WHY COCAINE LAW IS TOO TOUGH

The media is acting as if he just punched his grandma, but everyone
knows that James Hewitt is being made a monkey of. Marched away in
handcuffs, like a violent criminal and thrown in a cell because he was
found, smooching with his girlfriend in a bar, supposedly with a small
packet of cocaine in his pocket.

I am more offended by the public display of affection - finger sucking
- - than the white powder. Hewitt has been hauled in for a "crime"
committed weekly by a great swathe of the otherwise lawabiding
population. (The last time my uncle took his children to TGI Friday's
he told me, "The loos were full of dads doing coke.")

Meanwhile, citizens with real crimes to report - like Channel 4
newsreader Krishnan Guru-Murphy, who had had his credit card stolen
the night Hewitt was arrested - had to wait two hours for attention at
Notting Hill police station, so busy was every officer wanting to have
a look at Hewitt.

Of course, used to excess by someone with an addictive personality,
cocaine can be as destructive as alcohol, ecstacy or any other
recreational "high". Certainly, no one wants to end up with a nose
like former EastEnder Daniella Westbrook.

But I believe cocaine should be decriminalised in the same way that
cannabis has, so that police can turn a blind eye to possession. It is
ludicrous that the police are forced to treat casual users as
lawbreakers, (along with the mountains of paperwork and the enormous
waste of public money this entails.) If cocaine was legal, the police
and the justice system would be freed up to tackle the true problems
threatening society. Not to mention that there would be better
counselling and perhaps better treatment for the minority who do
suffer from addiction.

But why take my word for it? Commander Brian Paddick, speaking to an
all-party inquiry into reform of the drug laws in 2001, said: "There
are a whole range of people who buy drugs, not just cannabis, but even
cocaine and ecstasy, with money they have earned legitimately. They
use a small amount of these drugs. It has no adverse effect on the
rest of the people they are with, either in terms of people they
socialise with, or within the wider community, and they go back to
work on Monday morning and are unaffected for the rest of the week. In
terms of my priorities as an operational police officer, they are low
down."

In other words, cocaine is not a major menace to society. The only
danger is that users bore people to death. I'll bet the Law is
silently agreed that the Hewitt arrest is a pantomime.

As for the public, no one is shocked - and if they are, it's because
they know it could so easily be them. I'm made to feel a bit odd
because I've never taken a line of cocaine. Which is hardly
surprising, as cocaine use has almost trebled in the past seven years.
(According to a report this month in the journal Forensic Science
International, 22 per cent of 80,000 blood samples tested by the NHS
showed traces of cocaine.)

It took me a while to accept the glaring evidence of its daily use in
London. Like the time an exboyfriend painted my lounge in double-quick
time.

Or when we hosted a dinner and our guests - a theatre critic and a
librarian - had literally two bites of the four-cheese gnocchi. I
blamed my cooking. "No," said my husband. "Too much coke." But when I
got huffy, he shrugged. "It's a performance-enhancing drug for normal
people. Like drinking extra caffeine."

And so it is. Another acquaintance, Mark, 30, a trader, says,
"Everyone does it. The shoeshine boys who come round our floor are the
main suppliers. You get your shoes back with a discreet wrap in them."

In fact, the use of this class-A drug is so routine that, to quote a
friend, "For a cocaine story to surprise anyone, it have to involve
someone of the stature of, say, Gordon Brown, which is about as
unlikely as it gets."