Peter Hitchens Says Police Don’t Care Why Britain Smells of Weed

Britain is a country where free speech is lawful, yet people are often warned to watch their words. At the same time, cannabis remains illegal, despite its unmistakable smell seeming to drift through towns and cities everywhere.

Possessing the pungent drug is still a criminal offence. On paper, the maximum penalty is five years in prison and an unlimited fine.

In practice, however, the law is scarcely enforced. Officers who do pursue such cases can see them resolved through ‘out-of-court disposals’, meaning the offender is released without a prosecution. Many police therefore see little point in devoting time and resources to an offence they believe the courts do not take seriously.

The Daily Mail found ready examples. In Middlesbrough, a young woman was seen calmly preparing a spliff in full public view, apparently unconcerned by passing pedestrians or the prospect of arrest.

In Birmingham, a man was spotted rolling a cannabis joint aboard a train as police officers nearby took no action. Fellow passengers watched but remained silent. It is difficult to blame them: cannabis’s long-held image as a ‘soft’ and peaceful drug is increasingly being challenged.

Stepping in may be not only futile but risky. In New York, where cannabis is legal but smoking it on trains is prohibited, commuters have been stabbed after confronting people smoking the drug.

Britain has not escaped violence linked to cannabis users. Author Ross Grainger has spent years compiling court cases from across the country involving serious violent crimes committed by people who had used cannabis. His bleak collection, Attacker Smoked Cannabis, draws together those cases. Grainger says: ‘The law against cannabis possession is barely enforced in Britain.’ He argues that one reason may be the influence of the industry, adding: ‘Big Cannabis, as a lobby, is as real and insidious as Big Tobacco’.

Persistent campaigns for looser marijuana laws, sometimes funded by billionaires, portray the drug as safe, gentle and even beneficial to health. Yet the argument is that countries and states that have liberalised cannabis laws have suffered a grim cost. Britain, critics say, continues stubbornly to overlook the warning signs.

 Few have reported, for instance, that the killers of murdered soldier Lee Rigby were long-term marijuana users or that the Nottingham home of the crazed killer Valdo Calocane ‘stank of weed’ according to his neighbours.

In the US, doubts grow daily. The former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson has described a conversation with his wife, Jackie, a psychiatrist, which changed his mind. Jackie used to work at a grim mental hospital, a sort of American Broadmoor called the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychiatric Center, which looks from the outside like a prison, with barbed wire. Berenson explained: ‘It’s full of the criminally mentally ill – defendants judged not guilty by reason of insanity. Many of its patients are killers and arsonists. At least one is a cannibal. Most have been diagnosed with psychotic disorders like schizophrenia that provoked them to violence against family members or strangers.’

Berenson describes the decisive conversation with his wife: ‘A couple of years ago, Jackie was telling me about a patient. In passing, she said something like – “Of course he’d been smoking pot his whole life.”

‘“Of course?” I said. “Yes, they all smoke.”’

And she did not mean tobacco.

Berenson went on to write the book Tell Your Children, denouncing the rush to legalise marijuana that has swept North America over the past 15 years. And the signs are that the tide is now turning there, largely thanks to the unavoidable suspicion that the drug makes many of its users dangerously mentally ill.

Even the radically Left-wing New York Times, which in 2014 supported legalisation, is now retreating thanks to the disastrous results of the mass use of the drug. In February, it confessed its mistake, saying: ‘It’s time for America to admit that it has a marijuana problem.’

At the same time, the equally liberal Washington Post has reported the collapse of Portugal’s 2001 experiment in decriminalising marijuana and other drugs. Touted for years as proof that going soft would be just fine, the country has seen crime rates soar and its streets descend into squalor, which the police blame on drug use.

Here, most media and politicians are still stuck in the Hippy Dream of dope decriminalisation. Even Nigel Farage has publicly toyed with the daft idea. Then there are the ‘medical marijuana’ propagandists, making extravagant claims for the drug’s power to cure and treat disease or pain. This was always a deliberate deception.

The great guru of America’s pro-pot campaign, Keith Stroup, admitted in a 1979 interview that he planned to use medical marijuana as a ‘red herring’ to get the drug a good name. It must be the biggest red herring in history, for it has worked like a charm.

Even if the claims made for it are true, there is one small problem – anyone who takes it may well end up with lifelong severe mental illness. That is quite a side effect. Can regulators really permit its use, knowing that danger?

Until remarkably recently, fashionable opinion pretended that marijuana users were subject to a harsh, even Draconian prohibition. Yet marijuana is now probably slightly easier to buy than full-fat cow’s milk, especially on university campuses. Almost any sane person with eyes to see, and a nose to smell, nowadays admits that the drug’s use is widespread and unchecked by the law.

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Efforts to halt supply have failed, as they always do. Nearly 200 tons of imported marijuana, much of it from the US, was seized on its way to Britain in the year to March. This is probably a tiny proportion of the actual flow. Meanwhile, marijuana farms, perhaps the most profitable sector of British agriculture, thrive everywhere, run by criminal gangs using illegal migrants as slave labour.

