WHY DRUGS POLICY IS A MIND-BENDING SUBSTANCE

Soldiers of common sense are rarely summoned from the fields to support
David Blunkett in an hour of need. Normally we must seize our pitchforks to
defend liberty against that same Home Secretary's Dark Riders of Control.
Many is the son of freedom found dead in a ditch with a Blunkett spear in
his back.

Yet today the great man beams the smile of reason. He is demoting the drug
cannabis from Class B to Class C. He is not legalising or decriminalising
it. He is just reclassifying it as "non-arrestable" on first offence. Yet
even this modest change has Mr Blunkett shaking at the knees. The Prime
Minister and his predecessor, Jack Straw, swore that they would tolerate no
such change. The "Tory press" is watching from Alastair Campbell's office
at No 12 Downing Street. No signal is permitted that might attract the
hated adjective, liberal.

Then there is Mr Blunkett's own dark side. This week he has been struggling
to refashion Britain's local police forces into his personal gendarmerie.
Only the House of Lords stops him. Then his factotum, Hilary Benn, is
refusing homecurfew releases to 850 non-violent prisoners, for fear of the
Daily Mail. To this is the once-liberal House of Benn reduced.

In addition, to reassure The Daily Telegraph that he has not completely
joined the 21st century, Mr Blunkett will announce that maximum prison
sentences for selling cannabis (as opposed to consuming it) will be
lengthened from five to ten years. Cannabis may overnight be less
dangerous, but selling it is overnight twice as dangerous. Such are the
sinuous threads of reason that hold in thrall the brains of rulers.

The reclassification of cannabis is overdue, if only to give back some
credibility to classification as such. Only Mr Blunkett's terror of the
"message" lobby stops him tidying up the whole drugs list and moving
Ecstasy from Class A to Class B. Mr Blunkett's message to millions of
weekend Ecstasy users, that their drug is still as dangerous as heroin, is
on a criminological par with retaining capital punishment for the seduction
of the monarch.

Mr Blunkett's real problem has been down in Lambeth. The so-called Lambeth
Experiment, under the enlightened Commander Brian Paddick, has left
cannabis users free of arrest and persecution. This was intended, with good
reason, to release police time to fight more serious crime, of which
Lambeth has plenty. It was widely supported by police chiefs across the
country, all of whom know that Home Office policy is crass.

Introducing such an experiment only in Lambeth, as opposed to throughout
London, was like liberalising Prohibition only in Al Capone territory. No
one was likely to notice. Only the Tories fell with dreary predictability
into the trap. Down to Lambeth went their leader, Iain Duncan Smith,
desperate for cheap votes by opposing reclassification. Since Britain's
drugs mess is largely the Tories' fault and since the party's appeal to the
young is near to zero, he would surely have been better advised to support
Mr Blunkett's change.

During the experiment it would be astonishing if Lambeth's drugs market
were not more rather than less visible. Why deal at home if you can deal in
the street? We can assume that the rest of London is less active, though no
figures exist on all of this. Mr Blunkett should know about the
displacement effect. The biggest drugs market in London is inside Her
Majesty's prisons, under his direct control. When he says he wants charge
of every police force in the land to stamp out drugs, British parents
should quake for their loved ones.

Cannabis consumption has now been removed from criminal sanction across
most of Europe. This is no big deal because "illegality" is unenforceable.
But the manner of any change is full of danger. Cannabis is mostly supplied
by small domestic and continental growers. Mr Blunkett's decision to double
the penalty for cannabis supply to ten years puts it on a par with
aggravated rape and manslaughter. Since almost all users are sometime
suppliers, this change is madness. What it offers with one hand it
withdraws with the other.

It is hard to convey the full, counter-productive idiocy of the 1971 Misuse
of Drugs Act. This law has been the source of the greatest social menace
and personal tragedy in modern Britain. Seventy per cent of the prison
population is there for a drug-related crime. More than half of property
crime is carried out to pay for drugs, a supertax imposed by government
policy on private property. Were it not for drugs, we could empty Britain's
jail of women. So high are drug profits that imprisonment has no deterrent
effect that any penologist can show.

There is only one test for any change in the drugs law. Does it raise or
lower "the wall"? That wall is between casual and now ubiquitous use of
cannabis and Ecstasy and the dark tunnel of heroin and crack cocaine. Go to
any prison, talk to any drug therapist, consult any parent, and they know
this wall. Cannabis can do young people harm, as can Ecstasy. Wrongly used,
these drugs can mess up a few people's lives. But a confident society
should be able to handle that few with regulation and education, as it
tries to handle far more lethal alcohol and nicotine abuse. Whitehall
"sending messages on drugs" is beyond ridicule.

On the other side of the wall lies serious harm. It is heroin and the
cocaine derivatives now so profitable as to cause armed mayhem in Britain's
inner cities. Ninety per cent of the inmates of drug rehabilitation centres
are seeking a cure for heroin. Consumption of this drug is soaring. With
the British and American Governments tolerating resumed Afghan exports,
opium prices are tumbling. The cannabis dealer is the natural salesman for
this stuff. A market left unregulated as now is a gift to the heroin
supplier. Cannabis and heroin are different drugs from different producers.
But if there is no "wall" at the point of sale, the gateway between them is
open.

By increasing the "risk premium" on cannabis sales, Mr Blunkett is likely
to bring these markets closer together. Dealers will be more likely to push
heroin than cannabis to equate profit more closely to risk. Likewise under
Prohibition, it made more sense to trade in whisky than beer. By banning
heroin clinics and seeking to equate cannabis and heroin distribution, Mr
Blunkett is taking a reckless risk with the nation's youth. And all for a
weekend of spin.

There are many things wrong with how other countries control drugs. I know
of none that looks to Britain with admiration. One motive alone guides
policy in The Netherlands, Switzerland, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Spain
and elsewhere. It is to achieve "market separation" between cannabis and
heroin, to erect that wall. Britain has rightly indicated that cannabis is
a less dangerous substance. It has widened the image gap between cannabis
and hard drugs, but it has narrowed the commercial gap.

The only sensible way to regulate the market in cannabis is to license
outlets and seek to restrict supply to licensed growers. That is the only
way to re-erect the wall. Equally the sensible way of regulating the market
in heroin is to license clinics, to prescribe and undercut the big
importers, as happened before the 1971 Act. The Government will not do
either. Indeed it is pushing policy in the other direction, towards
rewarding the bigger crooks who are more able to bear risk and buy off the
police. Drugs are by far Britain's biggest illegal business. Ministers seem
putty in the hands of its proprietors.

Two years ago, the then Home Secretary, Mr Straw, announced a
liberalisation of pub and club licensing laws for alcohol. Brushing aside
the anti-alcoholism lobby, he said it was time that licensing laws "grew
up". Drunkenness was a personal responsibility. He never explained why he
wanted to take this risk with alcohol, from which thousands die each year,
and not with heroin, from which hundreds die, or cannabis from which none
dies. He was numb with unreason.

The real answer is that Britain's drugs policy is driven not by reason or
"the right thing to do". It is driven by fear of the media, fear of a
minority of public opinion, fear of message, image and spin. Such is the
slow strangulation of liberal Britain under Mr Blair.

Mr Blunkett appears to have conquered this fear. He has emerged from his
Home Office bunker. But his policy is incoherent. If he is not afraid, why
is he shaking like a leaf?