Reefer madness

After some consideration I am not sure that I can get excited about the debate as to whether cannabis should be classifed as a Class B drug or whether, as the Home Secretary Charles Clarke decided last week, it should remain Class C. Rather, I am coming round to the conclusion that it should be declassified as a drug altogether — and reclassified as a banned foodstuff. Instead of being handled by a bunch of creepy do-gooders from the drugs’ charities, the battle to keep it off the streets would then be run by the zealots of the Food Standards Agency. You wouldn’t get dopeheads and smalltime dealers being let off with a caution on the grounds that it isn’t fair to burden young people with a criminal record; they would be heavily fined, branded a danger to the public and named and shamed in the local papers. Just ask any former sandwich bar-owner who was imprudent enough to serve an egg sandwich made with mayonnaise that was a few days out of date.

Whether cannabis is Class B or Class C is an irrelevance. Technically, the difference is whether users can be jailed for two or five years. But it hardly matters, given that few people are prosecuted for using drugs anyway. Do middle-class types passing round weed at south London parties really fear that a copper passing their window might sniff the evidence and get them banged up for a couple of years? I think not. When I was at school in the early 1980s the only boy ever caught with cannabis in school was summarily expelled: any state school head who applied the same punishment now would provoke horror among liberal-minded parents. With columnists openly boasting of their drug habits and attempting to make out that anyone like me who has never taken illegal drugs is an oddball, the laws against drug-taking have become reduced to the same status as the law against hanging your washing out on a Monday morning or failing to engage in two hours’ archery practice: they are treated as some quaint hangover from an earlier age.

I wish I could share the libertarian view that cannabis is either a harmless bit of fun or, inasmuch as it does damage the health, it is the individual’s right to choose whether to take the risk or not.