recently picked up by the police with four times as
much. He didn't even get a caution. My own son has so far avoided this
particular rite of adolescent passage but I'm far happier he smokes
cannabis than cigarettes. I am also happy he feels able to tell me what
he's up to. Not, it appears, the thinking of Father X who, the Mirror
claimed, had no idea that his son even smoked the stuff. Zero tolerance,
the watchword of nanny Labour, had to start at home. Thus the full weight
of the law was unleashed, culminating in an injunction from the Attorney
General which prevented the press from blowing the whistle. Not that it
requires the sleuthing skills of Sherlock Holmes to work it out. Just half
a brain and access to Who's Who - which thoughtfully provides details of
marriages and offspring - to come up with a shortlist of one. There is
clearly a dilemma when the political becomes the personal. This was shown
all too clearly in Ireland recently, when Maire Geoghegan-Quinn resigned
after newspaper reports of the expulsion of her teenage son from school.
But this week, for all the sanctimonious blather about the rights of
minors, the actions - first of the Minister himself then of the various
authorities - seem designed to protect the man and his position rather than
the son. Knee-jerk stuff that in the long term will prove to be far more
damaging to the reputation of both Minister and government.

Even though my heart goes out to the boy whose misery and mortification
must be just appalling, I comfort myself by imagining how much Elsa, his
maternal grandmother, would have relished the situation and applauded her
rebel grandson. (Another clue, this time from my own personal supply.) Elsa
was a feisty, brilliant woman who some 20 years ago happened to need a
general factotum, cook, run-around for a few weeks following a hip
replacement. I was that person and for a month I lived with her, did for
her, and listened to her. She was a wonderful raconteur and one of the most
splendid people I have ever met.

The future Cabinet Minister was already paying court to her daughter. Elsa
wasn't that enamoured of her future son-in-law, I remember. He was, she
said, "too po-faced" for her liking. Although Elsa was a grande dame of
seriously upper-class stock, she was thoroughly unconventional and for
years was the mistress of George Woodcock, General Secretary of the TUC in
the 1950s, who had gone from cotton weaver to privy councillor, via a First
in PPE from Ruskin College, Oxford. In those days divorce was out of the
question. And she would regale me with the hypocrisy of the society that
made it impossible for them to live together openly. Today hypocrisy is
exemplified by society's attitude to cannabis.

Possessing it is still a criminal offence, yet British Home Office
statistics suggest that 1.5 million light up each week. Cannabis is both
less addictive and less damaging than either alcohol or cigarettes. While
these two socially acceptable drugs are the direct cause of God knows how
many deaths, cannabis is acknowledged to have wide medicinal properties,
four examples of which I can personally vouchsafe.

Sue Arnold, a journalist on the Observer, recently went public about its
benefits to her. She has retinitus pigmentosa and is, to all intents and
purposes blind, but was able to see for the first time in years when
someone suggested she smoked cannabis. A young friend of mine suffers from
Crohn's disease, a particularly painful and debilitating condition of the
intestines and bowel. By smoking two "joints" a day, one in the morning,
one in the evening, he can cut down his medication by half. When he is in
real pain, cannabis is the only thing that can relieve it. A friend who
died of cancer last year was advised by his consultant to take cannabis to
help overcome the nausea of chemotherapy, later the pain of his dying. It
is invaluable in the treatment of high blood pressure; an old boy of my
acquaintance has his supply delivered by his nephew, under direct
instructions from his GP. His quality of life has been transformed. Yet how
many old people have access to such a GP or such a nephew?

As a recreational drug, cannabis has been used safely and with no recorded
side effects for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Yet thousands of our
young people are being introduced to a criminal underclass in order to get
the stuff, not to mention the risk of arrest and a criminal record. In
Britain the campaign to decriminalise cannabis is attracting support from
an increasingly broad spectrum of opinion, including someone as obviously
New Labour-friendly as Richard Branson. "Cabinet Minister's Son Sells
Drugs" would be a good headline at any time. But when Her Majesty's
Government appears hell bent on giving Her Majesty's subjects lessons in
parenting, bringing in curfews and the like, it is particularly rich. In an
interview with the Mirror, Father X says he has "a good relationship" with
his son. "He has got exams coming up and I, like any parent would worry
about how he is likely to bear up under the circumstances." Indeed.

And if this sorry incident brings home to New Labour what everybody else
knows - that the drug culture is not limited to latch-key kids, a problem
of the underclass - then perhaps it may all be to the good. The first thing
must be a serious review of the law surrounding the use of cannabis. One is
currently underway in Britain, funded by the Prince's Trust charity,
instigated not by the government, but by those who know that the current
situation is ridiculous and unworkable, the Police Federation. It is to be
hoped that by the time it has reached its conclusion, the Irish Government,
as well as the British, will be prepared to listen. Just as this Cabinet
Minister would be advised to listen to his son which, for his information,
is what having "a good relationship" really means.