Rule by the right-wing press dooms any sensible debate on drugs
Matthew Norman
The Independent
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
The primary issue here is one of political courage, or rather, its 
absence under fire. Any politician who dares to stand against the 
tabloids quickly undares.
Not one of us, nor any of our children, nor any of their children, nor 
anyone at all even unto the seventh generation, will live to see it 
dawn. But one day, humanity will look back on "the war against drugs" 
with a shiver of the revulsion induced today by slavery, the 
criminalisation of homosexuality and other historic high points of 
legalised dementia.
For the unforeseeable future we're stuck with it, as the reaction to an 
attempt to create clearer penal distinctions between drug lords and 
their junior employees yesterday made clear.
A group entitled the Sentencing Council, possibly in homage to Paul 
Weller's post-Jam band, proposes reducing the punishment for runners 
caught with relatively small amounts of drugs, and particularly for 
women coerced into acting as mules. In certain circumstances, it 
advises, such people should be spared jail even when the substances are 
Class A.
The views of the public are sought between now and 20 June, but any of 
you selfless souls tempted to chip in are hereby advised to save the 
effort, and restrict yourselves to a shrug of defeatist indifference. 
Since both The Sun and the Daily Mail have already addressed these 
proposals on their front pages in starkly unflattering terms, my 
actuarial calculations establish that there is a 27 times higher 
probability of the Steptoes' horse Hercules winning the Grand National, 
the Derby and the British Grand Prix than of the Government accepting 
the tiniest fraction of them.
 From the tabloid response to its work, you would be excused for 
assuming that the Sentencing Council comprises, among others, Pete 
Doherty, Kate Moss, Keith Richards, Boy George, George Michael, the late 
Kurt Cobain, the later Dr Timothy Leary, the even later Aldous Huxley, 
Robert Downey Jnr, Cheech, Chong and Charlie Sheen.
The truth is less exciting, this hardly being the gang your kid would 
care to get stuck with at an illegal rave. Its president is that Fabergé 
of judicial eggs Lord Chief Justice Igor Judge – Judge Judge to his 
chums, and a rare exception to the rule that states: "Beware the double 
namer" (Humbert Humbert, Sirhan Sirhan, etc). Its chairman is senior 
appellate judge Sir Brian Leveson, and its members include a professor 
of criminology, a JP, and Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer.
These people do not strike me as anarchist-dopehead sleepers who 
inserted themselves into the establishment long ago with the ultimate 
goal of giving drug barons carte blanche to corrupt the young with 
impunity. It may be that Judge Judge and Mr Starmer were among those 
throwing things in central London on Saturday, convinced by choicest 
hallucinogens that Lucy, having falling from the sky, was imprisoned 
behind the glass frontage of Fortnum & Mason, and needed rescuing. At 
this early stage in the Met's investigations, it would be folly to rule 
anything out.
Let's take a punt, however, and presume that they were not; that they 
and their colleagues are a sober, well-meaning, intelligent and cautious 
bunch who understand the issues at least as well as headline writers; 
and that if, after exhaustively studying the evidence, they have 
concluded that prison isn't invariably the most effective way to punish 
tiny cogs in turbo-charged drug engines, they deserve a respectful hearing.
But then so did Professor David Nutt, the world- renowned expert on the 
effect of drugs on the mind – or neuropsychopharmacologist for the 
ambitious Scrabble player – whom Alan Johnson peremptorily and 
disgracefully sacked for misinterpreting his role as a governmental 
adviser on drugs by advising the government on drugs.
Then, as previously with Labour's reclassification of cannabis to Class 
B despite its drop in usage during its short stint as Class C, and as 
again now, the substances and their relative dangers were barely a 
secondary issue. The logic in favour of abandoning this futile "war 
against drugs", with its indolent rhetoric and self-defeating hypocrisy, 
is, after all, overwhelming.
Pumped full of ecstasy, which was developed as a truth drug, no senior 
politician would deny that the current strategy criminalises the sick by 
forcing them to crime, and wastes huge quantities of public money that 
should be diverted to rehabilitation and police time better spent 
elsewhere; that heroin in its pure form is among the least damaging 
substances available to humanity, blah blah, that it is lunacy bordering 
wickedness to allow people to die through overdosing or rat poisoning 
when they could cheaply be prescribed the medical version, plapp, plapp, 
plapp, that cannabis, though not without risks, is infinitely less 
damaging to the body than tobacco and alcohol, yada yada yada, and all 
the other time-honoured verities that have become clichés because they 
are true.
They are irrelevant to this debate because the primary issue here is one 
of political courage, or rather its absence, under fire. Any politician 
who dares to stand against the tabloids – whose line is not medical, 
social or criminal but entirely moral, and which would oppose any 
relaxation of the law even if every drug were categorically proved to be 
beneficial to health – quickly undares. Once, inevitably while in 
opposition, David Cameron took the enlightened approach, while Alan 
Duncan advocated the end of prohibition in a book before undergoing the 
usual epiphany.
The Sentencing Council, though you wouldn't know it from the front-page 
hysteria, is not peddling the libertarian line so briefly advanced by 
Little Alan. It is merely suggesting that sentence guidelines be tweaked 
to keep from jug those who either don't deserve to be inside or might be 
rescued from the recidivism a prison term so often confers. And the 
moment this series of mild proposals pops its head into view, it is 
smashed to smithereens by the red-top mallet like the well-named Cracky 
Crab in the end-of-the-pier amusement machine.
In 1974 Edward Heath went to the polls asking: "Who governs Britain?", 
and was answered that it certainly wasn't him. No PM since has been bold 
enough to pose that question, but when it comes to the intersect between 
social and penal policy, what need to ask could there be? The right-wing 
tabloids, now gunning remorselessly for Ken Clarke over his noble 
efforts to reform the prison system, govern Britain – and as long as our 
political leaders shake with terror at their every reductio ad 
dementiam, so they always shall.