Tonight:
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London's most common crime by far is taking drugs. Probably a million such crimes are committed every night.
No one bothers to catch the criminals since, if they were caught, half the youth of London would be in jail.
The next most common crime is political hypocrisy on the subject and no one goes to jail for that.
But you can be sacked for pointing it out, as the Government's drugs adviser, Professor David Nutt, knows to his cost.
The minister who sacked him, Alan Johnson, said at the weekend that his job as Home Secretary was to be "big enough, strong enough and bold enough" to take decisions.
If so, why does this decision appear so small, weak and cowardly? Did Johnson think he would ingratiate himself with the Right-wing press?
Most politicians of my acquaintance privately regard the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act as a disaster.
It has failed to curb the soaring consumption of harmful narcotics, performing worse than the law in any comparable country in Europe. Other British crime laws are reformed every year.
The drugs law is so awful that no one has dared touch it in 38 years.
Politicians, civil servants, scientists, committee members, legal advisers, even David Cameron when a backbencher, have in varying degrees castigated the law.
Most approve of some move towards decriminalisation and an efficient regulation of supply.
Yet whenever they come to responsibility they cut and run, covering their ears with their hands and muttering about "the press".
After serving with David Nutt on the 2000 Police Foundation report on the drug laws, I concluded that he knew more about the harm drugs do to the body than everyone in Westminster or Whitehall put together.
I also realised that the public was not silly. It would accept a reform of the law (according to opinion polls) if politicians would give a lead. They would not, not even the wretched Liberal Democrats who flirted with reform in the Nineties.
When the 2000 report appeared, tentatively suggesting various forms of decriminalisation while tightening regulation, the then home secretary, Jack Straw, rubbished it before reading it.
His successors, Jacqui Smith and Alan Johnson, have also prejudged the relative harms of ecstasy and cannabis before taking advice. Gordon Brown has done so too.
Drug classification is near irrelevant since hardly anyone knows what class any drug is in. The purpose under the act is merely to indicate relative harm.
This is not meant to "send a message" but to help judges in sentencing policy. It is plainly stupid to have ecstasy in the same class as crack and heroin: if they have a clue it merely inclines them to think heroin is no more harmful than ecstasy.
It is equally stupid to have cannabis in the same category as powerfully addictive amphetamines.
Johnson thinks drug classification is about sending messages but that is not the law. If it was, he should surely put all drugs in class A and have done with it.
Classification is not a political gesture but a criminological tool, supposedly based on evidence of harm to the brain done by different substances.
That is why, until Labour came along, the whole question of harm was delegated to a specialist advisory committee, that was chaired until this week by Professor Nutt.
Scientific evidence on the potency of narcotics comes to light all the time. Some derivatives of marijuana have led some to conclude that it has become very dangerous.
If this were true, the committee would be right to recommend that such derivatives be reclassified.
In reality, there is just a new market for existing derivatives, putting more potent skunk into wider circulation.
The whole point of an independent committee, and independent classification, is to keep separate judgments of science and those of politics.
If ministers are too gutless to reform the law, at least they should keep their hands off the objective assessment of the harm inflicted on drug users by that decision.
Nutt was annoyed at having his science constantly countermanded by ministers terrified of the Daily Mail.
He was not campaigning against policy but reiterating, in an academic lecture, the bizarre hierarchy of harms that people willingly inflict on themselves.
He reflected that horse-riding, smoking and alcohol abuse (not to mention rugby) were statistically more harmful to the body than ecstasy or cannabis.
Johnson's crass response was that more people take drugs in his constituency than ride horses.
That suggests that there be one law for the country and another for his constituency. British law makes no such localist distinction, so nor should the Home Secretary.
All politicians seem to think that defending the 1971 act is the macho thing to do.
But if Johnson were really tough on drugs he would demand that the police enforce the law, which he knows they cannot do because it is unenforceable.
The Home Secretary is too feeble to do anything about it - and so relapses into hypocrisy.
Being big, strong and brave, as Johnson claims to be, would mean accepting that the Misuse of Drugs Act is no longer fit for purpose.
It is useless in controlling the harm that abusing drugs does to young people in London. It has been tried for a third of a century and failed.
