Party Vibe

Is Britain really ready to overhaul drug laws?

THE first arrests in the UK for possessing cannabis took place in the early 1950s in Soho, London, in the wake of fears arising out of immigration from the Caribbean. Yet the drug had been declared illegal as far back as 1925, suggesting that the connection between drug use and the law in Britain is a complex one, driven historically as much by popular mood swings and political fashion as genuine health concerns.

By the Thatcher era, arrests for cannabis possession and dealing had jumped to more than 20,000 a year. The moral offensive failed – by the start of the 1990s, annual arrests had doubled to more than 40,000. By the mid 1990s, it had doubled again on the back of rising prosperity, vast social change and a hedonistic and individualistic culture that, paradoxically, Baroness Thatcher had helped to create.

Yet all the time, formal drug laws became more draconian as popular consumption among all classes soared. It is not a new paradox.

Victorian society, with its invention of industrially manufactured cheap chemicals, a consumer market and leisure time for the masses, also invented the use of recreational drugs. The most popular was laudanum, a cocktail of opium and alcohol purchased over the counter from new, mass market retailers such as Boots. Devotees included Victorian rock star equivalents such as the poets Samuel Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey. The same was happening in the US, where tonics such as Coca-Cola were liberally laced with cocaine.

However, the 19th century middle classes and their political representatives were growing frightened by the dangerous rise of the urban working classes, expressed in socialism or the abuse of alcohol.

There were also darker worries regarding the restive natives of the growing British Empire and their supposed addiction to drugs such as opium. A moral panic was born to deny alcohol and other recreational drugs to the lower orders. In the US, the first anti-opium laws were passed in the 1870s directed at Chinese immigrants and their opium dens, in which it was rumoured, young white girls were seduced against their will.

The milestone in this Edwardian drugs backlash was the 1912 Hague Conference where 46 nations agreed to a Convention for the Suppression of Opium and Other Drugs. Lowly cannabis was not included. Serious anti-drugs legislation began in Britain during the First World War when the government became worried that the heroin gel that women were buying from Harrods to send to their sweethearts on the Western Front might have an effect on discipline. A Dangerous Drugs Act came in 1920.

Yet middle-class opinion in Britain still saw drugs as a social problem of the lower orders, to be dealt with by medical help, as much as moral sanction. A government report in 1926 recommended that heroin and morphine be permitted on medical prescription to registered addicts. Depression and the Second World War preoccupied the nation and drugs did not resurface as an issue till mass prosperity returned in the 1950s.

The 1960s saw a sudden plethora of drugs legislation, mostly from the Labour Party, banning LSD and the cultivation of cannabis. Again, the historical accident of new industrial techniques to manufacture cheap recreational drugs was combining with establishment worries about new social and cultural forces. It was a time of student revolution, hippydom and anti-Vietnam War protests. More than 3,000 people held a “smoke-in” in Hyde Park and Mick Jagger, of the Rolling Stones, was imprisoned for possessing cannabis. This prompted a famous Times editorial – “Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?” – suggesting the establishment reaction was perhaps verging on the hysterical.

In response, Harold Wilson, the prime minister, commissioned the Wootton report which, in 1968, recommended that cannabis possession should not be an offence. But Wootton was rejected by the government and the subsequent 1971 Drugs Act retained stiff sentencing for the drug. Lest anyone think the politicians were growing soft, the new act placed most psychedelic drugs in Class A, along with morphine, heroin and cocaine.

Why this draconian response to butterflies? Partly it was a fear (often legitimate) of the power of the new man-made drugs. In 1978, the police Operation Julie raid on a Welsh LSD factory found 30 million doses. It was an early indication of the asymmetry in electoral pressures on the politicians. Parents, the police and the fearful were vocal in their opposition, but those enjoying drugs were rarely motivated to form a counter-lobby, even though the their use was spreading rapidly into the middle classes.

The Thatcher years saw drugs become associated, in the government’s eyes, with political opposition. The Public Order Act 1986 gave police powers to restrict New Age festivals, with their attendant drug-taking. The government also launched a “just say no” policy aimed at young people. Coming from Margaret Thatcher, it was never likely to have any effect.

Besides, this was an era of yet more cheap industrial drugs: crack cocaine and ecstasy. The latter drug was invented during the First World War. But the anti-Thatcher counter-culture and the fact that prosperous Britain now gave the young widespread affluence spawned a rave culture. At its height, a million pills were swallowed by British teenagers each weekend. Ecstasy defined a whole generation. Better educated and more opinionated, the young were only too well aware that the legal use of nicotine caused about 110,000 premature deaths each year in the UK.

