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Hashishi

The only message being sent is of cowardice and stupidity
This pseudo-tough move to reclassify cannabis flies in the face of the science and delivers a boost to the illicit drugs market
4-30-'08 | The Guardian | by Simon Jenkins

Next week, we are reliably told, Gordon Brown will reclassify cannabis as a class B drug rather than a class C. This obscure decision, taken in defiance of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, is a vignette of modern British government. Brown has no evidence to alter what is a pharmacological classification, but is happy to abuse science to "send a message".

Sending messages is the last refuge of the impotent. Nor is the recipient of this message to be cannabis users, long immune to such gestures. It is the editor of the Daily Mail, another amateur pharmacologist who is the prime minister's last friend in an ever-fickle Fleet Street, and whose pages have been obsessed with cannabis for weeks.

I declare an interest as a member of the Police Foundation committee under Ruth Runciman, which proposed widespread drug reclassification in 2000. Though rejected by Jack Straw, cannabis reclassification from B to C was implemented by David Blunkett in 2004, though the effect of lowering the penalty for possession was reversed when a panicky Blunkett promptly restored cannabis to the class of arrestable and imprisonable drugs.

You can therefore still go to jail for two-and-a-half years for possessing it, and 14 years for selling it. Why those in the press who believe in imprisonment as a "message" should publicise the lie that cannabis use is not imprisonable is a mystery. To return cannabis to class B will do nothing except double the maximum sentence for possession, to five years. Since this sentence is almost never used, the effect of next week's announcement will be zero.

In the event, cannabis use has fallen since declassification on every available Home Office count. Though the more widespread herbal cannabis is stronger than the old resin, research in America, Germany, Sweden and Britain has failed to sustain the much-vaunted "link" with mental illness. Schizophrenia rates among drug users have fallen, against an expected rise. Those who take cannabis for a long time certainly have a 40% higher incidence of mental illness. But they also drink, and there is no evidence of causality. That said, few doctors would argue that cannabis is advisable for those with a predisposition to psychosis. (Equally it can help those in acute pain.)

As for the deterrent effect of "messages", a Mori poll for the Police Foundation found this to be near zero in the case of cannabis. Another survey, for the charity Rethink, found just 3% of young people knew what classification meant. Ecstasy is, ludicrously, a class A drug alongside heroin and crack cocaine, carrying a penalty of seven years for possession and life for trafficking. Yet no teenager knows this, and tens of thousands consume ecstasy tablets every week. So much for using the law to "send messages".

Even if the fall in consumption is not due to the 2004 reclassification, there is no evidence that reclassification increased harm. The fall was probably due to more education about the dangers of abuse, as occurs with bad news stories about ecstasy and LSD. Consumption by the young appears to respond to education rather than punishment.

Message laws are a classic Westminster fantasy. Three home secretaries have sought easy headlines by "demanding" a review of classification, wrongly implying thereby that class C was a non-criminal category. The advisory council has commendably stuck to its guns and to science, forcing Downing Street into a public display of stupidity.

Never can a British law have failed so conspicuously to pass the test of general consent as the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act. What is now one of Britain's biggest industries by value is rampant in pubs, clubs, parks, streets and private houses thoughout the land. Roughly half of all imprisonments, a staggering 60,000 annually, are now attributable to drugs. Inside prison, drugs are openly traded, and users are driven to crime on release to repay dealers.

If the Home Office will not enforce the law on those under its supervision, how can it expect parents, teachers and the police to do better? No good is served by incarcerating an illiterate drugs "mule" in Holloway for 14 years for a first offence when she had no clue what she was doing and has left four children on the streets of Jamaica. She will be sent back in seven years, after Britain has spent £250,000 turning her into a drug addict and a wreck. Not since deportation for poaching has British penal policy been so heartless and so stupid.

At a conference on the future of prisons at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire this month, governors and criminologists from Britain and America returned time and again to the drug laws as the cause of social breakdown and its symptom, prison overcrowding. Drugs make prison rehabilitation impossible. They underpin an illicit market on the housing estates and criminalise minority communities. They wreck the political economies of poor countries from Colombia to Afghanistan.

Pseudo-tough, which means unenforcibly lax, drug laws lie at the root of so many social evils. Yet no politician - Labour, Tory, Liberal Democrat - or tabloid editor, is ready to take them seriously. All turn a blind eye. They are soft on drugs.

Ever since as a young reporter I covered the "London drug scene", I have wondered if a government would ever have the courage to get a grip on this subject. None has. Each has left in place the disastrous 1971 act. Each has allowed this poisonous market to permeate every educational and correctional institution, untested, unregulated and untaxed. Narcotics are cheaper, thrill-for-thrill, than alcohol or cigarettes.

There must be a reason for Britain to have the worst drug record in Europe. That reason will be on display next week. It is that while elsewhere policy is treated as a social and medical challenge, in Britain it is a matter of political machismo.

The moral and practical case for controlling a market that has defied suppression for a third of a century is overwhelming. Drugs such as cannabis, cocaine and heroin must somehow be distributed within the ambit of legal and medical regulation, as they were to an extent before 1971 and are slowly being elsewhere. Finding a means of doing this, given the scale of the illicit market, is a mighty challenge; but only cowardice places it beyond the capacity of Britain's politicians. All they can do is bleat out their pathetic "messages". Next week's will be one of abject surrender.

__________________
SWP



"I'm not into this detail stuff. I'm more concepty." -- "If I know the answer I'll tell you the answer, and if I don't, I'll just respond, cleverly." -- "Secretary Powell and I agree on every single issue that has ever been before this administration except for those instances where Colin's still learning." -- "As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns: the ones we don't know we don't know."

 

KWhite

This is so well written!

Does anyone know how to mail this to the American candidates for president?

__________________
"Your mind is your own, your body as well, from the soul we need not speak, tend it well, making those decisions you deem worthy, aware all responsibility is in your hands when the smoke clears" Kelly L. White

"It is a principle of natural justice that when bad men make bad laws, or when unprincipled authorities compromise good ones, citizens are justified in protecting themselves from the very authority that compromised law and order." Gandhi

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Hashishi

One of my favourite columnist writing for the UK's greatest paper.

SpiralArchitect

Yes, that was a wonderful article. I read the first paragraph and couldn't stop...

Sending this to a US president, boy, I wish they would take their time out of the day to read this... even if they did, they'd throw it away without a second thought most likely

__________________
I embrace my desire to
feel the rhythm,
to feel connected enough to step aside and weep like a widow
to feel inspired, to fathom the power, to witness the beauty, to bathe in the fountain,
to swing on the spiral of our divinity and still be a human.