HEROIN ON PRESCRIPTION A REMEDY FOR CRIMEWAVES

Barry Cooper's new DVD, Never Get Busted Again, which went on sale
over the internet late last month, will probably not sell very well
outside the United States.

In most other countries the possession of marijuana for personal use
is treated as a misdemeanour or simply ignored by the police.

But it will sell very well in the US, where many thousands of casual
marijuana users are hit with savage jail terms every year, in a
nationwide game of Russian roulette in which most people indulge their
habit unharmed while a few unfortunates have their lives ruined.

Barry Cooper is a former Texas policeman who made more than 800 drug
arrests as an anti-narcotics officer, but he has now repented: "When I
was raiding homes and destroying families, my conscience was telling
me it was wrong, but my need for power, fame and peer acceptance
overshadowed my good conscience."

Of course, Cooper's DVD, which teaches people how to avoid arrest for
marijuana possession, will also bring him fame, plus a lot of money,
but at least it won't hurt people.

It's as if reformers fighting against America's alcohol prohibition
laws in the 1920s had advocated re-legalising beer but wanted to
continue locking up drinkers of wine or spirits.

But there are bolder policemen around, who are willing to say publicly
that all drug prohibition is wrong.

One is Jack Cole, 26 years with the New Jersey police, whose
organisation, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (Leap), is supported
by growing numbers of policemen who have lost faith in the "war on
drugs" and want to make peace.

"Leap wants to end drug prohibition just as we ended alcohol
prohibition in 1933," says Cole, who argues that neither kind of
prohibition has ever had any success in curbing banned substances, but
that each has fuelled the growth of a vast criminal empire.

It is policemen who take the lead in these issues because they are the
ones who must deal with the calamitous consequences of the "war on
drugs".

No doubt the use of "recreational" drugs does a lot of harm, as does
the use of alcohol or tobacco, but that harm is dwarfed by the amount
of crime and human devastation caused by 40 years of war on drug users.

Howard Roberts, the deputy chief constable of the Nottinghamshire
police, was the latest senior policeman to make the case for ending
the war, pointing out last November that heroin addicts in Britain
each commit, on average, 432 robberies, assaults and burglaries a year
to raise money for their illegal habits.

Each addict steals about US$90,000 ($130,000) of property a year,
whereas the cost of providing them with heroin on prescription from
the National Health Service (NHS) in closely supervised treatment
programmes would be only US$24,000 a year.

So the health service should provide heroin to addicts on
prescription, said Roberts, like it did in the 1950s and 1960s, before
Britain was pressured into adopting the "war on drugs" model by the
US. Since then, the number of heroin addicts in Britain has risen
several hundredfold.

Days later, it emerged that the NHS is experimenting with a return to
that policy in three places - and Switzerland has been prescribing
heroin to addicts on a nationwide basis for some years now, with
encouraging results: crime rate down, addict death rate sharply down.

If every country adopted such a policy, legalising all drugs and
making the so-called "hard" ones available to addicts free, but only
on prescription, the result would not just be improved health for
drug-users and a lower rate of petty crime, but the collapse of the
criminal empires that have been built on the international trade in
illegal drugs, estimated to be worth US$500 billion a year.

That is exactly what happened to the criminal empires founded on
bootlegging when alcohol prohibition was ended in the US in 1933.

But what about the innocent children who will be exposed to these
drugs if they become freely available throughout the society? The
answer is: nothing that doesn't happen to them now.

There is no city and few rural areas in the developed world where you
cannot buy any illegal drug within half a hour, for an amount of money
that can be raised by any enterprising 14-year-old.

Indeed, the supply of really nasty drugs would probably diminish if
prohibition ended, because they are a response to the level of risk
the dealers must face.

Economist Milton Friedman called it the Iron Law of Prohibition: the
harder the police crack down on a substance, the more concentrated
that substance becomes - so cocaine gives way to crack cocaine, as
beer gave way to moonshine under alcohol prohibition.

This is probably yet another false dawn, for even the politicians who
know what needs to be done are too afraid of the gutter media to act
on their convictions.

But some time in the next 50 years, after tens of millions more
needless deaths, drug prohibition will end.