SR - Drugs Flashcards
Morgan, W., Drugs in America: A Social History, 1800-1980 (1981)
7) In 19th C, long before drug use became topic of national debate, adverse image of the opium user was at hand - one that could easily transfer to users of other drugs and crystallize many social concerns. This image derived from foreign models - English, Chinese, etc. It combined ill hlth, social irresponsibility, and personality that was degraded through enslavement
1838, major med journal depicted the opium addict as a walking corpse, social outcast
20) Between 1840 and 1900, dozens of articles in med journals suggested cannabis for innumerable ailments, and it entered the pharmacopoeia in 1870. Seemed useful as an anticonvulsant and relaxant. Docs experimented w it widely.
Cannabis also became fashionable in treating increasing amount of insomnia reported after 1850s.
Cannabis became important in treating general nervous complaints.
Cannabis had its detractors and never won the wholehearted support of docs. They espcially disliked its unpredictability, which they ascribed to the drug rather than to the personalities of users.
Cannabis was a difficult substance to regulate into exact doses.
Variability meant that by last part of the century, other substances were replacing cannabis.
Early experts considered cannabis a narcotic, which implied the dangers of overdose and habit. It never fully escaped this classification.
Hallucinations and euphoria it produced in many enhanced these fears.
21) Assoc of cannabis as aphrodisiac.
Most experts distinguished between hashish and other forms of cannabis, but the former gained a reputation for inducing violent and irrational behaviour that affected cannabis in general
1881 study, Kane held that habitual use of hashish caused physical and psychological ruin.
Much of the imagery derived from civilizations and groups of ppl that Americans considered decadent.
Idea that these drugs caused both personal and social ruin became well established.
Early users likened the psychic effects of cannabis to those of opium but with more positive feelings
Cannabis seemed to produce unusual and abnormal states of personality - e.g. (22) confusion
1857 commentator - Fears of similarity between someone w mania and someone using cannabis.
Like cocaine, cannabis seemed to have its medical uses, but none important enough to override its identification with irrationality, escapism, and mental disturbance
few social commentators at end of century thought abuse of cannabis likely, w decline in med use of cannabis products.
But experts thought that hashish in large and steady doses led to violence or insanity.
While cannabis itself was not apparently addictive, the psychic states it produced in susceptible minds cld be habit-forming.
Did not seem a social threat. Like cocaine, however, its public image was ambiguous and easily became negative
25) even before warnings about addiction began in the 1870s, many commentators thought hypodermic medication overused
28) By the 1880s, more and more sources warned about drug misuse
30) impression of rapid increase in num of addicts, esp to opium, early 20th C
31) lack of precise info, increasing anxiety
31) Fear that drug use undermined basic American values
37) association of Chinese with opium
43) Opium addict late 19th C = middle-class, genteel in taste and demeanor.
After 1900, typical case likelyt o be male, young, and a user by choice rather than accident or mistake
fear that drugs were eroding the talents of social groups especially important to progress
49) Reliance on drugs = mark of ‘backward’ peoples and those who had became decadent
50) threat to competitive work ethic
62) stereotypes to which the public responded were set in 19th C - remained fairly constant and had a long life
71) cannabis went through cycle of appeal and favour. Gained some importance as a tranquilizer
86) 50 yrs of elaborate treatments failed. Theorists and practitioners thus increasingly relied on psychology to explain why so many ppl were unable to attain permanent abstinence once their bodies drug-free. Now seemed that some intangible, psychological factors were at work
88) temperance movement
89) opium appearing less bad than alcohol - caused less violence/ public disorder
90) stream of comparison and comment turned against opiates because they seemed more enslaving, and their effects more debilitating and passive. Alcohol appeared more suited than opiates to the American experience. Alcohol represented external action, competition, manliness and strength. Opiates appeared defeatists, introspective, unnatural.
Always spokesmen to oppose prohibition.
Opoates had no such constituency except among addicts and some docs.
By the time prohibition became a national issue, drug use and addiction seemed as dangerous to soc as alcohol counterproductive, enervating, irrational
117) 1916 illicit market in most cities. Cure seemed impossible, actual prohibition unlikely. Perhaps only approach was to combine everything: institutional care for the willing addict, ostracism for the wilful, destruction of the sources of supply; propaganda and education to prevent future addiction,a nd the hope of an as yet undiscovered panacea through research
120) many fronts of federal war against drugs
127) Strong emphasis on drug addict as criminal in media because this was what interested the public
128) other suspect groups e.g. Jazz musicians figured int he stereotype of drug users in the 1920s and 30s
groups that shaped images of drug use in interwar period were divorced from conduct that society accepted or praised
129) Both policeman and scholar began to see the drug user as an abnormal personality w character defects that drug use seemed to control
131) psychological model stressed that drug experience provided a sense of normality and fulfilment to ppl who felt inadequate
Belief that criminal types likely to become addicts
137) enforcement enjoyed public and political support and benefitted from the medical profession’s general hostility or indifference toward drug users
Major exception = cannabis. Remained in the US Pharmacopoeia from 1850 to 1942 and was in numerous household remedies.
cannabis escaped inclusion in the Harrison Act. Pharma and drug industries objected
138) Bc of its effects on personality and assocs w certain kinds of ppl, mj became an easy target for regulation.
Cannabis had never won a firm identification in the puoblic mind as a useful med. Chiefly ident w suspect marginal groups e.g. artists and intellectuals in the 19th C, and jazz musicians, bohemians and petty criminals in the 20th.
Most commentators, beginning in the 19th C, incorrectly classed cannabis with narcotics and hallucinogens.
Potent hashish preparations thus received more notoriety than did the mild tinctures used in med practice.
Mj seemed another link in a chain that began a hundred yrs earlier in lurid reports of hashish effects from travellers to the Near East and writings of Ludlow.
By the 1930s, the public tended to class together all drugs whose effects altered the user’s observable personality or seemed to impair social functioning and productivity.
Mj (he calls it Marihuana) increasing concern from the 1930s
Connections with insidious habits of minorities e.g. Mexicans, (139) blacks
Mj became ident w violence and unpredictable behav
140) above all mj threatening bc its effects unpredictable and it produced an artificial personality detrimental to society and the user - an old theme in the drug debate.
Concern about mj’s effects on young ppl became chief focus of the discussion. Hedonist, sex-possessed adolescents.
Mj grew nearly everywhere - fears of it spreading, becoming uncontrollable
141) Mj Tax Act 1937
JAMA skepticism about need for federal regulation - docs shld have right to prescribe w/o taxes or keeping more records
142) 1940s researchers - not addictive or linked to insanity, but could cause dependence in some personality types and release some inhibitions
143) strong federal control late 1930s
145) rise in heroin use 1950s
Nature of users influential in forming or solidifying public attitudes. New addicts predom black, young males from urban ghettos. Supposedly stole to finance their habits.
Drug use appeared to reflect growing rebelliousness among young ppl, esp in cities, but potentially everywhere
146) drug user from abnormal to normal. Spreading to middle-class
LaGuardian Report - mj’s dangers in general greatly exaggerated. Did not change minds. JAMA rejected as unscientific
147) increased regulation
157) ambivalent reactions in the public towards ‘new’ drugs. Opinion might sympathize with the harried housewife and mother who (158) took barbiturates to sleep, amphetamines to ‘get going’, tranquilizers to ‘cope’ with the day’s activities
159) 1960s - images of irrationality and violence relating to mj from the 1930s were still strong. But also fears it led to heroin use. Domino effect.
Public did not differentiate much in the effects of various drugs and tended to lump together the experiences they produced. Widespread concern remained about the long-term social effects of mj smoking. ppl feared loss of individualism, production, efficiency, social responsibility
National Commission on Mj and Drug Abuse noted how much of antidrug consensus remained in relation to mj
Dramatic increase of mj use 1960s and 70s.
160) Mj use gained momentum through identification with an individualism based on desire for pleasure and self-exploration rather than on accepting and fulfilling reigning ideals.
Reinforced older generation’s bewilderment and hostility.
Idea that entire system of American values seemed on the wane
161) rise in use of mj meant support for law enforcement retained strength. Police forces had to use selective enforcement, leading to profiling - respectable users not likely to face prosecution
162) impossibility of effective enforcement leading to idea of decriminalization
163) LSD. Use in med circles e.g. psychologist Timothy Leary. But as with so many drugs in the past, LSD moved beyond the med community’s control
164) affluent ppl as likely to use mj, cocaine etc, but young users remained chief targets of public concern.
Pro-drug assoc w anti-war movements, so drug use seen as unpatriotic.
Above all, popular mind assoc drugs with the counter-culture that openly flouted the nation’s history, ambitions and alleged ideals.
165) image of the hippy - representing passivity, and unproductivity that so many ppl still equated w drugs
shift to care orientation
166) public slowly began to make distinctions about effects of drugs, especially mj. Division between soft and hard drugs
167) occasional use e.g. of mj generally developed as an acceptable norm among those so inclined, while compulsive or habitual use became increasingly suspect.
Consensus against other more ‘dangerous’ drugs remained strong
Matthews, P., Cannabis Culture: A journey through disputed territory (1999)
ALSO PRIMARY SOURCE
40% young ppl in Britain have tried pot
2) late 1960s was a well-defined ‘underground’ culture w dope as badge of identity - hippies, Rastas.
Illegal drugs consumer culture - dangers + lack of quality control meaning ppl get more well-informed
19) my first motive for smoking was same as any English public schoolboy’s before or since: quest for cool
20) over the last half-century cannabis has moved into the British mainstream, from two originally separate groups of user: college students and the West Indian immigrants who the yellow press of the 1950s saw as threatening to engulf Britain w reefer
21) British weed smokers now talk like Jamaicans - spliff and ganga have entered the language
24) punk and the new (25) consensus - uniting the Clash, the Socialist Workers Party etc - that joint-smoking hippies were passive, pathetic and boring.
Dope stopped being a mark of fashion.
Legalize Cannabis Campaign got going 1978
‘straight’ ppl starting to take cannabis - discovered them myself from late 1970s
26) Drug use spreading into ‘new townships’ e.g. Slough
1960s, cannabis becoming part of way of life of the established criminal class
30) Jail helped create the new cannabis culture.
It is the well-off who are the biggest drug users - Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence stats.
