Source: The Telegraph

12 December 2012

By Philip Johnston

The Home Office won’t admit it, but most Britons would scrap the ban on
cannabis

Why do we have laws against drugs – or, more precisely, against some drugs
and not others? This admittedly basic question was not actually addressed
by the Commons home affairs select committee, whose report on drugs laws
was published yesterday. As with every other inquiry into the subject in
recent years, the committee’s findings were greeted with the open-minded
approach for which the Home Office is renowned – and promptly thrown in
the bin.

I can sympathise with the MPs who are unhappy with this peremptory
dismissal because I sat on the RSA commission that spent two years looking
at drugs laws and can testify to the stupefying unwillingness of anyone in
government to contemplate the possibility that they may have got anything
wrong. Our policy is working, the Government said again yesterday, so we
need not bother with the opinions of the 200 or so witnesses who gave
evidence to the select committee inquiry.

The same brick wall greeted the conclusions of the UK drugs commission,
which reported recently, and the Police Foundation study several years
ago, and, indeed, the home affairs select committee itself, when it last
visited this topic in 2002. Then, it recommended that there should be an
easing up on the penalties for cannabis – something Labour proposed,
legislated for and then reversed. (David Cameron, incidentally, sat on
that committee.)

Now the MPs are proposing a Royal Commission into drugs laws – a pointless
exercise, since we can predict the outcome now. It will propose
decriminalising cannabis, and recommend that drugs policy should be based
on the harm caused by particular substances, an approach that seems
eminently sensible to everyone except the Home Office. The Royal
Commission will issue its findings and the government of the day will
reject them before the ink is even dry.

Which takes me back to the question posed at the beginning of this
article, which needs to be answered before we can reach any conclusions
about the way forward for drugs laws. Most crimes exist because the
activities harm other people, like murder, rape or theft. But when a law
proscribes a substance that directly harms only the user, then its sole
purpose must be to register society’s disapproval of its impact on them.
Otherwise, how could it make any sense for one plant – tobacco – to be
legal, while another – cannabis – is not? A free country should never
regard self-harm as sufficient justification for prohibition. If it were,
then the sale and possession of tobacco would be banned.

We are, therefore, in the realms of moral disapprobation. The law is a
statement that we, as a society, think it is wrong to take
personality-altering and hallucinogenic drugs and it serves as a signal to
our children that they should not use them. But what should happen when
most people no longer disapprove of a proscribed activity? We have seen
this happen with the law against homosexuality, which was in practice
illegal until the mid-Sixties and which is now, within the space of half a
lifetime, about to be officially recognised through the institution of
marriage.

While a good number of people object to this development, most people
don’t, judging by the opinion polls. Indeed, not only does a majority no
longer disapprove of homosexuality but anyone who criticises an
individual’s sexual inclinations is denounced as a social Neanderthal –
just witness the opprobrium heaped upon the Tory MP David Davies for
saying that most parents don’t want their children to be gay.

By the same token, there is good reason to believe most people no longer
disapprove of smoking cannabis. A survey of public opinion to guide the
work of the RSA commission on drugs policy found that a substantial
majority was happy to see the personal use of cannabis decriminalised, or
penalties for possession lowered to the status of a parking fine. On the
other hand, the same poll found that most people remained adamantly
against any lessening of the restrictions on heroin or crack cocaine,
thereby drawing a clear distinction between so-called hard and soft drugs.

So, if the rationale for a ban on cannabis is moral disapproval that
either no longer exists or has diminished markedly, on what grounds should
prohibition continue? In a characteristically trenchant book on the
subject, The War We Never Fought, the journalist Peter Hitchens argues
that because this country has collectively lost its moral self-control, it
needs to be reinforced by statute.

He challenges the libertarian belief that in a free society the state
should not be the enforcer of moral rectitude. “This would be true in a
society of strong independent morality,” Hitchens writes. “But the most
profound threat to freedom arises from the British people’s determination
– led by a libertine and selfish middle class – to throw off
self-restraint in their personal behaviour.”

I can see the force of this argument, but it is unevenly applied. Most
people would disapprove of someone who gets roaring drunk, yet we do not
seek to ban alcohol; and those who think it is right to proscribe cannabis
in order to send a signal that taking drugs is bad for your health do not
say the same about tobacco. Many people continue to disapprove of people
smoking cannabis and to see it as proof of moral turpitude, but I suspect
they are now in a minority. Whether you agree with legalisation or not, in
the end a law underpinned by censure cannot survive if the behaviour
itself no longer attracts public odium.

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