A BLOW FOR HISTORY

The headline in yesterday's London Evening Standard "The Cabinet
is going to Pot!" had a strong whiff of the 1970s.

Now we have a home secretary, Jacqui Smith, who admits that she smoked
cannabis at university. Then we had a home secretary, James Callaghan,
who, in drawing up the drugs laws that are still in force today,
believed that cannabis was as bad as heroin and should be listed as a
class A drug with heavy prison sentences for possession and dealing.

His views stirred a sharp debate inside the 1970 Labour government,
with the cabinet dividing, according to Richard Crossman's diaries,
strictly according to who had been to university and who had not. A
revolt by the cabinet's "student faction," as it was dubbed, actually
came close to fixing the maximum penalty at a UKP200 fine - not far from
the present class C classification.

The prime minister, Harold Wilson, and Mr Callaghan compromised and
created a special intermediate class B for cannabis, halfway between
"hard" and "soft" drugs with a maximum penalty of five years in prison
and an unlimited fine for possession. The cabinet minutes recall that
most ministers felt "that a sharp distinction between the penalties
for the possession of cannabis and heroin would discourage users of
cannabis from experimenting with the more dangerous drug."

The terms of the debate and the law have hardly changed in the last 35
years. If anything, the political potency went out of the issue the
moment in 2000 when Ann Widdecombe proposed to the Tory party
conference that a zero tolerance policy towards cannabis should be
adopted and half the shadow cabinet promptly admitted they had been
student smokers.

By the time Ms Smith got to Oxford in the early 1980s, the authorities
were far more worried about the link between heroin injecting and
HIV/Aids than the widespread teenage experimentation with cannabis. By
the time she had become a teacher, surveys were showing that as many
as one in three teenagers had tried smoking dope. All but a very small
proportion - as testified by the seven ministers yesterday - soon gave
it up.

But Ms Smith now faces the difficult question of whether to tighten
the drug laws. The most recent evidence shows that cannabis use is
falling, down from 28% of teenagers who had smoked it in the last year
six years ago to 21% now. Yesterday turned out to be the day when it
was finally safe for cabinet ministers to admit their past
indiscretions, but nobody knows how long the amnesty will last.