31) Rising class - prosperous professionals - are most likely to use drugs when young - predominantly cannabis
31-2) 2nd December 1998 drugs raid on Back Beat Club
42) work of Exodus, community group, spreading cannabis seeds, looking to build community centre
45) docs as suggesting medicinal cannabis - ‘all up for it’
47) Med cannabis available under Dutch equivalent of NHS - in which insurance companies refund the cost of patients’ supplies.
Now it’s in the UK rather than liberal Holland that med researchers are soon going to evaluate cannabis
48) First clinical trials will concentrate on two of the best-attested applications, in relieving chronic pain and the symptoms of MS
Prof Gabriel Nahas - med use is a scandal and a hoax
Peter Stoker of the National Drugs Prevention Alliance - ‘Medi-Pot scam’ perpetrated in order to give credibility to the legalization lobby.
The reputation of cannabis partly rests on word-of-mouth among patients, backed up by the self-help groups like the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics and, as in Cicely’s case, supported by a developing consensus among docs.
One reason for their interest = the discovery of how cannabis works.
I’ve been advised to smoke pot by a doctor.
49) med effectiveness of cannabis = a message that docs were increasingly prepared to listen to during the 1990s. 1997 Separate reports published by BMA and US National Institutes of Hlth
1998 HoL comte.
Professor Leslie Iverson, the scientific advisor to the committee and Visiting Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford Uni, told me that the biggest impression had been made by the personal testimony of MS patients. This of course was anecdotal evd rather than hard science; however, it was given weight by a scientific paper documenting the claims made by 112 cannabis-smoking MS patients, which concluded in favour of taking these claims seriously and investigating them further.
Several of the stories forwarded to Lords’ comte carried extra emotional charge because they took the form of handwritten letters. One described growing three cannabis plants in the greenhouse among the tomatoes and making the dried leaves into shortbread
50) another one - £30 for a piece as long (mainly) as my little finger and half the thickness (ACT’s LETTER)
VERY FACT OF THE HOL RECOMMENDATION WILL HAVE HAD AN IMPACT. MY SOLICITOR TOLD ME THAT HIS PARENTS-IN-LAW ARE CONSTANTLY AT ODDS OVER THE ISSUE. HIS MOTHER-IN-LAW WOULD LIKE TO SMOKE POT TO RELIEVE THE SYMPTOMS OF HER MS, BUT HER CONSERVATIVELY-MINDED HUSBAND OBJECTS. ‘NOW AT LEAST SHE CAN QUOTE THE HOUSE OF LORDS AS BEING ON HER SIDE,’ SAID MY SOLICITOR, WHO IS PROFESSIONALLY INCLINED TO BE IMPRESSED BY HOUSE OF LORDS RULINGS. SIMILARLY, CICELY NOW HAS A DEFENCE IF HER MOTHER DISCOVERS HER PUFFING ON A JOINT.
In Britain, med cannabis issue dovetails w ppl’s disinclilnation to get v worked up about this particular drug of abuse.
51) Overlap between med and recreational use. Bc of experience from recrational use, for a novel treatment, cannabis has a flying start; people are receptive in a way that they surely wouldn’t be if, say, crack cocaine started being touted as a cure-all.
Lobbying group each side of the Atlantic; both organizations are called the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics (ACT). British version was founded by MS patient living in Leeds, who took the pseudonym Clare Hodges to protect her two young children. She describes the ACT as ‘a loose affiliation of patients, doctors and politicians’, inspired and helped by the longer-established organization based in Washington, DC. Hodges told the House of Lords that when she first discussed cannabis with her doctors they had been sympathetic but not well informed: ‘they all said it couldn’t do me much harm in moderate doses and was probably safer than many of the meds that they could prescribe.’ HoL backed the ACT’s objective of making cannabis available immediately on a doc’s prescription. Probably helped that Hodges spelt out she was not campaigning for general legalization: ‘Even if cannabis were legalized we wld still be campaigning, as we think seriously ill ppl should get their med from their doc and not have to provide it for themselves.’
Colin Davies - (52) spinal injury.
53) he can halve his intake of pills if he smokes four joints a day.
June 1998 Colin Davies Manchester Crown Court. Prosecution told the jury that having taken an oath to give a true verdict according to the law, they had a duty to return a Guilty verdict. After judge had explained that a defendant might be justified in breaking the law to avoid death or some othe rextreme threat, jury declared Colin Not Guilty. Expert witness at the trial, Matthew Atha of the Independent Drugs Monitoring Unit, declared that the verdict wld bring closer the day when cannabis for med purposes wld be legalized.
After resulting publicity, Colin was contacted by two (53) activists w MS from Edinburgh and Huddersfield, West Yorkshire respectively. Soon afterwards the three of them publicly launched the Med Mj Co-op, run from Colin’s flat. Inspired by American buyers’ clubs
55) In America the views of older ppl were formed in the 1940s and 50s and they’re still too influenced by the press and movie campaigns of that era to risk a bout of reefer madness
56) Geoffrey Guy and HoL - lords took a shine to the young med entrepreneur and in their published report they ‘warmly welcomed’ his initiative
57) TOLD GUY THAT MY WORKING TITLE WAS ‘DOPE’. A CLOUS DID BRIEFLY PASS ACROSS HIS GOOD-NATURED FEATURES, AND LATER HIS PR PEOPLE WROTE EXPRESSING CONCERN THAT THERE SHOULD BE ANY BLURRING OF THE ISSUES OF LEGALIZING ‘MEDICAL’ AND ‘RECREATIONAL’ CANNABIS
Guy, after only a year, has been faced with the task of persuading the Home Office and the Medicine Control Agency to accept (58) him, in effect, to run Britain’s medical cannabis programme. Result - he was firing on all cylinders. We talked about hashish in Indian and Arab culture…. etc
Guy has a good CV for the job he’s invented (HE DID NOT INVENT IT - IDEA OF ACT??)
Guy’s background
59) Guy - Medicines are evaluated according to the criteria of quality, safety and efficacy. ‘And it’s important to understand that it’s in that order of importance’
‘If you’re unable to make your product consistently, even if it’s safe and effective it won’t be approved. After all, not all drugs are safe: take steroids or cytotoxic drugs, for example. That’s why synthetic chemicals deemed to be good starting points, not only bc you can get patents, but because you can test your quality.
Guy - Plant extracts were frowned on quite heavily in the late 70s and 80s. most Anglo-Saxons were saying ‘typical French’ - but things are changing now
The new climate of the 1990s allowed Guy to devel a plant med for eczema.
It was at a conference at the Royal Pharma Soc in (60) 1997 that parachuted Guy into the new area of medical cannabis.
British Govt continues to smile on Geoffrey Guy. His programme means that officials can go on opposing legalization without appearing heartless in the face of demands of MS patients and other campaigners for medical cannabis.
Guy’s project is helpful to med mj around the world. Until now, especially in America, campaigners have been called irresponsible in asking for a treatment that hasn’t been clinically proven; yet govts have placed severe restrictions on anyone wishing to make an illegal drug the subject of clinical trials. Guy’s work promises to break the log-jam.
Conference organized by Release and the American Lindesmith Centre, which is funded and supported by Soros.
61) Guy’s speech w emph on novel delivery systems like inhalers, patches or suppositories, and a generous tribute to the Home Office, was rather coolly received.
He’s also a kind of bridge-builder between cannabis users and the world of science: and among pharmacologists, biochemists, neurologists, cannabis is currently a hot subject
62) whatever the fluctuations in public opinion, I’d guess that there is a bedrock of support for pot for MS patients, and equally solid opposition to pot for schoolchildren
65) especially since the rows surrounding attempts to introduce genetically modified foods in Britain, people have become aware of the limits of scientific neutrality
As Guy told the House of Lords inquiry - until v recently, most research into cannabis has been funded primarily to get evd against its use, medical or otherwise.
Funding comes from the US National Institute on Drug Abuse and the effect of its ‘politically motivated research’ has, he said, been to ‘seed misinformation into the med and lay literature’
67) Nahas has been demonized by legalization activists e.g. Dana Beal in Emperor Wears No Clothes
WHO report, Cannabis: a health perspective and research agenda. no evd that cannabis adversely affects human fertility or causes chromasomal or genetic damage.
Dr Nahas - our side is losing
72) researchers’ cannabis international society formed and since 1991 has met every year
73) Guy - ‘the receptor theory has moved cannabis on from being polarized between paranoid fanatics and fervent believers’
74) drug companies are now involved, coming up with new synthetic cannabinoids as well as antagonists to block them
76) clue to Nahas’s anger at ‘the biggest hoax perpetrated on the scientific community’ is that the new consensus allows doctors to see mj as a source of medicines
78) Nahas accused me of being ‘a victim of media brainwashing.’
107) Herer = chief guru of the ‘hempists’ - see the cannabis plant as the world’s most important fuel, food and fibre crop
117) Body Shop big launch of 1998 was skin moisturizers based on hemp oil, w leaflects in shops cleverly headed ‘Hemp - the Great Smear Campaign’. Repeated Herer’s chief theme: ‘Hemp played a vital role in world commerce for over 8000 yrs up until the 1930s when a number of US-based industries competed by allegedly launching a smear campaign linking ‘industrial grade’ hemp to the drug mj
118) St-Pierre of the NORML foundation told me that defence attorneys in mj cases these days like to go to court in suits made of the finest hemp fabric - ‘Why ladies and gentlemen, my client isn’t guilty of growing anything that I wouldn’t wear myself’
119) the Emperor Wears No Clothes = ‘bible of the hemp movement’ (first coined by High Times magazine)
127) Hempists sometimes sound like religious believers
129) hemp revival, but it is in early days
144) Guy emphasizing his respectability with a white coat and an expression of intense almost pained seriousness
146) Guy’s written submission to HoL comte
157) Cannabis Cup
185) In Britain it seems to be conventionally agreed among many law enforcement officers that pot isn’t a real crime
186) Conspiracies
properly funded, professionally organized cannabis legalization campaign is not part of the British polit landscape.
Regent’s Park, 5 Sept 1998 - Soros paid for conference on ‘Regulating Cannabis’, capitalizing on a widespread feeling that change was at last in sight.
