Blow me: it’s another crackpot Blunkett plan
By Boris Johnson
Telegraph 11/07/2002
You remember the Harry Enfield sketch about the two gay Dutch policemen. They pull up in their patrol car and one announces, with a smirk: “You know, here in Omsterdom we have had great success in reducing crime.” The other one preens his moustache. “Yes,” he says, “we have legalised burglary.”
That, pretty much, is the strategy that seems to have been pursued in Brixton, under the leadership of the visionary Commander Crackpot, alias Brian Paddick. They stopped arresting people for possession of cannabis, and lo, the police found their jobs a good sight easier.
It doesn’t matter if the whole population of Brixton reeks of ganja. The police no longer have to go through the rigmarole of nicking them, interviewing them, reading them their rights, cautioning them and then, inevitably, letting them go again. It is estimated that 1,350 police man hours have been saved, equivalent to the annual labours of 1.8 full-time officers.
It would be an exaggeration, however, to say that the policy has been an unqualified success. Friends who live there say that every street corner in Brixton is now occupied by someone well thugged up (ie wearing a cowled sweatshirt) and hissing “skunk” or “weed”. Trafficking and other drug offences have soared, and, in the words of local spokesperson Ros Griffiths: “This is not a drug or race issue. This is about a breakdown of law and order.” Kate Hoey, the Labour MP for Vauxhall, is very worked up about the proliferation of dealers on the council estates, and one can see why. Commander Crackpot’s scheme hasn’t worked as he intended, for two reasons.
Brixton has been turned into an island of liberalism in a sea of repression. It has become the dope haven of England. On a hot day, one imagines that a vast aromatic hempen pall hangs over the whole of south London. He might as well have stuck big smiley faces all around the perimeter, with a legend saying – “Twinned with Amsterdam and Kingston, Jamaica”. If you wanted to get stoned or if you wanted to deal in drugs, Brixton was the place to go.
The second and more fundamental reason why Crackpot’s scheme didn’t work was that, even in Brixton itself, the policy was confused. It was neither legalisation nor a ban. It was puzzling to the populace. And that objection applies, in spades, to the measures announced suddenly, yesterday, by David Blunkett, who seems to have decided to turn Britain into a giant Brixton.
Pity poor Keith Hellawell, the late “drugs tsar”. It’s Ekaterinburg for him. He was there to wield the drugs knout over the drugs mouzhiks. And what happened? Revolution. Blunkett yesterday announced the declassification of cannabis from a Class B to a Class C drug, and Crackdown has given way to Crackpot. Labour is suddenly pro-cannabis. Labour is soft on the weed. Isn’t it?
It is impossible to tell quite what Labour intends – and that is the central problem. There is a sound and intellectually defensible case for a complete legalisation of cannabis. My own view is that drugs are no good for you, and often very bad for you; people smoking dope are spine-cracking bores; and I am told by experts that dope is no longer the innocent substance of the 1970s. This stuff skunk, grown by special hydroponic West Indian sunlamps, is apparently so powerful that it can fry your brains as effectively as any Class A drug.
There is, nevertheless, the argument for legalisation, which you will have heard so many times that I will repeat it only very briefly. Yes, it is true that cannabis is medically dangerous – but then so is alcohol. Legalisation would rid the streets of the pushers of soft drugs, and it would leave the police free to pursue the dealers in heroin and crack. It is not at all clear that legalising soft drugs would encourage people to move on to hard drugs. Only one per cent of dope-smokers try Class A drugs; and if you could buy cannabis legally, you would not come into contact with the nasty characters who push heroin. That is the case for legalisation, and it is good as far as it goes.
There is also a coherent and robust case, as Hellawell seems to have argued, for being utterly ruthless and enforcing the law. You could make it clear, once and for all, that cannabis is an illegal substance, and that anyone caught dealing it or using it will feel the full force of the fuzz. That might galvanise the police, give them a clear and consistent objective, and scare the spliff-smoking population into suddenly flushing their little brown pellets into the water supply, so zonking out the fish.
Of course, this policy would not be popular with the police, since they would be called on to feel the collars of the 50 per cent of young people who have used cannabis, including the 20 per cent of 19- to 24-year-olds who have used it in the past month. To anyone walking around London, where you will catch daily whiffs of a smell that would have been exceptional 10 years ago, it is clear that proper enforcement would be a huge job. But it could, just, be done, and it has, like legalisation, the merit of consistency.
What you cannot do is continue to ban cannabis and maintain stiff theoretical sentences for dealing (10 years), while sending out a signal to young people that it is now OK to smoke it. That’s no way to get rid of the dealers, or the crime. The stuff is either legal or it isn’t.
Mr Blunkett is an ideological version of one of those hermaphroditic parrotfish. One day he feels the jackboot forming invisibly round his shins; the next day he seems to want to freak out and wear flowers in his hair. Labour can’t work out whether it is libertarian, authoritarian, vegetarian or Rotarian. There is no Third Way with cannabis. You can’t suck and blow at the same time – with or without inhaling.
Boris Johnson is MP for Henley and editor of The Spectator
