SOLVING THE DRUGS CRISIS

I first embraced Britain's drug culture when I was sent to boarding school
in the mid-1970s. Smoking pot was one of the ways in which spoilt teenagers
of my generation repaid their parents for their selflessness in
impoverishing themselves with their children's school fees. I never really
took to the brown lumps we would mix with tobacco, and puff up the chimney
in self-conscious little huddles.

Most of us abandoned the habit in favour of beer as soon as we looked old
enough to be served in a pub. One of us lost his way, got mixed up with a
bad crowd, and was eventually found dead in a Brixton squat with a syringe
in his arm.

Over the years, I have often wondered why our friend allowed drugs to
consume him. His tragically shortened life could, I suppose, make him a
poster boy for the "stepping-stone" argument of the "zero tolerance"
activists. Their line is that cannabis paves the way to the horrors of a
life of addiction to cocaine, heroin or crack.

But even for our dead friend, smoking pot was a staging-post on the way to
injecting heroin only in the sense that the can of lager a child whips from
his parents' fridge is a stepping stone to keeping a bottle of vodka in his
office drawer 20 years later. For the rest of my crowd, cannabis was a
destination, not a gateway, and one which proved much easier to leave than
cigarettes. The question is: why do some people have self-destructive
impulses which lead them into acute addiction and early death, while the
rest of us are still alive, worrying about our waistlines?

David Blunkett's new cannabis regime is a mess. It is unclear how the Home
Secretary's "presumption" against arrest for simple possession will be
applied on the street, especially as some police forces have said their
policy will not change. And how characteristic of New Labour to
counterbalance the most modest of reforms by spending a million pounds on a
nannying advertising campaign to tell us that a drug which is being
re-classified downward is actually awfully bad for us.

Mr Blunkett's re-classification of cannabis may be flawed and incomplete,
but recognising that cannabis should no longer be classed alongside more
dangerous drugs is at least a statement of the obvious and a move in the
right direction. Yet he should be much bolder, and try, as an experiment,
to decriminalise entirely the possession and supply of cannabis. If that
works, or at least does not lead to other problems, he should extend the
experiment to other drugs.

The objection to the continued criminalisation of cannabis is both
philosophical and practical. As a matter of principle, governments have no
business restricting the pursuit of private pleasure unless it demonstrably
harms other people. This is largely a question of tolerance, which does not
actually imply approval.

The notion of tolerance has to cut both ways. Like most conservatives, I
don't think that hunting should be banned, not because I want to get on a
horse and chase a fox, or indeed because I approve of fox-hunting. It is
just that I think people should be allowed to do it if they want to. The
same principle applies to homosexual sex. You may think it right that gay
sex was decriminalised, but that doesn't mean you would necessarily be
encouraged to try it yourself, or assume it was good for you.

There is a further practical point here: it is very bad policy to have laws
on the statute book which the state is incapable of enforcing. Look at the
contempt in which our politicians are already held by the public for their
failure to enforce the asylum rules. Short of sending the Army door-to-door
through our inner cities and university towns, there is no feasible way to
launch the "crackdown on drugs" our politicians love to talk about.

However much they wring their hands at the Home Office and Conservative
Central Office, millions of people in this country regard cannabis as
essentially harmless, and will continue to smoke it, as criminal gangs grow
rich on the premium they can charge on contraband goods.

That reality debases the whole notion of the rule of law by creating a
two-tier legal framework ­ laws that must be obeyed, and a grey area of
laws that might be obeyed. If you and many of your neighbours take drugs,
yet know the chances of being prosecuted for it are negligible, why obey
other laws; why buy a television licence, or motor insurance?

Michael Howard's belated and opportunistic condemnation of cannabis
reclassification yesterday is doubly depressing because it undermines the
Conservatives' central argument against this Government, which is to
contest the notion that the state knows best how to order our lives and
spend increasing amounts of our money.

Tories should instinctively understand the limits of state intervention.
Gun crime was not a common problem in this country until the Dunblane
tragedy of 1996 encouraged MPs of both parties to unite in righteous
indignation to ban private handgun ownership. Perhaps that ban did not
cause the current explosion in gun crime in British cities, but it
certainly failed to arrest it.

So why should liberalising the drug laws create an explosion in drug
consumption and related crime? Decriminalising cannabis will not create a
crisis of drug addiction in this country - we already have one, and decades
of prohibition have not prevented it and have almost certainly made it
worse than it need be.

A certain humility about what government can achieve is required in the
approach to drug laws and their enforcement, and Tories should understand
this better than others. Most of us, even as children, know instinctively
that we should keep clear of hard drugs. The state cannot defend our
borders against smuggled goods or smuggled people. We should not expect it
to have all the answers to the existing drug problem in this country, any
more than we should expect a parent to know precisely what drives a child
into a self-destructive spiral of addiction.