The War on Drugs: local and global

Two occasions to think seriously about the ever ongoing issue of drugs and the possibility of drugs legalisation popped into public view this month. The first encountered was in my own backyard. The reaction of friends and relations to hearing that six students have just been expelled for smoking cannabis from my five-year old daughter’s school (no – not including my daughter) was the predictable one of the exclamation ‘I thought that’s what Bedales was all about!’ Well yes, cannabis was once tolerated there, and newspaper coverage included photos of the usual suspects dad Mick Jagger and expelled pupil Lily Allen, as though the current expulsions are (perversely) proof of a still continuing liberalness – Bedales being a school favoured by pop stars and media people for their children to go to.

In fact there seems now to be a determined effort at Bedales to ‘normalise’ the school and bring it much more in line with others generally – and with, (so we are told by head teacher Keith Budge), the blessing of the parents themselves, a peculiar situation if many of these parents were or are cannabis smokers - suggesting considerable hypocrisy all round.

One of the reasons I sent my daughter to this school was that I believed Bedales to be a  place where children were taught to think for themselves and to argue out issues – drugs of course being a particularly pertinent issue for teenagers to discuss. I believed Bedales to be a school which stood up for the pupil against ‘authority’. Wouldn’t it be more constructive to remove the current zero tolerance measures over cannabis possession, not to expel the students, but rather to involve them directly in a debate about whether cannabis should or should not be legalised.

Of course put against the notoriety and street cred that can potentially be achieved by (strong-willed) individuals that option starts to feel rather worthy. But there is another way of looking at this, as shown by the recent article by Johann Hari in the Independent which deals with precisely the same war on drugs at the larger geographical scale; and in comparing today’s war with the prohibitionists of the 1920s it is of course the ‘well-meaning’ prohibitionists who look worthy. There is the irony indeed – as Hari points out – that many of the alcohol prohibitionists regarded themselves as progressives – and indeed they were on many other issues. John Badley – the founder of Bedales – was himself a non-smoker and non-drinker. Yet, it seems to me that the principles of individual responsibility and thoughtfulness should far outweigh any individual pecadillos of the founder. Isn’t the war on drugs in Bedales (and Bedales has now, it seems, become merely a common example) a macrocosm of the global war on drugs, one that has caused, and continues to cause, misery around the world, even to the extent – as in Colombia – of tearing countries apart. Proper drugs education should begin in the classroom, and one could certainly start by pointing out the sloppy unthinking categorisation of drugs in Bedales’ own parents handbook: dangerous drugs -instant expulsion; smoking (tobacco one assumes?) – grounding only; alcohol – tolerated in school under ‘controlled conditions’. Since when, I ask, were tobacco and alcohol ever themselves not ‘dangerous drugs’?

Grow your own – and help fight the war on terror

Poor Jamie Waylett. Dragged across the newspapers and vilified for doing precisely the right thing. Grow your own – it’s a great idea. You know what you’re getting (you can monitor the strength) – you cut out the middleman (avoid the gangs) and it’s green as well. I would have considered doing the same if I still smoked cannabis as much as I did in America in the seventies. Back then it was very simple. You avoided Mexican because the US sprayed it with paraquat and usually opted for Colombian instead. (I gave up cannabis when I returned to  Britain where I encountered the habit of cutting with tobacco, a drug I have always avoided since I have asthma.)

I’ll say it again: grow your own – brilliant. We’ve got a great crop of potatoes in our garden this year – new and old – and the strawberries are magnificent – much better than from any shop. The main thing then is quality control – no different with cannabis. Waylett should be applauded for exactly the right kind of green initiative – and it is precisely of course why people grow their own cannabis for medicinal purposes.  

Why can’t we ever seem to grow up about drugs? Let me say this: I hate middle England’s constant undying tautological refrain of ‘drink and drugs’. Drink is a drug. They are all drugs – legal, illegal, prescribed, over the counter.  Of course no drug is safe – and every drug is different.

In the UK it all started with the Misuse of Drugs Act (1971). As everyone on the ground at the time will tell you (for instance vicars in the East End) there was a negligible problem before that legislation and an accelerating one afterwards. And even if there had been a big problem before this date then it has always been best to treat those who have misused drugs sympathetically without them becoming frightened of prosecution and going to ground – which of course is exactly what has happened in the last 30 to 40 years.

The law is an ass over drugs – and it is an ass internationally of course. And incidentally is the war in Afghanistan a war on terror or is it really a war on drugs (opium being arguably Afghanistan’s greatest resource)? And if so does this mean that the war on drugs in Afghanistan (and elsewhere – such as Colombia) is actually a war on terror and that to a major extent they have become so entwined as to become one and the same thing?  

The newspapers would have us believe that the public feels great terror at the idea of growing your own. In fact there is nothing terrible about it – the government should be encouraging it.