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 pass. 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.