Drugs reclassification: smoke signals

Tuesday June 24, 2008

To needlessly re-criminalise thousands of citizens is not only wrong, argues James Douglass, it bears no relation to the research

We live in a society where it is perfectly legal, if increasingly ‘unacceptable’, to set fire to one set of dried plant matter and inhale the resultant smoke, but doing so to another could gain you a prison term. If nothing else, that should be enough to demonstrate the utter irrationality, wrongheadedness and stubborn stupidity of our laws regarding marijuana since 1925. Dry dock leaves, burn them, sniff the smoke, and whilst you may be accused of eccentricity, you will not be carted off before the beak. Do the same to cannabis sativa and you are a criminal.

The latest issue of reclassification is simply the latest gambit in a long game of politics. It bears no relation to the research. Not only did the government’s own Advisory Council recommend against it, the figures for cannabis use produced by the Home Office’s Research Development and Statistics division showed that cannabis use amongst 16 to 24-year-olds had declined by seven per cent after the downgrading compared to a decade before.

Potency

For all that the potency of available cannabis is supposed to have increased ‘ten-fold’ since the 1960s – though serious doubts have been cast upon these claims – the council found that reported incidence of schizophrenia, the disease currently used as a forlorn hope for a sustained attack on cannabis, had gone down between 1998 and 2005. The only – scant – justification that the Home Office can find for reclassification is that having cannabis rated as a Class C narcotic “sends out the wrong message” to young people.

Leaving aside the issue of whether government policy should ‘send out messages’ as opposed to taking concrete step to deal with real problems, this is a contemptible decision. To needlessly re-criminalise thousands of your own citizens, flying in the face of all expert advice, is clearly and obviously wrong. The fact that even mental health charities such as Rethink, which agitated after the initial declassification for the links between schizophrenia and cannabis use to be investigated, are not on board would surely make any politician that genuinely had public health at heart think again.

Penalties

But of course this has little or nothing to do with public health, even were that validation for instituting judicial penalties against a pastime. It is little more than a desperate attempt by a dying regime to muster support amongst the Mail-reading classes. Notoriously disorganised when it comes to placing political pressure, and lacking public sympathy, dope-smokers can be gone for with impunity at a time when the executive is desperate to show some – any – gung-ho action.

In any case the steady increase since 1998 in recreational use of cocaine – which has stubbornly remained in Class A – suggests that whatever message the government may be trying to send, drugs users are steadfastly ignoring it. What is it that one does whilst Rome burns? Were it not for the spectre of prison sentences, this could well be Brown’s Cone Hotline.

Introspection

Anyone who has been in a room full of people smoking joints knows that the main symptoms are unenlightened introspection, paranoia, and a near-heroic capacity for talking balls. The only real surprise is that the current administration has failed to spot the common ground. It is too much to ask that cannabis be legalised, that would take political courage beyond the current legislature, but surely the time has come to cease picking at what has become a particularly unrewarding scab.

It is a sure sign of cognitive dissonance to believe that people are capable of choosing their government but incapable of electing when and how to become intoxicated. In an age when government ministers think nothing of confessing their own youthful ‘experiments’ with drugs, one hopes that the Prime Minister can come up with a better message to send than “I’m not listening, and I don’t care.”

James Douglass will be speaking at the Manifesto Club event, “Drugs: where should we draw the line?” on Thursday June 26 at The Old Queens Head, Essex Road, London N1 8LN. He is a contributing editor of Profile magazine, who previously conducted postgraduate research into drug cultures and has written for the Independent, Guardian and Spiked.

Link
Manifesto Club/Events