Comment

INJECTING SOME SENSE

Millions Of People Want To Use Drugs And Prohibition Will Not Stop Them

Peter Lilley's call for the legalisation of cannabis is a welcome sign of
sanity in the political classes. The former deputy Tory leader is right to
argue that current policy is unenforcable and indefensible. When drug use
is commonplace and widely seen as normal it makes no sense to prohibit it.
The result can only be to make criminals of otherwise perfectly ordinary
people.

But this argument does not apply only - or even chiefly - to cannabis. It
has still greater force applied to hard drugs, where the consequences of
prohibition include serious dangers to public health.

The reality that politicians of all parties still refuse to recognise is
that criminalising hard drugs has been a disaster. Legalising cannabis
would be a sensible step, but what is more urgently required is a
fundamental overhaul of the prohibitionist policies on drugs such as heroin
and cocaine that successive British governments have imported from the
United States.

The US is the world's largest market for illegal drugs. Decades of
prohibitionism have done nothing to quench the insatiable American demand
for an instant high. Around half a million people, a disproportionate
number of them black, are currently behind bars for drug offences.

Outside the US, America's puritan war on drugs has led to military
intervention in a number of countries, including Colombia, where - as Sir
Keith Morris, former British ambassador there, said last week - it has
aggravated a cruel conflict without reducing the supply of drugs or curbing
the demand for them in the US.

When I last wrote on this subject in the Guardian six years ago, I argued
that there was an unanswerable case for comprehensive drug legalisation in
the US. For Britain, however, I took what is now a standard liberal view -
that soft drugs should be decriminalised while the police effort against
traffickers in hard drugs should be intensified.

I think so no longer. Today, hard drug use in Britain is at pandemic
levels. Since 1971, when a long-standing enlightened policy of treating
addiction as a medical problem was abandoned and the current punitive
regime installed, the number of heroin users has risen a thousand-fold, and
they are currently the youngest in Europe.

Moreover, British heroin users are at quite exceptional medical risk - and
not only from HIV, which is often transmitted by sharing needles. As Nick
Davies highlighted in his Guardian investigation, there are around 300,000
people suffering from hepatitis C in this country, most of them current or
former drug users.

Hepatitis C is a life-threatening condition, and it is highly infectious.
Yet there is no systematic programme for treatment or prevention of the
disease, or for monitoring its spread. Because the government insists on
treating hard drug use as a criminal rather than a social or medical issue,
a major threat to public health is not being addressed.

David Blunkett has reacted cautiously but constructively to Mr Lilley's
proposal, and it is to be hoped that his response augurs a more rational
stance to the drugs question on the part of the government.

But - despite the plea for legalisation made over the weekend by Sir David
Ramsbotham, outgoing chief inspector of prisons, which is echoed in private
by a number of senior police officers - there is no prospect of the
government undertaking the radical overhaul of drugs that is now urgently
needed.

It is not just a craven fear of the rightwing press that holds it back -
sections of the rightwing press have, after all, joined with liberal papers
in questioning the current drugs regime - but also the belief that the
argument for drug legalisation depends on the half-baked libertarian notion
that people should be free to go to hell in their own way.

This is a serious intellectual muddle. Quite to the contrary, the case for
legalisation is based on the fact that using drugs has an enormous and
sometimes devastating impact on other people. This is as true of legal
drugs, such as alcohol, as it is of cannabis, heroin or cocaine.

But the social effects of drug use are hugely magnified and worsened when
it is illegal. It is not only that organised crime is strengthened, as it
reaps the benefits of a stupendously profitable black market.

Current policies are creating a growing underclass, which is medically,
legally and economically vulnerable in the highest degree. Even
clear-thinking authoritarians - if there are any in the government - must
accept that outlawing drugs is wreaking havoc on public health and social
cohesion.

The case for legalising hard drugs does not rely on ultra-liberal ideas
about individual freedom. But there is a peculiar absurdity in denying
people the freedom to use drugs while encouraging them to take risky
choices in practically every other area of their lives.

No doubt rightly, the government is constantly urging us to become more
entrepreneurial. It advises us to save for our old age by investing in
volatile stock markets. It never ceases reminding those of us who are
worried about environmental dangers that risks are present in everything we do.

It presides over a society in which personal choice is the supreme value
and risk-taking has become an essential ingredient of the good life. Where
drugs are concerned, however, it actively prevents people from making a
reasonable assessment of the risks they are taking.

Whatever the inherent dangers of any drug, an extra level of risk is added
when users have no reliable knowledge of the quality of the drug they are
consuming. Decriminalisation - a policy of not prosecuting the end-users of
drugs while continuing to target their sources - would not solve this problem.

Turning a blind eye on users - as is being done in regard to cannabis in
Brixton in an experimental scheme which makes long-established police
practice in south London official - leaves production and distribution in
the hands of criminals.

Only legalising the most widely used drugs, subjecting them to strict
quality assessment and making them available through controlled outlets,
will allow people to make intelligent choices.

The most odious tyrannies are those that seek to impose unreal values on
society. Drugs policy has become such a tyranny. The hard truth is that
millions of people want the freedom to use drugs, and no policy of
prohibition is going to stop them.

Isn't it time government accepted this fact, and allowed them to use drugs
more safely and at less risk to others?