The government wants your opinions – and the Home Office finally coughs up its secrets.

The Home office has finally been forced to reveal the text of the review ordered into drugs classification by ex-Home Secretary Charles Clarke, more about that later; first to the government we have now. Of course there’s a lot to dislike about the present coalition government – some would say just the fact that it’s populated by politicians is bad enough, never mind the cuts and other bitter policies it may inflict on us over the next few years. So perhaps it’s all a PR con, but at least they’ve opened a couple of websites for people to suggest laws they would like to see scrapped and to suggest ideas for saving money. Actually there are two such websites, one asks us which laws we don’t like and one asks for ideas of how to do the expenditure cuts we’ve been promised, they are quite separate from each other.

Please go to the Your Freedom website and have a look:

In the Restoring civil liberties section  it’s interesting, not to say pleasing, to see that one of the most popular ideas is cannabis law reform. See the cannabis/ drug law reform ideas here and the most commented ideas here and add your own ratings and comments.

In the Repealing unnecessary laws section there are also some drug law reform ideas – see them here, (and add comments and ratings) however the “Cutting business and third sector regulations” is, perhaps understandably, pretty devoid of any suggestions.

Next have a look at Spending Challenge

It looks very much like the freedom site but is different and totally separate from it. A search for “drugs” throws up some ideas that need votes and comments, and there’s this one by someone called “NR23Derek” whoever he is: “Subject all policies to a full cost benefit analysis”

You have to register first – separately for both sites – but then you can vote for and comment on the various ideas. The more comments and votes these ideas get the more they are going to be embarrassed when they ignore them.

OK, advert over. The sites are very badly designed though, the “highest rated” listings don’t take into account the number of votes, so an idea with one 5 star vote is listed higher than one which has 1000 averaging 4.9, so it’s not actually telling us which are the most popular ideas really, so look though the site and find all the ideas you like and boost them by rating and comments.

The other big development this week was to finally see the full Freedom of Information release of the previous government’s plans for reform of the drugs classification system under the Misuse of Drugs Act. This blog has been covering the Freedom of Information request made by the Drug Equality Alliance (see here and here) so we won’t recover old ground, but the newly released information shines a light onto the thinking in the Home Office at a time when the prohibition policy was under serious attack.

You can see the fully released document on the DEA site here

So we now know that the review was ordered by Charles Clarke because of the situation with cannabis which, having been downgraded to the less serious  class C because it was a less dangerous drug than others in class B had confused people who now assumed the the government had accepted it was a less dangerous drug. Silly people.

1.2 Historically, there has been very little movement of drugs between the three classes since the Misuse of Drugs Act was introduced in 1971. However, the classification system, and the way in which it is operated, lacks clarity, and has led to prolonged disagreements over whether certain drugs have been classified correctly according to their relative harms. This has been particularly true in the case of cannabis, the reclassification of which from a Class B to a Class C drug in January 2004 resulted in a degree of public confusion as to the Government’s view of its harmfulness and illegality.

Well, not really. What caused the confusion was the government didn’t carry out the drug law reform everyone was expecting them to do. As usual it’s everyone else who was at fault for being out of step with the politicians.

As if to demonstrate the “other worldliness” of political perception, Clarke writes the almost delusional claim:

1.5 The Government’s Drug Strategy is beginning to have a real impact in tackling drug misuse; the associated harms are now beginning to reduce.

This was four years ago remember, the harms due to prohibited drug use have not really reduced much if at all over the past decade, but perhaps if you say it often enough people will believe it? Anyway, the aims of  the review are explained:

2.3 The objective of this consultation is to explore alternative ways for controlled drugs to be classified so that there is a greater understanding of their harmfulness and the reasons for their illegality.

All well and good – if you accept that prohibition equates to “control” of course as politicians seem to.

2.5 …  The drugs in the lower class(es) still present significant risk. However placing drugs in the lower category can be construed as the Government indicating that the drug is not very harmful and not a serious matter if possessed or used. It is important that at the end of the review it is clearly understood that every drug within the classification system presents significant harms and that possessing or supplying those drugs is a serious matter.

