The Home Office won’t admit it, but most Britons would scrap the ban on cannabis.
Why do we have laws against drugs – or, more precisely, against some drugs and not others? This admittedly basic question was not actually addressed by the Commons home affairs select committee, whose report on drugs laws was published yesterday. As with every other inquiry into the subject in recent years, the committee’s findings were greeted with the open-minded approach for which the Home Office is renowned – and promptly thrown in the bin.
I can sympathise with the MPs who are unhappy with this peremptory dismissal because I sat on the RSA commission that spent two years looking at drugs laws and can testify to the stupefying unwillingness of anyone in government to contemplate the possibility that they may have got anything wrong. Our policy is working, the Government said again yesterday, so we need not bother with the opinions of the 200 or so witnesses who gave evidence to the select committee inquiry.
The same brick wall greeted the conclusions of the UK drugs commission, which reported recently, and the Police Foundation study several years ago, and, indeed, the home affairs select committee itself, when it last visited this topic in 2002. Then, it recommended that there should be an easing up on the penalties for cannabis – something Labour proposed, legislated for and then reversed. (David Cameron, incidentally, sat on that committee.)
Now the MPs are proposing a Royal Commission into drugs laws – a pointless exercise, since we can predict the outcome now. It will propose decriminalising cannabis, and recommend that drugs policy should be based on the harm caused by particular substances, an approach that seems eminently sensible to everyone except the Home Office. The Royal Commission will issue its findings and the government of the day will reject them before the ink is even dry.
