YOUNG PEOPLE ARE THE VICTIMS OF THE WAR ON DRUGS

Guns Are Not Inherent to the Sale of Drugs, Only to the Sale of Drugs
Under Prohibition

In our week-long national shriek about south London slowly morphing
into South Central, one key word has been missing: prohibition.

We have stared at the soft no-need-to-shave face of Billy Cox, the
15-year-old weed-dealer shot in his bedroom in the shadow of the City
of London. We have half-sniggered at the Ali G names of the gangs he
was up against: the Brick Lane Massive, the Paki Panthers, the Ghetto
Boys of Peckham. We have learned you can buy handguns for UKP200 and
a machine gun for UKP4,000 on the street. But we have failed to see
that the events of the past week are simply following the inexorable
logic of drug prohibition.

Here's how it works. By criminalising the trade in cannabis, cocaine
and heroin, we don't make the drugs disappear. We simply hand this
multi-billion pound industry - around 3 per cent of Britain's GDP -
to armed gangs. A fortnight ago, two of the most powerful drug
dealers in south London were sent to prison, so a slew of gangs is
now fighting to take over their patch, their trade and their profits.
The boys who are being gunned down are rivals for these riches. They
will keep shooting their opponents until one gang emerges as the
clear winner, or until a few gangs band together in an obviously
unbeatable alliance.

So these gun-toting posses of kids have not tooled up simply to play
the Big Man and look like Snoop Dogg (though no doubt it's an
incidental pleasure). This is not Columbine-style senseless violence.
It is happening for hard economic reasons. Milton Friedman, the late
Nobel Prize-winning economist, understood this. He explained: "Al
Capone epitomises our earlier attempt at Prohibition; the Crips and
Bloods epitomise this one."

He saw a central truth. Guns are not inherent to the sale of drugs.
They are only inherent to the sale of drugs under prohibition. Go to
a pub or off-license in Hackney, and you'll find that Oddbins and
Costcutters are not engaged in a turf-war. The Tesco Posse and the
Sainsbury's Massive are not taking out each other's homies over the
right to sell Tetley's Bitter. Why? Because their trade is not
subject to prohibition. If somebody tries to steal their stock, they
can call the police.

But prohibited substances can only be protected with private force.
That's why the underground bars in Chicago needed Capone's guns, and
why today - according to Scotland Yard estimates - 95 per cent of the
guns in Britain are linked to the drugs trade. Friedman calculated
that there are 10,000 additional murders in the US every year as a
result of drug prohibition: a vast mass grave of slaughtered dealers,
their families, and (mostly) random people caught in the crossfire.
We are now building a replica-pit in Britain.

Yet our politicians are too pickled in prohibitionist platitudes to
see this. Tony Blair is talking about extending prison sentences for
carrying guns, but this is a weapon with no ammunition. If you talk
to any of these gang-kids, they'll tell you their odds of ever being
caught are tiny.

They're right. As Stephen Lander, chairman of the Serious and
Organised Crime Agency, puts it: "If you are an organised crook for
20 years, you have a 5 per cent chance of getting nicked." This isn't
because of police laxness; it's because the drugs trade is so vast
the police can only ever hope to pick at its surface. Adding a few
extra years to a hypothetical sentence you'll never serve is no
deterrent at all to a gang member.

David Cameron is offering a parallel fantasy-solution when he talks
about gluing together broken families as The Answer. He points to
research that shows the children of divorced parents are more likely
to turn to crime - but this is irreparably punctured by the findings
of sociologist Louie Burghe, who discovered that these kids actually
start to do worse on every indicator long before their parents split
up. The problem isn't divorce; it's having incompatible parents who
can't stand each other. Bribing warring parents to stay together, as
Cameron wants to, may actually - according to this evidence - make
the problem worse.

No. The only real solution is to take the drugs trade back from the
gun-wielding gangster-children, and hand it to doctors and
pharmacists and off-licenses. This would bankrupt most of our
criminal gangs overnight, and remove the need for (and purchasing
power behind) 95 per cent of the guns in Britain.

Of course many criminals will try to move into other forms of illegal
enterprise, such as money-laundering or people-trafficking, but none
will have the profit margins of the old drugs trade and all carry
higher risks, boosting the relative utility of going straight. A boy
like Billy Cox would not be drawn to them. He would still be alive
today - and so would thousands more victims of our failing, flailing
"war on drugs".