As various Tory leadership candidates line
up to confess to
the usage of controlled and illegal substances in their youth, they are asking
us to judge them not on the ‘mistakes’ they made many years ago, but on their
record since. At first sight, this is an
entirely reasonable request; I can see no reason why what people did when they
were very much younger should be allowed to hold them back for the rest of
their lives. There is more than a slight
whiff of hypocrisy here though.
All of them, as far as I’m aware, support
the current law and government policy on drugs, under which those who at any
point possess or use class A substances – at least three of the current
leadership contenders – can be charged, prosecuted, and sentenced to up
to 7 years imprisonment. None of them
seems to be proposing any changes to that law.
And for those who get caught using such drugs (often people who are
already disadvantaged in other ways) the criminalisation process can and does
have a severe effect on their prospects for the future.
It seems to me that those Tories asking us
to forgive and forget their ‘youthful mistakes’ are actually asking us to treat
them differently from ‘common or garden’ drug users because a) they never got
caught, and b) they come from a particular social demographic. I’d have a lot more respect for their
position if their own experience had helped them to see how and why some people
get caught up in drug usage and gave them something of an insight into the
problems with over-simplistic criminalisation.
Instead, all they seem to have learned is that people from the ‘right’
background who don’t get caught committing a criminal act can and should expect
preferential treatment.
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