In the wake of a rash of "I smoked it" confessions by
Conservative Party leaders and even some members of the Blair
cabinet, Blair issued an edict ordering his cabinet to no longer
discuss past cannabis use. But Dr. Mo Mowlam, Cabinet Office
Minister and head of government drug policy, had already joined
the ranks of the confessors.

Mowlam made waves again last week when, in a break with
longstanding Labour cannabis policy that could signal a softening
of the Blair hard line, she told BBC's On the Record TV program
that the Labour Party could consider relaxing the laws on
recreational use of cannabis if the scientific evidence showed it
was not harmful or addictive.

In the interview, she said that the Blair government did not
condone cannabis use, but that she did not consider it a
"gateway" drug. Instead, she told BBC, it could be that "drug
pushers persuaded cannabis users to try heroin."

Later, in an appearance on BBC radio, Mowlam added that the
cabinet was now reconsidering its posture toward cannabis in
light of recent shifts in public opinion.

"What is going on is not just a cabinet discussion," she said,
"what is going on is what we want to see, which is a more open
discussion of the impact of cannabis."

"But," she hastened to add, "our position on cannabis has not
changed."

Mowlam's comments came just days after Ian McCartney, a Cabinet
Office colleague whose son died of a heroin overdose, attacked
the government's "just say no" policy as a failure and called for
a "new realism" on drug policy.

But stiff opposition to drug policy reform remains, as evidenced
by the savaging undergone by drug tsar Keith Hellawell in some
quarters of the media, after he had the temerity to challenge the
gateway theory that cannabis leads to hard drug use.

"I have never subscribed to the view that if you take cannabis
you end up taking heroin," he told an interviewer. "There's no
research I know of that proves the link."

Lost in the hubbub over gateway drugs and possible legalization
were Mowlam's remarks indicating that the Labour government is
preparing to move forward on medical marijuana. She told the BBC
News that action could come soon, depending on the results of
scientific trials.

If cannabis policy is giving the Blair government fits,
Labourites can take some solace in the fact that it is also
breeding nasty conflicts among the Tory opposition.

Last week, James Bercow, a Tory home affairs junior spokesman,
attacked his boss' policy on drugs. Conservative shadow cabinet
member Anne Widdicome, had ignited the current cannabis furor in
early October when she called for mandatory fines and criminal
records for cannabis consumers.

In an interview with the New Statesman magazine, Bercow said that
Widdicome's plan for "a vast clampdown" on cannabis was
unrealistic.

"The idea that the police should raid every home in the land
looking for dope-smokers is transparently absurd," argued Bercow,
who is a member of the socially liberal Portillo faction within
the Conservative Party.

"Personal use has been effectively decriminalized... In this
country we police by consent," he continued. "The police are not
interested in launching an all out war on soft drugs. As far as
I can see, alcohol and violence are closely related. It is not
at all clear to me that cannabis and violence are."

Finally, readers of last week's Sunday Times were titillated by
news that the paper had found traces of cocaine in parliament
lavatories, prompting one Labour Member of Parliament, Paul
Flynn, who has advocated the legalization of cannabis, to make
the following remarks linking the discovery to the gateway drug
controversy.

"Cocaine has become the social drug. But those addicted should
be treated as patients, not as criminals," he told the Times.
"At least the myth has been destroyed that if people start out on
a soft drug, they end up on heroin. That they end up on the Tory
front bench is not an enviable fate, but it is not quite as bad
as lying in a gutter with a needle sticking out of you."

In the 1990s, while most of Europe was moving toward harm
reduction and decriminalization strategies toward drug use,
Sweden went in the opposite direction. In 1988, Sweden
criminalized not just the possession but also the use of drugs.
Five years later, it increased the maximum sentence for being
high to six months in prison and empowered police to force
suspected drug users to submit to blood and urine tests in order
to arrest them for consumption of drugs.

Now, a new report from the Swedish National Council for Crime
Prevention has called that policy's tactics and effectiveness
into question. As reported in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, the
council found that arrests for minor drug offenses had increased
70% from 1991 to 1997, that the number of drug tests of suspected
users had more than doubled, but that youth drug use continued to
rise.

"On the basis of the information that is available regarding the
development of illegal drug use there are no clear-cut signs that
the criminalization of drug use and the more stringent laws have
had any deterrent effect," the report stated.

Criminologist Henrik Tham, a longtime critic of Swedish drug
policies, told the Nyheter, "The statistics show that our tough
legislation has not had any effect, even though the police are
inspecting body fluids in their search for illegal drugs."

A three-year experiment in tolerating drug possession has ended
in Poland. President Aleksander Kwasniewski this week signed
into law a tough new drug bill passed by the Polish parliament in
September.

The new law undoes provisions of the 1997 Act On Countering Drug
Addiction, which exempted drugs for personal use from criminal
penalties and called for drug treatment to occur only
voluntarily, except in the case of minors.

In regard to drug possession, the 1997 law said, "The
perpetrators of [drug offenses], who possess narcotic drugs or
psychotropic substances in diminutive quantities for their own
use, are not liable to any penalty."

In regard to coerced treatment, the 1997 law said, "Submission to
treatment, rehabilitation or re-adaptation shall be voluntary,
except when the regulations under this Law provide otherwise.

Under the new law, possession of narcotics or psychotropic
substances, including marijuana, can be punished by up to three
years in prison.

The new law also allows judges to force drug users into
treatment.

"The police can now arrest and stigmatize youngsters and addicts,
which will be easier than cracking down on professionals," Marek
Kotanski told Reuters. Kotanski heads Monar, Poland's largest
private drug abuse service organization.

Supporters of the new legislation argued that it would target
drug dealers, whom they asserted took advantage of the personal
use exemption to evade prosecution.

They also pointed to official statistics showing a steady
increase in the number of habitual drug users since the fall of
communism in 1989, not surprising in the wake of the fall of

ReconsiDer Tidbits