Daily Mail, February 18 2002

Pinch me; I must be dreaming. Indeed, there’s been nothing like it since Alice tried to work out why the March Hare had buttered the Mad Hatter’s watch with the bread knife.

The police in Lambeth, south London, have been conducting a six-month experiment in which they have turned a blind eye to cannabis possession in order to concentrate on pursuing Class A drugs. This has been a disaster.

Hard and soft drugs are now being peddled openly on the streets of Brixton. Drug tourists are flocking to this most pernicious of bazaars. Heroin addicts are shooting up in public. Local people are being mugged, propositioned and assaulted. It is, in short, mayhem.

What is the reaction of our Home Secretary, David Blunkett, to this crisis? He is said to be so impressed he intends to extend this experiment across the country. He rates it a success because police man-hours have been saved, and more hard-drugs arrests are being made.

Can this man be serious? There are more hard-drugs arrests because traffic in such substances has taken off as a result of this policy. And as for all those police man-hours saved -- well, no doubt if he decriminalised theft, grievous bodily harm and murder he would save even more.

Now Blunkett is threatening to send in a hit squad if the Metropolitan police doesn’t bring London’s violent crime under control. Yet last week Rudy Giuliani, New York’s ex-mayor who presided over a huge fall in crime, was explicit about the connection between cannabis and disorder.

‘Marijuana caused a lot of the violence we had’, he said. Former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik agreed. Cannabis use, he said, was not a victimless crime, adding: ‘Anyone should be arrested for the use of marijuana’.

What is the response of our establishment to these voices of experience? The Home Affairs Select Committee is expected to recommend decriminalising cannabis and downgrading Ecstasy from class A to class B. Stuff that dormouse into the teapot immediately.

A received wisdom has developed that the war on drugs has been lost, cannabis is no worse than alcohol or tobacco and that it’s not drugs but the law that’s the problem. All of this is the exact opposite of the truth.

One had only to look at Holland to predict exactly what would happen in Lambeth. As a result of the Dutch blind eye to cannabis, the use of Ecstasy, cocaine and other drugs including marijuana has soared along with the crime rate in that previously tranquil country.

The philosophy embodied by Giuliani is that for crime to be tackled effectively, all society’s messages have to be consistent. His ‘broken windows’ theory means that the police cannot deal with crime merely by going after murder and robbery.

They have to deal with low level disorder – begging, public urination or abandoned cars -- because only this transmits the message that legal and social codes of behaviour mean something, and society simply will not tolerate them being broken. If such offences are thought too trivial to bother with, this sends out the opposite message that no-one cares. So small transgressions lead to bigger crimes.

Exactly the same applies to drug use. The Swedes have understood this well. They know it’s a mistake to treat hard and soft drugs differently – as we do. They know it’s a mistake to try fruitlessly to stop drug supply – as we do -- when the source of the problem is demand. They know it’s a mistake to treat drug users as hapless victims – as we do -- while targeting their suppliers as villains.

Instead, they criminalise and pursue all drug use. This does not mean locking up all cannabis users. But it does mean that if a teacher, for example, suspects that the sudden drop in standards by an able pupil is due to cannabis, the police and social workers are called in and the child dealt with appropriately.

The difference between the Swedes and us is that the Swedes believe themselves when they say drug use is a social menace. The result is that their drug and crime rates are a fraction of ours. We have not lost the war on drugs – we’ve never had one.

But the Home Affairs Select Committee didn’t visit Sweden, nor talk to authoritative Swedish experts. Instead, it took evidence from a wholly disproportionate number of drug legalisers and muddleheads.

The reason so many of the great and good are going down this route is that they don’t want their own pot-puffing children to get criminal records. So to protect the reputations of the parents of Tabitha or Orlando, the young of Lambeth and other inner cities are to be thrown to the drug wolves.

In particular, the argument that the cannabis law is an ass has confused the whole debate. Cannabis is being used as a Trojan horse for the legalisation of all drugs; and the medicinal use of cannabinoids is being used as a Trojan horse for the legalisation of cannabis.

The government is to ask its medicines regulator, the National Institute for Clincial Excellence, to rule on whether cannabis components can be used to treat chronic illness. If their benefits are indeed unambiguous then of course they should be -- just as heroin is medically prescribed for extreme pain relief.

But there is a great difference between smoking cannabis and the selective use of its components. Contrary to popular myth, cannabis is one of the most potent and dangerous drugs around. Among the effects of regular use are permanent damage to memory and thought processes, psychosis, chronic demotivation, cancer, panic attacks, aggression, damage to unborn babies and a low sperm count. Oh, and addiction, and a propensity to use hard drugs too.

Politicians shut their ears to this because they are listening instead to the hum from the compromised middle classes and to the siren song of the legalisation lobby, masquerading as dispassionate experts. The influential charity DrugScope, for example, argues that there should be no criminal sanctions for possessing small amounts of any drug. This is a short step from saying all drugs should be legalised. Why is the Home Office funding such an outfit?

Many believe that because drugs cause crime, legalisation will bring that crime to an end. This is an idiotic argument. Drugs cause crime because they break down moral inhibitions and provoke an insatiable urge to replicate and better the high they deliver. Criminals will always exploit this urge by undercutting any legal supply. The black market would only stop if all drugs were totally free and available without limit.

Drugs are illegal because they are dangerous; they are not dangerous because they are illegal. Drug legalisation would mean the enslavement of millions. Yet mad as this is, we are now heading that way.

Heaven only knows what’s got into our otherwise bullish-sounding Home Secretary. Maybe someone slipped him something in his tea.

Posted by admin at February 18, 2002