I was fairly irked by this article:
Woman behind 'soft' policy on cannabis has addict relative.
Dame Runciman chaired a report in 2000 recommending that cannabis possession no longer be dealt with as an arrestable offense. But one of her relatives has a drug addiction. I don't know which drug, the article doesn't say, but just about halfway down it acknowledges in parenthesis that is not cannabis. The blurring of cannabis and any other substances (except alcohol and tobacco, of course) into the immoral category of substance, "drug" is the first thing to start me off.
Dame Ruth Runciman has never publicly admitted that she has a family member whose life has been affected by drugs, despite her liberal stance on cannabis.
But on the day the Government formally starts a review which could upgrade cannabis to a class B drug, the Standard can reveal that a relative has fought drug addiction for years.
Secondly, I don't like they way they say "admitted", as though it is something she needs to hold her hands up. I think it is irrelevant to anything she has said publicly, and I agree with Dame Runciman when she says asking about it is "remakably intrusive".
My third niggle might just me being pedantic:
Runciman, who believes no users of illegal drugs should be imprisoned, insists that ...
She actually believes drug possession should not be an imprisonable offense. It's a subtle difference and most people would probably figure out her actual position but it bugs me. I don't know if it is an attempt to deliberately mislead, or just bad journalism.
My fourth ache concerns the whole article and a general level of hypocrisy. Columnists in the Daily Mail love to tell us how our politicians are diconnected from the real problems, they don't see the impact of the laws they make from the vista of their ivory towers. But as soon as someone has a personal situation that is remotely related, they use it as a knife to attack them with.
Fifth, there are no comments published alongside this article in spite of the ones I have posted, and I know others have posted too. This is what I posted but has, for some reason, failed moderation:
I cannot see how Dame Runciman's opinions on one drug could be compromised by her experiences with another entirely different drug. It's like saying my opinion on crack cocaine has been influenced by my alcoholic father.