Deborah Orr: An unregulated, dangerous market - that's the main problem with drugs

That didn't take long, did it? It's now a ritual of public life: a new influx of ministers means a new investigation into what illegal drugs, if any, they may have tried. The answer is that a lot of them have tried and hated cannabis, including Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary. Gordon Brown may have provided the ideal opportunity to place such a survey on the immediate agenda, what with his half-baked perorations about the re-reclassifying of cannabis. But it would all have happened anyway, for some reason, at some point, because it always does.

Public debate on drugs had taken an odd turn this week anyway, with the awful murder of Lucy Braham by William Jaggs being touted as proof that dangerous drugs had now reached the private school, Harrow, and therefore the highest echelons of society. The poor, sad spectre of Olivia Channon, who died of an overdose at Oxford in the early 1980s, was once again revived as a necessary counter-argument.

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I'm not sure quite who believed the former to be anything other than nonsense anyway, since the history of drugs in Britain over the past 30 years has unequivocally been one of democratisation. As student acquaintances from the Oxford days of Jacqui Smith told The Times this week: "Posh people had proper drugs and voted SDP. Labour and Tories drank lager and had the odd spliff ... [Drugs] was the territory of the posher, more fey places like Magdalen and New College."

I can vouch for this myself. At a Scots university in the early 1980s I took lots of drugs. But such substances as cocaine or heroin were entirely unheard of, and right out of our financial league anyway. Our favourite was mushrooms, which grew free in the fields and could be dried for year-round use. We also took the speed that was manufactured by a drop-out medic, who was eventually imprisoned for his pains, and acid was a couple of quid for a 12-hour special-occasion trip. We also grew our own grass, while hash was a precious commodity, taken in the form of hot knives, which were much less wasteful than joints. At times of more desperate poverty we could be witnessed drying banana skins under the grill (never worked) or munching extremely copious amounts of nutmeg (not worth the effort).

The main problem with drugs now is that, if one discounts their total illegality, they operate in the most free, the most violent and the most globalised market there is. Damage limitation has to start there, not with the relatively innocent, annoyingly stubborn, arrogantly youthful end user.

There are many reasons why the focus on classification of cannabis is of little relevance to anything except the response of the local criminal justice system to its use, just as there are many reasons why the local criminal justice system can only ever be useful in dealing with a narrow aspect of the culture of drugs in our society.

In the case of cannabis, people buy it on the black, free market without knowing exactly what they are getting. Some cannabis is mild, because it contains little of the main ingredient, tetrahyrdocannabinol, and some of it is hazardously powerful, because it contains much more of it.

This is a fact of life because it is all illegal and all unregulated, and no amount of reclassification will get over this difficulty. For many, this is a no-brainer argument for legalisation. Yet while that is in many respects a sensible solution, it also brings its own frightening difficulties. No one would wish for cannabis to be sold legally to under-18s, which would leave children more vulnerable than ever to the blandishments of the illegal dealers.

Maybe the public discourse should be focusing on practicalities such as these, rather than whether the making of bunny ears as a student (as seen in a sweet photograph of the young Jacqui) is seemly behaviour for a future home secretary. Personally, I believe that bunny ears should be no bar to high office, and I speak as a woman whose good friend was once fired as a croupier by the Playboy Club, because she scratched the "C" off the name badge she was obliged to wear to encourage customers to address her as Bunny Coral. She was not under the influence of drugs at the time.

* Much has been said about the spat between a well-known British subsidiary of Wal-Mart and its clash with Bloomsbury over the sale of the latest Harry Potter. But not enough praise has been lavished on one London freesheet, which rose splendidly to the occasion by coining the magnificent headline: "The Prisoner of Asda-ban." Do call us, un-sung, heroic sub-editor. I'm sure there's a shift or two for you here at the Indy.

Love in the time of self-help

Poor old Britney Spears is rumoured, no doubt meretriciously, to be stepping out with her former Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor. My own hunch is that the poor guy is merely hanging on in there and doing his best to help the troubled young mother to break with what looks from the reports in the yellow press to be a whopping great case of denial.

While it is true that romance very often blossoms among members of the AA fellowship, sexual relationships between sponsor and sponsee are considered never to be a Good Thing.

In fact, while it is accepted that partnerships between members of what is possibly the foremost self-help group on the planet are common and often extremely successful, it is also accepted that the words of wisdom from one of the British fellowship's founding gurus are always worth bearing in mind.

Asked what his own position on the issue was, he replied after brief consideration that caution was the order of the day. "The odds are good," he counselled fastidiously and, of course, anonymously. "But the goods are odd."

Armed, dangerous and cheesed off

There is some good news for those among us who give sulky succour to worldwide insurgency by harbouring such unpatriotic thoughts as: "How exactly does the placing of my mascara and my Touche Eclat into a small zip-lock plastic bag render it less likely to be utilised in the bomb-making panoply?"

That news is that, in Glasgow at least, raw remembrance of an attempt at terror is making little further inroads into the prevalence of common sense. Not only does the robust west-coast sense of humour prompt the city into wondering whether the religious festival of Ramavan may soon be upon us. It has also failed to inspire security staff into abandoning the modicum of perspective that has prevailed at the airport since 9/11.

Passing responsibly through security at the airport this week, with all unguents safely destined for stowing in the hold, I was hauled up, nevertheless, and asked why I had included a large sharp object in my hand baggage. I explained that the cheese grater must have been stuffed in my carrier bag by my mother, who had given it to me as a whimsical gift in celebration of my 10th wedding anniversary (which is, glamorously, tin). Armed with the weapon in question, and my explanation, the security woman convened an informal meeting of hijacking experts.

Their light-hearted discourse alluded to a surprising amount of previous experience with attempted in-flight cheese-grater offences.

Happily, it was quickly established that custom and practice had confirmed that while the cheese graters with the wider apertures that facilitated slicing or shaving, did indeed have to be confiscated, mine, which offered only a range of opportunities for actual trituration, was a perfectly reasonable candidate for the comfort of the overhead lockers. A fine adjudication, I feel. But don't try this yourselves, folks, if you're Asian.

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