A first step toward sanity over drugs

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On Tuesday David Blunkett accepted the substance of last year's report by the Runciman Committee, on which Simon Jenkins served. But this should be only the start of the Government's rethink

Sack Jo Moore? Outrageous. The woman deserves beatification. Sainthood is not tested in the plains but on the heights. Only since 11 September has Ms Moore's true virtue shone. She is St Clare to Alastair Campbell's St Francis. In the realms of spin, she has made the unthinkable possible. She has allowed the Blairites to dare to be unpopular in doing right.

In a hilarious radio interview yesterday, David Blunkett protested his innocence of hiding his U-turn on cannabis behind the IRA's decommissioning announcement. What appalling cynicism, he blurted out, when this was the first of his policy pronouncements that had not been spun. Yet it was carefully co-ordinated with Downing Street, whose terror of Press reaction rubbished and dismissed any change in the drugs law last year. People are now in prison because Mr Blunkett's predecessor, Jack Straw, had not the guts to face down the spinners.

I only lead with spin because, on drugs, this is what the Government has done. Yet at last we have a Home Secretary with the courage to make Whitehall's first sane announcement on cannabis in a generation. The streets of London will be easier to police and safer as a result. New Scotland Yard must heave a sigh of relief that the Lambeth experiment is to be extended, not curtailed. London parents will no longer see children's lives ruined by arrest and imprisonment for what a large majority do not see as a crime.

Mr Blunkett's decision is remarkable. As a member of the Runciman Committee, I must declare an interest, for he has accepted the substance of our report last year. He has shifted the emphasis of policy from penalisation to harm reduction. He has dared to end the 100,000 annual arrests for cannabis possession. He is asking his advisers to produce new guidance on medical cannabis. To those who have laboured long in this vineyard, here is a politician tackling Britain's greatest social evil, the market in narcotics, rather than just dumping it on the police.

Knowing the Downing Street reactionaries and wimps against whom Mr Blunkett has had to struggle, I hesitate to qualify my praise. The fact is that the London drug scene will be little affected by what Mr Blunkett has done, because he has left in place the criminal suppliers. He says he is asking his scientists for advice, but they will tell him what he knows, that cannabis is a toxic sedative that is harmful to some but far less so than alcohol.

The advice Mr Blunkett needs should come from his economists. London's unregulated drugs market is completely out of control. Cannabis, by far the most common drug, is cheap, plentiful and consumed regularly by hundreds of thousands of Londoners, including the policemen supposedly banning it. Mr Blunkett has not "relaxed" this market, as commentators said yesterday. He has merely saved thousands of young people from harassment and arrest. The market could not be more "relaxed" than at present. It should be made less so, but that will only come with the regulation of supply.

Nothing better illustrates the fatuity of Britain's drugsupplylaws than that the most flourishing market is inside Mr Blunkett's own prisons. The biggest pusher is, in effect, the Home Secretary. Ways must be found to bring a trade that is virulent in every high street in the capital under some restriction. This is hard, because the United Nations will not alter its treaty banning legalisation, a treaty that underpins the world's most lucrative criminal trade, that in opium and coca derivatives.

There is only one sensible way to respond to this. The market for less harmful drugs must be separated from the market for more harmful ones, and both must be regulated. Otherwise Mr Blunkett will do little more than hit police overtime. The target of drugs policy must be the socalled "market gateway", the dealers in cannabis and ecstasy who roam the streets inducing youngsters to try "something stronger". These markets must be seized, monitored and controlled. Nothing else makes sense.

The two most "anti-social" drugs are heroin and crack cocaine. In London at present, crack is a total menace. Its dens and crime syndicates wreck neighbourhoods and have led to a surge in gun crime in the capital. They merit the fullest police attention. I would be less worried by ordinary cocaine, which is widely used and, in my view, should not be imprisonable. As for ecstasy, a mildly harmful-drug, the chief risk remains adulteration, reinforcing the case for controlled supply. As with cannabis outlets, the choice in all these cases of failed law enforcement is simple. It is between some attempt at a licensed market and criminal anarchy. If we say no to the former, we will have the latter. We have tried it for the past 30 years and it has not worked.

Heroin is a different matter. Nobody really knows how many heroin addicts there are in London. It is believed that there were some 6,000 addicts at the time of criminalisation in 1971. Current estimates are of 270,000 mostly young people. This is horrific. Heroin consumption is a classic case of the futility of using the law to fight an epidemic. You might as well try to ban the plague. Lives are being wrecked as young people are driven into the underworld and crime for their supplies. Britain used to have the world's most sensible heroin law. It now has the stupidest.

Mr Blunkett wants to extend heroin treatment and cross-over prescribing with methadone. This is good. But he must stop squandering millions putting heroin addicts, who are mostly also dealers, in prison to become even more addicted. He must simply stop it. The money must be spent instead on compulsory treatment in the many remarkably successful centres now being put out of business by the lunatic red tape of Alan Milburn's health department. Never was government less "joined-up".

The present drugs law actively exposes children to risk. A way must be found to squeeze street traders out of business. Heroin pushers must be undercut by a return to the controlled pharmacies which existed before 1971. The gateway from soft to hard drugs must be slammed shut and never again reopened by idiot legislators.

Good start, Mr Blunkett, but only a start.