My mum gave me a good laugh yesterday afternoon. She rose from her slumbers just after midday, as is her habit, and was just in time to catch Home Secretary Jacqui Smith in parliament announcing the Gordon Brown’s latest plan to make the country a Better Place: the reclassification of cannabis to class B.
“Fucking fat cow,” she exclaimed. “Fucking fat, fat fucking cow,” she continued. “I’m tired of being ruled by fat people. Look at them, all fat and comfortable. What’s their problem? Fucking fat cow.”
This kind of language is unusual for my mother, who is usually among the best and most properly spoken people I know. On this occasion however, notwithstanding her morning grumpiness, her violent hyperbole seemed entirely justified.
Not only are the government clearly over-nourished, but by their reclassification of cannabis they have clearly signalled that they intend to use the full discretionary powers of parliamentary mandate to make sure that no one in the country has any fun whatsoever. No wonder they are polling the worst electoral results in 50 odd years.
This is just the latest move in a trend which I indentified in an earlier blog post: the move towards puritan politics. First they banned smoking indoors, next they blocked supercasinos, now they are increasing penalties for weed smokers. What next? A ban on kissing on the grounds that it leads to unnecesary and risky exchange of saliva?
What’s worse is that the government ignored their own advisors on this move, for the first time in parliamentary history. Even the Home Office’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs recommended that reclassification would make no difference to the level of cannabis use in the UK, and that there is no scientific evidence to support a tightening of legislation. Indeed, the advisory council’s top scientist, Prof David Nutt, dismissed the move as “naive”. In the end they voted twenty to three against reclassification, which seems pretty definitive
This recommendation came in the face of recent media hysteria over links between cannabis, especially the supposedly super-strong ’skunk’ variety, and psychosis in young people. The right wing press, for reasons best known to themselves, have championed this campaign, with lurid tales of teenagers brutally murdering their own families while under the influence of the ‘evil weed’. Commentators have sought to
imply links between the emergence of stronger varieties of dope with the spate of teenage violence affecting our urban communities. Overall, they have used the kind of hyperbole more appropriate for crack cocaine to vilify cannabis and cannabis users.
In fact, as most news reports have been eager to point out, cannabis use among young people has actually decreased since it was made a class C drug. And the evidence for a link to psychosis is, as the ACMD’s decision shows, sparse. Which makes one wonder what the government’s real reason is for reclassification. My mum reckons it’s because they actually want more people smoking weed, ostensibly to stop them rising up in some kind of spontaneous revolutionary movement. Perhaps, she argued, increasing the legal penalties will make it seem more illegal, and so more appealing to rebellious young people. I have a different theory.
There is a very convincing school of thought that argues that the original reason for drugs prohibition in the USA was more to do with the control of certain groups of people, rather than public health. At the beginning of the 20th century the USA was experiencing a massive wave of immigration. Economic migrants from all over the world began pouring in to the sea ports of the US looking for the American Dream. This made the White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) majority nervous: they envisaged their country being stolen away from them, as they had in turn stolen it from the native american peoples. In response they passed laws which allowed them to use the legal and penal machinery of the state to target these new immigrant groups. Opium was made illegal to criminalise Chinese immigrants who came to build the railroads. Alcohol was prohibited to criminalise Catholic Italians and Irish immigrants. Cannabis was made illegal to target Mexican farm labourers.
So who are the goverment trying to criminalise this time? Well, the foremost answer is young people. This government is afraid of youth, they don’t understand it, they didn’t inhale and if they did they probably got scared and didn’t like it. But more than that, they are also criminalising whole sections of the Afro-Caribbean community who have strong cultural connections to cannabis use – sections of the community whose culture incidentally lends rather a lot to English popular youth culture.
A recent announcement by the Police backs up this theory. As reported in the Guardian recently, police chiefs claim that, even with the reclassification of cannabis, they do not intend to depart from their current strategy of confiscation and warnings for possession of small quantities, except where they see fit to impose harsher penalties. This hands the power to criminalise over to the police. Always a bad idea.