187) mood less upbeat than the words of the key speakers - experiences of past disappointments
201) 2 MPs supporting decrimnaliation - Chris Davies, Paul Flynn
Davies says he keeps as battle honours the mound of Labour literature from the by-election campaign - ‘Top cop says Davies is wrong’, ‘Lib Dems go to pot’, ‘Chris Davies - high on tax and soft on drugs’
202) London drug Czar, Commander Andy Hayman - hard stance
203) No such thing as a safe drug
210) Exodus launch legalization campaign under name CANABIS
218) According to Linda Hendry of the Scottish Legalize Cannabis Campaign, the police are prepared to threaten loss of contact with your child to get you to inform on your dealer in Orkney
219) got the lawyers mixed up in David’s case - ‘defence counsel’ who saved David from prison had actually been the barrister from the Crown Prosecution Service
222) We need to evolve our cannabis culture, not repress it
Goode, The Marijuana Smokers (1970)
29) Public stereotypes change more slowly than that whichis being stereotyped. Oft an activity or group will never have its image catch up with itself.
These images and stereotypes must be thought of as a kind of reality. Fact they are believed makes great deal of difference.
Image of the mj user in the 1930s was not v different from that of the narcotics addict. Term ‘addict’ as applied to the mj smoker was the rule
30) most popular stereotype = hippie. Unkempt, unemployed, politically radical, promiscuous. This image is gradually being replaced by one almost as absurd - mj user no different from the rest of us
Fraser, valentine, Substance and Substitution: Methadone Subjects in Liberal Socieities (2008)
1) Book about methadone, methadone maintenance treatment (MMT)
2) Illicit drug use occupies a uniquely stigmatised position in contemporary society
32) following Barad, representation and reality are not straightforwardly separable
38) Truism in modern cultural studies that cultural representations such as newspaper texts are neither able to guarantee meaning (the ways in which they are interpreted by readers) nor be entirely ‘polysemous’ (open to any kind of meaning making)
Barad - linguistic tuen has tended to position materiality as the product of discourse (largely figurd as one-way process). Cultural studies has tended to focus on the production of meaning and experience for individuals and groups through culture, understanding materiality as either prior to, or the effect of, these moments of meaning making
Barad - meaning-making = the product of the intra-action between texts, readers and material conditions, and meaning,rather than the effect of pre-constituted agents -text and reader - is understood as highly contingent phenomenon constituted by other highly contingent phenomena. Model shifts focus from a choice between two agents (txt and reader) to the constitution of all agents (including materiality) and their attributes in the moment of reading. All readings depend in part on the phenomenon of the text
40-1) metaphor
42) gender hierarchy metaphor.
For some feminists, metaphor is not only potentially subversive, it is inherently so.
Where Enlightenment thinking - reason, univocality, linearity and the concrete - dominates, metaphor, in its fluidity, suggestiveness and liminality necessarily occupies an oppositional domain (Janusz, 1994)
Altman - ‘what begins as an interesting analogy spills over into a proposition about how something “is”. This blurring is the source of a tremendous discursive power
Neil Smith - part of the function of metaphor is to establish the object as unknown and the phenomenon being used as the metaphor as self-evident: ‘to the extent that the metaphor continually appeals to some other assumed reality as known, it systematically disguises the need to investigate the known’
literal and (43) metaphorical cannot be separated
Le Doeuff - impossibility of operating entirely in the rational, and more specifically, of the places within the text where there is something ‘the system itself cannot justify, but which is nevertheless needed for its proper working’
metaphor is always already produced through the process of reading. Agency produced within metaphor
44) examination of metaphors used in references to methadone in NYT, Times and Sydney Morning Herald during 2004 and 2005.
Consistent absence of explanatory detail accompanying these references suggests authors take for granted reader familiarity w methadone and its implications
worn-out metaphor of addiction presents drug user as passive, less than fully fledged liberal subject.
Lenson - Through metaphorical figuration of regular drug use as a kidn of surrender to (and of) powers of speech, the addict is changed from subject to object.
Significant implications for the materiality of treatment programs such as methadone treatment - e.g. pharmacotherapy clients are oft excluded as stakeholders from policy development around treatment provision.
Military, policing and pugilistic metaphors
Methadone as silver bullet
(47) portrays in positive terms
49) handcuff/ stranglehold metaphores.
Pugilistic metaphors vary in how they position methadone, but all present addiction as a battleground, as necessarily involving violent struggle.
In these images, the stakes for those involved are extremely high, and the possibility of peaceable co-existence with addiction is obscured
51) metaphors condensing several phenomena popularly associated with drugs: emotional vulnerability, naivety, entrapment.
52) all metaphors also construct meanings for the objects that surround them
54) aligning of notions of addiction with femininity
55) Both in the particular ways in which methadone is metaphorised in the public realm, and in the sense in which methadone itself operated as a metaphor for heroin, it occupies a doubly problematic relation to mainstream liberal values
Methadone is both like heroin and not like heroin. Like heroin - dangerous. Not like it - inauthentic
56) There is no methadone except that which is represented, and the differing ways in which methadone is represented produce not different ‘aspects’ of methadone, rather, different ‘methadones’.
Matter such as methadone is not seen in terms of a priori attributes, rather as a phenomenon produced in specific intra-actions with other phenomena, including particular media accounts.
Media accounts matter bc they are profoundly implicated in methadone’s material becoming, and this constitutes their ethical action.
It is the spectre of ‘public opinion’ (partly revealed, it is oft assumed, through press coverage) that politicians, legislators, policymakers and service providers regularly cite in formulating the legal and material conditions for harm-reduction strategies such as methadone provision.
policy role - perhaps stop using terms such as ‘replacement’ - tend to invoke the inauthentic. Different ways of naming and framing methadone will bear on how it is represented elsewhere - indeed, this reframing will remake methadone in its materiality
Fraser, valentine - To look at
Critical ethnographic studies of illicit drugs:
- Bourgois, 1995
- Maher, 1997, 2002
Moore, 1992, 2004
Barad - ‘posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter’
Altman - how not to do things with metaphors we live by
Derrida (1993), the rhetoric of drugs: an interview. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
Derrida (1974), White mythology: Metaphor in the text of philosophy
Lenson (1995), On Drugs
Ricoeur (1978), The rule of metaphor - as figure, metaphor constitutes a displacement and an extension of the meaning of words; its explanation is grounded in a theory of substitution.
Metaphor ‘is’ signifies both ‘is not’ and ‘is like’.
Treloar and Fraser 2007, Public opinion on NSPs: Avoiding assumptions for policy and practice, Drug and Alcohol Review
Coomber, R. (ed.), The Control of Drugs and Drugs Users Reason or Reaction? (1998)
LART, CH4:
55) In period between the Rolleston report and the second Brain report, the definition of addiction changed from an individual dysfunction of the body, to a socially infectious condition of the mind.
Role of surveillance in the construction of the objects of discourse: Home Office Index served as form of surveillance which helped construct addiction, by the 1960s, as existing in the social body.
Also w the construction of the psyche, addiction was reconstructed in the mind, not the body, of the addict.
Post-war psychiatry’s claim to speak the truth on the mind,
and its claim to the neuroses, meant that psychiatrists became the authorised speakers on addiction
19th C, acc to Smart, addict became worse than useless mem of society. Addict is a problem because they are a waste of resources
Here I argue that in the 1960s, the addict was seen as a single manifestation of contagion, and hence of a ‘menace to the community’ and that this is a re-conceptualization of public hlth itself, and of drug use as a public hlth issue
Shift of drug use during 19th C from habit to addiction - pathology
60) Brain Comte - GPs creating addiction through over-prescription
Was from the medical profession’s new construction of the disease of addiction that the public hlth measures of specialist Clinics, notification and controlled prescribing emerged
66) Looking at British drugs policy through the lens of an analysis of med power/ knowledge moves the debate on from a dichotomy between treatment and control
Murji, Ch5:
dominant, conventional approach has seen the media as a key force in the demonisation and marginalisation of drug users - lurid, hysterical images and provider of un-critical platform from which politicians and other moral entrepreneurs are able to launch and wage drug ‘wars’.
Media seen to mis-rep drugs.
Followers of this broad line of argument see their task as being to ‘debunk’ media misreps, sometimes by recourse to proposition media reaction constitutes moral panic.
Media studies
effects theories - concentrate on (70) deployment of media messages and that these have real consequences or effects.
Bc of its media-centricity, role of the audience is oft left largely unexamined.
In contrast, alternative approach in media studies has stressed ability of audiences to filter, interpret, de-construct and even re-construct media messages into something that can be very different from any intention that the producers may have had (Morley, 1995)
This = laissez faire or commercial model.
Has been much less prominent with regard to drugs.
I do not demur fromt he view that media reps are problematic and may be implicated in ‘panicky’ responses from officialdom
(71) British death media attention to people dying of ecstasy in 1990s, e.g. Leah Betts on 18th bday, Sun front page - ‘Don’t become another Leah’.
Elements of the media treated the death of Leah Betts and the other cases as symptoms of a general social malaise.
Daily Express - death of Leah revealed that drugs were present as a ‘rotten core at the heart of middle England’
72) New statesman article - media reaction to case of Leah Betts signalled ‘we are in the midst of a moral panic’
Sharkey, Guardian article:
- Media ‘horror stories’ about ecstasy pre-dated the death of Leah Betts. Her case merely provided a hook or peg on which the hang those stories
- Exists a largely manufactured consensus that drugs are evil, those who sell them are ‘monsters’, those who take them are ‘victims’
- Corrosive effect of this type of media coverage is such that ‘even factual TV programmes now take their editorial lead from such reporting’
- Risk of death from ecstasy greatly exaggerated
73) The debunking approach can sometimes include a complaint about ‘the media’ itself, which is presented as going through periodic, inevitable and predictable phases of reaction in which crude stereotypes will be perpetuated.
but the reaction being objected to obvs represents only some parts and sections of the media
Counter-reaction can contain an exaggerated tendency to see media coverage as hysterical and promoting anti-drugs ‘consensus’ even when the existence of counter-reaction must signal, at v least, a crack in any widespread consensus
Reaction and counter-reaction can oft appear to be merely diff sides of same coin, or to ‘mirror’ one another. Elements that are problematic in media reaction are no less problematic when they occur in counter-reaction.
Dorn - both supporters and opponents of cannabis legalisation subscribed to a common ‘demonic’ image of other drugs such as heroin
Dorn and Murji - drug ‘warriors’ and ‘legalisers’ display and share an equal passion in hyping up the nature (or ‘horribleness’) of the drug market.
Once things can be seen to have got ‘so bad’, it enables both sides to make their case that either even more and tougher enforcement is required, or that legalisation is the only option left
74) Ways in which reaction and counter reaction mirror one another:
1. view of social consensus. Media reaction assumes there is a moral or social consensus which is under threat or breaking down. increased drug use by young ppl is presented as a symptom of this decline, or as a contributory or principal cause of social decay. For counter-reactors there is consensus but it is one manufactured by the media and other interested parties. Image presented is one of a monolithic control culture which sees the world in terms of binary opposition of good versus evil. Consensus simply assumed to exist. One-dimensional views
2. simple messages. Counter-reaction can end up effectively substituting one over simple message for another. Can hardly be a coincidence that both types of perspective are promoted in newspapers and other media, since they make equal use of simplification and lay claim to certainty. Exemplify ‘sound bite culture’ (Schlesinger & Tumber, 1994)
3. Strong view of media effects. Either pop culture promotes drug use/ is assoc w it, or over the top media coverage promotes false social consensus marginalising users
75) 4. Both sides can see drug users as ‘victims’ at mercy of drug sellers
5. parents treated as ciphers - grief used to promote message about drugs, or parents are virtually ‘dupes’ being used by media to promote an ideologically loaded message
6. both perspectives see drug use as prolific
7. Both perspectives cana lso be seen to have implicit conception of the ‘audience’ that is being addressed, constructed and re-constructed in media discourse. Echo (1979) saw ‘closed texts’ as ones that envisage an average addressee and aim to arouse a particular response. This is more likely to be successful if the text can appeal to an existing ‘common frame’ of which the audience has already been ‘made fond’.
media reaction, favouring the individualising ‘human interest’ approach to private troubles, and counter-reaction, with its use of exposé-style journalism, are forms of closed texts that are accustomed to constituting their audiences in a particular frame of reference
Common problem with effects models - need to make allowance for the probability that audiences, because they remain regular readers and viewers, may also have got used to ‘seeing’ and constructing themselves within such a framework. Dynamic and reflexive relationship or inter-play between media and audience.
76) McRobbie & Thornton (1995), Moral panics have become the way in which daily events are brought to the attention of the public
77) to consider all media hype ‘moral panic’ makes little allowance for the possibility that audiences may well recognise there is more than an element of commercial hype in much of this type of coverage.
Moral panic as party of ‘promotional logic’ which business practice can play upon.
Media portrayals not necess widely shared
Over-use of phrase ‘moral panic’
Critics and counter-reactors asserting that the media over-reacts (78) imply that news coverage is, or should be, governed y quasi-actuarialism
79) The media and powerful groups are sometimes forced to follow rather than lead public opinion
80) news values shape and construct what becomes the news
Michael Keith (1992) has written about the ways in which academic writing masks its own rhetoric chiefly through the use of a dispassionate tone and style
Hysteria and emotion are taken as the hall marks of that which is to be debunked and this is best done with a ‘cool’, dispassionate and logical tone.
As Sparks points out, however, reason is not actually the opposite of emotion.
Rationality’s key rhetorical role
81) The use of reason seeks to artificially disqualify emotion.
Have tended to over-stress similarities between reaction and counter-reaction
At risk of overstating the case, it is probs true that drug scares and the most extreme forms of coverage are likely to be found in the mass market tabloid newspapers while the more ‘reasoned’ counter-reactions are to be found in broad sheet quality newspapers
82) Presence of political conservatism apparently makes it more acceptable to talk ‘tough’ about drugs than to appear ‘soft’.
Recent example is the extensive coverage given to a Labour party shadow minister who called for a fresh look at the laws on cannabis. Response to even this modest proposal was a howl of protest by the media which eventually led the politician to apologise and retract.
Hence, more likely that ‘alternative’ views get much less time and space in the media than ‘mainstream’ ones
de Certau’s distinction between the strategies of the powerful and the tactics of the weak.
Ultimately the problem with both reaction and counter-reaction is that they construct a terrain in which each reader and viewer is invited to position as for one side and against the other
183) Grinspoon and Bakalar:
185) Coca-Cola first concocted 1886 by a Georgia pharmacist. Coca-Cola company founded in 1892 and throughout the 1890s Coca-Cola advertised as a headache remedy and stimulant as well as enjoyable drink. in 1903 cocaine extract was removed from Coca-Cola and replaced with caffeine.
188) From 1950 to the mid-1960, psychedelic drugs - esp LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin - were used extensively in experimental psychiatry.
Also used extensively in psychotherapy.
More than a thousand clinical papers were published discussing forty thousand patients.
Beginning in the mid-1960s, with the increase of illicit use, it became difficult to obtain the drugs or get funding for research, and professional interest declined.
Now growing interest in therapeutic potential of this class of drugs
192) Experiment of providing a psychadelic experience for the dying
204) If any other med had shown similar promise, public and professional interest would be intense. But the govt, in its zeal to prosecute the War on Drugs, has been doing everything it can to reduce that interest and prevent the fulfillment of marihuana’s promise
To see from Coomber
Reinarman and Levine (1989), ‘the crack attack’, in Best, Images of Issues
Morley (1995)
Bean (1993), Cocaine and Crack
Nicholas Dorn (1980), ‘The Conservatism of the Cannabis debate’, in National Deviancy Conference (ed.) Permissiveness and Control, London:Macmillan
Dorn and Murji, Drug Prevention, London: Croom Helm
Dorn and Murji, review of Clutterbuck’s Terrorism, Drugs and Crime in Europe after 1992. Review appeared in the International Journal on Drug Policy in 1992
Schlesinger & Tumber, 1994, Reporting Crime, Oxford: Clarendon
Eco (1979), the role of the reader
Sumner and Sandberg, ‘The Press censure of dissident minorities’, in Sumner ed, Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice - jst for how to analyse news?
Morley (1995), ‘theories of consumption in media studies’, in Miller (ed), Acknowledging consumption
Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond
55-6) Rise of investigations into therapeutic potential of LSD. Docs’ examinations
57) LSD the talk of the town in Hollywood and Beverly Hills in late 1950s. Movie starts.
Cary Grant - LSD therapy a success. Became a zealous missionary for LSD
Ppl from all walks of life echoed Grant’s plaudits for the drug.
Psychiatrists who practiced LSD therapy were inundated with inquirites
61) research work of young psychiatrists
68) Kuhn, structure of scientific revolutions, scientists moulding data to prevailing scientific paradigm.
Osmond pleaded w his fellow researchers not to dismiss something that struck them as unusual or different simply became transcends those fashionable ruts of thinking that we dignify by calling logic and reason
70) When it came time to lay down their hand, the med establishment and media both ‘mimicked’ the line that for yrs had been secretly promoted by the CIA and military - hallucinogenic drugs extremely dangerous because they drove ppl insane, and all this talk about creativity and personal growth was just a lot of hocus pocus
141) Cultural rebellion fuelled by LSD
150) many said unsupervised use of LSD for nonmed purposes can only lead to trajic results
159) Religious overtones
180-1) Celebrities e.g. Beatles taking LSD
183) Acid subsulture in mid- and late-1960s. Those who got heavily into tripping oft subscribed to mythology of ego death
Mills, J., Cannabis Nation: Control and Consumption in Britain, 1928-2008 (2012)
1) was it safe to assume that the century of concerted action on cannabis had been one of sensible decisions made for sound reasons that had resulted in a coherent and well-thought-out approach to controlling the drug, that no wise government could contemplate improving upon?
7) flurry of interest in British medical circles about the therapeutic potential of synhexl, or synthetic cannabis, early on in the period of research into antibiotics sparked by the wartime development of penicillin. However, events at the United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organization (WHO) were to kill off any chance of a revival of therapeutic applications of substances based on the plant in the 1950s.
A determined campaign against cannabis was waged by the WHO and the UN Secretariat in this period which was to ensure that little doubt was left in the mind of medical experts and drugs bureaucrats that it was a useless and dangerous material.
8) 1960s - While cannabis consumers found their voice in legal and policy circles in this period it is important to understand that it was a particular type of consumer that chose to speak up, one for whom use of the drug was a political gesture. Not all users shared their commitments
9) By the late 1990s there were more cannabis consumers than ever before in the UK, and greater numbers of them finding themselves in trouble with the police than had previously been the case. This despite attempts to focus enforcement agencies on other drugs under the Conservative Government of the period 1979–97.
29) the Second World War did see a brief revival of scientific interest in the therapeutic potential of cannabis. The Lancet announced in 1940 that ‘we may find ourselves in the position of having demonstrated that there is a substance that possesses all the virtues of the forbidden fruit and none of its calamitous after-effects’. It referred to studies by Walton and Bromberg, published in the United States, which argued that cannabis was not a habit-forming drug.
32) Cannabis meds omitted from the British Pharmacopoeia in 1932
Cannabis medicines appeared outdated and a throwback to the nineteenth century when compared with the new synthetic products of the age
the medical press may well have been part of the story of how this happened. The drug was most frequently mentioned there in reports from the colonial authorities in Egypt where it was dismissed as a crude and dangerous intoxicant. This would have discouraged practitioners and scientists from considering the therapeutic deployment of the drug
disappointment by 1945 of those working with (p.33) cannabis medicines suggests a final reason why they fell from favour in this period. The failure to isolate and extract the active agent in cannabis meant that substances prepared from it remained unreliable and unpredictable to work with.
Little recreational cannabis consumption in this period.
Even enforcement officials seem to have been little concerned about cannabis consumers, but they did come to monitor and prosecute them because the enforcement agencies were increasingly well briefed and organized to deal with drugs offences in general. This is explained by the establishment and rapid development of the Home Office Drugs Branch. Originally set up to implement laws relating to opiates and cocaine in the wake of the 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act, it added cannabis to its caseload after the 1925 Geneva Opium Convention.
