DRUGS ARE, AND SHOULD BE TREATED AS, A MENACE

For the past three decades or so, drug use and the criminality it
spawns have posed the greatest threat to our social fabric. Any
contribution to the debate on how to combat this menace is welcome.

A specialist committee set up by the Royal Society of Arts has spent
two years examining the problem and its report, Drugs - Facing Facts,
is nothing if not thorough. It explores ways of reducing the supply of
drugs, discouraging demand and treating addicts, while formulating new
mechanisms for the delivery of drug policy. Along the way, it has
useful things to say about education, treatment and
rehabilitation.

Yet the overall tone of the report is naive, and dangerously so. While
the committee is under no illusion that drugs are bad, it strikes a
note of fashionable tolerance that suggests it does not want to combat
this scourge, but accommodate it.

"The use of illegal drugs is by no means always harmful
any more than alcohol use is always harmful," it asserts, as if an
ecstasy tablet or cannabis joint are as benign as a glass or two of
Chilean red.

In fact, there is a profound difference. The use of soft drugs all too
often leads to the use of harder drugs and addiction.

Even more sanguine is its contention that "a majority of people who
use drugs are able to use them without harming themselves or others".

Really? What a complacent, middle-class take on recreational drug use
is encapsulated in that sentence.

In the real world, the victims of drugs are predominantly poor people
on sink estates preyed on by ruthless drug dealers.

Their need to fuel their drug-taking habit accounts for about 70 per
cent of criminal activity in this country. "Without harming themselves
or others"? We don't think so.

As part of its light touch approach, the committee wants drugs to be
classified alongside alcohol and tobacco, rather than in a category of
their own.

Such a move would simply blur the boundary between illegal drugs and
the two legal drugs; it would only be a matter of time before the
boundary vanished altogether.

The report also bemoans the fact that drug policy is seen primarily as
a criminal justice issue, rather than one of health. It wants to
redress the balance by giving the Department of Local Government and
Communities the lead role, rather than the Home Office. That is simply
throwing in the towel.

The report's most galling assertion is that current drugs policy is
driven by "moral panic".

Not so. It is driven by the desperation of people whose streets are
not safe from the depredations of thugs hooked on illegal drugs
looking for money for their next fix.

That demands not greater tolerance, but the vigorous policing of
unambiguous anti-drug laws.