Pubdate: Sun, 10 Mar 2002
Source: Independent on Sunday (UK)
Copyright: Independent Newspapers (UK) Ltd.
Contact:  http://www.independent.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/208
Author: Simon O'Hagan

FROM THE BEATLES TO BRIXTON, WHAT A LONG, STRANGE TRIP IT'S BEEN

It seemed so daring when 'The Independent on Sunday' began its campaign to 
decriminalise cannabis. Simon O'Hagan reflects on how public and political 
opposition went up in smoke

We have come a long way since police raided Ringo Starr's London flat in 
the late 1960s and emerged triumphant with one and a half ounces of 
cannabis. As the Beatles generation has grown up to be the leaders of 
today, the use of cannabis has become so normalised, its effects long now 
revealed to be so much less damaging than the establishment's scaremongers 
would have had us believe, that decriminalisation has become almost inevitable.

That, however, is not to down-play the efforts of campaigners over many 
years to force recalcitrant governments and police chiefs to look at the 
issue dispassionately. As recently as 1997, when this newspaper took what 
was then considered the daring step of calling for the decriminalisation of 
the drug, the new Labour government refused even to countenance the idea.

Now we have a Home Secretary - David Blunkett - who has declared that 
cannabis should lose its Class B status, which was all but an admission 
that no casual user of the drug need fear prosecution. And with the news 
that a committee advising Mr Blunkett has said that an experiment in 
leniency in Brixton, south London, should be extended nationwide, the 
argument is virtually over. To all intents and purposes, use of cannabis 
today is no more a matter for police concern than is the smoking of 
ordinary tobacco.

It is an extraordinary capitulation - an acknowledgement that the fears 
surrounding its use are largely unjustified and that, while tobacco and 
alcohol remain dangerous and legal, it is a nonsense that cannabis remains 
harmless and banned. More important, there is a widespread consensus that 
the law as it stands is wholly counterproductive in allowing criminals to 
feed off it. Above all, with an estimated one in 10 people using the drug - 
twice the European average - Britain's changing social mores demand a new 
approach.

"Speaking as someone who takes his main pleasure from alcohol and 
cigarettes, it seems to me entirely logical that all drugs should be 
decriminalised," the playwright Alan Bleasdale, a supporter of the original 
Independent on Sunday campaign, said yesterday. "If they legalised it 
they'd remove crime from the streets and take the money from the bank 
accounts of the bastards who sell drugs."

So how has this radical shift in policy come about? It was around the time 
that the Beatles fell foul of the cannabis laws that a similar prosecution 
of Mick Jagger prompted the then editor of The Times, William Rees Mogg, to 
quote Alexander Pope's line about "breaking a butterfly on a wheel". The 
Times ran a short-lived campaign, and a "Legalise Pot" movement was set up. 
But while, over the next 30 years, cannabis use acquired increasing 
acceptability, the authorities never saw it that way.

Any hope that New Labour might see cannabis differently was dashed when the 
Home Secretary in its first administration, Jack Straw, declared himself 
implacably opposed to decriminalisation, even as he set up the first "drugs 
tsar", Kenneth Hellawell. Mr Straw drew the fire of The Independent on 
Sunday, whose high-profile campaign supporters - from Sir Paul McCartney 
and Nick Hornby to Anita Roddick and Mike Leigh - helped create a public 
debate about cannabis use that would otherwise have been suppressed. Some 
30,000 people attended a Decriminalise Cannabis march in London in early 
1998, and the paper's then editor, Rosie Boycott, recalls that "we had 
touched a popular nerve". Central to the argument was the plight of MS 
sufferers, for whom cannabis provided proven relief. By 1999, even some 
right-wing newspapers were calling for changes in the law, and condemned Mr 
Straw for being too conservative on the issue.

Several shadow cabinet members are now urging Iain Duncan Smith to make 
decriminalisation party policy as part of a more liberal approach on social 
issues. Mr Blunkett would therefore be responding to opinion across the 
political spectrum if he backed decriminalisation. Tony Blair has publicly 
expressed his opposition in the past. But those close to him say he has 
never had a "closed mind" on the issue.

Meanwhile, the police know the reality on the ground. As more pressing 
priorities have crowded in, prosecutions have fallen away. According to the 
most recent figures available, there were still 120,000 cases of cannabis 
use dealt with by police in 1999. Anomalies persist, and how "offenders" 
are dealt with depends largely on where they live. In 2000 we highlighted 
the case of MS sufferer Lezley Gibson, who was put through a four-day trial 
at Carlisle Crown Court after police raided her home and found her in 
possession of eight grammes of cannabis. Only then was she found not 
guilty. In other parts of the country, she would have received a warning.

No less a figure than the novelist P D James - Baroness James of Holland 
Park - said yesterday: "I'm in agreement with the proposal to legalise it 
for personal use. I think it's extremely important that it's available for 
patients in need of it for medical reasons."

Ms Boycott said yesterday: "It's very good that the Government is 
rethinking its drugs policy. This marks an important step. I'm delighted 
that our campaign has borne such fruit."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom