The New Scientist letters@newscientist.com
http://www.newscientist.com/
April 11, 1998
A Letter to the Editor of the News Scientist from George Howarth, Parliamentary Under
Secretary of State, The Home Office (Justice Ministry), London
See
London Times
Calls For A Royal Commission For "A fresh line on drugs" – Major Defection
From Prohibitionism!
and Go Dutch!
and
Vraag Een Politieagent. Go
Ahead, Ask A Cop For Dope. The Dutch Don't Mind
New Scientist Special Report
and
UK "Justice"
Minister Straw’s Rejection of Fact Finding Cannabis Commission Based On Errors of
Fact
NO CHANGE
Your special on cannabis contained a great deal of fascinating material, but in the end
failed to convince me that the government is wrong in its view that the current illegal
status of this drug should remain (Marijuana Special Report, 21 February, p 23). Nor did
it undermine the credibility of the conclusion of the WHO report on the health effects of
cannabis.
In response to your news item (p 4), the WHO has explained that the prepublication
changes to its report were part of the normal editorial process: there is nothing sinister
about removing an off-the-cuff comparison between cannabis and tobacco when the report is
not about tobacco in the first place.
That the consumption of dangerous drugs such as tobacco and alcohol remains lawful does
not undermine the government’s case against the legalisation of cannabis. Suffice to
say that both the WHO report and your own analysis demonstrate abundantly the many reasons
for believing that cannabis has harmful physical and mental effects, both in the short and
long term.
The British Crime Survey suggests that there are about 15 million people in Britain who
have used cannabis in the last month, compared with an estimated 12 million people who
smoke cigarettes every day, and 42 million who drink alcohol to a greater or lesser
extent. The illegality of cannabis is one of the main reasons why we don’t have a
cannabis problem which is just as big.
And that brings me to your interpretation of the Dutch experience, and your statement
that the leading researchers on this subject, Robert MacCoun and Peter Reuter, "have
concluded that ‘reductions in criminal penalties have little effect on drug use, at
least for marijuana"’. That is a seriously misleading quotation from the
editorial summary of their article in Science which appeared on 3 October last year (vol
278, p 47).
The article itself, in the critical passage (p 50) says that "there is no evidence
that the depenalisation component of the 1976 policy, per se, increased levels of cannabis
use. On the other hand, the later growth in commercial access to cannabis, after de facto
legalisation, was accompanied by steep increases in use, even among youth." We have
no intention of conducting a similar experiment on the young people of the UK.
George Howarth,
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State,
The Home Office,
London
New Scientist replies:
The MacCoun and Reuter article does indeed conclude that there was an increase in
cannabis use in the Netherlands during the 1980s. But as the authors go on to say, the
link with coffee shops "may not be causal; we have already seen that recent increases
occurred in the US and Oslo despite very different policies. Second...throughout most of
the first two decades of the 1976 policy, Dutch use levels remained at or below those of
the US." Throughout the 1980s, the prevalence of cannabis use in the Netherlands was
comparable to that in Germany, Sweden, Britain, France and Austria. To imply that the
Dutch policy backfired is therefore misleading.
Supported