THE ONGOING STRUGGLE AGAINST THE 'WAR ON DRUGS'

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, because 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 U.S., 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 over 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."

However, Cooper lacks the courage of his own convictions. He argues
that the war on drugs is futile and counter-productive so far as
marijuana is concerned, but nervously insists that he is offering no
tips that would help dealers of cocaine or methamphetamines to escape
"justice". It's as if reformers fighting against America's alcohol
prohibition laws in the 1920s had advocated re-legalizing beer but
wanted to continue locking up drinkers of wine or spirits.

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

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

Each addict steals about $90,000 of property a year, whereas the cost
of providing them with heroin on prescription from the National
Health Service in closely supervised treatment programmes would be
only $24,000 a year. So the NHS should provide heroin to addicts on
prescription, said Roberts, like it used to in the 1950s and 1960s,
before Britain was pressured into adopting the "war on drugs" model
by the U.S. Days later, it emerged that the NHS is actually
experimenting with a return to that policy at three places in Britain.

If every country adopted such a policy, legalizing 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.

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

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 sometime in the next 50 years, after only
few more tens of millions of needless deaths, drug prohibition will end.