Alan Johnson’s apples and oranges

By Marjorie Smith

This article was also published on Marjorie’s blog, Left Wing Polemics.

Alan Johnson’s justification for sacking Professor Nutt over his refusal to acquiesce on the Government’s decison to reclassify cannabis from Class C to B under the Misuse of Drugs Act is spurious in the extreme.

The main reason that the Labour leadership seems to struggle over this issue is that there is a streak of Christian Socilalist thinking (Straw, Brown, Blair, et al) that seems to rely more on the advice of the Association of Chief Police Officers than those better-versed in what is actually happening on the streets. It is an ethos that top-down policy making based on moral certainties are appropriate for how society should govern itself.

The Government seem intent to continue digging a gigantic hole over this issue and continues to flip flop like a startled fish in a Japanese sushi bar.

It was David Blunkett who declassified cannabis as a Class B to Class C in 2002. Taken on the advice of experts this seemed at the time a reasonable step only opposed by the indignanti of the Mail and Telegraph brigade. This was shortly followed by the virtual de-criminalisation of cannabis in Brixton and other areas, implicitly indulged by the Home Office who wanted to test public opinion on attitudes to cannabis.

The forces of reaction made sure that the public furore (mainly confined to the Op-Ed pieces and letters page of the said Mail and Telegraph) was blown-up into a media firestorm that intimidated the Home Secretary and the Home Office to beat a hasty retreat.

This was then followed by a drip, drip, drip campaign about the dangers of drugs generally and their damaging effects on society as a whole. The Government (and especially the Prime Minister) so often in thrall to the Daily Mail eventually caved in to the editorial line of Paul Dacre and performed a policy u-turn.

As Sue Blackmore in the Guradian so elequently exposed Jacqui Smith’s reasoning for reclassifying Cannabis to Class B:

“In May 2008 Jacqui Smith announced that she wanted to reverse the decision and put cannabis back to Class B. She said she was concerned about the evidence linking cannabis smoking with schizophrenia, and with the increase in the supply of skunk and other strong forms of the drug.

There was indeed some evidence of a link with schizophrenia but the numbers of people affected are tiny, the risk small, and the reason for the correlation unknown (for example people who are genetically predisposed to schizophrenia may be more likely to smoke cannabis or to find it helpful). Some research even suggests that there is no link and that people diagnosed with “cannabis-induced psychosis” would have developed the symptoms anyway but blamed the drug. And interestingly, since the 1950s there has been a huge increase in cannabis smoking with no change in the rate of schizophrenia.”

The other main reason for reclassification was that the strength of skunk on the street had dramatically increased over the years and that the level of active ingridient (THC) in street level skunk was much higher than 30 years ago.

This simple claim by the Home Secretary reveals the absolute paucity of rationality behind the recent decision. The reason why skunk is so much more popular than it was is precisely because it is stronger and, crucially, it is widely available due to widespread expert cultivation in the UK. In other words, the skunk (then more widely know simply as grass) of 20-30 years ago was widely disliked because of its poor quality, it was viewed as the smoke of last resort. Not so in 2009.

The valid comparison should have been made between today’s skunk and yesterday’s hashish, which came in a block and was and probably still is stronger than today’s street-level skunk. But if you compare apples with oranges you get bizarre results.

Labour’s rush to heavily increase the criminalisation of today’s youth reveals a nasty anti-libertarian streak within the current Government that does society no favours and does young people, especially, no good.