HAVE WE LOST THE WAR ON DRUGS?

Three years into the government's 10-year strategy to fight drugs, the war
is over. The government lost. Not only is Britain awash with drugs, but
they are more affordable and more easily available than ever before. The
time has come to face the fact that drugs have become just another part of
our leisure activity.

British kids spend as much on Ecstasy as the whole nation spends on tea and
coffee. Cocaine is almost as freely available as alcohol and is nearly as
popular. And it is not just the young, the trendy or the socially deprived
who are recreational drug users.

Everyone's at it. Just a cursory study of the backgrounds of people
mentioned in drug-related stories in the national newspapers turned up the
following occupations: plumbers, photographers, psychiatrists, doctors,
receptionists, accountants, actors, dancers, chefs, waiters, investment
bankers, PR executives, television producers, models, footballers, airline
cabin crew, policemen, solicitors, barristers and journalists.

No one wants to admit any of this because the subject is a political,
emotional, religious, social and economic minefield. No one even wants to
discuss the fact that the war is over and that we need to consider what we
do now. This is because accepting defeat would involve admitting that the
whole drugs war - both here and in America - has been a sham. A strategy to
bring the drugs trade under control has always been available, but this
strategy is not acceptable in the new global economic order.

If London and Washington were serious about the drugs war they would hit
the drugs barons where it hurts - in their pockets. They could use their
powers to regulate banking and the international electronic money transfer
system to halt the movement of illegal monies. But they would also have to
eliminate all off-shore banks and tax havens as legitimate hide-outs for
capital.

But, of course, they cannot do that because legitimate business in Britain
and America does not want the off-shore tax havens closed. The hypocrisy of
the drugs war is that Washington and London say that they are waging war on
drugs when they know that there are more important issues - namely banking
and free trade.

The accumulated profit from drugs, estimated at $500 billion, sloshes
around the world banking system until it can be laundered, and the
money-laundering capital of the world is London. True, the government has
authorised the Bank of England, the British Bankers' Association, Customs
and Excise, the Serious Fraud Office, Scotland Yard, the City of London
Police, the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service - all
liaising through the National Criminal Intelligence Service - to crack down
on drugs-money laundering. But where are the 10-year sentences for drug
barons and the financial services advisers who helped them wash their
money? Their absence is explained officially as the difficulty in defining
legally at what point dirty money becomes clean.

But there is another, unofficial reason. City institutions welcome the
flood of drugs money into Britain, arguing that it is safer for it to be
laundered and then go into legitimate financing rather than move around
unaccountably in the black economy. And it's good business.

And here we are at the crux of why we lost the drugs war - economics and
the theory of the market. Everyone underestimated the power of the profit
motive on the supply side and the appeal of drugs on the demand side. All
the police, armies, secret services, prisons and executions in the world
cannot buck a market where the tax-free profit on a kilo of cocaine is
20,000%. All the drugs education in the world cannot overcome the fact that
many people find in drugs enormous pleasure and feel that the state has no
moral authority to deny them that pleasure - even if there are health risks.

Another reason the anti-drugs campaigners lost the war was that their
strategy was wrong. They should have said, "Mind-bending drugs have been
part of human culture since time immemorial. Why, as recent as the early
years of the 20th century, heroin and cocaine were legal and popular -
Coca-Cola was originally made with cocaine. True, the world might be a
better place if nobody took anything that could harm them. But since they
seem determined to do so, we need to learn to live with drugs in such a way
that they do the least possible damage. Let's work out what this way might be."

Instead they embarked on a crusade that was based on racial and religious
bigotry. American racial contempt for the Chinese became focused on their
opium-smoking habits, and the Protestant missionary societies in China and
the Women's Christian Temperance Union set out on a moral campaign to
protect the white world from the horrors of opium.

Even today, the war against drugs remains in many ways a religious matter
rather than a law-and-order one. The anti-drug lobby speaks of drug-taking
as "evil . . . immoral . . . a sin . . . an offence against God that can
result in the loss of your soul". Yet how can a campaign be a moral one
when, as the Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman says, "It leads
to widespread corruption, imprisons so many, has so racist an effect,
destroys our inner cities, wreaks havoc on misguided and vulnerable
individuals and brings death and destruction to foreign countries?" He
might have added: how can the campaign be a moral one when it so terrifies
American doctors that they turn away from their patients' cries of pain and
refuse to prescribe morphine for them in case they run foul of the Drug
Enforcement Administration for over-prescribing?

With the war over, where do we go from here? How about licensed sales
outlets for drugs, a sort of drugs off-licence, where initially cannabis
and Ecstasy would be on sale at reasonable prices. There would be a minimum
age for purchase, just as there is now for alcohol and tobacco. The drugs
would be supplied by licensed manufacturers to ensure the purity and safety
of the product. Driving under the influence of drugs would carry the same
penalties and stigma as driving under the influence of alcohol.

Drugs off-licences would save Britain the UKP 800m a year spent on
enforcing anti-drug laws. If the drugs were taxed at the same rate as
alcohol and tobacco they would provide the Treasury with revenue of at
least UKP 1 billion a year. They would cut the prison population by 10% at
a stroke, reduce crime and violence and put the drug bosses out of business.

I have little hope that such a scheme will be adopted. It is too logical
and, as the American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz has pointed out, it is
useless to present facts and logic to the anti-drugs lobby. He says the war
on drugs is a mass movement characterised by demonising certain objects and
persons - "drugs . . . addicts . . . traffickers" - as the incarnations of
the devil. Hence there is nothing to be gained by trying to point out to
its supporters that the anti-drugs lobby has lost the war. "Since he wages
war on evil, his very effort is synonymous with success."

Phillip Knightley debates the world-wide drugs problem with a panel of
commentators that includes Rosie Boycott and the Sunday Times columnist
Melanie Phillips, at the Sunday Times Hay Festival, today, May 27, at 1PM.