Pubdate: Fri, 15 Aug 2003
Source: Daily Telegraph (UK)
Copyright: 2003 Telegraph Group Limited
Contact:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/114
Author: Stephen Robinson

'DIDN'T EVERYONE DO DOPE AT COLLEGE?'

The new Director of Public Prosecutions isn't the first member of the 
Establishment to admit to 'youthful indiscretions'. Stephen Robinson reports

It is known to the legions of British middle-class narcotic lags as the 
"channel of shame", and our new Director of Public Prosecutions will have 
to run this gauntlet the first time he is called to Washington for a summit 
about the "war on drugs".

Cannabis: 'quite hard to avoid' in the Seventies

It is a poignant image. The British Airways jumbo will be taxi-ing on the 
tarmac at Dulles airport. Kenneth Macdonald's fellow passengers in Club 
will have smugly ticked the "no" boxes on their visa waiver forms, 
confirming they have never been a member of a Nazi party, convicted of the 
crime of genocide, or plan to import a piece of fruit into the United States.

As he walks through to the arrivals hall, Macdonald's mind will flit 
guiltily back to the carefree days of Oxford in 1971, when he sent a tiny 
quantity of cannabis to a friend in Salisbury, and ended up in Oxford 
magistrate's court with a fine of ?75.

This is how another "youthfully indiscreet" convicted cannabis user 
describes the moment of embarkation in the United States. Like Macdonald, 
he picked up his criminal record while a student at Oxford. High on life, 
this friend, who now lives blamelessly on the fringes of Dartmoor, puffed a 
little too conspicuously on a joint in a pub. When the landlord summoned 
the police, he was found to have a tiny stash in his pocket. It was a 
trivial enough offence, but one this friend has had plenty of time to rue.

"You have to get a visa every time you go to the States, and because you've 
had to tick the prior convictions box on your entry form, you are 
invariably directed down the channel of shame to the immigration 
supervisor's office. There you sit, with all the Nigerians and bin Laden 
suspects, praying the supervisor takes pity on you and lets you through."

Fellow members of the "Tony crony" club, from which Kenneth Macdonald QC 
emerged to take on the ?145,000-a-year DPP role, were quick yesterday to 
support their man. "Everyone has done it in their youth," they said, and 
indeed that is so.

The generation that now forms our Establishment came of age in the 
Seventies, and few of our current leaders were able or inclined to insulate 
themselves from the influences and substances of their formative era. It is 
a striking thought that all those Britons who were convicted of that 
generational offence of smoking pot in the Seventies have to travel to 
America these days to feel the slightest sense of opprobrium.

Three years ago, when Ann Widdecombe wackily announced a new Tory "zero 
tolerance" policy towards cannabis, backed up by ?100 spot fines, the 
shadow cabinet tripped over each other in their desperation to declare 
their "youthful experimentation", before they were turned over by the tabloids.

"It was quite hard to go through Cambridge in the Seventies without doing 
it a few times," protested Francis Maude. Oliver Letwin, the civilised 
voice of Tory tolerance, also came clean, and rather brilliantly trumped 
Bill Clinton's tortuous "I didn't inhale" explanation during the 1992 
presidential campaign. Letwin confessed he had unwittingly used cannabis 
while at Trinity, Cambridge, when some mischievous undergraduate pusher 
sneakily put some in the Letwin pipe, and watched him smoke it.

When Michael Portillo declined to join his fellow Conservatives in saying 
whether he had ever used cannabis, the ghastly suspicion spread around 
Westminister that the Tory pretender was actually too uncool to have tried 
it during his years at Peterhouse, Cambridge.

In a way, the strangest aspect of Macdonald's forced confession is that he 
acted so ashamed by omitting to mention it until challenged. True, his 
office did put out a statement on Wednesday night owning up to the cannabis 
and that other quintessentially middle-class offence, speeding. But his 
apparent candour was forced upon him by a call from a Daily Telegraph 
sleuth on London Spy, which had exclusively learnt of Macdonald's 
undergraduate indiscretion. Only then did his press office whirr into 
action, and feed the news to the rest of Fleet Street.

The reaction in yesterday's newspapers was generally muted, not least 
because most journalists know they inhabit glass houses on this issue. 
Rosie Boycott, who is lauded on the website skunk.co.uk ("dedicated to the 
finer aspects of living") for her commitment to the decriminalisation 
cause, kept a cannabis plant in her office while editor of the Independent 
on Sunday. She used it as a symbol of her paper's commitment to get the 
cannabis ban lifted.

Oliver Letwin, now the shadow home secretary, downplayed the significance 
of Macdonald's cannabis conviction, and rightly so, given his own 
unfortunate experience at Cambridge. Rather, he suggested the real issue 
was that the new DPP, an old friend and colleague of Cherie Blair, lacked 
the all-round legal experience for the important post.

But surely, Letwin is missing the point. If we are to be governed by a 
ruling class that has smoked dope, why shouldn't we be prosecuted by a man 
who ended up before an Oxford magistrate, and even now has to walk the 
channel of shame?
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens