Fleet Street inhales the case for softer drug laws
Published 10 April 2000
Media - Ian Hargreaves
The Daily Telegraph's editorial of 30 March 2000 might just be one for the history books. In it, the paper argued for an end to the "war on drugs" favoured by all British and American governments of the past 30 years and urged Tony Blair to "draw up plans to legalise cannabis".
With the Daily Mail also advocating "hysteria-free and rational examination" of the Police Foundation's arguments for a softening of the laws on cannabis and Ecstasy, the newspapers have been looking at each other in wary amazement. It is as if Charles Moore, the Telegraph's impeccably traditional editor, had suddenly discovered the musical charms of Da Slammin' Phrogz.
Among the broadsheets and mid-market tabloids, only the Times rejected Lady Runciman's arguments outright, and even its view was overwhelmed in its own pages by those of the columnist Simon Jenkins (one of the report's authors) and his neighbour on the op-ed page, Mary Ann Sieghart. Sieghart likened the shift of position represented by the Mail and Telegraph to the moment in September 1988, when Margaret Thatcher made a speech to the Royal Society about global warming - after which environmentalism became respectable across the political spectrum.
The government's instant response was to dismiss the report, though the spin-masters then got up to their usual tricks of securing contradictory headlines in papers with opposing views. So Jack Straw spoke to the Observer and generated a headline: "Straw retreats from his hard line on Ecstasy"; whereas his own News of the World article was headlined: "Why we won't be going soft on cannabis." Surely one day, new Labour will realise the counter- productive effect of this duplicity.
Only the NoW rolled out the once automatic standard tabloid case for a further crackdown on "traffickers", while maintaining "the clear message to the potential user that drugs are dangerous". The NoW has something of a commercial self-interest in the drugs trade, with its thriving niche market in celebrity drug busts, like the one it used to snare the England rugby captain, Lawrence Dallaglio.
At the other end of the tabloid political spectrum, positions are well established. Rosie Boycott at the Express no longer campaigns for cannabis users, but we know what her papers think. The Mirror told the government to "get real" about drugs. Carol Sarler, a columnist in the People, even swept from the mantelpiece the icon of Janet Betts, the woman married to the father of Leah Betts, who died after taking Ecstasy in 1995, and who has an annoying habit of falsely describing Leah as her daughter in the course of denouncing any liberalisation of the drug laws.
It is, however, understandable that ministers were caught by surprise. You don't have to reach far back in the files to find the Mail taking a view contrary to the one it proclaims now. On 7 February, its front page reported a "storm as anti-drug chiefs go soft on cannabis"; an editorial denounced the primrose path of easier drug laws.
Nor have any of the tabloids broken clear of their standard cliches on drug stories. These invariably involve evil "pushers" who "prey on" their innocent victims. Mainstream media mythologies deny the truth that most people who use illegal drugs choose to do so and find themselves little harmed as a consequence.
Why then the change? A touch of it, I suspect, is the pleasure all newspaper editors get from tickling the feet of a humourless and politically unassailable government. Then there is public opinion, which, according to a MORI poll for the Runciman inquiry, deems cannabis safer than some legal drugs and favours a change in the law.
It is also true that drugs are now so ubiquitous that newspaper editors are familiar with the issues in a way they seldom are about, say, poverty or refugees. Most newspaper editors are children of the Sixties or Seventies and parents in the Eighties and Nineties. Since half of those under 25 have used illegal drugs, the harsh hand of the law is raised not merely against frightening black youths in faraway inner cities, but against the golden progeny of Fleet Street.
But perhaps, above all, we should be watching business. The most interesting media treatments of Runciman Week came from Ministry, the monthly clubbers' magazine published by James Palumbo's music club empire, the Ministry of Sound. Within its own marketplace, the Ministry of Sound is mainstream stuff, the British Home Stores of clubland. The magazine includes in its April "free drugs" special a judicious protective coating of the "taking heroin is stupid" variety, but a survey of its readers suggests that more than 90 per cent of them use cannabis and Ecstasy, nearly a third of them several times a week. With Ecstasy prices a quarter of their 1988 levels, drug-taking is "now normal behaviour for normal kids".
Most sentient beings have known this for some time, but what we have not understood is the extent to which respectable corporations want to share the high. Ericsson and Budweiser are among the sponsors of the Ministry of Sound's spring offensive. As the magazine says: "Multinational companies are queuing up to sponsor nightclubs in the full knowledge that drug-taking is key to clubbing. This is sponsored drug abuse."
Or as the Daily Telegraph editorial put it: "Surely the truly conservative answer to the problem is to find ways of acclimatising drugs to bourgeois society."
Tricky, these forces of conservatism.
The writer is professor of journalism at Cardiff University
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