IN LONDON, EXPERIMENT IN RELAXING DRUG LAWS GETS A MIXED REACTION

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, where teenagers brazenly smoke on the
street and dealers set up shop next to fruit sellers in the market, hissing
"skunk weed, skunk weed" at pedestrians.

"People started smoking openly, whereas before they'd have their little
hideaways," said the Reverend 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 5 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. "For me and my friends,
it's all good - we don't have to worry about getting hassled if we want to
smoke a little herb," said David Reading, 21, a would-be record producer
just out of college.

But others were angry at the way pot-selling and smoking had been thrust so
clearly into the open.

Ros Griffiths, director of the Employment Cafe, a job center and Internet
coffee shop, said she was unsure what had offended her most: when a dealer
grabbed a loudspeaker at the weekly farmers' market and yelled, "Come and
get your weed here!" - or when a teenager sauntered through her door and
sought advice on setting up a cannabis cafe.

Griffiths said she resented the way the drug experiment transformed
Brixton, long the center of London's black population and now an
increasingly vibrant multiracial community, into a magnet for drug use.
"Suddenly people were thinking, 'Yeah - let's go to Brixton and smoke
cannabis!'" she said.

Andre-Watson was waiting at a bus stop recently when a pair of teenagers
lit up in front of an elderly lady. "I said, 'Do you know that it's
actually still illegal?'" the pastor recalled. "And they said, 'Everybody's
doing it, and no one's doing anything about it.'"

He and other residents complained so bitterly about drug dealing that,
after negative newspaper stories, the police finally cleared the streets
this month.

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 Coldharbour Lane, the center of
race riots in 1981.

Indeed, until last week, there were dozens of opportunities to buy pot on a
Brixton street crowded with families and stores. Few people were under the
illusion that marijuana was the sole product being offered.

"It's not like people stand on one side of the street dealing cannabis, and
on the other side they're dealing crack and cocaine," Griffiths said. "It's
the same person." Trying to address that problem, the new drug law, whose
passage by the Labour-controlled Parliament is a sure thing in the next
legislative session, provides for increased penalties for pushing drugs,
particularly hard drugs.