STRAW BOWS TO CANNABIS CALL

Pressure is growing for cannabis to be decriminilised in the wake of the
drug fiasco centring on Home Secretary Jack Straw and his 17-year-old son
William.

Straw said yesterday that if campaigners could prove the drug was not
dangerous, the government would have to think again about legalising it.

John McAllion, the Labour MP for Dundee East, has called for a Royal
Commission to be set up "to get all the facts out in the open". McAllion
said it was time to end the hypocrisy surrounding the way society treats
other consumer drugs, such as alcohol and tobacco. "A previous Scottish
Select Committee shied away from the decriminilisation call by only one
vote.... I think a Royal Commission is a good thing."

But David Macauley, Director of Scotland Against Drugs and a former
pharmacist, said: "To immediately go towards making cannabis freely
available is nonsense. Drug misuse is no respector of social class or
daddy's job. What Mr Straw has learned is the same lesson that 90 per cent
of Scottish families will have to wake up to."

Straw, who spent most of yesterday at home with his family, has led the
government's crusade against parents who cannot control unruly children. He
emphasised that at present there is no evidence to force a change in the
law on cannabis. He said he believed "quite a lot" of pupils at his son's
school used cannabis and insisted he believed it should remain illegal.

"If drug companies and pressure groups can come forward and say, first,
that it has medical therapeutic uses, let them do so. If they can prove
this drug is not [narcotic and dangerous], of course we will have to think
about it again."