Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Consider the life of a regular family. The twelve year old is just coming back late from school after skateboarding and hanging out with some friends, a younger sibling has had a dreadful cold. The oldest is taking A-levels and the financial issues of a possible university course are looming over the household. Mum has a good but pretty stressful job. Dad is changing his, as globalisation if he is in the private sector, or perhaps another government re-structuring, takes place. Mortgage payments have just gone up, but not too badly. One grandparent is chronically, how can we put it?, growing old, the others, all told, are fine, but all live more than an hour's drive away. One set of grandparents are divorced. Mum and dad are looking forward to a Mediterranean package holiday but concerned abut the weakness of the pound against the euro. It's sunny out. The family is as happy and hard-working and anxious as a good family can be. Dad was home already and is tinkering with the car. Mum comes in with the dinner. She checks out the younger one with the cold, breaths a sigh of relief, and, before making supper, lights up a joint.
Well, why not? After all, she is a policewoman. She has to live with tension and there was a stressful incident, perhaps a nasty accident or a very abusive prisoner. This evening, she needs something calming but not inebriating. She buys her cannabis from a police solicitor whose supplier works for a QC.
This situation - the everyday use of mild drugs - is normal. It takes place in households across the land. They look at the Sun or the Mail if they buy a paper at all. They are aghast at what takes place below ground in Austria, they nod with agreement about how bad youth violence is becoming, and they occasionally light up. Because the parents do - or did - the children are bound to.
I've written before about the openly reported use of cocaine to add nerve to the financial markets not to speak of international affairs.
It's normal in the city. Now we have a mayor of London who agrees he took cocaine then adds that he does not want his children to do drugs. Well, they will go to private schools which are shot through with substances provided by uncles who have just flown in from Dubai. The only question for Boris is: "as your children will do drugs, do you want them to be made criminals and even sent to jail for being like you?"
In every class of our society drugs are normal. If you want excitement and you don't want to take drugs, all I can suggest is that you start a website!
It is not a matter of whether and how we should re-classify normality as the entirety of our political class seem to believe (despite all their protestations about 'being in touch' with the people): it is a question of how we de-criminalise it; how we legalise the cash flows so that they support government rather than gangs and mafias; how making it available legally can protect us from the destructive crimes of addicts; how its use can be managed just as we have successfully banned smoking in pubs. All the rest is tosh.
PS- Andrew Curry has a no-nonsense post on Britain's random drugs policy on his Next Wave Futures blog. Especially interesting is this graph he produces on the harms caused by different drugs. In some cases, such as Ecstacy and alcohol, it seems the degree of harm a drug causes is inversely proportionate to the severity of the penalty for its use.
