Diary Note 301201-01
Sunday 30 December 2001
You are in the company of Roger Warren Evans

Drugs: a cruel deceit
The turn of the year is upon us. And Government drugs policy is definitely turning.

The Lambeth policing experiment (avoiding arrests for cannabis, using confiscation and “warnings” instead) was due to end on 31 December, but will be extended for another couple of months, pending a further Police Foundation report: see Nick Hopkins, writing in The Guardian. Educative drugs publicity is being stepped-up, through all the media: see Alan Travis, also in The Guardian. Consideration is being given to heroin prescription, reverting to pre-1971 medical practice. This is all good news.

Yet it is also a cruel deception. No law will be changed. None of these changes will remove the awful stain of criminality from drug-users. That stain will remain, in spite of changes in Police and Home Office practice – young lives will still be blighted, careers ruined, relationships destroyed, families broken. A professional career can be destroyed for criminality, without a prosecution. And the home-growing of cannabis will still be prosecuted, trapping the poorer and unwary user. The criminal fraternity will still thrive. International drug-trafficking will still prosper. As a matter of law, nothing will change.

Indeed, the deceit will go further. Citizens will be faced with a range of activities designated by Parliament as “crimes”, while expecting the Police to take no action when the activity 		is undertaken. This leaves local Police with awesome discretionary powers, to prosecute or not to prosecute: such a discretion will be the breeding-ground of corruption. And while the Metropolitan Police, working in a cosmopolitan London, may well take a liberal line, provincial Police forces can be far less forgiving. There will be no enforceable Government instruction, binding them not to prosecute: in our Constitution, such intervention would be unlawful. The result will be “postcode justice”, unpredictable and perverse.

The only solution is to sweep away the paraphernalia of prohibition, which Europe imported from America in 1920. The stain of criminality must be removed forever from drug-users, as it has from users of alcohol and tobacco.

For me, this is a fundamental civil rights issue. I am playing my part, in promoting the case for radical reform. In Autumn 1999, I made my first move and published a pamphlet Drugs: The Defining Liberal Issue. LIBERTY, the leading civil rights group of which I am a member and Director, is committed to the legalisation of the consumption and supply of all psychoactive substances. I was the draftsman of the “Angel Declaration” in September 2001, and I remain Secretary of Angel Action the group promoting the Declaration. We are seeking to assemble the voices for reform, as public signatories to the Declaration.

If you want to add your signature, you can sign on-line at the Angel Declaration

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