Surrendering to drugs, part ninety-four
“The excuses stay the same, and the results never vary: more drug use, more violent crime, more misery.”
I wrote recently for Bournbrook that legalisation or decriminalisation of cannabis always follows years of lax to non-existent enforcement. Last week in the UK, Thames Valley Police made this laxity official policy by announcing that minors caught with ‘small’ quantities of drugs, of any class, will be offered three chances to mend their ways before facing the possibility of prosecution.
The scheme isn’t new or terribly innovative: anyone under 18 caught with a quantity of drugs that might have brought a charge of simple possession (rather than possession with intent to supply) will now be offered the chance to follow a three-hour drug awareness course or a treatment programme; if they refuse, they will be offered a second chance; if they are caught a third time, they might be arrested and prosecuted.
Is this proven to work? According to Thames Valley Police, the nation’s second largest force, a pilot scheme in one of its boroughs this year resulted in two of 84 people arrested for drug possession completing the course and remaining drug free. That’s right, two out of 84, or 2.3%.
Chief Inspector Jason Kew offered the usual pitiful excuse for this surrender, that it would “free up” time for his force to focus on “serious” crime, implying that teenagers openly smoking cannabis, inhaling nitrous oxide and snorting cocaine in public isn’t serious.
What he didn’t mention, of course, is that the police are already free to focus on more ostensibly serious crime, for they do almost nothing about drug possession. Take that pilot scheme, for instance. It was in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, population 151,422, and has been running since January. Which is more likely: that only 84 people in the borough were in possession of drugs in those ten months; or that there was anything from ten to a hundred times that figure, and that the police missed, ignored or let off the majority? And do you think the terribly busy officers of Thames Valley Police went looking for those 84 hapless drug users; or that they arrested them on suspicion of a more ‘serious’ crime, and happened to find drugs on them?
Moreover, in dismissing drug use as unserious, Chief Inspector Kew misses the vital link between consuming drugs, above all cannabis, and the few crimes, such as murder, rape, and violence, that the police still react to. As I document on my website, attackersmokedcannabis.com, cannabis smokers commit violence against themselves or others (or both) almost every day.
This latest surrender is nothing new, of course. As Peter Hitchens points out in his 2012 book ‘The War We Never Fought: the British Establishment’s Surrender to Drugs’, the policy of de facto decriminalisation was set in motion with the Wootton Report of 1968, codified in the resulting Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 (created by Labour, and gladly finished off by the Conservatives, either side of the 1970 general election), and spelt out in a speech by then Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, in 1974, in which he ordered judges and magistrates not to send cannabis smokers to prison.
The excuses stay the same, and the results never vary: more drug use, more violent crime, more misery.
