POT LAWS HAVE BRITISH IN A TEMPEST OVER TEA

William F. Buckley Jr.

A friend abroad writes to ask whether the American press has picked up
on the editorial in the Nov. 11 Lancet titled "Deglamorising cannabis."
The answer is no, not as far as I am aware.

Indeed, no news here is very strange news because The Lancet is the
pre-eminent medical publication in Britain, something like The New
England Journal of Medicine in this country. And the extraordinary
last line in the editorial in question reads, "Cannabis per se is
not a hazard to society, but driving it further underground may well
be.

Inquiry into the story reveals that a Labor member of Parliament,
Clare Short, proposed in the House of Commons recently that pot be
legalized. As would have been the case if she had made the same
proposal in Congress, Short was all but run out of town with wet
towels.

But one has to suppose that some of the data she cited seeped
through to the British consciousness, even if they did not get
relayed here.

Begin with the poll in Glasgow, Scotland. It documents a quite
astonishing story, namely that half of all students between the
ages of 14 and 25 admit to smoking pot "every day." Short then
went on to cite the experience of cannabis use in Holland and in
doing so bumped into another story. It is this: that for 20 years
the Dutch in Amsterdam have simply ignored the use of pot, which
is regularly sold in 4,000 coffee shops in amourts up to 30 grams
per customer.

Technically, the use of the drug, let alone the sale of it, is
illegal, and during its most recent campaign, the governing party
pledged to repeal this technicality.

It was all set to do that when it was reminded by its neighbors of
something called the Schengen agreement, which introduced the
border-free zone among the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain,
Luxembourg and Belgium.

France threatened to annul the agreement because cannabis was
flowing merrily into a country in which no drug is permitted to
compete with alcohol.

The Dutch have said that they must therefore crack down on pot, which
would mean closing half the coffeehouses in Holland - not a popular
idea.

But The Lancet, reviewing the controversy kicked up by Short, asks the
Home Office to consider the implications of the rise in marijuana use in
Great Britain. Notwithstanding Britain's laws, consumption of pot has
doubled in 10 years. And The Lancet goes on:

"Perhaps the politicians' real fear was that freedom to use soft drugs
would automatically progress to increased use of substances such as
cocaine and heroin. If so, they must have overlooked the recent Dutch
government review which pointed out that decriminalization of possession
of soft drugs had not led to a rise in the use of hard drugs."

Even so, the British government struggles on. Last year Home Secretary
Michael Howard in creased the maximum fine for possession of the drug
from $750 to $3,750, which is rough stuff but not, of course, to be
compared with going to jail for a year, or 10, as we do things here.
There it "depends where you get caught," writes drug reformer Mike
Goodman.

"There are parts of Wales and various rural areas where you'll
certainly go to court for possessing cannabis and get a fairly stiff
fine. In other areas, such as London, you'd be unlikely even to
get a caution."

In London, what you usually get is "informal disposal" - which means
the police throw the confiscated drugs down the drain.

The evidence pours in. Another Home Office survey, this time of
25-year-olds, reveals that eight out of 10 men and women have taken
illegal drugs and that the biggest consumers were not school children
but young white males from the professional and middle classes.

At the other end of the empire we read that a businessman in Vancouver,
B.C., is quite openly engaged in distributing cannabis seeds all over
the world. He is paying his taxes, and the government of British
Columbia is perfectly happy to accept the wages of sin, keeping his
tax money and ignoring his illegal activity.

"If the drug ever does become legal in Britain," writes a correspondent
of The Herald in Glasgow, "it will be because of the sheer weight of
such statistics, which indicate a threefold increase in the use of
pot since 1989."

What is striking isn't so much the difference between what is legal
and what people do, as the quite calm acceptance by the medical
community of the relative harmlessness of cannabis, although the
point is over and over again made that if the weed were legalized,
its quality could be super intended.

And attention continues, however gradually, to focus on the
paradox.

"Although no exact figures are available," says the dispatch from The
Herald, "it is known the government is spending about twice as much on
policing and prosecuting drug offenders as it does on education,
prevention and rehabilitation."

That strikes some people, including your servant, as dumb.

Author and commentator William F. Buckley Jr. is editor of National
Review and host of the television program "Firing Line. "