Pubdate: Thu, 11 Jul 2002
Source: Daily Telegraph (UK)
Copyright: 2002 Telegraph Group Limited
Contact:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/114
Author: Boris Johnson

BLOW ME: IT'S ANOTHER CRACKPOT BLUNKETT PLAN

You remember the Harry Enfield sketch about the two gay Dutch policemen. 
They pull up in their patrol car and one announces, with a smirk: "You 
know, here in Omsterdom we have had great success in reducing crime." The 
other one preens his moustache. "Yes," he says, "we have legalised burglary."

That, pretty much, is the strategy that seems to have been pursued in 
Brixton, under the leadership of the visionary Commander Crackpot, alias 
Brian Paddick. They stopped arresting people for possession of cannabis, 
and lo, the police found their jobs a good sight easier.

It doesn't matter if the whole population of Brixton reeks of ganja. The 
police no longer have to go through the rigmarole of nicking them, 
interviewing them, reading them their rights, cautioning them and then, 
inevitably, letting them go again. It is estimated that 1,350 police man 
hours have been saved, equivalent to the annual labours of 1.8 full-time 
officers.

It would be an exaggeration, however, to say that the policy has been an 
unqualified success. Friends who live there say that every street corner in 
Brixton is now occupied by someone well thugged up (ie wearing a cowled 
sweatshirt) and hissing "skunk" or "weed". Trafficking and other drug 
offences have soared, and, in the words of local spokesperson Ros 
Griffiths: "This is not a drug or race issue. This is about a breakdown of 
law and order." Kate Hoey, the Labour MP for Vauxhall, is very worked up 
about the proliferation of dealers on the council estates, and one can see 
why. Commander Crackpot's scheme hasn't worked as he intended, for two reasons.

Brixton has been turned into an island of liberalism in a sea of 
repression. It has become the dope haven of England. On a hot day, one 
imagines that a vast aromatic hempen pall hangs over the whole of south 
London. He might as well have stuck big smiley faces all around the 
perimeter, with a legend saying - "Twinned with Amsterdam and Kingston, 
Jamaica". If you wanted to get stoned or if you wanted to deal in drugs, 
Brixton was the place to go.

The second and more fundamental reason why Crackpot's scheme didn't work 
was that, even in Brixton itself, the policy was confused. It was neither 
legalisation nor a ban. It was puzzling to the populace. And that objection 
applies, in spades, to the measures announced suddenly, yesterday, by David 
Blunkett, who seems to have decided to turn Britain into a giant Brixton.

Pity poor Keith Hellawell, the late "drugs tsar". It's Ekaterinburg for 
him. He was there to wield the drugs knout over the drugs mouzhiks. And 
what happened? Revolution. Blunkett yesterday announced the 
declassification of cannabis from a Class B to a Class C drug, and 
Crackdown has given way to Crackpot. Labour is suddenly pro-cannabis. 
Labour is soft on the weed. Isn't it?

It is impossible to tell quite what Labour intends - and that is the 
central problem. There is a sound and intellectually defensible case for a 
complete legalisation of cannabis. My own view is that drugs are no good 
for you, and often very bad for you; people smoking dope are spine-cracking 
bores; and I am told by experts that dope is no longer the innocent 
substance of the 1970s. This stuff skunk, grown by special hydroponic West 
Indian sunlamps, is apparently so powerful that it can fry your brains as 
effectively as any Class A drug.

There is, nevertheless, the argument for legalisation, which you will have 
heard so many times that I will repeat it only very briefly. Yes, it is 
true that cannabis is medically dangerous - but then so is alcohol. 
Legalisation would rid the streets of the pushers of soft drugs, and it 
would leave the police free to pursue the dealers in heroin and crack. It 
is not at all clear that legalising soft drugs would encourage people to 
move on to hard drugs. Only one per cent of dope-smokers try Class A drugs; 
and if you could buy cannabis legally, you would not come into contact with 
the nasty characters who push heroin. That is the case for legalisation, 
and it is good as far as it goes.

There is also a coherent and robust case, as Hellawell seems to have 
argued, for being utterly ruthless and enforcing the law. You could make it 
clear, once and for all, that cannabis is an illegal substance, and that 
anyone caught dealing it or using it will feel the full force of the fuzz. 
That might galvanise the police, give them a clear and consistent 
objective, and scare the spliff-smoking population into suddenly flushing 
their little brown pellets into the water supply, so zonking out the fish.

Of course, this policy would not be popular with the police, since they 
would be called on to feel the collars of the 50 per cent of young people 
who have used cannabis, including the 20 per cent of 19- to 24-year-olds 
who have used it in the past month. To anyone walking around London, where 
you will catch daily whiffs of a smell that would have been exceptional 10 
years ago, it is clear that proper enforcement would be a huge job. But it 
could, just, be done, and it has, like legalisation, the merit of consistency.

What you cannot do is continue to ban cannabis and maintain stiff 
theoretical sentences for dealing (10 years), while sending out a signal to 
young people that it is now OK to smoke it. That's no way to get rid of the 
dealers, or the crime. The stuff is either legal or it isn't.

Mr Blunkett is an ideological version of one of those hermaphroditic 
parrotfish. One day he feels the jackboot forming invisibly round his 
shins; the next day he seems to want to freak out and wear flowers in his 
hair. Labour can't work out whether it is libertarian, authoritarian, 
vegetarian or Rotarian. There is no Third Way with cannabis. You can't suck 
and blow at the same time - with or without inhaling.

*	Boris Johnson is MP for Henley and editor of The Spectator
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom