Grass and the Whiff of Hypocrisy

Has Judge Michael Mott brought the law into disrepute?

by Paul Benhaim

While the Chief Investigations Officer of Customs and Excise was announcing record seizures of heroin to journalists in London on Monday, another law officer was making a rather different pronouncement in Worcester crown court. Judge Michael Mott was jailing a man who had published a book on how to grow Cannabis. The offence was "incitement" and the penalty, twelve months in jail.

Tony Newton, the Cabinet minister responsible for co-ordinating the anti-drugs campaign, said at the customs press conference that Britain was now "awash" with drugs. He added that to reduce the supply we had to reduce demand "especially among young people."

What could be more calculated to bring the law and warnings about drugs into disrepute among young people than the prosecution and jailing of someone whose offence was to produce a guide to the growing and harvesting of a plant? While our senior customs officers warn of a heroin glut, our police officers are despatched to raid the village home of Michael Marlow, a man who has sold fewer that 500 copies of a book giving information that has been freely available in this country and throughout the world for many years.

Surely a man who reduces the profits of drug dealers should be a hero? He is now despatched into a system, a third of whose inhabitants use drugs, for the purpose of punishment and "rehabilitation."

Ministers and senior police officers routinely say that their aim is to target the dealers of hard drugs rather than the users of soft drugs. The figures tell a rather different story.

Of all the arrests in the last annual figures, 83 percent were for Cannabis offences. The lurking suspicion is that, in these times of "performance indicators" within the police service, soft drug users make a soft target. But there are two other issues here: Mr Marlow was charged with "incitement." We have had the 1797 Incitement to Mutiny Act and the 1934 Incitement to Disaffection Act, but who within the criminal prosecution service (CPS) deemed the production of a gardening book worthy of such treatment? If such a volume is now deemed so inflammatory, where does that place articles in magazines and newspapers expressing views in favour of Cannabis legalisation? Are we to see prosecutions of the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph? What about T-shirts with drug messages or ear-rings designed in the shape of Cannabis leaves? should they now be seized? We all saw how swiftly Clare Short was shut up when she made the perfectly reasonable suggestion, during a television interview last year, of a debate on the laws regarding Cannabis. Now we have moved into a world where a judge is ordering the incineration of a book on the subject. The pungent aroma that comes from this sorry bonfire is the strong whiff of hypocrisy.

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