Daily Mail, March 11 2002

There was a time when the Liberal Democrats were regarded as the adolescents of politics. Although what they said was viewed as idiotic and immature, no-one took them seriously because, like any mouthy 14 year-old, they were expected to be daft.

Now, however, the LibDems have lost their prerogative of cutting edge infantilism. This particular lapel button is now being sported by the Home Office. The LibDems called at the weekend for the legalisation of cannabis, the downgrading of Ecstasy and an end to prison sentences for possession of hard drugs.

They seem to think all this is radical. Stupid, destructive and criminally irresponsible, yes; radical, no. For the Home Office has got there before them.

The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, is poised to downgrade cannabis to the same status as tranquillisers in response to a recommendation this week by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Despite Blunkett’s protestations, decriminalisation isn’t far down the line now.

When he made possession of cannabis a non-arrestable offence last year, he claimed this was to enable the police to focus on hard drugs. But now we can see that the government’s resolve on hard drugs, too, is just crumbling away.

A Home Office booklet briefs club owners on how to make it ‘safe’ for dancers to use Ecstasy, providing ‘chill-out’ rooms and ‘amnesty boxes’ for drugs to be handed over to the police, and regulating the beat of the music to guard against drug users overheating. And in a separate, scarcely noticed remark, the government has said it will enable more doctors to prescribe heroin to addicts.

These are truly astonishing developments for politicians with even a passing claim to maturity. These are the policies of a government that has simply lost it – intellectually, morally and practically.

‘Chill-out’ rooms, ‘amnesty boxes’ and all the rest of it for clubs send a clear signal that illegal drug-taking is no longer a proper target for law enforcement. The message now about taking Ecstasy is ‘do it safely’, which will be understood immediately as ‘do it’.

Taking Ecstasy can never be safe. Despite the ludicrous claim by DJ Fat Boy Slim (Norman Cook) that Ecstasy cured his depression, the fact is that Ecstasy destroys the brain’s supply of serotonin, which makes us happy, and in the long term can result in anxiety, panic, confusion, insomnia, psychosis and hallucinations. Oh, and death.

The junior Home Office minister, Bob Ainsworth, says we have to recognise that illegal drug use has become an integral part of a clubber’s night out. Why must we recognise this? If he said we had to recognise that pushing a broken bottle in someone’s face had become an integral part of a pub-drinker’s night out, we would conclude that this man should be ejected from his government job forthwith.

Drug ‘amnesty boxes’ utterly undermine a law passed only last year making it a crime for club owners to permit the use of any controlled drug on their premises. The booklet now says the law puts club owners in a difficult position.

But it’s only difficult because they are allowing the law to be broken on their premises. Wouldn’t it be more fitting for the Home Office to ensure that the law is enforced, rather than apologise to those who are party to a crime for the frightful inconvenience the law causes them?

In another equally sagacious proposal, Ainsworth told Channel Four News that the government was changing the rules to allow ‘a few more’ addicts to be prescribed heroin by the small number of doctors with licenses to do so. They will be able to prescribe it where an addict cannot tolerate the substitute methadone. Yet far from ‘a few more’, it is estimated that this would increase heroin prescriptions fivefold, from the current 300 to 1500.

What planet are these people on? We’ve been here before. Heroin was generally prescribed to addicts by GPs in the 1970s. The addicts sold on the prescribed drug for a profit, buying street heroin with the proceeds. Heroin use rose so alarmingly that the Home Office ended the practice.

Now, with 40 times the number of heroin addicts and a vastly increased potential for massive abuse, the Home Office proposes to return to this discredited policy. Doctors themselves are appalled, and no wonder. As one told Channel Four News, it will cause more deaths.

Many people think, though: so what if drug users die? The drugs they take only hurt other people if users commit crime to pay for their habit. So why not legalise the drugs and end crime?

But there are two major mistakes in this thinking. Drugs do hurt others. They cause paranoia and violence; they produce irresponsible parents, demotivated workers, broken relationships; and they predispose users to crime.

There will always be a black market in drugs unless they are totally free and available without limit. When doctors widely prescribed heroin in the seventies, a Home Office study found that crime by the recipients actually went up.

Legalisation will increase the number of drug users and will not stop the crime. The official blind eye to cannabis being turned in Lambeth is producing a drugs and crime free-for-all there – a fitting tribute to the policy’s policeman architect, Commander Brian Paddick, who has confessed that he is attracted to anarchy.

Our war on drugs has failed because it has never existed. Look at the way we all tolerate nightclubs which are factories for a mass-produced drug culture. Instead of apologising for the law, why aren’t the police systematically raiding these clubs and, when they find drugs on the premises, asking the magistrates to revoke their entertainment licences?

Why are city councils granting these licences in the first place when they know full well that they will encourage the enslavement of their young people? The fact is that this night life is considered vital to the regeneration of our cities. These enterprising city fathers might as well market a chain of clubs called ‘Blunkett’s’ and display a menu of the drugs on offer, along with a full supporting tariff of chill-out nurses, anarchic police commanders and doctors prescribing heroin.

Right on cue, research to be published this week by the Rowntree Foundation says that policing cannabis offences is equivalent to the work of 500 police officers per year. It is surely only a matter of time before the Rowntree Foundation reveals the number of police man hours wasted on pursuing cocaine, Ecstasy and heroin, not to mention theft, grievous bodily harm and murder.

There is no limit to what social science researchers will produce to appease political fashion. There is no limit to the unravelling of a culture once it has decided that its law is no longer to be upheld.

There is a word for the state of affairs where a governing class has so comprehensively lost it in this way. That word is decadence.

Posted by admin at March 11, 2002