IT'S HIGH TIME OUR NON-INHALING POLITICIANS STOPPED TREATING US LIKE
DOPES OVER DRUGS

IT IS as well for the future of the nation that our politicians,
without exception, enjoy a peculiar genetic advantage over the rest of
us. Try as they might, not one of them - not a single one - is ever
capable of enjoying cannabis. Back in the funky, distant days of youth
- - never last week, for some reason - they "experimented". Alas, "it
did nothing" for them; "it had no effect"; and the smoke, presumably,
got in their eyes. Remarkable.

Home secretary Jacqui Smith, and several fellow cabinet members, have
joined the ranks of the confessing non-sinners, the Clintonite
breathing-not-inhaling elite. In some political circles the admission
is now almost a rite of passage, proof that you may know, roughly,
what you're talking about when dope is mentioned. Since Smith is about
to reclassify the drug from "not very" to "somewhat" dangerous, her
own revelation is well-timed. But let's not call this a career high,
as it were.

She attempted cannabis "just a few times" - well, you have to be sure,
don't you? - at Oxford University in the 1980s. Of course, being a
future politician possessed of special DNA, she "did not particularly"
enjoy it. She is not proud of her younger self now. "I did break the
law I was wrong drugs are wrong," she told the BBC.

advertisementDrugs are wrong? Surely drugs are either dangerous or not
dangerous. Chemicals have no moral standing and addicts, where they
exist, have physical and psychological problems. They are not
ingesting an ethical defect. Their status as criminals, much like the
renegade student Jacqui Smith, depends on home secretaries who dither
over whether cannabis is no worse than a prescription antibiotic
("Class C") or something that merits imprisonment ("Class B"). Does
Smith believe that drug-users are bad people?

Presumably she refers only to the degenerates who actually enjoy the
stuff. You can imagine the Home Office briefing. "But why are so many
teenagers doing this?" "Well, minister, according to our very best
research, it turns out that the young reprobates like it."

In order to be in a position to lecture the rest of us, politicians
cannot admit to guilty pleasures. Smith claimed last week that her
confession proved that she is "a human being". I hadn't heard anyone
suggest otherwise, though with New Labour you can never tell. By her
own account, Smith is just like us, but with the crucial political
difference that she is incapable of actually enjoying our filthy
habits, and therefore free to moralise. And legislate.

Backing up his boss, Home Office minister Tony McNulty also admitted
that he, too, had flirted with reefer madness while a student. If
anything, he went one better than Smith, having merely "encountered"
cannabis at university. Which is to say he had a close encounter by
smoking it "once or twice". This was the variant of the standard line
proffered last year by Vernon Coaker, also of the Home Office - what
is it with that ministry? - who said: "When I was a student, I took
one or two puffs of marijuana, but that was it".

At least eight Tories and a bunch of other Labour people have made
similar disclosures. The line is always the same: couple of puffs,
didn't care for it, saw the error of my ways. Is it just me, but
wouldn't this fad for drug-related reminiscence be just a tiny bit
more plausible if one of them, just one, said: "Yeah, sure, I was the
biggest dopehead in the college. Out of it morning, noon and night.
Didn't turn me into a psychopath, of course. Are you looking at me, by
the way?"

It seems bizarre, nevertheless, to hear upholders of the law admit to
past crimes while denying the sole motive for illegal recreational
behaviour: you do it because you like it. It seems odder still - or do
I mean merely hilarious? - that these people should then pretend to
have special insights thanks to their wholly unproductive "encounters"
with a substance. It is like nothing so much as the person who loathes
the very taste of whisky claiming to understand alcoholism. And about
as believable.

Just before you skin up - no crumbs on the picture byline, please -
bear this in your short-term memory, though. Cannabis, in certain of
its modern forms, gives some pause for thought. Even five years ago I
would have dismissed the idea that it counted as any sort of health
hazard in a world of smack and superlagers. Yet some of the newer,
home-produced dope offerings, their active component
(delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, if you care) amped up, are beginning to
produce reports of casualties.

The research is not clear, as ever. Do skunk and the like induce
mental illness, or is inevitable mental illness in the susceptible
merely hastened by a drug that has become too hard to handle?
Politicians such as Smith, supported by some doctors, are inclining to
the former. Prime minister Gordon Brown has therefore called for the
classification of cannabis to be reviewed by the Advisory Council on
the Misuse of Drugs, via the Home Office. Hence, one suspects, the
home secretary's "confession".

Whether another reclassification in three years would make a blind bit
of difference is open to question, I would say. Recall, also, that
only last year the advisory council reported on this very subject. It
found that there is certainly scientific evidence to suggest a link
between cannabis use (how much use?) and "long-term psychotic
symptoms", but concluded that the risks are not serious enough to
warrant a Class B rating.

The work has already been done; the dangers assessed. Yet Brown
(never, ever touched the stuff, says Downing Street) and No-Buzz Smith
want the issue revived. How many wars on drugs can one country stand?
How many politicians with a remarkable immunity to narcotics do we
still need? Or would a small moral panic speed the social policies of
the new Brown government on their way? Tough on illicit pleasures;
tough on the chemical causes of illicit pleasures. The alcohol
industry must be dreading the next, logical step. Right.

At this point, we could rehearse all the arguments for and against
prohibition. We could wonder over the risks of passive smoking at
Edinburgh University when the new prime minister was a student there.
We could kick around old arguments over the status of dope as a
gateway drug, or pause to wonder what's become of the young folks
nowadays, eh? I still struggle to get beyond the procession of
politicians who find it useful, suddenly, to admit to their
involvement in past non-events.

It says something about the relationship between the governing and the
governed. If Smith had told us, last week, that she once smoked a bit
of dope, like many students, and that like a lot of them she enjoyed
it for a while, the contribution would have been useful. She could
have added that no real harm was done, that she soon put the tiny vice
behind her and then got on with her studies. Don't smoke dope, kids,
she might have said, join New Labour instead. It's
mind-altering.

Instead, Smith had to tell every news channel available that she was
"not proud" of her crime, that her drug use was "wrong", and that she
was still a human being, despite it all. You might think she had spent
her student years biting the heads from budgies. You might think, more
to the point, that she has forgotten the realities of the country in
which she lives. As a matter of information, it is not a country in
which many thinking people are addicted to guff.

An awful lot of them refuse to believe that cannabis is so very bad.
Millions use it daily, apparently. Reports of increased numbers harmed
may simply reflect, as a fraction of those already unstable, wider
use. We don't really know. But politicians with a magical physical
indifference to a drug are perhaps not best placed to enlighten us.
They still claim always to know the difference between wicked and
virtuous, however, and that's just silly.

Still, it keeps them in a job. And off the streets. And off the dope
to which they, once upon a time, just said no. That must be why they
know what's good for the rest of us even when, as they continue to
insist, they don't actually know what they're talking about.

Someone must be on something. I don't think it's me.