Pubdate: Thu, 02 Aug 2001
Source: Salon (US Web)
Copyright: 2001 Salon
Contact:  http://www.salon.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/381
Author: Jared Manasek

SMOKE SIGNAL

Police in London's gritty Brixton neighborhood are losing the war on 
drugs, so the police chief is experimenting with not enforcing 
cannabis laws.

Aug. 2, 2001 - LONDON -- When they kick at your front door in 
Brixton, chances are it won't be for drugs.

Earlier this month, police in the south London borough of Lambeth, 
where Brixton is located, began a six-month experiment in which they 
are supposed to ignore minor marijuana offenses.

In one of the most serious attacks yet on Britain's harsh drug laws, 
Brian Paddick, the local police commander, has instructed his force 
to turn a blind eye to citizens caught with pot. His success or 
failure will be a key factor in the growing national debate over the 
future of the country's war on drugs.

Britain has some of Europe's harshest drug laws -- a minor marijuana 
bust can bring up to six months in jail, with a fine of 5,000 pounds 
(about $7,000). But according to an exhaustive report on U.K. drug 
policy published last year by the Police Foundation, a think tank 
partly funded by the government, this policy has largely failed. 
Meanwhile, Britain has developed Europe's biggest drug problem.

Moreover, as many police officers will readily admit, enforcement is 
a mess. About 90 percent of drug arrests are for possession, and of 
those, around 75 percent are for possession of cannabis.

Yet with the exception of Lambeth's experimental program, there is no 
efficient way to handle simple possession cases.

Drug arrests in Britain are a bureaucratic nightmare for police, 
requiring up to five hours of paperwork and other red tape to process 
a suspect -- time that many believe could be better spent on the 
streets fighting more serious crime. And officers who choose to go 
against policy and not make arrests are thereby eroding the authority 
of the police.

The result is a system that is plugged with minor drug crimes and a 
population that increasingly thinks the drug laws are inappropriately 
harsh. As has happened in the United States, police in the U.K. have 
come under fire for their stop-and-search policies and profiling of 
potential drug users and dealers.

Such tactics have drawn especially strong criticism in ethnically 
mixed neighborhoods such as Brixton. Stop and search "has done little 
to engender good relations between community and police," says Danny 
Kushlick, director of Transform, an organization that campaigns for 
reform of drug laws. The Lambeth initiative "will help in that 
regard," he believes.

Under the new rules, the police in Lambeth may confiscate your joint, 
but the most that will happen to you otherwise is a solid scolding, 
formally called a caution.

A caution involves about the same level of bureaucracy as a traffic 
ticket: The officer seizes the drug, and the person who is busted 
must sign the warning.

That's the most lenient punishment police can issue after an arrest.

But despite its toothless name, a caution bites.

It still requires a hefty dose of desk time for cops -- and it can 
create legal problems for the recipient because it requires an 
admission of guilt.

Worse, a caution shows up on a person's permanent police record, 
which must often be revealed, for example, to potential employers.

And a caution can cause real trouble for anybody working in fields 
such as child care and healthcare, or anybody seeking a visa to live 
abroad.

Still, the initiative is the first step in a long journey for a 
country that has recently begun to show a willingness to experiment 
with alternatives to the strict enforcement of drug laws. Scotland, 
which enjoys a certain degree of autonomous rule, has gone possibly 
the farthest by developing a range of penalties for drug use or 
possession -- including warning letters and fines -- that require 
neither reams of paperwork by the police nor admission of guilt by 
the person they've collared.

Most of the experiments involve treatment of hardcore addicts 
following a bust. There is a growing interest in alternatives to 
incarceration for hard-drug users in the U.K., including a pilot 
program that supplies pharmaceutical-grade heroin to junkies and then 
slowly reduces their dosage until they are no longer addicted.

Judges increasingly seek to get addicts into rehabilitation programs 
instead of prisons.

Yet most of these solutions deal with hard drugs, not cannabis, and 
occur only after an arrest has taken place, not before.

It's not surprising, then, that politicians and policy experts are 
keenly interested in the Lambeth experiment. Seldom does police 
pragmatism square so neatly with the will of drug-law-reform 
activists, and the 65 percent of voters who, according to a recent 
survey by the left-leaning Guardian newspaper, think cannabis 
possession should be the lowest priority for police.

And nowhere has reform become more symbolic than in Brixton, a rough 
corner of Lambeth known for its great night life, serious crime and 
bad drug problem.

