THIS WAR IS UNWINNABLE

As ambassador to Colombia , I watched the endless Anglo-US campaigns
against drug traffickers and I know they will never work.

November 1992, European Drugs Week: Panorama opened with seven minutes of
Kenneth Clarke, the then home secretary, jumping out of helicopters to look
at coca growing in the jungle and opium poppy being sprayed in the High
Andes. Behind him there hovered, to the embarrassment of my children, a
white-haired ambassador with a stick.

Thus started what the Colombians came to call "narcotourism". The chatter
of the Colombian anti-narcotics police helicopters, with their machine guns
at the ready and columns of smoke from burning mountains of cocaine, were
used to show that the war on drugs was no metaphor.

When I accompanied Clarke that day, I believed there was a point to that
war. In the years since, I have come to realise that the war is unwinnable,
costly and counter-productive.

I was appointed ambassador to Colombia in 1990 knowing I had much to learn
about the drugs trade. The Colombia I returned to 20 years after my first
posting there had changed greatly, mostly for the better, with steady
growth and substantial spending on education and health. Along with the end
of the cold war, this should have helped bring about a negotiated end to
the low intensity communist insurgency that had plagued the country from
the mid-60s.

But instead of peace, Colombia saw a dramatic increase in violence and
corruption as prohibition made cocaine a profitable commodity. Slumbering
Marxist guerrillas prospered on the money the drug traffickers paid them to
protect the cocaine laboratories. The traffickers also hired assassins to
kill and intimidate, and paramilitaries to defend their ranches from the
very guerrillas to whom they were paying protection money.

Under US pressure, the Colombians extradited drug traffickers to the US. In
retaliation Pablo Escobar, then the world's seventh-richest man according
to Forbes, launched a campaign of narcoterrorism. In one year, from August
1989, his assassins killed three presidential candidates, blew up an
airliner with more than 100 passengers, set off dozens of car bombs and
killed 200 policemen in Medellin alone.

So as I arrived in Colombia, the war on drugs seemed like self-defence. The
US, the UK and other Europeans had just started to give help in training
and equipment to the Colombians to counter the direct threat to the state
that Escobar represented. It was meant to be part of a deal: as well as
helping tackle supply we - the consumer countries - would crack down on the
supply of precursor chemicals, check money laundering and reduce demand at
home. At the time, we really believed that the war was winnable.

Some progress was made. The Colombian police responded well to help and
advice. Escobar gave himself up when the threat of extradition was dropped.
He escaped a year later but his organisation was demolished and in December
1993 he was killed. But the Americans immediately started briefing that
Escobar had long been a sideshow and that the real problem was the Cali
cartel. After so much effort and many lives lost, the trade was still as
great as ever. I began to wonder about the chances of success and also
about the obsessive attitudes of our leading ally.

My concerns were justified. US policy on Colombia came to be dominated by
drugs. Two days after President Samper was elected in 1994, he was accused
of having accepted $5m from the Cali cartel to finance his campaign. US
agencies had allegedly been involved in taping conversations. The American
line when I left Colombia in late 1994 was that Samper would be judged on
his performance against the traffickers. The Cali cartel was dismembered by
mid-1995, but when members of Samper's own campaign, who were under
investigation, implicated him in the drugs scandal, the US administration
imposed sanctions, undermining confidence in what had been South America's
most stable economy.

Morale in Colombia's overstretched armed forces was undermined as they saw
their president attacked by their great ally. The only beneficiaries were
the Marxist guerrillas and their rightwing mirror image, the
paramilitaries. Ironically, it is only recently that the US has started to
take the threat of communism in Colombia seriously again, and has taken
steps to strengthen the army. But it isn't ideology that fuels Colombia's
violence: it is the money from the illegal drugs trade.

Colombia has now been involved in anti-narcotics efforts under US pressure
for 30 years: against marijuana in the 70s, cocaine in the 80s and 90s, and
heroin in the 90s. And for the past 12 years there has been intense
international cooperation. But as General Serrano, the highly respected
former commander of the Colombian police told me in March, in spite of all
that the flow of drugs has increased. The cost: tens of thousands dead,
more than a million displaced people, political and economic stability
undermined and the country's image ruined.

The attack on the supply side of the drugs trade was always bound to fail
if the other elements - precursor chemicals, money laundering and demand -
were not tackled too. But there seems to be no shortage of chemicals
reaching the traffickers; there have been no striking results on stopping
money flows; and demand has grown, with the habit now spreading to the
producer countries too. There has been a cultural change which has led to
the recreational use of drugs being seen by the younger generation as
normal. It is now part of a global consumer society that demands instant
gratification. Laws cannot change that. All they can do is create a $500bn
criminal industry with devastating effects worldwide. It must be time to
start discussing how drugs could be controlled more effectively within a
legal framework.

Decriminalisation, which is often mentioned, would be an unsatisfactory
halfway house, because it would leave the trade in criminal hands, giving
no help at all to the producer countries, and would not guarantee consumers
a safe product or free them from the pressure of pushers. It has been
difficult for me to advocate legalisation because it means saying to those
with whom I worked, and to the relatives of those who died, that this was
an unnecessary war. But the imperative must be to try to stop the damage.

Some politicians have religious objections to any attempt at legalisation.
Others still believe that if we persevere the war can be won; and there are
many who will tell you in private that we are getting nowhere but believe
that the electorate and certainly Washington would never buy radical
change. I am not so sure. The younger generation views things differently
and what is politically impossible today can become politically imperative
tomorrow. I hope this government will at least agree to a serious debate on
the subject. It deserves it.

Sir Keith Morris was ambassador to Colombia from 1990-94, and will be live
online this afternoon at 3pm.