THE STREETS DON'T CARE WHAT CLASS DRUGS ARE

Upgrading Cannabis And Downgrading Ecstasy Will Make No Difference To
Policing Their Misuse

Cannabis was reclassified yesterday from C to B. The Advisory Council
on the Misuse of Drugs is preparing to give its recommendation to the
Home Secretary soon that Ecstasy be downgraded from A to B.

I'm never sure which is more arbitrary - the fashion for uppers or
downers that changes wildly with each generation of drug-users, or
the fashion in policy-making circles for downgrading one year and
upgrading the next. We need to scrap the whole classification process
- - it is outdated, not understood by the public and utterly irrelevant
to life on the streets.

I used to serve on the council in my capacity as the leading police
officer on drugs policy. By the end of my stint I felt that its
detachment from grassroots reality had eroded its credibility. Its
purpose seemed to be to generate endless rounds of meetings and
glossy reports to send to ministers.

Up to 70 members - made up of representatives from all sorts of
government and voluntary bodies - attended the unwieldy full
meetings, which were supported by a plethora of smaller working
groups and sub-committees. I was always struck by how the experience
of those living in the thick of the drugs problem got lost among the
grey suits having highbrow technical and medical discussions.
Although street-workers are represented, the actual men and women who
work closely with dependent users do not attend.

The council would be horrified to learn that its recommendations on
drugs classification are not taken seriously. But that is the case.
The public either don't understand the process or are not interested
in it. For the police, the advisory council is a sideshow; officers
prefer to apply their professional discretion on whether to caution
or arrest suspects.

Put bluntly, how a drug is classified doesn't help police officers in
their day-to-day duties. The first thought of an officer confronted
by a user of an illegal drug is to weigh up whether the possession
warrants anything more than a caution. To make an arrest and charge
doesn't guarantee a prosecution so it may be simpler to deal with it
on the street. That decision is made regardless of the classification
of the drug involved.

For the courts, categorising a drug does help to provide a tariff for
punishment. But even that idea has become dated as the Crown
Prosecution Service now tends to apply its own prosecution
guidelines. In practice, the classification of a drug does not
significantly change how the courts or police deal with drug offenders.

This is well illustrated by the moves to reclassify cannabis and
Ecstasy. The upgrading of cannabis is presumably intended to trigger
a tougher enforcement policy towards its users and dealers.

Conversely, the downgrading of Ecstasy sends a message to encourage a
more relaxed approach. But past evidence suggests that life on the
streets and in the courts will not change.

Cannabis is so prevalent that how it is policed is dictated by
manpower and resources - there is simply not enough time for the
police or the courts to push high numbers of offenders through the
system. Regardless of the advisory council's rulings, the police and
courts take a more lenient view towards users of cannabis because
they deem it as less harmful than other drugs. I expect those same
people will judge Ecstasy to still be a dangerous drug.
Reclassification will change nothing

It is time to abandon any form of categorisation - regardless of
their classifications, they are all illegal drugs and the powers of
the police to deal with each type hardly differ. To varying degrees
each category carries the power to arrest and search a suspect or
premises. If the minor differences were ironed out and police were
given the same powers to deal with all drug offences this would be a
simple message to convey to the public.

Setting the tariffs for punishment is even simpler. The courts
already apply their own criteria for sentencing across a range of
drug offences. Each case is considered on its own merits, aligning
the crime with the punishment. If the courts required help in setting
a tariff, a medical guide could be provided. This does not require
the protracted and expensive classification process conducted by a
large committee working at public expense.

After all, no equivalent body to the advisory council meets to
provide technical advice to the courts for other types of criminal offending.

The classification of drugs matters only to the council and
politicians - it is an irrelevance to the police and to other drug
agencies. The decison by Jacqui Smith, the present Home Secretary, to
reverse David Blunkett's downgrading of cannabis hints more of a
political ping-pong match than anything more serious. More effort is
directed towards debating how a drug should be classified than to
trying to stem the misuse of drugs.

Rather than soldiering on trying to make a classification process
that was designed in 1971 work in 2009, we should drop the pretence
that classification matters.

Andy Hayman was Assistant Commissioner for Special Operations at Scotland Yard