Here begins a summer of cannabis. As you’ll know already, because you probably keep smelling it in the park. “I don’t even know what it smells like,” you may retort, indignantly. To which I would say, well, you know that thing you keep smelling in the park? It smells like that.
Really, that’s most of what you get in parks these days: mud, insane unsocialised lockdown dogs and people smoking cannabis. Probably it helps them cope with the first two. Maybe we could give the cannabis to the dogs, too? I interviewed a cannabis entrepreneur a couple of years ago who gave it his cat because she had back pain. I was incredulous but he insisted it worked. Mind you, he was on cannabis.
Most British people back decriminalisation, or think they do, as we report today. Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, plans to launch a review to examine the idea, should he be re-elected. Boris Johnson, his predecessor, is unlikely to play along. Writing on these pages last week, James Forsyth explained that the prime minister has “no interest in the decriminalisation agenda” and nor does Priti Patel. Good thing, too. Legalisation is what you want, from use to supply to production; deploying the same logic that we apply to most other mildly dangerous things that some adults want to use and children definitely shouldn’t, such as booze, or guns, or cars.
Often “decriminalisation” seems to be understood as a less frightening word to use, in much the same way that Hyacinth Bucket couldn’t bring herself to say “toilet”. Actually, though, it is the worst of all possible worlds, rendering justice murky while incentivising organised crime, youth exploitation and modern slavery. Much British cannabis is grown by trafficked Vietnamese teenagers, locked away. Decriminalisation means more of that, not less.
The thing about decriminalisation is that it is not far off what we have already, just in less erratic form. Dame Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, said in 2017 that arresting people for possessing cannabis was “not our highest priority”. Yet the government’s race report last week also pointed out that almost half of prosecutions of ethnic-minority people are connected to laws about class B drugs, and the vast majority of those drugs will be cannabis. Which makes you wonder about other priorities.
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You may believe that Johnson’s opposition to change is driven by fierce conviction, but I’m not sure I’ve ever had weed that strong. More likely it comes out of his fear of being attacked from the right on ye olde Tory law and order grounds. Law and order, though, means law and order. It doesn’t mean a generation learning to regard the law as little more than a weapon an unfriendly copper might pull out of his pocket.
Some also cite a link between cannabis use and poor mental health which might be causal and might not, because messed-up people self-medicating is hardly a novel concept. As an argument against liberalisation, though, it makes no sense at all when they’re smoking it already. On 2019 figures, about a fifth of people aged 16 to 24 had taken cannabis in the past year and about a third did so frequently. And that was pre-pandemic, when their social life didn’t just involve sitting on a bench.
None of this sits within this government’s comfort zone, although that comfort zone is a farce, too. We keep hearing of a supposedly looming advertising campaign, designed to remind middle-class cocaine users of the hypocrisy of sipping Fair Trade when their coke caused slaughter in Mexico and perhaps arrived in Britain up a terrified Albanian’s bottom.
I share the sentiment, but isn’t it a bit revealing? It reminds me of the elderly white lady I met in Zimbabwe who insisted that most black Africans must now own cars because she kept driving past them. As in, while Islingtonian dinner parties may be what this is all about for Johnson, I’m not convinced they’re really the front line of the British drug economy. He should be talking about pubs, clubs, gigs, festivals, football terraces, big nights out and quiet nights in. And, these days, parks. As you’ll know.
Cocaine, at any rate, is another story. Sanitising that industry would involve multinational global co-operation and probably a decent-sized war in Central America too. A handful of other drugs — particularly crack, opiates and the horrible synthetic drugs endemic in prisons — are in my view better understood as medical problems than criminal ones anyway.
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Cannabis should be the easy bit. Yes, the global legal cannabis industry is a hilarious mess of spivs and chancers, and yes, it is true that no jurisdiction which has legalised has done so flawlessly, with issues of public health, taxation and enforcement still bubbling away like the water in a bong, if you’ve ever seen one of those. It is also true, though, that each and every one of them now has a situation which makes far more sense than our own.
Terrible things sometimes happen, true enough, but parents know full well that the worst impact that any soft drug use is likely to have on their children’s futures will come not from taking it but from the legal consequences to which that might lead. For the most part the public doesn’t want cannabis to be illegal, the police don’t want to routinely arrest people for using it and the government doesn’t particularly have the stomach to ask them to. And yet still we pretend.
If that feels like nonsense today, wait and see how it feels with the pubs open. The dogs will calm down eventually and the mud will green over but I’m pretty sure the weed is going nowhere. So if you’re against decriminalisation, and you should be, then you either go backwards or forwards. Personally, I don’t think backwards is going to work.