GRAND EVASIONS HIDE IN TRIFLING HONESTIES

WHO Cares Whether Politicians Smoked A Spliff At University That's
Just A Diversion From The Very Real Problems Of Drugs And Crime

Cannabis and political hysteria have a lot in common. Both cause
distorted perception and trouble with thinking. Traces, in the
habitual user, can linger for weeks. But, as the initial fug lifts,
the effect of the drug-smoking admissions of the Home Secretary and
eight of her colleagues are becoming clear.

Moves towards raising cannabis from class C will be futile, as
demonstrated by the abandon with which ministers took the drug when it
bore the class B status that some now want to reinstate. The absurdity
does not stop there. In other ways, the cannabis confessions have been
a psychedelic experience.

People who look as if they never took anything more mind-altering than
Vimto have declared their sin. At one point the causal links between
the Haight-Ashbury experience and the Gordon Brown cabinet seemed so
solid that you would not have been surprised to hear that pensions
policy was being formulated by the Grateful Dead.

More encouragingly for the government, the mental hologram of John
Hutton inhaling a damp spliff may be as powerful a deterrent to the
young as a picture of Giant Haystacks on a dieter's fridge door.
Already, since the downward reclassification in 2004, the proportion
of cannabis users has dropped from 11 to 8 per cent.

That should be the end of the story, but for skunk. While European
monitors and Drugscope say there is no robust evidence for an increase
in average potency, there is an increased focus on the damage to
mental health. I don't think this is just media scaremongering.
Several young people I know have stopped using cannabis, or seen their
friends stop, because its effects have frightened them. Others have
had their lives upset, or even wrecked.

Even so, last year's review by the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of
Drugs said that, although regular cannabis used can have 'real and
significant mental health effects', it was unlikely to cause
schizophrenia and that its ill-effects were 'not of the same order' as
class B drugs. Since nothing has changed, that verdict remains the
sanest guidance.

If Brown is keen on a review of dangerous substances, he should focus
on alcohol, possibly with a campaign featuring vignettes of cabinet
members relating how they once ended up legless in A and E. Bringing
back the maximum five-year penalty that goes with class B drugs would
simply increase use and waste police time. The better option -
teaching children what they risk - has been hit, inexcusably, by a
government funding cut of 10 per cent that means prevention and
advisory services are having to scale down or close.

The stale old reclassification debate launched at PMQs was as
worrying, though, for its context as its content. Even the most
drug-free listener might have had the hallucinogenic notion that
Gordon Brown was transmogrifying into Iain Duncan Smith. The hint that
cannabis could be upgraded was lifted - lock, stock and smoking reefer
- - from the recent IDS social policy report.

Brown's debt to Tory thinking carried on, even after he had finished
with cannabis. Pressed by David Cameron on the alleged crimes
committed by some offenders let out of jail 18 days early, he
resorted, twice, to boasting about Labour's plan to build 9,500 new
prison places. Brown should have told Cameron that the game was
changing, and that, even with early releases, the record population of
around 80,000 is set to rise by 500 a week. As Jack Straw has
admitted, we cannot build ourselves out of trouble. So, Brown should
have added, Cameron had better get used to the idea that falling crime
was finally going to be reflected in a regime in which all but the
violent and dangerous served their sentences in the community.

But Brown did not say that. Nor did he stress that he is planning a
programme finally stripped of the excess legislation that has created
3,000 new offences since 1997, so clogging up prisons that are also
the high temples of drug abuse. According to Prison Reform Trust
figures, as many as eight out of 10 men admitted to prison are on
class A substances: 29 per cent of robbery victims think their
attackers are drugged up.

Brown did acknowledge that government 'must do more' on treatment
programmes. Yes, the government has put more money in, but Drugscope
says that 60 per cent of the extra funding for prison programmes
disappeared after they were taken over by primary care trusts.

No doubt, Wednesday's consultation launch will have something positive
to say about the real drugs crisis, whose centre of gravity is
government's addiction to custody and the hopeless lives of those
caught up in it, at huge cost to themselves and others. Brown could
have used his PMQs to sketch a revolution in drugs and crime, just as
Jacqui Smith might have avoided her announcement of a crime reduction
strategy being obliterated by her spliff history. Instead, a populist
hint of new cannabis laws allowed ministers some risk-free nostalgia.

Nobody cares less whether politicians smoked cannabis at university.
Whether last week's mea culpas touch any public chord is more
doubtful. The spectre of our policy leaders as Kerouac-style Zen
lunatics in thrall to Gaia, hippiedom, Cat Stevens and brown rice is
much scarier than their normal fix of class A ambition. Honesty may
beat evasion, but last week's admissions also reek of self-indulgence.
The root of Britain's drug problems is not the quadrangles of Oxford
but the barren flats where parents are shooting up and children are
beaten, aimless, truanting or stealing, or any combination of the
above. In Scotland, those admitted to hospital for drug misuse is 17
times higher among the most deprived quintile than in those sections
of society likely to breed a future chancellor.

The pointless fuss over relabelling cannabis has supplanted a proper
debate about crime and drugs, just when Mr Brown should be laying down
some serious markers. This is all the more disappointing in the light
of previous, hopeful signs that he recognises, as his processor did
not, that hard-edged criminal justice is not the panacea to all social
blight.

This week will see, with any luck, some good ideas on how better to
wean people off drugs and how to stop children taking them in the
first place. But the cannabis episode has highlighted a bigger
question: is Brown a revolutionary or a tinkerer? His heart, it seems
to me, is in the right place. The test will be whether he dares risk
the wrath of Middle England. If he is serious about reform involving
crime and drugs, he should leave cannabis law well alone while beefing
up his boldness from class C to B.