LONDON'S DRUG EXPERIMENT GETS MIXED REVIEWS

LONDON - At the rundown Stockwell housing project here, the potheads were
complaining about the smackheads.

"Right down there, I saw a guy injecting a girl into her neck," said James
Haind, 28, his indignation wrapped in a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke.

Hanging out recently at the project's skateboard park with his friends,
their skateboards and their stashes of weed, he offered himself as living
proof that marijuana does not lead inevitably to harder drugs. "A sensible,
stable person will not turn to heroin," declared Haind, an out-of-work sign
painter who estimates that he has been getting high for half his life.
"That's for the more stupid people."

That is just the message the government seems to have sent to Brixton, in
South London, where a six-month experiment in loosening the national drug
laws has just ended. The program pleased Brixton's smokers, and even the
police. But it left many residents feeling that their neighborhood had
turned into an open-air drug bazaar.

"People started smoking openly, whereas before they'd have their little
hideaways," said the Rev. Chris Andre-Watson, pastor of the Brixton Baptist
Church, who runs a mentoring program for teenage boys and says the drug
experiment has left many youths "zombied out."

Partly as a result of Brixton's trial, the government recently announced
plans to downgrade the criminal penalties for smoking pot in a country
where an estimated five million people are habitual users. Although the
plan is an acknowledgment that drugs like heroin and cocaine are far more
harmful than marijuana, the mixed reviews here raise a host of questions
about loosening marijuana laws.

Under the experiment, people caught smoking marijuana in Lambeth Borough,
which includes Brixton, got off with warnings rather than arrests, leaving
the police free to pursue more serious criminals. The police said it led to
an overall decline in crime and saved much police time.

Haind and his smoking companions were thrilled. But others were angry at
the way pot-selling and smoking had been thrust so clearly in the open.

Andre-Watson and other residents complained so bitterly about drug dealing
that after negative newspaper stories, the police finally sent officers
this month to clear the streets.

But how long the stepped-up presence will persist is anybody's guess. When
London as a whole relaxes its marijuana policy under the new legislation,
people in Brixton are predicting that the open-air dealers will be back, at
the busy subway station and up and down Coldharbor Lane, the center of race
riots in 1981.