TIME FOR GOVERNMENTS TO SURRENDER IN A PHONEY WAR

In his Channel 4 programme last week entitled Drug Laws Don't Work: The
Phoney War, journalist Nick Davies outlined many of the inescapable facts
about drug policies that have become blindingly obvious over the years, but
which politicians continue, for their own self-serving reasons, to ignore.

He pointed out that the so-called war on drugs trumpeted by politicians
like Bill Clinton, George Bush, Tony Blair, Jack Straw or indeed our own
Justice Minister John O'Donoghue is in reality a sham that exacerbates the
very problem it purports to solve.

Many of the problems associated with drug use -- death, illness, crime, the
destruction of communities -- stem less from the actual drugs themselves
than from the black market on which they are sold. The strategy of
prohibition pursued by governments has the inevitable consequence of
generating massive profits for organised crime, bringing in its wake
violence and corruption on a huge scale. As prices are driven up, users, in
turn, are forced into crime to fund their addiction.

Class A drugs like heroin are far more benign in terms of their effects on
human health than we are lead to believe by the moral panic whipped up by
politicians and the media. Pure heroin, while highly addictive, is a
relatively safe drug. The real danger to the health and the lives of drug
users arises out of the fact that the policy of prohibition hands control
of the production and distribution of drugs to criminals.

The black-market dealers are motivated solely by profit and heroin is
transformed into a far more dangerous product as soon as it is mixed with
anything from drain cleaner to talcum powder to cement dust. Prohibition,
and the black market it gives rise to, eliminates the possibility of
providing the type of information, regulation and safeguards that could
save lives. In its absence, the purity of street heroin can vary
dramatically, causing users to overdose accidentally.

Despite the perverse effects of prohibition, politicians continue to ignore
the evidence and to press ahead with their phoney war. Speaking at a
Trocaire/Oxfam seminar in 1997, O'Donoghue declared that "this Government
means business when it comes to putting the drug barons out of business"
and vowed to "protect our young people from the evil merchants of the drug
trade".

He boasted of the setting up of the Criminal Assets Bureau to investigate
criminal wealth and of the introduction of mandatory 10-year sentences for
serious drug trafficking offences. In the wake of the hysteria generated in
the aftermath of Veronica Guerin's death in 1996, emergency bills were
pushed through that included qualifying the right to silence in drug cases
and allowing for the seven-day detention of those found in possession of drugs.

Yet while O'Donoghue may have succeeded in driving up the prison
population, there is scant evidence to suggest such strong-arm tactics have
any positive effect in terms of reducing levels of drug use.

In Britain, Davies points out, there were fewer than 500 heroin addicts
when the country began to impose prohibition of heroin in 1968. Today, the
Home Office estimates that there may be as many as 500,000. Nor can such a
strategy ever put the drug barons out of business, as O'Donoghue vowed.
Just as surely as the US prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s generated a
serious crimewave, the continued prohibition of drugs will always ensure a
thriving black market and organised crime.

Nowhere has the war on drugs been conducted with greater zeal than in the
US, which has spent in the region of $350billion in the last 18 years in an
effort to eliminate drug use. Yet the only discernible effect has been to
make the illegal drug trade even more lucrative and to inflate the
country's prison population to the point where it now accounts for a
quarter of the incarcerated population of the world.

The US is now building a new prison every week to cope with people serving
mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession. Meanwhile, drugs are more
readily available on the street than ever. As a social policy, it has been
a monumental failure. Yet rather than breaking with the failed strategies
of the Clinton era, the Bush administration has instead renewed the war on
drugs with the appointment of hard-liner John P Walters as US `drugs Tsar'.

Walters will be responsible for a budget of $19b, covering a range of
programmes and initiatives from public information to `Plan Colombia', a
strategy whose aim is to eliminate the Colombian coca crop through the
aerial spraying of toxic pesticides on the Colombian countryside.

The Irish Government's recently launched National Drugs Strategy has been
lauded as a radical departure that brings all elements of drugs policy into
a single framework and advances a partnership approach with the communities
most affected by heroin addiction through Local Drugs Task Forces.

Yet nowhere does the strategy engage in a serious re-evaluation of the
failed policy of criminalisation. Instead, it persists with futile targets
for supply reduction, such as deploying more Gardai in Local Drug Task
Force areas and increasing the volume of illicit drug seizures -- by 25% by
2004 and by 50% by 2008. Even assuming that these targets are met
(Creamfields will help their cause, no doubt), all that would happen,
surely, is that the prices of illicit drugs would rise further on the black
market, forcing addicts to commit more crimes to fund their habit.

A more enlightened approach would be to decriminalise and regulate the
entire drugs trade, not just cannabis, thus undermining the black market,
reducing levels of crime and reducing drug-related deaths and illnesses by
protecting drug users from the dangerous concoctions offered by
unscrupulous racketeers.

Despite the manifest failures of existing strategies, however, politicians
remain impervious to these arguments. One can only conclude that the war on
drugs has less to do with its actual stated goals than with political
calculations. There is nothing politicians like more than a moral crusade
against a common enemy, and the "evil merchants" of the drugs trade fit the
bill perfectly.

Nevermind the consequences. It's appearances that count.