IT'S OUR LAST CHANCE TO GET TOUGH ON DRUGS

We used to count the number of addicts in the hundreds; we now count
them in the hundreds of thousands. The UK Drug Policy Commission's
report published yesterday - Tackling Drug Markets and Distribution
Networks - contains an alarming body blow of further statistics.

Britain has a problem which is now thought to be worth in excess of
UKP 5.3 billion a year, and which the Government is spending about UKP
1.5 billion a year trying to tackle.

As much as 60 per cent of crime may be connected to the illegal drugs
trade; and the sex trade in our cities, and increasingly in our rural
areas, has the women's dependency on illegal drugs at its heart.
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There are thought to be in excess of 300,000 children growing up in
homes where one or both of their parents are dependent upon illegal
drugs. For these children drug abuse is a fact of their everyday life.

The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime has suggested that
countries get the drug problem they deserve. But if that is the case,
what, one might ask, has Britain done to deserve a drug problem that
is virtually without equal in Europe?

The easy - and misleading - answer is to say that poverty and social
exclusion are causing the problem. The trouble with that response,
though, is that it divests the individual from taking any
responsibility for their abuse.

Yes, drug taking proliferates in areas of social breakdown but it also
causes social breakdown. Abuse has also now spread across all social
classes, and among the rich and the famous.

The "poverty causes drug abuse" mantra is simply too easy an
explanation. For too long we have couched our nation's drug habit
within a moral vacuum in which the decision to use or not use illegal
drugs is seen to be a matter for the individual.

Some commentators seem to be frightened of expressing a moral view in
relation to illegal drugs, for fear of being castigated as a spokesman
for the extreme Right. But moral judgments are not the preserve of the
Right-wing and moral agnosticism is not the preserve of the political
Left.

Moral judgments express our view of how we want to live and how we
want to be treated. Instead of seeing illegal drug use as a human
right, we need to see it for the hugely negative social cancer that it
represents.

For the past 15 years, government has pursued a drug policy that has
been more about reducing the harms associated with illegal drug use
than about reducing the scale of the problem itself.

That is where we are going wrong. Yes, policy must focus on treatments
that enable addicts to become drug free, but also on hard-hitting
prevention with robust enforcement.

Policing the problem means tackling street-level drug dealing
directly. It must also mean tougher action against those who profit
from the trade. We need to ensure that our police are protecting our
communities. This will not be done through intermittent, high-profile
campaigns, but sustained action.

The UK drug problem is barely 40 years old. In that time, it has
spread to take in somewhere in the region of 1 per cent of the
population. And that's only directly. Indirectly, it is responsible
for over half of the nation's crime and thereby reaches towards us
all.

The horrors associated with even a 2 per cent growth in our problem
would simply be beyond the capacity of any of the current systems to
cope and the drugs trade would truly have won.

If we don't tackle drug abuse right now, we will look back in 10
years' time and regret that we missed our last chance.