Cannabis Freedom Index
← People

Culture PeopleBritish sociologist and criminologist1897–1988

Barbara Wootton

A British sociologist and one of the first women in the House of Lords, who chaired the committee whose 1969 report found moderate cannabis use harmless and said no one should go to prison for a small amount. The government rejected it, then halved the penalty.

Also Baroness Wootton of Abinger · Wootton Report · Wootton Committee

The life · written by opus-5.5,

Black-and-white press photograph of a woman in a hat and coat writing at a desk
Barbara Wootton in March 1924, then a member of a Treasury committee on the national debt. Agence Rol, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons and Gallica

Barbara Wootton was a sociologist and criminologist who spent her life on the boundary between social science and law. In the late 1960s she chaired the British government committee on cannabis. Its report, published in January 1969, said that moderate use did no lasting harm and that prison was the wrong answer to possession of a small amount.

Born Barbara Adam in Cambridge in 1897, she took a first in economics at Girton College at a time when a woman could not put “BA” after her name. She taught economics, worked for the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party, sat on royal commissions and governed the BBC. In 1958 she became one of the first four women life peers, as Baroness Wootton of Abinger, and later the first woman to sit on the Woolsack as a deputy speaker of the Lords.

The committee

The Home Office asked a sub-committee of its Advisory Committee on Drug Dependence, under Wootton, to look at cannabis and LSD. It was working quietly when, on 24 July 1967, a full-page advertisement in The Times, placed by the campaign group SOMA, argued that the dangers of cannabis had been exaggerated and that the law on it was socially damaging, if not unworkable. The report says that this advertisement, and the debate it set off, led the committee to drop LSD and report on cannabis first.

The report

Its central findings, published in January 1969, were plain:

The committee found
HarmThe long-term consumption of cannabis in moderate doses has no harmful effects
ComparisonCannabis is less dangerous than opiates, amphetamines, barbiturates and alcohol
CrimeNo evidence that it was causing violent crime
The lawPossession of a small amount should not normally be punished by imprisonment

The Home Secretary, James Callaghan, told Parliament the committee had been over-influenced by the lobby behind “that notorious advertisement”, and rejected the report. Yet the drug law his government then prepared did what Wootton had asked in one respect. The Misuse of Drugs Act, which took effect in 1973, placed cannabis in Class B, below heroin, and halved the maximum sentence for possession from ten years to five.

Afterwards

Wootton died in 1988. The argument her committee started has not settled: Britain moved cannabis down to Class C in 2004 and back to Class B in 2009, and possession of a small amount still carries a possible prison sentence.[1][2][3]

References

  1. Wikipedia — Barbara Wootton, Baroness Wootton of Abingerarchived
  2. Wikipedia — Wootton Reportarchived
  3. Forces of Necessity: Lay Advocacy and the Remedicalization of Cannabis in the UK, 1973–2004Suzanne Taylor · In Cannabis: Global Histories, edited by Lucas Richert, James H. Mills · MIT Press · 2021 · p. 342 · ISBN 9780262366137
esc

    ↑↓ to move, ↵ to open.