Well, yes. We are not daft and when we see millions of people using a substance with little ill effect then we do tend to reach the conclusion that it isn’t all that dangerous. This is why the cannabis and mental illness campaign was as effective as it undoubtedly was; it challenged the perception of cannabis the harmless herb in a way classification as a class B drug never did. The fact that “reefer madness V2” did this with the help of rabid misreporting by the media and on the back of some dodgy science is beside the point.

However when cannabis was reduced to class C against the background of widespread social acceptance – originally in order to make it a “Non arrestable offence” – it is reasonable to assume people would view it as a less serious matter.

2.7 This consultation concerns the system for classifying drugs under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, and the possible case for change. The scope does not extend to the specific classification of individual drugs, nor to the issue of legalisation. The Government has consistently made clear that all drugs are harmful and that those controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act will continue to remain illegal.

So whatever the findings, the government was unwilling to consider real law reform. At least they were being consistent. The proposals outlined for reform were:

1. A Single Classification

This is what the prohibition camp really wanted and what they are still pushing for, it’s what hard line Sweden has been using for some years now.

2. Integrating the Classification and Scheduling systems into a unified two-tier structure and 3. Move from the current three-tier to a two-tier system.

The distinction between options 2 and 3 isn’t really clear, but they seem to be a sort of half-way house where the distinction between class B and C is scrapped. In effect this has already happened due to the changes introduced with the cannabis debacle when the penalties for dealing class C drugs were brought into line with those for class B, only a minor difference in the penalties for possession remains between classes B and C.

4. Group Classification

By far the most interesting if strange proposal, this would have seen drugs grouped together by their properties:

Class I – Opiates include heroin
Class II – Cocaine and Crack
Class III – Hallucinogens – includes, LSD, magic mushrooms
Class IV – Amphetamines including methylamphetamine
Class V – Barbiturates
Class VI – Cannabis.
Class VII – Benzodiazepines including valium
Class VIII – Steroids.

Of course, the amusing thing about this grouping idea is that cannabis is there in a group all of it’s own.

5. Simple Harm Measurement System

If we make the assumption that prohibition is a form of effective control (which it isn’t) then it makes sense to base the penalties on a measure of harm and this is what Prof Nutt was working on and which ultimately led to his sacking as head of the ACMD. It should be simple really – the more harmful the drug, the more illegal it is, if only life were that simple! The big problem with this approach is that the regime a drug exists under greatly affects its potential to cause harm, so any harm caused by a drug is greatly increased by being prohibited, this factor was not taken into consideration by Prof Nutt’s scale of harm ranking, which still managed to put cannabis lower than alcohol.  So the other big problem Clarke was forced to address was what to do about the legal drugs – especially alcohol and tobacco which are not included in the Misuse of Drugs Act and clearly should be.

The creation of a system to assess the harmfulness of drugs on a more structured and transparent basis, as presented earlier in this paper could be extended to cover alcohol and tobacco but for comparative and messaging rather than control purposes.

But of course a system that openly penalises people for use of a drug which is rated lower than one which is legal would never stand critical analysis. Clarke put it this way:

6.11 This approach would allow for a more logically consistent approach to substance misuse. However most people would not want to see the drugs classification system as a mechanism for regulating legal substances such as alcohol and tobacco. If applied to legal as well as illegal substances, this would conflict with deeply embedded historical tradition and tolerance of consumption of a number of substances that alter mental functioning

That s truly stomach churning political logic. This “deeply embedded historical tradition” of alcohol and tobacco use is the stated reason for not criminalising the use of these two drugs elsewhere in the document; it is, of course, a load of rubbish. The suspicion remains that alcohol and tobacco weren’t included in the MoD act nor the UN Single Convention (which is the root cause of all this misery) simply because it was drafted by people who used alcohol and tobacco and didn’t consider them to be “drugs”. Cannabis, after all, also has a “deeply embedded historical tradition”, just not one that Mr Clarke and his ilk chose to recognise.

Anyway all this was dropped like a hot potato once Clarke was removed from his post as Home Secretary, it will be interesting to see if the new government dares to take it up again, if they do it will almost certainly open all the cans of worms they really don’t want opening.