These farms are not like the ones in the rural soap operas The Archers or Emmerdale. They occupy suburban houses and abandoned shops and warehouses, probably near you. They are heated and lit with stolen electricity, and entirely free of tax and regulation.

Figures are vague but it is likely that while hundreds are discovered, thousands go undiscovered, every year. The Daily Mail’s Tom Kelly recently reported that there are at least 450 Albanian cannabis farms known to be operating across Britain.

Nobody doubts there are many more that are undetected. They bring with them illegal migrants, to toil in them, and vicious criminal behaviour, to exclude rivals from their territory.

It makes me nostalgic for the days, not long ago, when liberal campaigners such as Sir Simon Jenkins, former editor of The Times, would claim that the laws against the drug were strictly enforced. Back in 1997 he said the marijuana law ‘has led more young people into prison and a life of crime than any other Act’. In 2000, he said: ‘Thousands of young people are criminalised each year for using a substance that most people feel should be legal.’

Was this right? Even then a tiny number of offences were being prosecuted, compared with the number being committed, and the police response to marijuana possession was to ignore it if possible. It was hard to find any example of anyone who had been sent to prison for simple marijuana possession.

A dozen years ago, I used to take part in a lot of debates on the subject on university campuses. I would always ask everyone in the audience to raise their hands if they had smoked marijuana.

Invariably, almost every hand went up. They weren’t afraid of admitting it, or of doing so in public. They were obviously unafraid of the law. As far back as 1994, the former head of Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad, John O’Connor, said: ‘Cannabis has been a decriminalised drug for some time now’. Enforcement, as we shall see, has been diminishing for decades.

This ended up with the police themselves making their own law, introducing a procedure called a Cannabis Warning, which was not recorded and had no effect on the person to whom it was issued. Increasingly they don’t even bother with that and it is likely to be dropped soon.

In the year ended March 2025, police in England and Wales recorded 95,274 possession of cannabis offences, ludicrous when you consider the millions of such offences actually taking place. Fewer than 17 per cent were even charged. Just over half were written off with so-called Community Resolutions, otherwise known as Slaps On The Wrist. Many were just closed for various reasons.

As the truth became clear, the liberalisers subtly changed their tune. As the facts and the smell showed that the ‘draconian prohibition’ claims were piffle, we were told: ‘It’s too late to do anything about it, so let’s give in totally.’

In 2018, the supposed conservative William Hague wrote in a national newspaper: ‘As far as marijuana, or cannabis, is concerned, any war has been comprehensively and irreversibly lost. The idea that the drug can be driven off the streets and out of people’s lives by the state is nothing short of deluded… this battle is effectively over.’

This is untrue. Japan and South Korea continue to enforce their laws against cannabis possession and, as a result, have much lower levels of cannabis use.

A Japanese celebrity caught with marijuana can also generally expect to experience public shame and career damage, unlike here. The decriminalisers really do not want to know this, just as they do not want to know that this country, too, had serious anti-marijuana laws and enforcement of them until the late 1960s. It was then that the powerful establishment campaign to dilute and eventually destroy Britain’s marijuana laws began.

On July 24, 1967, much of the establishment were beguiled by a full-page advert in The Times, paid for and signed by all four Beatles, plus the novelist Graham Greene, the broadcaster David Dimbleby and various clerics, psychiatrists and artists. It proclaimed, untruly: ‘The law against marijuana is immoral in principle and unworkable in practice.’

Soon afterwards a government report, by the liberal battleaxe Barbara Wootton, more or less backed the campaign. And in 1971, a Tory Home Secretary, Reggie Maudling, steered through the tricky, deceptive legislation that has ever since given marijuana possession a special status in English law. This status was openly recognised by another apparently crusty but in fact rather soft Tory, Lord Hailsham. In October 1973, as Lord Chancellor, he urged the magistrates of England to go easy on marijuana smokers.

He said: ‘Users of “soft drugs” should… be treated with “becoming moderation”.’ And they were, with increasing generosity. That is why your hometown’s streets now smell the way they do. One of the few who opposed this at the time was the journalist and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge, who said it had all happened before. He had witnessed, while teaching in Cairo in the 1920s, the horrible effect of mass use of what was then called hashish. After describing the drug-affected students as ‘stupefied zombies incapable of learning or thinking or talking,’ he said that no one in 1920s Egypt would have claimed marijuana was harmless. In fact, it was the Egyptian government’s concern about the effect of the drug that led to the League of Nations putting cannabis on its banned list back in 1924, the basis of the UN’s international drug laws to this day.

Muggeridge jeered in 1968 that he had had to wait 40 years to hear the claim made that dope was harmless – not just by ‘crackpots and wild libertarians’ but by ‘respected citizens, clergymen, purported scientific investigators, and other ostensibly informed and enlightened persons’.

He called the 1960s push to legalise marijuana an example of ‘the death wish at the heart of our way of life’.

Would anybody now like to say that he was wrong, and that the legalisers were right?