Pubdate: Fri, 23 Aug 2002
Source: Daily Camera (CO)
Copyright: 2002 The Daily Camera.
Contact:  http://www.thedailycamera.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/103
Author: Sarah Lyall

LONDON'S DRUG EXPERIMENT GETS MIXED REVIEWS

LONDON - At the rundown Stockwell housing project here, the potheads were 
complaining about the smackheads.

"Right down there, I saw a guy injecting a girl into her neck," said James 
Haind, 28, his indignation wrapped in a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke.

Hanging out recently at the project's skateboard park with his friends, 
their skateboards and their stashes of weed, he offered himself as living 
proof that marijuana does not lead inevitably to harder drugs. "A sensible, 
stable person will not turn to heroin," declared Haind, an out-of-work sign 
painter who estimates that he has been getting high for half his life. 
"That's for the more stupid people."

That is just the message the government seems to have sent to Brixton, in 
South London, where a six-month experiment in loosening the national drug 
laws has just ended. The program pleased Brixton's smokers, and even the 
police. But it left many residents feeling that their neighborhood had 
turned into an open-air drug bazaar.

"People started smoking openly, whereas before they'd have their little 
hideaways," said the Rev. Chris Andre-Watson, pastor of the Brixton Baptist 
Church, who runs a mentoring program for teenage boys and says the drug 
experiment has left many youths "zombied out."

Partly as a result of Brixton's trial, the government recently announced 
plans to downgrade the criminal penalties for smoking pot in a country 
where an estimated five million people are habitual users. Although the 
plan is an acknowledgment that drugs like heroin and cocaine are far more 
harmful than marijuana, the mixed reviews here raise a host of questions 
about loosening marijuana laws.

Under the experiment, people caught smoking marijuana in Lambeth Borough, 
which includes Brixton, got off with warnings rather than arrests, leaving 
the police free to pursue more serious criminals. The police said it led to 
an overall decline in crime and saved much police time.

Haind and his smoking companions were thrilled. But others were angry at 
the way pot-selling and smoking had been thrust so clearly in the open.

Andre-Watson and other residents complained so bitterly about drug dealing 
that after negative newspaper stories, the police finally sent officers 
this month to clear the streets.

But how long the stepped-up presence will persist is anybody's guess. When 
London as a whole relaxes its marijuana policy under the new legislation, 
people in Brixton are predicting that the open-air dealers will be back, at 
the busy subway station and up and down Coldharbor Lane, the center of race 
riots in 1981.
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