Former Home Office Minister Bob Ainsworth says…

“Prohibition has failed to protect us. Leaving the drugs market in the hands of criminals causes huge and unnecessary harm to individuals, communities and entire countries, with the poor the hardest hit. We spend billions of pounds without preventing the wide availability of drugs. It is time to replace our failed war on drugs with a strict system of legal regulation, to make the world a safer, healthier place, especially for our children. We must take the trade away from organised criminals and hand it to the control of doctors and pharmacists.”

Ed Miliband’s appointment of the former Times hack Tom Baldwin has sent ripples through the stagnant Labour pond, the Alastair Campbell protege is supposed to bring substance to a weak team and perk up Ed’s image However Labour backbenchers have been left slightly confused by the employment of a controversial Murdoch man, blunting the sustained attacks upon Coulson. Further to that, it’s going to be tough for Red Ed to deploy class based attacks, as he so savoured at last week’s PMQs, given Baldwin’s heiress wife has the nickname “Just Sixteen”, given that was her response when asked how many million she had just inherited…

Another thing that isn’t going to go down well is the rumours of Baldwin’s former closeness to Dave. Roughly contemporaries at Oxford, it is said they both shared their “normal university experience” and their friendship bloomed though the lively world of PR and journalism when the young Dave was working long hours spinning for Carlton. Baldwin and Steve Hilton remain firm friends.

If it’s true that Bad Al Campbell put Baldwin up to the job, it’s going to be a hard sell for Ed to his backbenchers, who didn’t vote for him in the first place and claim to want an end to the dark days of New Labour spin…

The PM’s trip to China reminds Guido that he has a little factoid that he hasn’t seen anywhere else, namely that during Dave’s 1985 gap year he worked for Jardine Matheson, before going up to Oxford. Young Cameron worked for three months in Hong Kong as a ‘ship jumper’ for Jardine Shipping Agencies. Dave was responsible for attending to ships when they called at Hong Kong. His tasks ranged from taking care of all the formalities with the customs and immigration authorities, to looking after travel and personal arrangements for crew members. Did his time in Hong Kong teach him to work hard and invest wisely – or did it encourage him to squander his salary  in the bars of Wan Chai? Guido can confirm that there are many exciting diversions for a young man in Hong Kong…

The political relevance of this is that Jardine Matheson is one of the original Hong Kong trading houses or “Hongs” and Jardine Matheson’s early profits were based on selling opium to the Chinese. When the Chinese emperor tried to ban the trade, the company called on Britain to intervene, leading to the 1839 Opium War. This is not viewed well in China, something to be borne in mind when the former lackey of the oppressors is lecturing them about human rights…

The sacked Professor David Nutt has turned the tables on Alan Johnson.  Johnson keeps repeating angrily that the professor should stay out of politics, the professor is squarely saying that politicians should stay out of the science. Dr. Les King has followed the professor and resigned as a government adviser, a third adviser Marion Walker, is said to be going. Drugs policy in this country is mad. You can get 5 years jail time for smoking a spliff, something millions of Britons do regularly. We hear baseless political propaganda about “skunk” and schizophrenia. The scientists have determined what users already knew, that this scare is myth. Professor David Nutt’s Eve Saville Lecture 2009 – the source of the controversy – is clear on this:

… schizophrenia seems to be disappearing (from the general population) even though cannabis use has increased markedly in the last 30 years. When we were reviewing the general practice research database in the UK from the University of Keele, research consistently and clearly showed that psychosis and schizophrenia are still on the decline. So, even though skunk has been around now for ten years, there has been no upswing in schizophrenia. In fact, where people have looked, they haven’t found any evidence linking cannabis use in a population and schizophrenia.

This was the Jacqui Smith and David Cameron excuse to justify their hypocrisy, dope today was different from the dope of their youth, skunk was supposedly some kind of dangerous super-marijuana.  Hypocritically Cameron was, according to his Etonian contemporaries that Guido has interviewed, a regular toker.  A bit of spliff didn’t seem to stop him getting into Oxford or getting a first in PPE.   He really does know better.

If things had gone slightly differently for David Cameron instead of being on the verge of becoming PM, he could be yet another former public school boy who ended up squandering his privileges and doing jail time for possession of cannabis and cocaine. The current President of America could just be another black ex-con from a broken home. Our drugs policy can not be determined by the Daily Mail’s Paul Dacre, who lives in an alternative drug-free reality.  Gordon Brown’s Calvinist mores don’t permit any room for people to do recreational drugs and his misguided claim that cannabis is lethal is just wrong.  Tobacco and alcohol kill far more people than all the other illegal recreational drugs combined.  Psilocybin (“magic”) mushrooms have been used by Britons for millenia, used by druids in the only indigenous religious ceremonies we have because they are found naturally all over these isles.  Guido has munched them on golf courses.  This has now been criminalised.

Nice people do drugs.  We need a grown up political conversation that shifts problem drug addicts out of the criminal judicial system and into the healthcare system.  The same as we do for alcoholics.  The lesson of Galileo should teach politicians that sacking scientists won’t make the earth flat.  Time to deal with the reality, not Dacre’s drug fantasies.

Source : [pdf] Estimating drug harms: a risky business? Professor David Nutt Eve Saville Lecture 2009

The tabloid headline driven drug laws in Britain are a mess. The next Prime Minister of Britain spent his days at Eton smoking dope, the current Home Secretary says she only smoked “weak” dope, as if that makes a material difference.   If they had been caught and convicted they would probably not have got where they are today.

It is a mad situation where you get a lighter sentence for raping someone than you would for selling them a joint.  Which do you think is worse?

According to the government’s sentencing guidelines study in 2004, the average custodial sentence imposed for rape of an adult was 79.7 months and for GBH was 50.1 months.  For dope dealing the average was 84.0 months.

Why does “intent to supply” a relatively harmless, though wrongly categorised class ‘A’ drug like Ecstasy, attract a stiffer sentence than “attempted rape”?

UPDATE : Just noticed that Peter Wilby in the New Statesman is saying the contemporary left is too timid to be rational on drugs. The centre-right is too, given that a fair share of the Shadow Cabinet have enjoyed recreational drug use, isn’t it time we stopped kow-towing to Dacre and had a grown up attitude to drug addiction? It is a public health problem, not a criminal / judicial problem.

Hat-tip : UK Drug Policy Commission

An email arrives to the inbox from Andy Reed MP. In it he challenges Guido to “Chase the Dragon” around the back of Portcullis House. Odd, he seems to be a bit of a fitness freak…

Guido may have got the wrong end of the opium stick…

Anthony Wells reports