Cannabis medicines remained legally available throughout this period and yet were little used. A revival of interest in the early 1940s seems to have been related to wartime needs stimulating research into drugs that had potential as painkillers and psychiatric therapeutics, but this revival only serves to draw attention to the practical obsolescence of cannabis medicines in the 1920s and 1930s
A media scare stoked by confused policing had provoked the Pharmaceutical Society into declaring cannabis to be a poison in the Pharmaceutical Journal in 1924,78 and for much of the 1930s reports from the British police chief in Egypt dominated references in the medical press to the drug, cementing the notion that it was a suspicious and a questionable substance rather than a viable therapeutic. These points of connection between the therapeutic and the recreational, and indeed between the approaches of enforcers and the ideas of medical scientists and practitioners, were to grow in succeeding decades.
60) The earliest British ideas about, and policies on, cannabis and its consumers originated in Asia and Africa. Circulating from the eighteenth century onwards, these ideas eventually stirred the Victorian imagination to the extent that cannabis was briefly heralded as a wonder drug, and writers waxed lyrical about a ‘sister of sleep’. At the same time colonial policies stoked outrage among moralists and missionaries who confused the drug with opium, and troubled Parliament to the extent that the IHDC was ordered as a twin to the Royal Commission on Opium
At the same time as the British chief of police in colonial Cairo was forcing cannabis prohibition into discussions in Geneva his contemporaries in India were breaking existing controls in order to export the drug to markets elsewhere in the Empire
the ideas and policies that emerged from colonial contexts which were related to cannabis often drew upon a wide range of agendas and were not always based on long and hard thinking about the drug
61) A change of policy in colonial Burma was based upon a desire to balance the government’s budget rather than any fresh attitude towards the drug. The vigorous approach to prohibition in Egypt of the 1930s was down to the creation of a new agency to enforce drugs laws there, and perhaps a need to give the ongoing British presence a veneer of respectability
83) Nowhere in the story of cannabis and the British is it clearer than in this account of the period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s that debates about the drug were often about many things other than cannabis itself. Newspaper stories and books talked about cannabis while articulating the acute racial fears and political tensions of a population disrupted by the upheavals of the Second World War and unsettled by the transformations of the 1950s.
Migrants arriving from Britain’s former colonies brought with them the habits of using the drug for recreational and therapeutic purposes that had been well documented by imperial administrators for over a century
They encountered Customs officials and police officers who had been primed since the 1920s by the activities of a zealous Drugs Branch at the Home Office to prevent them from indulging these habits in Britain. However, they also encountered a growing interest among local youngsters in what the new arrivals might have to offer.
113) at much the same time ideas about cannabis from abroad were circulating in British medical and scientific circles, and that it was in the international context of the United Nations that the UK’s controls on cannabis were being formulated.
On the one hand the UK’s experts could arrive at their own positions regardless of the international hubbub (p.114) about cannabis, and the Brain Committee’s clear conclusion that cannabis was not addictive stood in contrast to the contention voiced by the UN’s Secretariat that ‘cannabis drugs are addiction producing’
On the other hand British actors could act decisively to shape international decisions on cannabis that would affect the UK. The ambition of the WHO and the UN to impose a total prohibition on the use of cannabis in medicine was thwarted by the UK, even if this had less to do with any great belief in the drug’s therapeutic potential, and more to do with a concern about the political implications of transnational bodies like the WHO and the UN seeking to control domestic arrangements in countries where national governments had their own bodies and advisory groups to drive policy.
Bodies such as the Expert Committee on Habit-Forming Drugs at the WHO and the Secretariat at the United Nations were determined to assert the darkest picture possible of cannabis in this period and to force through the strictest possible control mechanisms.
The reasons that the UN and the WHO took such a dim view of cannabis are various. In the first place, the position of control advocates in key roles and on important committees in these organizations ensured that negative views of a whole range of substances were the starting position for international discussions throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Moreover, both the UN and the WHO were nascent bodies that were engaged in carving out positions for themselves in the post-war world. Their interest in cannabis can be seen as just one instance of a wider project of empire-building and territory-claiming by the staff of ambitious organizations at a time when a growing remit for these bodies ensured their significance and survival. In the 1920s cannabis had first been caught up in the international regulatory system because of the competing interests of national and colonial governments such as the UK, the US, Egypt, and India. In the 1950s (p.115) cannabis was located closer to the heart of the international drugs agenda than ever before, and it was put there not by national governments, but by the UN and the WHO, transnational bodies seeking to widen their spheres of interest by finding new problems that they claimed it was their responsibility to fix.
153) cannabis became caught up in the politics of the 1960s. The small numbers of British youth that sought to challenge the traditional order with notions of the counter-culture took to the drug as a means of achieving alternative mental states. They also saw in its association with the colonized of Britain’s empire a symbol of opposition to the politics of the past. Their readiness to appropriate cannabis as an emblem of their position meant that the media seized upon the drug in sensationalist reporting and that reactionary politicians identified it as a target for their ire. A Conservative Government’s desire to tackle what they perceived to be the indolent among the nation’s young prompted hasty legislation on the drug and increased powers for the police
the origins of this legislation also lie in the more prosaic ambitions of drugs enforcement agencies for enhanced resources and their willingness to take the case into the public arena and the media when they found that their superiors were reluctant to support them
cases where cannabis was actively planted on those that had none show that the drug itself was not the chief concern but rather it was the person who was framed that was the target of (p.154) police activity. Cannabis laws could be used as a tool with which to deal with white youth or black migrants who were thought to be threats to British society. However, this must not be overemphasized. Throughout the decade it is clear that there remained significant differences among the agencies responsible for enforcing drugs laws about the effort that should be devoted to it. While the Home Office in London was keen to impose a rigorous approach, many police forces resisted this and the evidence suggests that few dealt with more than a couple of dozen cannabis offenders in any one year.
While in practice both the consumption and the control of cannabis could often be very limited in the 1960s in the UK, in policy circles the decade was marked by an ever expanding debate. The cannabis user was represented in this for the first time, albeit on a limited and a partial basis. Organizations like SOMA and Release were invited to express their ideas and opinions while policy was being formulated, but they were not invited onto the committees that actually made the decisions
the sheer diversity of professional backgrounds included on the Wootton Committee and the amount of attention it devoted to cannabis were unprecedented. So too was the decision to make the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs a permanent feature of the policy process.159 Along with Parliamentarians, the police, the magistrates, and the judges, the experts were now formally incorporated into the process of formulating Britain’s drugs policies. Indeed, by 1971 they had played a decisive role in this, as it was their decision to back ‘the British compromise on cannabis’, of leaving the law much as it stood but of advising the police and the courts to apply it less stringently, that was to shape approaches to consumers for the next quarter of a century.
156) ‘The British compromise’ would only work if those charged with enforcing laws took the advice to do so with ‘becoming moderation’. The evidence suggests that over the course of the 1970s they did so. The report of the Wootton Sub-Committee had observed that in 1967 over two-thirds of cannabis offenders did not have a record of non-drug offences and that 90 per cent of all cannabis offences were for possessing less than 30 g. About a quarter of those convicted received a custodial sentence, about 13 per cent were made subject to a probation order, and about 17 per cent of first offenders were sent to prison. By 1975 the ACMD analysed sentencing and found that only 6 per cent of those punished for cannabis offences received custodial sentences. Most found guilty of such crimes were fined less than £50 and a handful were let off with a caution
157) he process of educating magistrates not to send offenders to prison for simple possession first advocated by the Wootton Committee and then adopted by governments early in the 1970s had been a success and that trafficking became the offence most likely to result in a period of custody by the end of the decade. What it also suggests is that the police were more zealous than ever in enforcing drugs laws and that increasing numbers of cannabis consumers were finding themselves with criminal records simply for using the drug, even if they were avoiding prison.
158) Criminal Law Bill in 1977 gave reformers the opportunity to thrust cannabis legislation and policy back into the political limelight. Lord Anthony Gifford was a noted civil rights lawyer who would go on to be involved in such high profile cases as the Birmingham Six appeals and the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. In a debate in the House of Lords in 1977 he moved an amendment to the Bill that would have removed the possibility of imprisonment in a magistrate’s court for the simple possession of cannabis. His suggestion was not that possession be made legal, but rather that it should be punished by a fine of up to £500. He added that cannabis should be the only Class B drug to be treated in this way, and that possession of others in that category should remain subject to terms of imprisonment
Gifford had been prompted to take up the issue by Rufus Harris, one of the founders of Release.
159) Opposition to the amendment came from the government spokesman Lord Harris, who pointed to the British compromise in stating that after the Wootton report there had been ‘a substantial reduction in the use of custodial sentences
160) At this stage, it looked as if the government was about to give in to the pressure to remove imprisonment as the ultimate sanction for simple possession of the drug.
The lack of consensus at the ACMD served to thwart this.
161) Similar tactic was adopted in the House of Commons whereby those seeking alterations to cannabis laws attempted to use the Criminal Law Bill as a vehicle for change
(p. 164) It was only in 1977 with the Gifford and Corbett Amendments that a sense of urgency was injected into the ACMD’s deliberations on cannabis. This urgency simply served to expose the divisions there between those that saw cannabis as a civil liberties issue and those that were more concerned to see it from the ‘Public Health view’
166) Responses to the ACMD recommendations were divided. Apathy seemed to be the general approach, as it was noted by one official that ‘the proposals in the report, which were given some coverage in the press in January when they were announced to Parliament, did not arouse significant public interest at that time
168) Nahas and Paton were high-profile opponents of cannabis consumption and collaborated regularly throughout the 1970s on the issue
169) the lack of ‘incontestable conclusions’ about the effects of cannabis on the human body was enough for those who advocated a cautious approach to change in laws related to the drug on grounds of fears about public health
170) The decision that the Home Secretary did not favour any change was announced on 11 March in the House of Commons by Mr Patrick Mayhew, Minister of State, Home Office, during the Committee stage of the Criminal Justice Bill. Mr Mayhew explained that the decision was taken both on grounds of principle and on practical grounds. The Home Secretary considers that any relaxation in control could be taken to mean that the health risks from using cannabis had been exaggerated, thus encouraging its use, especially by young people. He took very much into account the report of the Council’s expert group and concluded that the Government should not seek or support a change in the law as long as the dangers of using cannabis are not adequately known
(p. 177) One reason that cannabis fell down the list of matters to be addressed by government can be found at the ACMD. David Hardwick took over as secretary in 1980 and wrote to a colleague in the DHSS that ‘we need, I suggest, to try to give a new impetus to the Council’s work, and to ensure that they devote their energies to problems on which there is some hope of progress.
