Pubdate: Tue, 20 Aug 2002
Source: Times, The (UK)
Copyright: 2002 Times Newspapers Ltd
Contact:  http://www.the-times.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/454
Author: Joan Smith

A CRAZY POLICY ON CANNABIS

The Government Policy On Cannabis Is Like Announcing That It Is Legal To 
Eat In A Restaurant But The Chef And Waiters Will Go To Prison

It is hard to imagine a crazier government policy than David Blunkett's 
decision to reclassify cannabis. Downgrading it to a category C drug is an 
unequivocal liberalisation, yet the Home Secretary is also planning to 
double penalties for dealers  rather like announcing that it is legal for 
diners to eat in a restaurant, but the chef and waiters can expect to go to 
prison for a very long time.

In parts of the country where the police are following the new Home Office 
guidelines  and the absence of consistent enforcement is one of the 
problems  people caught in possession of small amounts will merely be 
cautioned, while suppliers are to get much heavier sentences. How anyone 
could have come up with such a patently absurd "reform" is beyond me, 
although it expresses the Manichean outlook I have come to expect from this 
Government.

It is not so much a moral judgment, I suspect, as a pragmatic one: dealers 
are very bad people, and can be banged up with impunity, but there is no 
electoral advantage to be had by dishing out criminal records to hundreds 
of thousands of middle-class kids who use the drug. One of the few benefits 
of this preposterous compromise, apart from making it a little less 
difficult for people with multiple sclerosis to get hold of a substance 
that appears to alleviate their symptoms, is that it has stimulated a 
debate about the effects of soft drugs.

The latest voice to be raised is that of Susan Greenfield, Professor of 
Pharmacology at Oxford University, who argued at the weekend that relaxing 
the law on cannabis is a mistake. Rejecting the widely-held belief that 
cannabis is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, Greenfield suggested that 
it may cause lasting damage to the brain. She linked it with schizophrenia, 
estimated that half the young people attending psychiatric clinics may be 
regular or occasional users, and claimed that it can cause psychotic episodes.

After enumerating these alarming possibilities, she went on to ask: "Do we 
really want a drug-culture lifestyle in the UK?" The problem with this line 
of argument is that we already have one. Prohibition of cannabis, like the 
ban on alcohol in the US in the 1920s, must be one of the most 
spectacularly unsuccessful laws ever enacted; anecdotal evidence, and 
surveys showing that huge numbers of people in this country have tried the 
drug demonstrate that the law has done little to curb supply.

This is not to cast doubt on the proposition that cannabis has harmful 
effects. In recent years, I have heard the term "cannabis psychosis" used 
more and more frequently to describe mental breakdowns apparently induced 
by the drug, and I suspect that Greenfield is right to link it to psychotic 
attacks in otherwise healthy people. For the most part, though, we are 
talking about heavy long-term use. While the medical consequences may be 
different from alcohol and tobacco, they raise similar issues.

All these substances are damaging to a greater or lesser degree. When I 
returned home after my first term at university and mentioned that I had 
smoked a couple of experimental joints, my father exploded and threatened 
to march me down to the local police station. I never developed a drug 
habit but he was completely unable to give up cigarettes, succumbing to 
lung cancer at the tragically early age of 63.

Cigarette smoking kills around half the people who take it up, but the 
habit is so entrenched as to make a ban totally unworkable. In the 
circumstances, the proper course of action is to regulate its sale and 
impose heavy taxes that go some way towards paying for smokers' treatment 
on the NHS. The arguments for criminalising alcohol and cannabis are much 
weaker, given that the damage associated with excessive consumption has to 
be balanced against the innocent pleasure provided by moderate use, a point 
often overlooked by out-and-out abolitionists.

At the moment, the law relating to cannabis in this country offers the 
worst of all worlds: contradictory penalties for use and supply, a complete 
absence of quality control and almost unlimited opportunities for organised 
crime. We already have a thriving drug culture, whether we like it or not, 
and opinion is polarised between people who argue that cannabis is 
completely harmless and those who see it as the first step towards moral, 
physical and mental disintegration.

The truth about the drug almost certainly lies somewhere in between, as it 
does with alcohol. There is an urgent need for users to be better informed, 
which is why Greenfield's intervention is welcome, even if her conclusions 
are flawed. Above all, we need clarity from the government, instead of 
ill-judged initiatives from a Home Secretary who does not seem to know 
whether he is hard or soft on drugs.
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart