OUR FAILED DRUGS POLICY HAS TO CHANGE

Drugs policy has failed. Do not take my word for it. That was,
essentially, the conclusion of the Prime Minister's strategy unit in
a report published last year after initially being suppressed. The
aim of drugs policy over the past four decades has been to reduce
demand and curb supply. It has done neither. Crime associated with
drug-taking is as rife as ever. A new way needs to be found.

In order to explore whether one exists and is worth pursuing, the
Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and
Commerce (RSA), a venerable institution born during the Enlightenment
of the 18th century, decided to establish a commission of experts and
lay people to examine the impact of drugs policy and consider the
merits of alternative approaches.

On Thursday, the commission (of which I am a member) will publish its
report after two years of deliberations. The length of this gestation
period betokens both the monumental scale of the task, in considering
the volume of evidence from around the world, and its difficulty.

It is one thing to gather together academics, a senior police
officer, politicians, drugs practitioners and drug users, community
workers, lawyers and medical experts to discuss an issue about which
most of us have hundreds of questions and precious few answers; it is
quite another to achieve a consensus about what to recommend.

But, to be honest, there were very few major arguments. Nobody
stormed out demanding the legalisation of all drugs or the return of
the birch for dealers. What struck me was that most people working in
this field, and that includes policy-makers when they do not have an
eye on an imminent general election, are trying their best to perform
an almost Sisyphean task in which the greatest efforts appear to get
you not very far.

So it ill behoves us to be critical and negative. Yet, more than 35
years after the Misuse of Drugs Act - the main legislative framework
for policy - it is time to revisit these issues to see whether they
can be better and more effectively tackled. All of us have a huge
stake in doing so.

We may or may not be victims of the crime with which drug misuse is
associated; we may have family members who take drugs or are addicted
to them. The taxpayer also forks out a vast sum every year to deal
with the consequences. We have a vested interest in getting it right.

But what is right? Since 1971, our policy has been largely, though
not exclusively, driven by the criminal justice aspects of the
prohibition on certain drugs. Any new thinking is always within the
constraints imposed by this framework.

As Professor Anthony King, the commission chairman, observes in his
introduction to the report: "The question for policy-makers is never,
'Where do we go?', but always, 'Where do we go from here?' " What the
commission seeks to achieve is to broaden the public debate on drugs
rather than to offer a panacea. We emphasise the importance of a
"harm reduction" approach, which critics often take as a euphemism
for "going soft" but which is not intended to be.

Indeed, we would hope that the debate could be conducted in a less
simplistic rhetorical climate than that. Politicians are often
reluctant to embrace new ideas lest they be denounced as wishy-washy
liberals; yet the public indifference to David Cameron's recent Great
Spliff Revelation suggests a change in public attitudes - not
approval, but an acceptance that these things happen.

However much we would like it to be otherwise, drugs and other
psychoactive substances are not going to go away. And why should
they? I enjoy a bottle of wine and millions continue to smoke despite
facing a constant barrage of opprobrium.

Many of the drugs that are illegal do not necessarily cause any
greater damage than alcohol or tobacco, both of which when taken to
excess are debilitating or lethal. So if drugs cannot be eradicated,
then the principal object of public policy, instead of trying to
criminalise as many people as possible, should be to discourage their
use on health grounds and mitigate the harm they cause. Furthermore,
most of us felt, without being excessively libertarian about it, that
if people are harming neither themselves nor others, the state has no
reason to intervene.

The commission began its work very much in the muddled middle and
probably has not really left that position. We knew at the outset
that some drugs are very harmful and are the root of serious illness
and crime. We also suspected that other drugs, subject to similar, if
lesser, criminal sanctions, are probably not especially bad at all,
and no more so than legal drugs.

We also felt that the idea of a drugs-free world is fantasy, yet this
has been the principal ambition of public policy for many years. Some
years ago, the UN set itself the goal of ridding the world of drugs
by 2008, a target that has become more, rather than less, fanciful over time.

In the late 1960s, there were a few thousand drug addicts at most
across the United Kingdom; today there are a quarter of a million
problem users, who damage not only themselves but the very fabric of
society with the criminal activity they engage in to fuel their habit.

The fact is that, after two decades of special measures, higher
sentences and umpteen education programmes, there are more drug users
than ever in the UK, the profits to be made from selling drugs are
greater than ever, and the crime associated with drugs shows little
sign of abating to the levels we saw before drugs exploded on to the scene.

The RSA commission will propose a new departure for drugs policy,
though not an unrealistically radical one. No doubt there will be
many reading the report who will question whether it offers a viable
way forward, but its ideas are worth discussing. More of the same is
no longer an option.