Another reason that cannabis slipped from the view of politicians and experts was the urgent concern in the 1980s with other substances and new phenomena in the drugs sphere
182) While it is clear that enforcement agencies in the 1980s came to view simple possession of cannabis as a relatively minor offence that did not merit a trip to court, let alone imprisonment, this does not mean that cannabis consumers were less likely to encounter enforcers
This increase in officers and resources in the latter half of the 1980s was not driven by cannabis, but rather by anxieties in government about heroin and later crack cocaine and other substances such as Ecstasy. Nevertheless, as cannabis remained far and away the most popular of the illegal substances throughout the period its users ended up snared in a net designed for other groups.
It is also likely that for enforcement agencies that needed to justify new and generous resources, a ready supply of cannabis users provided a source of activity through which officers could demonstrate effectiveness. Between 1989 and 1992 the number of cannabis offenders shot up from (p.183) 15,620 to 34,705.
it was still the case that by 1992 cannabis offenders made up almost two-thirds of those found guilty under the Misuse of Drugs Act.
This left the UK in a position where the tacit assumption on the part of the authorities was that possession of small amounts of cannabis for personal use was a minor matter that should take up as little police time as possible and should certainly not trouble the courts.
Yet it was one of the most common offences committed, and gave criminal records to thousands of people who would otherwise never trouble the authorities.
A full decade after Kilroy-Silk had last sought change to laws on cannabis there, the House of Commons heard Tony Banks, Labour MP for Newham North-West, ask in 1992, ‘is it not time to consider the possibility of legalising soft drugs, especially cannabis? After all, cannabis does much less harm to a person’s health than nicotine, and yet cigarettes are legal. It is the criminal activity surrounding the supply of illegal drugs that we should really worry about. If we were to legalize soft drugs that would no longer be a problem’.
The significance of the quarter-century or so after the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act lies first in the broadening and the indigenization of the market for cannabis in the UK
184) government approaches to cannabis and cannabis consumption became increasingly shaped by laws and policies directed at other issues and problems. This was not the case at the outset. In the 1970s many hours and much effort were devoted to the issue of cannabis legislation and policy. The outcome of this was the gradual implementation of the recommendations published in 1968 by the Sub-Committee chaired by Baroness Wootton. Penalties for cannabis offences were reduced, magistrates took the advice not to send those guilty of simple possession to prison, and eventually even the police found ways of dealing with consumers which meant that few received permanent criminal records, let alone custodial sentences. This had been achieved not because those in power had been persuaded that smoking cannabis was harmless, but because the habit had become something of a cause célèbre among those that felt that civil liberties were under threat in Britain in this period and who therefore sought to protect these by seeking less oppression of consumers. However, experts could not agree unanimously that using cannabis was sufficiently harmless to justify more radical action on cannabis laws, and the public health view enabled the Conservative Government’s rejection of calls to reclassify cannabis.
185) the British compromise, of not changing laws but of changing the way that they were implemented, came to have perverse outcomes. By delegating power over the application of cannabis laws to the discretion of those in enforcement, legislators and the government ensured that the often complex agendas of police officers on the ground came to be the single most important factor shaping the experience of the cannabis consumer. This resulted in greater numbers of cannabis consumers than ever before finding themselves in trouble with the police, albeit in ways that resulted in less severe punishments than previously.
when these perverse outcomes were finally acknowledged by legislators and the government in the 1990s it proved difficult to wrest the power back from enforcers in order to do something about it.
187) The first statement on cannabis of the New Labour Government that came to power in 1997 was made in the House of Commons in June of that year. It revealed that the last set of official figures (for 1995) showed that 41,155 people had been cautioned for possession of cannabis and that a further 32,393 had ended up in magistrates’ courts because of the drug.
As more and more people found themselves in trouble with the police for minor cannabis offences than ever before, the civil liberties anxieties of the 1970s began to resurface to drive cannabis back into the concerns of government.
decade after 1997 was to be one in which the uneasy order of the preceding twenty-five years, where legislators, politicians, and experts had ceded control of policy on cannabis consumers to the courts and then to the police, was to be robustly challenged and roundly criticized only to be reassembled and reaffirmed.
187) One of the key features of the drugs debate in the 1990s that was to shape the period after 1997 was the re-emergence of a consumers’ lobby
The Legalise Cannabis Campaign (LCC) had also endured. A well-organized critic of cannabis policies in the 1970s, by the 1990s it did little more than produce the occasional copy of its journal, The Hookah.
The Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics in Britain founded by Clare Hodges became an important voice for those that consumed cannabis for medical purposes, and is discussed in more detail below. The Legalise Cannabis Alliance was more concerned to articulate the position of recreational users, and was founded in Norwich in 1992 as the Campaign to Legalise Cannabis International.
Its members were moved to act as they felt ‘dissatisfied with the legalise cannabis campaign at the time and felt that more action was needed’ in the wake of a police campaign against cannabis users in Norfolk. It came to national prominence in 1997 when Howard Marks, the celebrity cannabis smuggler, represented the group as a Parliamentary candidate in Norwich North, Norwich South, Southampton West, and Neath constituencies, campaigning on the single issue of legalizing cannabis
188) On 28 September 1996 Howard Marks and Free Rob Cannabis claimed to have distributed free cannabis from Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park before offering themselves for arrest at the local police station and they repeated the stunt on the same day of the following year. They were unable to provoke the police into arresting them on either occasion, and a spokesman for Marylebone Police Station was reported in 1997 as saying that ‘there was no evidence against the man apart from his own claims…officers continually exercise their discretion on how to proceed on a whole host of incidents and allegations and this occasion was no different’. Press reports noted that there were about 300 demonstrators there in support of the activists.
Free Rob Cannabis was to enjoy greater success in his civil disobedience campaign over subsequent years, going to prison for the first time in 1998 for non-payment of fines and appearing in court on five occasions for cannabis-related offences.
Perhaps the most significant impact of the campaigning by Free Rob Cannabis was in the inspiration that it provided to the Independent on Sunday to start its campaign for the decriminalization of cannabis in 1997. It was launched to coincide with the second event organized by Free Rob Cannabis to distribute cannabis at Speakers’ Corner on 28 September 1997, and featured an editorial by Rosie Boycott with the title ‘Why We Believe It Is Time to Decriminalise Cannabis’. This statement was rather light on evidence for its arguments, simply asserting that ‘the truth is that most people I know have smoked at some time or other in their lives. They hold down jobs, bring up their families, run major companies, govern our country, and yet, 30 years after my day out in Hyde Park, cannabis is still officially regarded as a dangerous drug’.
189) The Independent on Sunday campaign took this nostalgic link with the cannabis campaigns of the past even further and organized a second cannabis march in Hyde Park on 28 March 1998 which the paper claimed had attracted 16,000 supporters. Its coverage explicitly made the link with events of previous decades: ‘there was a sense of deja-vu as the marchers gathered in Hyde Park, the scene of the first cannabis rally in July 1967
the link established with the past was not without its drawbacks as it allowed Alastair Campbell, New Labour’s most powerful spin doctor, to dismiss those campaigning for change in cannabis laws and policies as ‘just a bunch of middle-class, middle-aged hippies wanting to smoke dope’.
Quite why Rosie Boycott chose to use the Independent on Sunday to champion the cause of change in cannabis policies is open to question. She quickly left the newspaper after initiating the cannabis campaign early in 1998 and took up the editor’s post at the rather less liberal Daily Express. She showed no inclination to replicate her commitment to the cause of cannabis decriminalization during her short stint there. Indeed, it is worth bearing in mind that her own account of the episode suggests that she had pragmatic motives for the campaign at the Independent on Sunday that were narrowly focused on the exigencies of the newspaper business:
The editor of the ‘Independent on Sunday’, Rosie Boycott, is on a high, but not for the reason some of her critics might suspect. Her campaign to decriminalise cannabis has struck a strong public chord — and is pushing up circulation…The fact is the IoS is now selling comfortably over 300,000 copies per week for the first time in a long time. At least part of our growing popularity must be a result of our cannabis campaign. A lot of people who had (p.190) never heard about the ‘Sindy’ before or gave it only a passing glance on the news-stands have suddenly been eagerly seeking us out.
If consumers found their voice in the 1990s it was to prove more difficult to turn this into a sustained or a coherent presence in policy circles. The Independent on Sunday campaign fizzled out once Rosie Boycott had departed. The Legalise Cannabis Alliance fielded thirteen candidates in the 2001 general election and twenty-one contenders in the following one, while also fielding candidates in a variety of local polls. Its greatest electoral success was to secure 7 per cent of the vote in a local election in Halton, and in 2006 it deregistered as a political party to revert to a role as a pressure group
The success of the Independent on Sunday campaign and of organizations such as Cannabis in Avalon and the Legalise Cannabis Alliance therefore did not lie in electoral achievements or the establishment of a mass base from which political pressure for legislative change could be applied. Rather, it can be found in the impact they had in forcing the issue to once again become a matter of urgent public and political concern. The Conservative Government of the period 1979 to 1997 had been little exercised by cannabis, particularly in the 1980s when it had the more pressing concerns of heroin and crack cocaine to deal with.
191) Home Secretary responded by increasing the maximum fines in England and Wales from £500 to £2,500 and the prime minister, John Major, was reported as stating that ‘I know some people make a case for legalising some soft drugs but frankly I don’t agree with it’
The New Labour Government swept to power in May 1997 and a number of its prominent members had previously spoken out on cannabis. For example, Tony Banks, who had revived the issue in the House of Commons in the 1990s, found himself a minister in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and Clare Short was appointed as Secretary of State for International Development. While a member of the Shadow Cabinet she had suggested that cannabis be sold legally and taxed.16 At the time she had been dismissed by her colleague, the future Home Secretary Jack Straw, who told BBC Radio’s The World This Weekend that ‘Labour’s position on drugs is very clear. We are against the legalisation of cannabis and other soft drugs’.1
When the new government took power it confirmed that it would be ‘tackling the problem with renewed vigour’, and revealed that ‘the Government will be appointing a “drug tsar” to co-ordinate action against drugs…one of his or her first tasks will be to review the existing drugs strategy’.18 As such it provided a fresh focus for cannabis campaigners in this new ‘drug tsar’ and his review. Indeed, the Independent on Sunday admitted that this was a factor in the decision to take its stance, noting in its opening statement on the issue that ‘the campaign comes as the Government prepares to appoint its first US-style “drugs tsar”
In 1998 figures for convictions and cautions of those caught in possession of cannabis peaked at 84,310, the highest number before or since.
