The dopey blue line
What an idiotic response by the police to the government’s reported determination to reclassify cannabis as a class B prohibited drug in an attempt to reverse the significant damage done by downgrading it to the relatively anodyne class C. According to the Guardian, the police have stamped their size twelves and declared that they will not adopt a tougher approach to cases of simple possession of cannabis if the drug is upgraded. A spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers said:
The key will be the discretion for officers to strike the right balance. We do not want to criminalise young people who are experimenting.But by declaring that they will refuse to arrest and charge anyone caught in possession of cannabis, they are ruling out the use of such discretion. Furthermore, the issue is not — as the legalisers would have us believe and the police are here mindlessly echoing—the criminalisation of young people. It is about, first and foremost, telling the truth about the dangerousness of this drug both to potential users and their parents -- thus equipping the latter to advise and deal with their spliff-puffing offspring before their brains are destroyed by cannabis-induced psychosis. And upgrading would also mean that cannabis trafficking would once again surface on the policing radar, from where it so disastrously fell off when downgrading caused both police and customs officers to stop targeting cannabis imports, causing the market to be flooded, the price of cannabis to go through the floor and rocket fuel put behind the trade in other drugs.
It should not be forgotten that, with some honourable exceptions, the police have been amongst the loudest voices calling for decriminalisation of cannabis and other drugs. That is because, having failed to get on top of the drugs problem years ago, they drew precisely the wrong conclusion. Instead of realising that their own strategy of trying to pursue dealers while largely ignoring users was exacerbating the problem (not least because for every Mr Big there’s always a Mr Bigger) and that the only way to get on top of it was zero tolerance towards dealers and users, they decided that the issue was not their own rubbishy law enforcement but the nature of the law itself.
They appear to have learned nothing.