The problem not the substance

The Independent on Sunday seems to think there is a debate to have about cannabis - a debate that centres on the drug's legal status in the light of so-called 'new evidence' about the dangers of the drug and incidentally, based on a distortion of evidence about potency as revealed by the Guardian (24th March).

Last week The Lancet published a league table of drug harms including both alcohol and tobacco while the recent report by the Royal Society of Arts and last year's report by MPs, both queried whether the Misuse of Drugs Act was fit for purpose.

There are certainly questions to be raised about our response to the harms caused by drugs - not least the media-fuelled obsession with cannabis while the much greater damage caused by alcohol is glossed over. But while concerns about the evidence-base for our drug laws may help to inform the wider debate about drugs, they actually miss a key point: we should be focusing on the problem, not the substance.

The Misuse of Drugs Act is no more than a legal instrument and can also be a mechanism to signal police priorities. The reclassification of methamphetamine to Class A was not driven by a clear and present danger, but at the request of the police who argued that should they need to, it would be easier to allocate scarce resources to methamphetamine as a Class A rather than a Class B drug. Because there is no evidence that where a drug sits in the Act makes a whit of difference to the decision to use it.

So, for example if anybody thinks that placing stronger strains of cannabis in Class A is going to do much for young people with problems, they are sadly mistaken. What would actually help those teenagers chronically using alcohol and cannabis to cope with social and personal problems would be to have well-funded youth services, decent child and adolescent mental health services and comprehensive family support from social services. And generally a far greater effort to tackle the lethal alientation felt by many young people in British society highlighted in the recent UNICEF report which placed our teenagers way down the happiness league table of developed countries. These are the issues that warrant media campaigns.