A range of expert bodies launched their own investigations into various aspects of the cannabis issue. The British Medical Association published its report on the medical potential of the drug in November 1997; the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs requested the Department of Health to conduct three literature reviews which were produced in May (p.192) 1998; the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology decided to look at cannabis in February 1998, which prompted the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences to investigate the matter and publish a report in June of that year
The media attention followed by the flurry of activity by various expert groups ensured that cannabis became an issue on which the major political parties felt obliged to take a position, particularly in the months leading up to the general election of June 2001. In October 2000 the prime minister reiterated the New Labour position, stating that ‘there is a debate about whether you decriminalise cannabis or legalise it and I am against it’.25 In part he was forced to do this as his administration’s official line on cannabis had been increasingly undermined by Mo Mowlam, the Cabinet Office minister at the time who was charged with the government’s anti-drugs campaign. She had attracted a lot of media coverage back in January 2000 when she had confessed to trying cannabis as a student in the 1960s.26 She was reported later that year as hinting that the government was not committed on principle to keeping cannabis illegal, and was prepared to consider relaxation of the law if scientific evidence showed it was not harmful and did not lead to harder drugs.27 This provoked a clear and unequivocal response from the Shadow Home Secretary, Ann Widdecombe, who advocated zero tolerance of possession.
193)Widdecombe’s stance was quickly dropped by the Conservative Party.
possibility that much of this discussion of the drug was not about cannabis at all. In the Conservative Party of the period there was an ongoing controversy about the nature of its ideology in Opposition. Those that were gathered around the Shadow Chancellor, Michael Portillo, were sure that the party needed to reject aspects of its right-wing, reactionary tradition and to present itself as adapted to the perceived moral geographies of modern Britain
Meanwhile Widdecombe sought to represent those that felt that the party must stay true to its traditional principles and chose drugs as an issue through which to articulate this
The spat about cannabis among the Conservatives in 2000 was hardly about the drug at all, but was instead about the future of the party
194) As Tony Blair’s position on cannabis had been made clear since the 1990s and was maintained during his period in office, discussion of the drug provided a safe means for some in the Labour Party to express distance from him
195) Keith Hellawell, the government-appointed drugs tsar, recalled Straw asking ‘if I was seriously suggesting that he should be the first Home Secretary for a decade to preside over a fall in drug-arrest figures’ when the former had suggested a more relaxed approach to policing cannabis.38 However, Straw moved on to become Foreign Secretary after New Labour’s victory in the election of June 2001. In October his successor, David Blunkett, suddenly (p.196) declared that he was willing to look into the possibility that cannabis should be reclassified as a Class C drug.
It seems that Blunkett was keen to use the cannabis issue to assert his authority in his new office, or, as Keith Hellawell was told when he protested about Blunkett’s position, the Home Secretary’s ‘change of mind’ was ‘political’.
199) police officers ignored guidelines as they found it useful to swell numbers of arrests for drugs offences by dealing with cannabis consumers
200) , just before Blunkett announced his reclassification senior police officers intervened to resist his ambitions to impose a position from the Home Office so that they could maintain for themselves the right of deciding where and how the law should be enforced. The whole point of reclassifying cannabis as a Class C drug was that possession of substances in that category was not an arrestable offence.
201) major advances in the understanding of cannabis as in 1964 the active ingredient tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) was isolated and in 1988 cannabinoid receptors were discovered.
can be argued that in the late 1980s and early 1990s cannabis became a folk medicine in Britain as people recommended it for pain relief to those suffering from such ailments as multiple sclerosis and cancer. This phenomenon surfaced in the press in the early 1990s as Anne Biezanek, a 65-year-old doctor, was charged with supplying drugs to her daughter
(p.202) Dr Biezanek had an interesting history as an activist on health issues as she had courted controversy in the early 1960s as Britain’s first Catholic doctor to operate a birth-control clinic and to advocate the use of oral contraceptives.64 It was Clare Hodges however that became the leading proponent of medical cannabis use in the 1990s. An Oxford graduate and journalist, she had suffered with multiple sclerosis since 1983 and began to use cannabis in 1992 after reading a medical report from the US. She found it useful in relaxing muscle spasms and relieving pain and bladder problems and became an advocate of the medical application of cannabis. Eventually she established a UK branch of the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics with the assistance of the American organization of the same name that had been founded in 1982
Hodges was successful in presenting herself as ‘a middle-class mother with two young children’ who ‘hated being branded a criminal’ simply for being one of the many ‘poorly people trying to get relief from our symptoms’.
In opening an office of the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics in Britain she was careful to sign up to an agenda that sought to ‘reform the laws which prohibit medical access to marijuana’67 as opposed to seeking wider changes to legislation on cannabis that would make recreational consumption easier too. Hodges kept her activities focused on the narrower issue of medical use of the drug through interviews and press stories and with an advertising campaign aimed at the newspapers.68 The outcome of this was that she became established as the respectable face of the medical cannabis consumer and succeeded in organizing two meetings with the Department of Health and the Home Office.\She contributed to the shape of the British Medical Association’s 1999 report, The Therapeutic Use of Cannabis, was interviewed by the House of Lords Select Committee of 1998, and appeared as an expert witness when medical cannabis cases came to court.
At the meeting with the Home Office she advocated the licensing of medical experiments with cannabis by Geoffrey Guy. He made a substantial fortune from opium painkillers in the 1980s and 1990s and turned his attention to cannabis products after contact with various other scientists that had been looking at the drug over the previous decade.
These scientists recalled that their work had been gently encouraged throughout the mid-1990s by the Home Office which had licensed use of cannabis in scientific work with greater enthusiasm than in previous decades. As such it was no surprise when Geoffrey Guy was given permission in November 1997 to press ahead with his work.70 The timing of this was ironic though; just as a (p.203) private company was being licensed to develop a medicine from cannabis by the Home Office, the Home Secretary blurted out that
it does not follow that because there are no deaths from a drug, it is therefore not harmful. There was a drug which was quite good for its original purpose in the 1960s, called Thalidomide but it turned out to have terrible side-effects. It is said that the continual use of cannabis can cause personality disorder and many other serious side effects.71
It seems that the civil servants were not at pains to keep their elected boss clearly informed of their strategy or direction. Scientists such as Roger Pertwee and John Notcutt who had been working with cannabis since the 1980s recall that this sudden receptiveness of the Home Office to licensing experiments with cannabis medicines was quite deliberate. Officials such as Alan MacFarlane at the Home Office were increasingly troubled by the medical consumers’ lobby and the sympathetic headlines that they generated, not least of all because the legalize cannabis campaigners showed signs of trying to co-opt them for their more general purposes. As such, the bureaucrats could see the merit of encouraging controlled scientific trials with the drug as by demonstrating that they were committed to establishing the efficacy and safety of cannabis medicines they hoped to clearly mark out the medical potential of the drug as a separate issue from those related to recreational consumption.
As such, Geoffrey Guy and GW Pharmaceuticals came along at the perfect time for the Home Office as their project was not simply to look into the potential of cannabis medicines but to develop modern pharmaceutical products from them. This raised the prospect of standardized and homogenized medicines available through modern modes of delivery coming on to the market for those in need of them. Such products would mean that those suffering with multiple sclerosis, cancer, arthritis, etc. would not have to rely on smoking or eating unpredictable lumps of organic cannabis. This prospect perfectly suited the Home Office agenda of separating out the medical from the recreational uses of cannabis as in this scenario the cultures of consumption would be entirely divorced from one another; the tablet or spray would be distinct from the joint or hash-chocolate.72 Such was the enthusiasm for this development at the Home Office that the latter put GW Pharmaceuticals in touch with HortaPharm, a company that they were aware of in Holland that had been developing cloned THC-rich cannabis plants there since the 1970s.
it was consumer demand and activism that created this situation. As those with multiple sclerosis, cancer, arthritis, etc. became dissatisfied with the array of drugs that they were provided with by modern pharmaceutical companies in the 1990s they experimented with cannabis and become unafraid to champion its virtues when they found it useful despite the medical orthodoxies that they encountered
Almost as soon as Blunkett’s decision to reclassify cannabis came into law in 2004 the move was called into question. At the heart of the challenge was the issue of ‘skunk’. This was defined by the ACMD as a form of ‘sinsemilla’; they described it as ‘a higher potency preparation’ derived from ‘the flowering tops from unfertilised, female Cannabis sativa plants and…most commonly produced by intensive indoor cultivation methods’.75 Alarming accounts of the widespread availability and unknown dangers of this allegedly super-strength cannabis began to surface in 2004 and 2005. Newspaper reports carried stories about users such as ‘Ryan, 19’ who was said to have stated that ‘I think if I smoked hash it wouldn’t be so bad, but I smoke skunk and that really knocks you out’ before pointing out that ‘in January cannabis was downgraded from a Class B to a Class C drug…many are concerned this gives young people the impression it is a safe drug and encourages them to experiment’
All this under the headline ‘ALARM AT RISING CANNABIS ADDICTION’. By March 2005 the Daily Express had progressed onto headlines like ‘THE CANNABIS DISASTER THAT IS DESTROYING OUR CHILDREN’S MINDS’
(p. 208) Clearly there was real anxiety at the ACMD that it was not just MPs and ministers that were ignoring its evidence, but that the Home Office was also now conjuring up policy from convictions rather than from consideration. The government responded by letting it be known through press leaks that it would be dismissing the ACMD advice on cannabis even before that advice had been offered
214) at a time when more research than ever before was available on the drug and its consumers, the newspapers preferred to reproduce images of cannabis users as violent and criminal that echoed myths that stretched back to the nineteenth century and journalistic traditions that were over 100 years old.
