"a bunch of trendies"

Following my January 5th post below on the looming UK reclassification of cannabis, there's an interesting quote from the following day's Daily Mail:

Kate Hoey, one of ten Labour MPs who voted against reclassification in October 2003, said: "I take no satisfaction in this, but I'm pleased Charles Clarke is now taking the issue more seriously than perhaps it was taken at the time.

"The evidence on mental health was all there when the Commons debated this. I mentioned it in my speech, and so did other MPs.

"Nobody was calling for reclassification except a bunch of trendies. Everybody on the Advisory Council seemed to be from the pro-legalisation camp, so their findings were hardly surprising."

Déjà vu

This remark, very insulting to the members of the Advisory Council, is just like one made by James Callaghan, then Home Secretary, in the 1969 debate on the report of the Wootton Commission on cannabis. He insulted Baroness Wootton and her committee (of very upright citizens) with his remark :

"I had the impression... that those who were in favour of legalizing pot were all the time pushing the other members of the committee back, so that eventually these remarkable conclusions emerged that it would be wrong to legalize it but that the penalties should be reduced."

This is the level of debate which our appointed representatives give us for our money. A few more intellectual gems from that debate:

"This mania for research that inspires sociologists and armchair legislators fills me with misgivings. There is a lot that we do not know about water, but I have a pretty shrewd conviction, at any rate when I am in a boat, that it is wet and better kept out of and not got into."
T L Iremonger

"The effects of cannabis are bad. It is all very well for the Honourable Member for Yarmouth to say that they are not bad. The essential of drug taking is that one has to take more and more to have the same effect." Captain Walter Elliott

(Emboldening is mine)