Jacqui Smith: Nice People Take Drugs

This card is one of a deck produced by Release to highlight politicians’ hypocrisy towards drug use.

Jacqui Smith admitted that she smoked cannabis while she was at university but later regretted it. She is now a passionate supporter of a non-scientific based drug policy and she publicly denounced government advisor Professor Nutt when he suggested that Britain’s drug laws should be based on the individual harm of the drug.

Under Gordon Brown, Smith headed a review of the UK’s drug policy and played a fundamental role in the reclassification of cannabis from class C to Class B. After a 12-month study conducted by the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) based on 4000 academic papers concluded that ecstasy was nowhere near as dangerous as heroin or cocaine and should be downgraded to Class B, Smith still refused to act.

During the expenses scandal Jacqui Smith was found to have “clearly” broken the rules on second home allowances and her husband even claimed for pornography on her parliamentary expenses account. She subsequently stood down as Home Secretary and unsurprisingly was not reelected in her constituency of Redditch during the 2010 general election.

You can see the entire deck of cards here.