'It de-stresses me... it makes my life easier'

It didn't take long for teenagers on the street to wise up to the new law on cannabis. "It's legal for me to smoke it at home, but not outside - that's how I see it," said Amy, a 19-year-old from Peckham who has been smoking since she was 10, picking up the habit from her mother. "I don't smoke it in public because if they catch you they'll take it. If people smoke on the street they still hide it in their hands. It's always been like that."

Amy and her friends are all daily users whose habits and consumption appear to have changed little since the new law came in. Poppy, 16, from Southwark, says she sometimes smokes spliffs on the street, but not in shops or on buses. Only the most brazen flash them around.

For young people such as Amy and Poppy cannabis is a way of coping with the traumas in their lives. From broken homes and abused as children, they treat cannabis as a tranquillizer. "It de-stresses me," says Poppy at the Kids Company drop-in centre in Borough. "It makes my life easier."

On the street, the relaxation of the law appears to have eased tensions over police stop and searches.

"It's not that young people are smoking any more, or smoking it more openly," says 20-year-old Mark Fearon, from Brixton. "There's now a bit less tension between kids and the police. If you are stopped, cannabis is less of an issue, so youngsters are less defensive. Likewise the policeman is free to ask you about what he's really interested in. I don't feel I'm going to be harassed for nothing."

The way police use their discretion under the new law is illustrated by Landor Road in Stockwell, which had a reputation for open drug dealing and consumption. The closure of the Green Leaf cannabis cafè there in January 2003 was accompanied by an increase in patrols and a blitz on dealers.

Rev Ivelaw Bowman, of St Andrew's Church in Stockwell, said "The law has allowed police to redouble their efforts against crack."