Legalising cannabis could make things worse

Another big row about drugs policy – like all the others, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. This one centres around the sacking of Dr David Nutt, an adviser to the Home Secretary, for public disagreement with government policy. Radio phone-ins all day have been full of rants: experts know much more than ministers, the latter should listen to them, Alan Johnson should have been sacked instead, etc. etc. The present government can no more do anything right than could John Major’s in 1996.

But the fact is that expert advisers are solely employed to give expert analysis and recommendations; they are not responsible for the political and social consequences of these, whereas ministers are. If ministers are apt to attach too much importance to possible cheap shots in the tabloids, those are political and social consequences too, and can’t be ignored altogether.

What interested me was that Dr Nutt’s departure followed so closely on Jacqui Smith’s stellar performance on Thursday’s Question Time. Ms Smith was jolly courageous to go on at all; as she must have expected, she appeared to a slightly rougher reception than that recently accorded to Nick Griffin. By the end of the programme she had turned it right round: she was getting full endorsements from Tory MP Cheryl Gillan, Plaid Cymru chief Elfyn Llwyd, and most of the audience. All by fearlessly holding the line on the drug policy argument. Dr Nutt was out next day. If she saves her seat, she will owe it to that programme.

I don’t have any coherent views on all this. All the drug arguments I’ve ever heard make sense for thirty seconds and then evaporate into a vague miasma. I’m very glad I’ve got two children through to adulthood – and in South London, too! – without any drug disasters. I know that I drink more than is good for me, and that this disqualifies me from pontificating. The argument I’ve been most impressed by in thirty years of cogitation was the late Sir Kingsley Amis’s: alcohol has probably preserved society from falling apart under the stresses and strains of modern life, and, more to the point, it is now part of the warp and woof of society, claims which more modern drugs cannot make. But then, you may correctly say, Sir Kingsley was parti pris; parts of his Memoirs are a masterpiece of alcoholic denial.

What I don’t understand is the way the legalisers keep bringing forward the argument that alcohol is a bigger social problem than cannabis, but that this is not properly recognised because alcohol is too popular for its banning to be conceivable. It’s a cogent argument, but doesn’t really support their case. If it is true, maybe it would be better to suppress cannabis, to stop that becoming so widely used that it becomes a huge and insoluble social problem – just like alcohol.