The best way to stop our children damaging themselves with skunk and Ecstasy is to remove the need for them to deal with criminals – and to talk honestly with them.
'Ease drug penalties on the young,” a government adviser has urged. And of course, Professor Les Iversen, chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, is absolutely right. After all, if every young man who had dabbled with drugs had felt the fullest penalty of the law, then David Cameron would not be prime minister nor Barack Obama US president.
But in my view, Les Iversen doesn’t go nearly far enough. He talks of police being granted the discretion as to whether to press for civil rather than criminal penalties in certain drugs cases. This, however, is a fudge that doesn’t address the real issue. If our drugs laws are antiquated, expensive, inconsistent, socially damaging, draconian and counterproductive – and they are – then the solution is not to give the police more leeway to turn a blind eye. The solution is to change the laws.