The Major years saw ambivalence to the failure of the drug laws to engineer social behaviour, and cocaine become the recreational drug of choice among the middle classes as cannabis became passé. In 1993, Commander John Grieve, of the Metropolitan Police, called for the decriminalising of cannabis. Instead, the home secretary, Michael Howard, declared a “war on drugs”. His crusade was not against drugs. It was against rising levels of street crime associated with the need to fund the heroin epidemic among the underclass.

With Labour back in office in 1997, Lord Bingham of Cornhill, the most senior judge in England, called for a public debate on the legalisation of cannabis. This was immediately rejected by the home secretary, Jack Straw. Barely weeks later, it was reported that Mr Straw’s son had sold £10-worth of cannabis to a newspaper reporter. It was more apparent than ever that milder recreational drugs, though illegal, were in widespread use despite 40 years of ever more draconian laws. In January 2002, it became known that 17-year-old Prince Harry had smoked cannabis in the grounds of the Prince of Wales’s Highgrove estate. Seventy-five years of prohibition had obviously failed somewhere.

http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/

after having spent some time in Bolivia, both on coca plantations and in La Paz, where much of it is converted into the boo we think of here, I can’t bring myself to touch the stuff. If it isn’t 50 cents for 2G of pure, it’s a burn.

plus it turns even the nicest people into a bit of a bore.

yeah I also no alot of people in a bit of trouble with money aswell, I recently went to global gathering though and did laughing gas(nitrous oxide), I did it once before at project mayhem at the coven but I didn’t get the full effect!! Did this time though blew me bloody mind!! was like bein on acid but only lasted for a few minutes it was amazing!! see a hell of alot a lot cheaper than coke at £1.50 4 a balloons worth me thinks its worth it!!! If u haven’t tried it do it!! its a gr8 little mind bender!! 😀

seems we’re all pretty much in agreement here, which begs the question: where are all the coke heads?

the media seem to regularly be talking about the rise in cocaine use. maybe the users are all to busy talking the hind legs off donkeys to use the net.

tried coke a few times, but (luckily!) it doesn’t work for me. I hate the taste in the back of my throat, other than that there seems to be no effect…. Add to that the cost, and it should be clear I don’t touch white.

It is fun to take the piss out of snorters tho, just pretend to wipe your nose a lot and you see them get paranoid [IT’S ONLY PARANOIA IF YOU CAN’T PROVE IT].

We’re allowed some fun too eh 😀

June 2002

Recent coca production trends and political developments in Bolivia and Peru that are unrelated to Plan Colombia are troubling. Reporting indicates that Bolivian coca farmers are replanting coca at an alarming rate. This replanting is not surprising, considering that coca leaf prices in Bolivia are at record highs. In addition, increased violence by coca farmers against government eradication forces in the Chapare and Yungas has slowed down the pace of eradication.

In 2001, the U.S. Government reported the first increase in Peru’s coca cultivation since 1995. Although growth in new coca was limited (some 3,400 hectares), it confirms other disturbing trends. Prices for Peruvian coca leaf have rebounded and some Peruvian coca farmers are replanting previously abandoned fields. If these trends are not reversed, the counterdrug successes achieved in Peru will be increasingly at risk.

I went to the ‘southern cone’ of Latin America last year and spent some time in Bolivia.

I met a butterfly collector in a village in the Amazon jungle who agreed to be my guide into regions more remote than petrol could take us. On the first day we set off in a canoe and in the afternoon moored at the river bank and stopped to meet a farmer. He grew lots of fruit (although it hardly need to be culivated), some coffee, sugar cane and loads of ginger. he also cultivated coca between the rows of his main crops. This fed him and his family. His coca output was used to sell at local markets where indegenous people chew leaves like your granny drinks tea.

A few days later and my guide and I found ourselves crawling through dense tropical vegetatin on hands and knees trying not to be spotted by the guys with machine guns patrolling a ‘farm’. “es muy peligrosso aqui” said my giude. he was right. This crop was bound for La Paz to be processed for foreign markets

These are two very different uses of the same plant, but one is steeped in tradition and history, and the other was invented by (and now causes untold problems in) western societies.

Bolivia has recently seen it’s president toppled by strikes, roadblocks etc and the first indigenous president appointed (in a country of majority Quechuan population). This has as much to do with poverty as it did with the right to produce coca: A sacred plant central to many aspects of Andean life, such as weddings, harvest celebrations… not to mention very difficult to live without at 4500m above sea level (one of the effects is increasing lung capacity).

In the late 80’s the US spent millions paying Bolivian coca farmers not to grow (on their own land). They simply used to money to move to some other piece of land, syndicate and grow more. Now the approach is a military one, resulting in the deaths of many workers that are simply trying to earn enough to live on.

However, when people were no longer allowed to practise what they believed was thir right, the government finally fell. Perhaps our governments should take heed. With oppresive laws and actions, you may see a statistical decline in something you don’t like for a short time, but you can’t supress people forever.