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Comment & Debate: So what if politicians smoked a little grass?: All those earnest confessions last week were a mere diversion from the very real problems of drugs and crime that fill Britain's courtsThe Observer (London); Jul 22, 2007; Mary Riddell; p. 33 Full Text:(Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited Jul 22, 2007)
Cannabis and political hysteria have a lot in common. Both cause distorted perception and trouble with thinking. Traces, in the habitual user, can linger for weeks. But, as the initial fug lifts, the effect of the drug-smoking admissions of the Home Secretary and eight of her colleagues are becoming clear.Moves towards raising cannabis from class C will be futile, as demonstrated by theabandon with which ministers took the drug when it bore the class B status that some now want to reinstate. The absurdity does not stop there. In other ways, the cannabis confessions have been a psychedelic experience.People who look as if they never took anything more mind- altering than Vimto have declared their sin. At one point the causal links between the Haight-Ashbury experience and the Gordon Brown cabinet seemed so solid that you would not have been surprised to hear that pensions policy was being formulated by the Grateful Dead.More encouragingly for the government, the mental hologram of John Hutton inhaling a damp spliff may be as powerful a deterrent to the young as a picture of Giant Haystacks on a dieter's fridge door. Already, since the downward reclassification in 2004, the proportion of cannabis users has dropped from 11 to 8 per cent.That should be the end of the story, but for skunk. While European monitors and Drugscope say there is no robust evidence for an increase in average potency, there is an increased focus on the damage to mental health. I don't think this is just media scaremongering. Several young people I know have stopped using cannabis, or seen their friends stop, because its effects have frightened them. Others have had their lives upset, or even wrecked.Even so, last year's review by the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs said that, although regular cannabis used can have 'real and significant mental health effects', it was unlikely to cause schizophrenia and that its ill-effects were 'not of the same order' as class B drugs. Since nothing has changed, that verdict remains the sanest guidance.If Brown is keen on a review of dangerous substances, he should focus on alcohol, possibly with a campaign featuring vignettes of cabinet members relating how they once ended up legless in A and E. Bringing back the maximum five-year penalty that goes with class B drugs would simply increase use and waste police time. The better option - teaching children what they risk - has been hit, inexcusably, by a government funding cut of 10 per cent that means prevention and advisory services are having to scale down or close.The stale old reclassification debate launched at PMQs was as worrying, though, for its context as its content. Even the most drug- free listener might have had the hallucinogenic notion that Gordon Brown was transmogrifying into Iain Duncan Smith. The hint that cannabis could be upgraded was lifted - lock, stock and smoking reefer - from the recent IDS social policy report.Brown's debt to Tory thinking carried on, even after he had finished with cannabis. Pressed by David Cameron on the alleged crimes committed by some offenders let out of jail 18 days early, he resorted, twice, to boasting about Labour's plan to build 9,500 new prison places. Brown should have told Cameron that the game was changing, and that, even with early releases, the record population of around 80,000 is set to rise by 500 a week. As Jack Straw has admitted, we cannot build ourselves out of trouble. So, Brown should have added, Cameron had better get used to the idea that falling crime was finally going to be reflected in a regime in which all but the violent and dangerous served their sentences in the community.But Brown did not say that. Nor did he stress that he is planning a programme finally stripped of the excess legislation that has created 3,000 new offences since 1997, so clogging up prisons that are also the high temples of drug abuse. According to Prison Reform Trust figures, as many as eight out of 10 men admitted to prison are on class A substances: 29 per cent of robbery victims think their attackers are drugged up.Brown did acknowledge that government 'must do more' on treatment programmes. Yes, the government has put more money in, but Drugscope says that 60 per cent of the extra funding for prison programmes disappeared after they were taken over by primary care trusts.No doubt, Wednesday's consultation launch will have something positive to say about the real drugs crisis, whose centre of gravity is government's addiction to custody and the hopeless lives of those caught up in it, at huge cost to themselves and others. Brown could have used his PMQs to sketch a revolution in drugs and crime, just as Jacqui Smith might have avoided her announcement of a crime reduction strategy being obliterated by her spliff history. Instead, a populist hint of new cannabis laws allowed ministers some risk- free nostalgia.Nobody cares less whether politicians smoked cannabis at university. Whether last week's mea culpas touch any public chord is more doubtful. The spectre of our policy leaders as Kerouac-style Zen lunatics in thrall to Gaia, hippiedom, Cat Stevens and brown rice is much scarier than their normal fix of class A ambition. Honesty may beat evasion, but last week's admissions also reek of self-indulgence. The root of Britain's drug problems is not the quadrangles of Oxford but the barren flats where parents are shooting up and children are beaten, aimless, truanting or stealing, or any combination of the above. In Scotland, those admitted to hospital for drug misuse is 17 times higher among the most deprived quintile than in those sections of society likely to breed a future chancellor.The pointless fuss over relabelling cannabis has supplanted a proper debate about crime and drugs, just when Mr Brown should be laying down some serious markers. This is all the more disappointing in the light of previous, hopeful signs that he recognises, as his processor did not, that hard-edged criminal justice is not the panacea to all social blight.This week will see, with any luck, some good ideas on how better to wean people off drugs and how to stop children taking them in the first place. But the cannabis episode has highlighted a bigger question: is Brown a revolutionary or a tinkerer? His heart, it seems to me, is in the right place. The test will be whether he dares risk the wrath of Middle England. If he is serious about reform involving crime and drugs, he should leave cannabis law well alone while beefing up his boldness from class C to [email protected]