No matter what eventually comes of the Lambeth trial, Britain is 
still in the Stone Age with regard to drug law reform in Europe. Most 
Americans are aware of the Netherlands' lenient approach to pot; the 
host of the annual "Cannabis Cup" dope degustation has 
decriminalized, but not outright legalized, possession and 
distribution of small quantities of marijuana, thus giving rise to 
Amsterdam's famous coffee shops.

Other European countries aren't far behind.

Belgium recently decriminalized possession of small quantities of 
marijuana for any person over age 18, and both Italy and Spain have 
dropped criminal charges for possession of small amounts while 
retaining administrative penalties and fines.

And in 1994, under a challenge made to German law, the nation's 
Constitutional Court ruled that turning minor cannabis offenders into 
criminals was unconstitutional. Although anti-cannabis laws remain on 
the books in Germany, almost no charges for possession have been 
brought since then.

The police may have been concocting the Lambeth scheme for ages, but 
it would never have come into existence without at least the tacit 
support of the government. Credit Tony Blair's Labor government with 
creating an environment in which the experiment could take place. 
David Blunkett, the new home secretary, has been in office only a few 
weeks but has already made his mark on the drug debate: first by 
firing the ineffectual drug czar and eliminating the office, and then 
by allowing the Lambeth experiment to move forward.

Blunkett has even called for an "adult, intelligent debate" on drugs.

Some members of the Conservative Party have gone even further.

Peter Lilley, who as former deputy leader of the Tories has solid 
right-wing credentials, has responded to the hubbub surrounding the 
Lambeth experiment with a call for full-scale legalization of 
marijuana. Although some party members consider the proposal 
outrageous, Lilley has some influential backers, including Charles 
Moore, editor of the conservative Daily Telegraph. Lilley also has an 
ideology: Because the Tories are a party of free choice and the 
current drug laws infringe on such freedom, the party should not 
support them.

Despite the progressive Lambeth experiment, and the apparent 
political support for it, there is little evidence that Britain's 
politicians are preparing to follow their neighbors across the 
English Channel down the path of decriminalization. Debate there may 
be. Equally likely are committees and studies and reports and 
recommendations ad infinitum. Yet, as Transform's Kushlick points 
out, there are few issues on which politicians are so far out of sync 
with the public as the war on drugs. "The climate for change is 
here," he says, "but the political will is not."

The Labor government is cursed by its left-wing history and is 
unlikely to risk being called soft on crime by pushing for all-out 
change. And despite Lilley's position, the Conservatives never have 
been -- and still aren't -- a true libertarian party with leanings 
toward greater personal liberties.

Ann Widdecombe, a leading hard-line Conservative and critic of the 
Lambeth initiative, presses a completely different line. Widdecombe 
recently told a Sunday Independent reporter: "The Conservative Party 
is opposed to legalization and, indeed, decriminalization. If we 
legalize cannabis, it is very unlikely that the drug barons would 
just go home."

Still, the experiment has catalyzed public debate over the country's 
drug laws. As a compromise between extant legislation and the reality 
of enforcement police routinely confront, it may well point the way 
toward decriminalization by default -- a situation similar to 
Germany's, where the laws remain on the books but are seldom used.

Just days after Paddick announced the launch of the pilot program, 
British police and customs officials came back with a noteworthy 
rejoinder, saying they would no longer hunt down marijuana smugglers. 
If officers stumble across marijuana in their ongoing pursuit of 
heroin and cocaine smugglers, they will confiscate it and make 
arrests. But they won't target pot. The war on marijuana, blared the 
tabloids, is over.

That is, of course, an exaggeration. Growing, dealing or possessing 
cannabis is still a crime in the U.K., and the penalties are, by and 
large, still enforced.

A recent court case, modeled after the 1994 constitutional challenge 
in Germany, unsuccessfully argued that the country's cannabis 
possession laws contravened the European Convention on Human Rights.

However, for the next six months at least, Brixton will remain a safe 
haven. And what is happening there is both remarkable and ordinary: 
People are going about their lives as before, the smell of pot floats 
in the air no more frequently than before and the drug dealers hustle 
as they always have. Except for one thing: Now a dreadlocked man has 
positioned himself at the exit to the Brixton Underground station, 
wedging himself between a bootleg-CD seller and a proselytizer.

As the station disgorges commuters, he calls out in his thick 
Jamaican accent: "Ganja! Sinsemilla! Don't be afraid to smoke in 
Brixton!"
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MAP posted-by: Kirk