Pubdate: September 30, 1999
Source: Guardian, The (UK)
Copyright: Guardian Media Group 1999
Contact:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Section: G2
Author: Catherine Bennett

THE MENACE OF BLAIR'S DRUGS IGNORANCE

There is nothing like a party conference for reminding you that
politicians are not as other men and women. It is not only, as Tony
Booth remarked this week, that politicians are now under the control
of androids intent on world domination - the strange otherliness of
our leaders is evident in so many other ways, from the curious "tough
on smiles, tough on the causes of smiles" expressions Labour ministers
adopted for this conference, to their peculiar use of the English
language. Does anyone apart from politicians (both conservative and
modernising), use the word "prudent"? Does anyone else, even when
speechifying, say "I say in all frankness..."?

On the subject of drugs, the current administration becomes almost
baroque in its expressions of horror. Keynoting away, Blair raged
against the "drugs menace", and the drugs industry - as he put it,
"the most chilling, evil industry the world has to confront".

Even outside the conference hall, any mention of drugs can be depended
on to work our modernisers into a passion of denunciation. They never
talk about the need to restrict drug use, or discourage it, or
understand it, but must always refer to "the war against drugs", for
all the world as if this were a simple, Good versus Bad conflict in
which we are all - except for the doomed druggies themselves - eager
combatants.

Presumably, the lurid language is supposed to convey the extremity of
the problem - invariably depicted as a grubby stew of crackheads,
playground zombies, dead people in toilets. Before his conference
speech, in an interview with the Mirror's Paul Routledge, Tony Blair
explained why he wants to extend drug testing of "people who are
arrested and charged". "Did you know," Blair said, "that in some areas
50% of people who are arrested have drugs in their system? I don't
know about you, but that petrifies me."

We must hope he does not decide to extend the scheme to people who are
invited to receptions at No 10, or some of his most modern guest lists
might be decimated. Drugs, as some bishops and even some opposition
politicians, are aware, are not always, indubitably a "menace". You
don't have to like them, or take them, to acknowledge that rather a
lot of people are doing so now without sliding into the vileness of
the gutter and thence into a criminal life from which they can only be
rescued by the ludicrously named czar and his legions of
drug-testers.

But maybe Tony Blair is more innocent than the Bishop of Edinburgh.
Maybe he is not, in all frankness, aware that much, if not most, of
the modern British creativeness, from Britpop to Britart, to British
fashion, with all of which his government so longs to be identified,
is the work of artists who have had drugs in their system. Some of
these creative people, such as Noel Gallagher, the No 10 invitee, are
brazen about it. Some, dashingly, write novels and make films about
it. Others, though more discreet about their part in the "drugs
menace", feel no sense of shame, or stigma.

Cool Britannia, as Labour used to like to call it, is drug fuelled.
Maybe testing should be extended to all those who pass through the
doors of London's Groucho Club? But if the war on drugs is to be
thoroughly prosecuted, it must venture still further, into the
recesses of uncool Britannia. We already know, thanks to It Girl Tara,
Lord Freddie Thing and the Parker Bowles son, that drugs are as much a
feature of junior upper class life, as they are of gangs on sink estates.

A recent report suggested that 43% of sixth-formers at independent
schools have tried drugs, principally cannabis. They simply do not
believe it is harmful. Perhaps they have concluded that their parents
suffer more obvious ill effects from alcohol than from drugs. For
middle-class people, many of them with impressionable children (people
not wholly unlike the Blair family), also play their part in the evil
industry. Successful lawyers, financiers, businessmen, government
lobbyists - all, otherwise, of the utmost, Blairite probity, are at it
too - seemingly convinced that theirs is a recreational habit, which
will not end up with car crime and a compulsory blood test. It may not
be easy to persuade them, or their world-weary children, otherwise.

When Tony Blair talks about his war on drugs - all drugs - it's hard
to imagine to which constituency he is appealing. Too many people now
appreciate that there are differences between hard and soft drugs and
yet more complex differences in individual susceptibilities to the
same drugs. Some people can't stop drinking and smoking, either. Even
those of us who have been robbed by drug addicts might feel that our
interests would be better served by an end to prohibition, or partial
prohibition, than a futile and costly "war".

Blair's bellicosity cannot disguise the fact that his scheme is wholly
unrealistic. Why does he want to test people? "We should be looking at
the whole question of bail for cocaine and heroin users," he told
Routledge, "because the evidence is that if people are put on bail
they just go back to crime to feed their habit. Far better to get them
into treatment." Treatment in prison? According to some estimates,
half the prison population has a drug problem. It would be like drying
out alcoholics in a brewery.

The explosion in drug abuse and drug-related crime is alarming, and a
severe challenge, but it cannot be seen in isolation as the preserve
of a weak-willed underclass and nothing to do with Brit Award winners,
models and other modern-approved personalities who don't try to
conceal their drug use. Increasing numbers of establishment figures -
doctors, editors and police officers among them - are now arguing for
the decriminalisation of soft drugs. If Blair is to wage all-out war,
he must purge these collaborators and appeasers from his acquaintance.
The next Cool Britannia party might be just him and Ann

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