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London parents will be torn by this decision, divided not just among themselves but within themselves, too. Gordon Brown's proposed review of the reclassification of cannabis apparently aimed at branding dope once more as a Class B, rather than as a less serious Class C drug will split many Londoners of a certain age in two. It will pit their youthful selves against the people they are now.
Many will have some experience, if not fond memories, of the drug. They will be like the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith who last week, along with eight other members of the Cabinet, admitted she had smoked pot in her university days. As more than one senior politician has confessed, it was pretty hard to go through college in the 1970s or 1980s without coming across the weed.
And yet those same people who 20 years ago sat in foggy, dingy rooms passing round a joint are now mothers and fathers and with the haze of youth gone, they tend to see the issue rather differently.
Now they are troubled by the reports of the widespread availability of drugs to London's schoolchildren, the sense that at teenage parties cannabis is on offer along with the beer and cigarettes. Is that so different from the sweaty, cloudy gatherings of their own youth? Yes, they say. In a curious twist on the perennial generation gap, today's parents worry that the dope of 2007 is not like it was back in the old days.
As if nostalgic for the mild herbal highs of the past, they insist that contemporary cannabis is a different drug altogether. Witness the recent speech by David Cameron something, one suspects, of an authority on this subject as he explained how much stronger the drug is now than it was back when & and there he stopped himself.
He wasn't wrong. Dope does indeed come in stronger varieties now than it used to. The smellier it is, the stronger it is hence the name "skunk" with a higher content of the main psychoactive ingredient, THC. While old dope might have contained just one per cent of THC, the newer strains can include 20 per cent or more. They kick in much faster and more powerfully, triggering hallucinations and a variety of sideeffects..
Still, plenty of forty- and fiftysomething Londoners will have an instinctive sympathy for relaxing the laws on cannabis, either keeping the drug classified as Class C, as it is now, or going further, towards full legalisation.
The arguments will come easily to them after all, they probably used to make them to their own parents.
First comes the view that criminalising cannabis wastes police time, having them bust student parties when they should be out fighting real crime rather than a minor, victimless infraction.
Second, prohibition of pot, like prohibition of alcohol in 1920s America, hardly works: if the estimates are right, there are two million Britons happily puffing away and one in two school-aged children has tried cannabis at least once.
Third used to come the view that cannabis was fairly harmless, less bad for you, the serious potheads used to say, than alcohol or cigarettes. But in recent years that argument has become harder to make, as more evidence emerges of the link between cannabis use and mental health problems. Prolegalisation campaigners insist the number of dope-smokers who develop either psychosis or schizophrenia is too small to count as any kind of basis for forming policy. But that's hard to square with the most serious expert opinion.
The Royal College of Psychiatrists reports that "& regular use of the drug has appeared to double the risk of developing a psychotic episode or longterm schizophrenia" and that "adolescents who used cannabis daily were five times more likely to develop depression and anxiety in later life". Indeed, "If you start smoking it [cannabis] before the age of 15, you are four times more likely to develop a psychotic disorder by the time you are 26." The psychiatrists cannot be definitive on why teenagers might be particularly vulnerable, but their working explanation is straightforward: until the age of 20, the brain is still developing, undergoing a process of "neural pruning". Any substance that interferes with that process cannot be helpful.
This, to me, is the crucial argument and it seems to be what prompted the government change of heart. Privately, Gordon Brown says that it's the risks to the mental health of the young, rather than any worry about police time, that is motivating him to seek reclassification..
To their credit, pro-legalisation campaigners, such as the lobby group Transform, do not deny that danger.
But they insist that legalisation would be a better solution. If there were authorised outlets selling cannabis, then the shopkeepers could simply refuse to sell dope to those under-age.
You'd also sweep away the entire illegal trade in dealers and suppliers and would have an answer to concern over ever-stronger strains of cannabis. "You could just walk into a shop and choose between three per cent, five per cent, 10 per cent or 22 per cent," says Transform director Danny Kushlik. "As opposed to now, when you go to see some bloke on a street corner and you have no idea what it is you're getting." It's a logical, even seductive idea in theory. In practice, it would surely be no harder for a 15-year-old to get dope from a legal shop than it is for him to buy cigarettes now. Kushlik admits as much, believing that you can never hope to stop kids engaging in risky behaviour.
More importantly, it's not in the realm of political reality to imagine Gordon Brown proposing legal cannabis cafés not when he's already winning plaudits for staking out the terrain of Middle England social conservatism.
Which means that, in the current context, the right move is surely to reclassify cannabis as a more serious drug. If it's dangerous to smoke cannabis too much and too young, then society needs a simple, clear way to send that message. Right now, there's too much confusion: one survey of primary school children taken shortly after cannabis had been downgraded found that 86 per cent thought the drug was legal and 79 per cent that it was safe. It's not safe for the young and Gordon Brown is right to use the law to say so..
'If it's dangerous to smoke cannabis too much and too young, then society needs a simple, clear way to send that message'
Reader views (1)
It's dangerous for the young to drink at an early age and it causes far more problems, but we don't make every one a criminal because of a few?
- Dave, Exeter, 04/10/2007 06:21
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