THE LEAGUE TABLE for illegal drugs has been exposed as a shambles. It turns out that the varying status of Class A, B or C is conferred not by the harm done to those who indulge but by the punishment meted out to those who get caught (and no, you’re not alone if you had naively assumed that the two might have been related all along).
Taking this anomaly together with a poll showing that one in ten people has used a Class A drug, rising to one in four among those aged 20 to 24, MPs on the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee have come up with a radical plan: reclassification, which in essence means putting all the same drugs in a different order, to improve on “the message being sent”. And you just have to wonder, when will they ever learn?
At least the instigators of the original classification had the excuse of ignorance. It was 35 years ago, when anyone of an age to hold sufficient power to introduce it had been born in the 1930s and 1940s and therefore knew little about drugs. This generation of power, by contrast — today’s politicians, head teachers, judges, doctors, editors and top executives — is the generation that first made chic the widespread use of illegal drugs: we smoked, dropped and snorted our way through young adulthood; the more middle-class the more likely, the more educated the more certain.
Indeed, when it comes to current and aspiring prime ministers, far from seeking to embarrass them with questions about inhaling, I just assume that they all, like myself, liberated entire pharmacies — and that if they didn’t, they must have suffered a strange absence of curiosity.
So, all right, most of us grew up and out of drug-taking. But that is no excuse for the spasm of collective amnesia that inflicts our brokers of influence whenever drugs are mentioned. It would be far more useful for all concerned if memories rather than denials were allowed to inform policy; our derring-do did, after all, teach us something.
We know first-hand, for instance, why young people take mind-altering drugs. It’s because they feel very, very nice and because there is nothing that screams louder to be altered than the mind of an adolescent. We know that there are no “gateway” drugs — no amount of one drug will make flesh crave another — but we also know that there are “gateway” environments, within which samples of the other might be offered.
We know that there are casualties of recreational drugs; my crowd lost friends’ bodies to heroin and minds to LSD, even though I still maintain that in each case such was their emotional frailty that if it had not been drugs that stole them from us it would have been something else. We know that there may be overdoses, after-effects, accidents while senseless and exacerbation of physical and mental illness — for all of which experience, and more, we might feel hugely entitled to prefer that our young darlings left the whole damned lot alone.
However, if we properly dredge that memory, this we also know: just as most of us knew pretty much what we were doing and lived to tell the tale, so do — and will — our children.
When a young person takes drugs he joins a club in which status is afforded by knowledge of its subject and literacy within it. It has its own language, deliberately designed for inclusion and exclusion; I still recall the code that meant you asked someone for a “straight” rather than a cigarette, just to show you knew there were smokes of a different kind.
The gurus of the group were those who knew their red from their yellow Leb or their Acapulco gold; the sages would warn us against a batch of acid tabs that were giving bum trips. Much the same, I am told, applies now. Further, to leave children out of the argument, as we properly leave them out of many things, there cannot be a young person of, say, 18 who does not know the difference between Ecstasy and heroin and their respective dangers.
I do not know why this young person might then choose to inject his veins with heroin; then again, I do not know why he might race cars while drunk or take up the latest killer craze of “tombstoning”, whereby you chuck yourself from cliffs into unknown waters. I do know, however, that the problem is not ignorance; every last idiot in the land is aware that his free choice — at least that’s what it is for the first few times — is dangerous, and nobody knows that better than the young man making it.
By the same token, it took me less than an internet minute (how much more quickly would an 18-year-old do it?) to be told that Ecstasy causes just seven deaths per million users a year and that more people die fishing.
So what do we, the amnesiac gen- eration, do with that difference? Put skull and crossbones on angling magazines? No. We lie and we manipulate: David Blunkett thought there might be votes in moving cannabis from Class B to C, then Charles Clarke thought there might be more if he moved it back again; we splash pretty girls dying of Ecstasy on billboards, giving them the same prominence as the dead or dying heroin addict. We thereby create a dynamic mistrust between our generation and the next — and then a bunch of well-meaning MPs thinks the answer is simply to reclassify.
Most people, no doubt, would like to keep some drugs illegal. So be it. But let us decide which ones, keeping the list short enough for enforcement not politics, and be done with it.
Freely available information will continue to be circulated to those who need it most; classification will continue to be about as clever as taking all the red Smarties out of one tube and putting them in another. It’s tokenism, it’s power play and it’s useless. For this much I promise you — nobody has ever said: “Oh, no thanks, that’s Class A. I’m more of a B-girl, me.”
