FROM THE BEATLES TO BRIXTON, WHAT A LONG, STRANGE TRIP IT'S BEEN

It seemed so daring when 'The Independent on Sunday' began its campaign to
decriminalise cannabis. Simon O'Hagan reflects on how public and political
opposition went up in smoke

We have come a long way since police raided Ringo Starr's London flat in
the late 1960s and emerged triumphant with one and a half ounces of
cannabis. As the Beatles generation has grown up to be the leaders of
today, the use of cannabis has become so normalised, its effects long now
revealed to be so much less damaging than the establishment's scaremongers
would have had us believe, that decriminalisation has become almost inevitable.

That, however, is not to down-play the efforts of campaigners over many
years to force recalcitrant governments and police chiefs to look at the
issue dispassionately. As recently as 1997, when this newspaper took what
was then considered the daring step of calling for the decriminalisation of
the drug, the new Labour government refused even to countenance the idea.

Now we have a Home Secretary - David Blunkett - who has declared that
cannabis should lose its Class B status, which was all but an admission
that no casual user of the drug need fear prosecution. And with the news
that a committee advising Mr Blunkett has said that an experiment in
leniency in Brixton, south London, should be extended nationwide, the
argument is virtually over. To all intents and purposes, use of cannabis
today is no more a matter for police concern than is the smoking of
ordinary tobacco.

It is an extraordinary capitulation - an acknowledgement that the fears
surrounding its use are largely unjustified and that, while tobacco and
alcohol remain dangerous and legal, it is a nonsense that cannabis remains
harmless and banned. More important, there is a widespread consensus that
the law as it stands is wholly counterproductive in allowing criminals to
feed off it. Above all, with an estimated one in 10 people using the drug -
twice the European average - Britain's changing social mores demand a new
approach.

"Speaking as someone who takes his main pleasure from alcohol and
cigarettes, it seems to me entirely logical that all drugs should be
decriminalised," the playwright Alan Bleasdale, a supporter of the original
Independent on Sunday campaign, said yesterday. "If they legalised it
they'd remove crime from the streets and take the money from the bank
accounts of the bastards who sell drugs."

So how has this radical shift in policy come about? It was around the time
that the Beatles fell foul of the cannabis laws that a similar prosecution
of Mick Jagger prompted the then editor of The Times, William Rees Mogg, to
quote Alexander Pope's line about "breaking a butterfly on a wheel". The
Times ran a short-lived campaign, and a "Legalise Pot" movement was set up.
But while, over the next 30 years, cannabis use acquired increasing
acceptability, the authorities never saw it that way.

Any hope that New Labour might see cannabis differently was dashed when the
Home Secretary in its first administration, Jack Straw, declared himself
implacably opposed to decriminalisation, even as he set up the first "drugs
tsar", Kenneth Hellawell. Mr Straw drew the fire of The Independent on
Sunday, whose high-profile campaign supporters - from Sir Paul McCartney
and Nick Hornby to Anita Roddick and Mike Leigh - helped create a public
debate about cannabis use that would otherwise have been suppressed. Some
30,000 people attended a Decriminalise Cannabis march in London in early
1998, and the paper's then editor, Rosie Boycott, recalls that "we had
touched a popular nerve". Central to the argument was the plight of MS
sufferers, for whom cannabis provided proven relief. By 1999, even some
right-wing newspapers were calling for changes in the law, and condemned Mr
Straw for being too conservative on the issue.

Several shadow cabinet members are now urging Iain Duncan Smith to make
decriminalisation party policy as part of a more liberal approach on social
issues. Mr Blunkett would therefore be responding to opinion across the
political spectrum if he backed decriminalisation. Tony Blair has publicly
expressed his opposition in the past. But those close to him say he has
never had a "closed mind" on the issue.

Meanwhile, the police know the reality on the ground. As more pressing
priorities have crowded in, prosecutions have fallen away. According to the
most recent figures available, there were still 120,000 cases of cannabis
use dealt with by police in 1999. Anomalies persist, and how "offenders"
are dealt with depends largely on where they live. In 2000 we highlighted
the case of MS sufferer Lezley Gibson, who was put through a four-day trial
at Carlisle Crown Court after police raided her home and found her in
possession of eight grammes of cannabis. Only then was she found not
guilty. In other parts of the country, she would have received a warning.

No less a figure than the novelist P D James - Baroness James of Holland
Park - said yesterday: "I'm in agreement with the proposal to legalise it
for personal use. I think it's extremely important that it's available for
patients in need of it for medical reasons."

Ms Boycott said yesterday: "It's very good that the Government is
rethinking its drugs policy. This marks an important step. I'm delighted
that our campaign has borne such fruit."