215) Research published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation suggests that little had been achieved by the tinkering of officials, legislators, and experts throughout the decade after 1997. Published just before Jacqui Smith’s decision as Home Secretary to reclassify cannabis as a Class B drug, a 2008 Rowntree publication argued that ‘on the strength of the findings of this study, we very much doubt that a change would have any impact whatsoever on young people’.116 No wonder, as the media and political furore of the previous decade had resulted in very little change in the position of cannabis users in relation to the law and to the police. Possession of cannabis remained an arrestable offence and the police continued to be the key power-brokers in matters related to the drug throughout the period. They had successfully seen off attempts by legislators, experts, and consumers to wrest from the police control of state approaches to the drug and it could be argued they had actually been able to increase their powers in this area. In 2008, as in 1998 or indeed 1968, it was the police that made the policy
As this book goes to press in 2012, it is the opinions, beliefs, and mood of the police officer that stops the individual in possession of cannabis that decide what will happen to that individual, not the will of Parliament, the conclusions of the scientists, or the interests of the user.
217) It was international events related to the Empire rather than domestic concerns that first shunted cannabis into the early drugs control regime in Britain. The 1924/5 Second Geneva Opium Conference was convened to consider tighter controls on cocaine and opium. Cannabis was suddenly thrust onto the agenda by the Egyptian delegation. In part it did this to embarrass the country’s former colonial masters, the British, who had failed to effectively enforce a prohibition on cannabis products while in charge there and who also allowed a free trade in cannabis substances in the South Asian part of the Empire. Indeed, the British representatives of the Government of India were chief among the opponents of the effort to include the drug in discussions at Geneva.
The Egyptians relied on the force of their rhetoric rather than any clear technical evidence to condemn cannabis. Although few delegations there had any experience or knowledge of the plant, and in spite of a lack of medical or scientific data, the Conference ignored British efforts to strike cannabis from the agenda and ended up by including preparations of the drug in the controls agreed there early in 1925.
This meant that as a signatory to League of Nations treaties, the UK was forced to ratify controls on cannabis that British representatives at the Conference had opposed.
These controls were eventually put into force in 1928 through the mechanism of the Dangerous Drugs Act.
This legislation had been passed in 1920 after wartime concerns about the consumption of opium substances and cocaine in Britain. Cannabis was not originally included in the Act, and was only declared to be a poison in 1924 when some confused policing of opium and a media scare prompted the Pharmaceutical Society to place the drug in the Poisons Schedule
218) There was one crucial difference, however, between cannabis and the other drugs in the history of the period. The work of the Rolleston Committee (the Departmental Committee on Morphine and Heroin Addiction) in 1924 and its subsequent impact on the revised Dangerous Drugs Act of 1926 fixed notions of drug users. It established that regular consumers of substances like morphine and heroin were to be viewed as ill and therefore subjects for medical treatment rather than as criminals who should be prosecuted for breaking the law on drugs for their personal gratification. It has been argued that this liberal view reflected understandings of the habitual users of the period, who had usually taken to the substances through medical treatment and who were from respectable backgrounds, which meant that they were not perceived to constitute a social ‘problem’.2 Cannabis users enjoyed no such status. Where they did come to the attention of the authorities consumers were from the country’s colonies whose peoples were considered at the time to be inferior races. They either featured in exotic stories as enemies of the order imposed by the colonial authorities, or as disruptive itinerants who had troubled the peace maintained by the police in the nation’s dockside cities. As such, cannabis consumption and consumers were firmly rooted within the remit of law enforcers at a time when more lenient approaches were adopted for those using other drugs.
The decline of therapeutic applications of preparations of the plant by the 1930s would have sealed the sense that they were no concern of the medical profession.
When looked at this way it is clear that from the outset the regime in the UK to be applied to cannabis was not designed to deal with a domestic market for the drug. Control came before consumption in Britain. The regime had its origins in British concerns about the wartime use of opiates and cocaine, and in colonial disputes and anxieties about cannabis consumers of African and Asian origin.
The mechanisms for enforcing this regime were enthusiastically put in place by officials in the government’s Home Office Drugs Branch, not because of their fears about cannabis, but because of the zeal with which they sought to establish their new (p.219) department.
With minimal discussion about the substance, its properties, or its consumers, cannabis was lodged within the duties of Britain’s law enforcement agencies by 1945.
The rise in cannabis arrests in the 1950s, and the fact that those apprehended tended to be migrants who were arriving from the Empire, gave rise to an association between the drug and that group. For those who resented or feared their arrival cannabis therefore became connected with racial anxiety and criminality.
For those who saw in their arrival a welcome injection of new energy into British society, their drug, and the perception that they were persecuted for using it, became causes célèbres
(p. 221) Most important of all, the experts drawn into the policy process by the Home Office in the second half of the 1960s came up with ‘the British compromise’ which has shaped the UK position on cannabis since. Advocated by members of Baroness Wootton’s Committee, it was designed specifically with the political tensions over the drug in mind. The idea was to keep the country’s more traditional elements content by retaining laws that made the recreational consumption of cannabis illegal. At the same time ground could be conceded to those that felt strongly about the civil liberties position of cannabis consumers as advice would be given by the Government to those applying the laws on the streets and in the courts to enforce them in a sensitive and liberal manner
(p. 223) In the 1980s and 1990s cannabis continued to be alluring because earlier associations, particularly with African and West Indian cultures and with the radical postures of the 1960s, ensured that consumption of the drug remained superficially ‘alternative’ and ‘cool’. This explains why it is mainly teenagers and those in their early twenties who consume the substance even today, and why most of them seem to grow out of regular and excessive use as their lives become more complex and stimulating and ‘cool’ becomes less important. The exception to this is those who take preparations of cannabis for therapeutic purposes. Patient-activism has grown in Western societies since the 1960s. A disaffection with prescribed drugs and official medical advice has ensured that consumers of medicines have often become more assertive about their right to reject standard therapeutic substances and to explore a wide range of self-medication options. This is the context for understanding the appearance of organizations like the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics (ACT) in the 1990s. Members were people who found themselves ill enough to consider breaking the law and who were driven to consume cannabis solely because of their condition. They draw attention to the changing and diversifying nature of the market for cannabis in the UK since it was first established in the 1950s.
224) By the late 1990s the balance had swung back in the direction of the civil liberties argument because the numbers of consumers in trouble with the police had hit an all-time high and because reviews by various expert bodies of the evidence of health impacts confirmed that no unequivocal position could be established. A new generation of consumers articulated their various arguments for the freedom to access the drug and made clear their dissatisfaction with ‘the British compromise’ which had entangled so many of them with the law. A canny newspaper editor eager to boost the circulation of her traditionally liberal newspaper took up the issue and by the end of the decade it was once again an urgent matter in the media, for politicians, and for expert bodies.
An ambitious new Home Secretary casting about for a means of stamping his authority on the Home Office saw in ‘the British compromise’ an ideal target, as by decisive action he would bring clarity to an apparently confused position that had become ossified through customary use.
David Blunkett’s efforts failed because discussions of cannabis control and consumption were once again obscured by interests that were only indirectly related to them. The police resisted his plans, not because of some great concern over cannabis consumers, but because they wished to retain the powers of arrest granted to them by laws on the drug that gave them licence to pursue wider policing agendas. The Conservative Party simply breathed new life into the vague old associations between cannabis consumption and social problems in order to claim that New Labour’s policies lay behind what the Tories came to call ‘Broken Britain’.
225) at few moments in the past has detailed knowledge of the plant and the effects of products prepared from it influenced decisions.
The material gathered before the ACMD made its recommendations in 1978 took the best part of a decade to collect and yet it was firmly ignored when the government finally made a decision in 1982
nature of cannabis itself has made straightforward conclusions difficult. It is a complex substance that interacts in many ways with human bodies, and the impacts of which can be affected by such variables as the content of a particular sample, the mode of consumption, and the age, condition, and mood of the individual using it. For this reason the search for simple answers in scientific research or sociological surveys to the various policy dilemmas posed by the drug may prove to be as frustrating in the future as it has been in the past.5 In short, definitive statements that point the way such as ‘cannabis is harmful’ or ‘cannabis is not harmful’ are likely to continue to be elusive.
The factors that shaped the key decisions about the control mechanisms that were developed to deal with cannabis have most often been related to wider contexts and interests rather than to detailed knowledge of the drug or of its effects on consumers
226) Canny senior police officers, bullish Home Secretaries, (p.227) fragmented consumer groups, shrewd newspaper editors, and calculating politicians have all brought their ambitions and anxieties to bear on the debates about cannabis control over the last forty years. The result has been that ‘the British compromise’ has survived for four decades despite its imprecisions and imperfections as this multiplicity of ambitions and agendas has made it difficult to see its shortcomings and impossible to initiate inclusive discussions about alternatives.
228) Berridge was right to remind colleagues a decade ago that international dimensions of narcotics issues must not be neglected
This book seeks to balance a view of the international with a call for attention to the details of the national
(p.229)
While there is little space here to dwell on the wealth of literature that tackles network theories of political science it is worth reflecting briefly on the implications of the history of cannabis in Britain for such ideas. The story has certainly shown the dynamic tension between policy communities, interest groups, and the networks in which both have been embedded. It also suggests, however, that there can be a danger in imposing labels like ‘policy community’ or ‘interest group’ on what are often loose aggregations of actors with divergent opinions, agendas, and beliefs.
seems clear that the story of cannabis in the UK makes little sense without taking into account the impact of entrepreneurial bureaucrats like F. W. Thornton, driven scientists like William Paton, enthusiastic consumers like Free Love Cannabis, and committed campaigners like Rufus Harris. The energy and commitment of these individuals was often decisive in shaping events and outcomes and it is important that the key role of such actors in policy processes is not lost in technical discussions about ‘communities’, ‘groups’, and ‘networks’.
current arrangements have their foundations in a time when the patchy information available about the (p.230) drug was shaped by the politics and cultural relations of Empire, and long before there were many consumers in the UK itself. Since then these arrangements have been buffeted by shifting forces within British society and the system’s shape reflects the convictions and agendas of the politicians, policemen, campaigners, and experts of the past. Most of these are now long gone, and if those that have replaced them want to address cannabis and its consumption in the UK in a fresh way then the lesson from the past is to reject it.
Even if that which emerges from such a process resembles what is in place today, at least it will have been arrived at through a fully informed and transparent process, rather than warped by the ebbs and flows of British history.