In the case of hard drugs, the law has led to thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of wasted lives.
These lives should be on the consciences of a dozen home secretaries. Getting tough on drugs means taking tough, not populist, decisions.
It involves decriminalising drug use and regulating supply, as we now regulate the supply of nicotine in shops and narcotics in chemists (as with heroin pre-1971).
It would mean licensing and taxing suppliers, controlling quality and stamping out crack houses and illicit dealing dens.
At very least, getting tough would mean doing things now being done to combat the menace of illegal drugs across Europe.
The present Home Secretary is not just soft on drugs, he is celebrating ignorance.
Reader views (8)
John from Highgate: Actually the law is pretty unenforceable, simply because so many break it so routinely that neither we, nor any country in the world that I can think of, has the resources to prosecute more than a tiny fraction of offenders, and because drug use is a consensual crime, unlike crimes that deliberately victimise others, such as theft or assault, it is far harder to detect, so the deterrent effect of the law is condemned to be forever negligible.
Also, as a consensual crime (comparable to sodomy pre-1967, or adultery or witchcraft in earlier centuries, which were largely based on the enforcement of majoritarian prejudice), many people simply do not think it morally wrong (support for decriminalising cannabis is approaching 50%, for example, and support for decriminalising all drugs is substantial... whereas no one is campaigning to legalize rape or burglary) or at least, not the kind of wrong for which people deserve to be punished by the criminal law. Can you imagine the furore that would result if everyone caught with a joint were jailed for 5 years?
This only leaves a paternalistic 'punish the users for their own good' argument - and that is an empirical, not an ideological question: if punishing the public to improve public health is justified, we should need evidence of its effectiveness. The evidence that the illegality of drugs makes individuals or society overall safer or healthier is, shall we say, less than compelling.
- David, Blairgowrie, Perthshire
Mr Jenkins is wrong about the law. It is not unenforceable. It is unenforced. That is because the magistrates and Judges (many of whom are former users) only impose lenient sentences on users, so the police just issue cautions, if they bother to do anything. The users indirectly cause death and mayhem on the street because they need the dealers. It is time that the guidelines were changed to require deterrent sentences on the buyers of drugs even if it is for their own use. Drug use would fall overnight. If there were no buyers there would be no sellers.
- John, Highgate
Johnson has demponstrated his ignorance and lack of judgement. He has been suppported by Brown and also(with the usual caveats)by Cameron and Grayling. I'm strill cringing from reading Widdicombe's 'contribution'in the Guardian
This is but one example of where elected politicians dismiss scientific data, logic, and expertise, and pander to the lowest common denominator of unelected media opinion.
Oh for a parliament with the integrity, intelligence, and guts of Professor Nutt.
- Grey, Dorset
The misuse of drugs act has not been abolished or even amended because the funds that the illegal drugs market raises for some agencies means its too big to fail or shut down.
It's a deep dirty hole and no politician in power wants to go down there.
- Paul Davis, Hounslow
Excellent article - Mr Jenkins, you should be the next Drugs Advisor! Nice to see some sense being spoken. The Government have absolutely no idea what they are doing, and I for one support Dr Nutt's comments. Thousands die each year from smoking which the government happily take the taxes and yet enforces smoking bans. The same with drinking alcohol both of which kills and does more damage than cannabis, ecstacy and other recreational drugs. It's about time to decriminalise drug taking and controlling supply. This will lead the way to getting rid of crack houes, dens, and dealers. Surely this is the way forward?
- Steve Carr, London UK
Brown and Johnson - strong on spin of drugs, invisible in enforcing their own spin!
- Dave B, Beckenham
Like Afghanistan most of Europe has given up on this preposterous US led ‘war on drugs’ under the radar and it is only our government that still believes this failed policy of prohibition which has been a catastrophic failure on every level. Maybe it is a generational problem and hopefully this is the last crop of politicians that will base their drug policy on sentimental populism.
- Ian, London
An excellent article, Mr. Jenkins.
The Government has utterly failed in it's duty to correctly administer the Misuse of Drugs Act.
Drug policy clearly must be taken out of the hands of the Home Office.
- Eric Powell, SE1
