IN October 2000 I was vilified by the Left-wing press and betrayed by some of my colleagues who objected to my announcement that if the Conservatives won the General Election, which was expected to take place a few months hence, I should implement a policy of zero tolerance towards all drug crime from the supply of hard drugs to the possession of soft.
One of the observations I made was that studies in Amsterdam had shown that as soft-drug use rose following liberalisation of the law, so did hard-drug use. Few would give me a hearing. I was branded out of touch and a liability to the Tories and, having watched the row unfold, Labour decided to relax the cannabis laws by giving it a lower classification, a measure eventually reversed but not until a great deal of harm had taken place.
Just before the weekend not one but two major studies set out what that harm was. The chance that a young person who had never smoked cannabis would now try it went up by a quarter; assaults, car theft, burglaries and vandalism increased; the numbers of men admitted to hospital suffering from the effects of hard drugs rose by between 40 to 100 per cent.
Given that in 2000 drugs were responsible for 80 per cent of acquisitive crime and 30 per cent of all crime, my reasoning was that if we began to win the battle there would be a substantial impact on the overall crime figures. What a pity nobody listened.
