RADICAL RETHINK NEEDED TO TACKLE DRUGS CRISIS

I suppose you could describe them as entrepreneurs of a sort: the
General, the Viper, the Monk et al. And last week, we said goodbye to
'Marlo' Hyland.

All their career paths are similar: general nobodies who start in
petty crime and then rise rapidly to prominence, thanks to their
ability to dominate the illegal drugs market.

There is a brief flowering of cash, killings and general mayhem, and
many end up blown away by their associates or rivals.

Their careers are mercifully short: the tide of misery that washes
them up so quickly washes them away again.

But it seems that they must have some sort of appeal, some sort of
folk hero status.

By all accounts, the crowd that turned out for Hyland's funeral in
Dublin last week was massive.

These Celtic Tiger gangsters also seem to have learned something from
the paramilitaries: the ostentatious funeral, the huge police presence.

Overall, it is a display of defiance, a rare opportunity for
visibility for their "cause", whatever it may be.

Come to think of it, can you imagine what those hundreds who turned up
at Hyland's funeral might say to explain their presence: "I knew his
granny"; "He's a neighbour's child"; "Just came for a gawk."

When you study the crowd, it provides a rare opportunity to see who
exactly these young men are who now terrorise our society. Young
males, heads shaven, expensively dressed, all cocks of the walk.

They strut around on the day like some sort of aristocracy of warriors
and, presumably, they are at war with us.

And what are we to do with them?

Once upon a time, gangsters amassed their loot and then headed off for
sunnier, less extraditable climes. They robbed, defrauded and ran
prostitution and protection rackets. But overall, few innocents were
injured, and their reigns were brief, as informers eventually coughed
them up to the police.

Our modern gangsters are entirely different.

These people are a serious threat to society, not because they are any
different to the long run of criminals, but because their trade is
drugs.

In their wake, they leave thousands of hopelessly addicted victims,
their lives potentially ruined. Even worse, they have created a
thriving and impressive market and, irrespective of how spectacular
and short their own lives are, their market survives them.

No sooner is one major player - as they call them - laid to rest with
another expensive funeral than there is another to step into his shoes.

The market they create is only the beginning of the crisis. Vast sums
of money are being made - which, only a generation on from the start
of this phenomenon in the 1980s, is now threatening to create an
alternative, organised criminal economy.

As with the Mafia in Italy and the US, sooner or later vast amounts of
cash will be laundered into the legal economy.At that point, organised
crime can disappear behind legalised structures and the task of
dealing with them multiplies in its complexity.

But what is most worrying of all about this crisis - not only here,
but internationally - is that the strategy involving the
"criminalisation" of drugs is failing. Despite more and more police,
more and more laws and more and more international cooperation, we are
merely keeping the lid on the worldwide crisis.

In short, the accepted approach of criminalising the drug crisis
within our liberal democratic framework has not worked. Certainly, the
survival rates of the major players are low, but they are merely
bit-part players in the whole crisis; the market simply continues to
expand.

Despite over 60 years of this approach, drug use across the world -
and particularly in western societies - continues to grow. The latest
surveys here in Ireland show that its consumers are getting younger
and younger, and that it has become a nationwide phenomenon.

Remarkably, for example, every village and town in Ireland now has its
drug dealers. What was once a metropolitan phenomenon has spread everywhere.

Apart from the damage it does to individuals, it is also principally
responsible for most criminal offences. The majority of robberies,
burglaries, muggings and murders in our society are linked to drugs.
Every day, thousands of addicts wake up in desperate need of cash and
then go out and get it, wherever and however.

Is it not time, then, for a rethink of how to deal with this crisis,
since the current methods we are using are simply unable to cope?

One argument being advanced is that the greatest harm being done by
the illegal drug trade is actually not to the unfortunate individuals
caught up in it, but to wider society as a whole.

The social and economic costs are huge and spiralling. When one adds
up the size of the black economy it creates, the price it exacts for
crime, policing and prisons and, most importantly of all, the
empowerment the illegal trade gives to criminals in their war on
society, perhaps the rules really have to be totally changed.

Perhaps society has to act for the general good.

The argument goes that, were the criminalisation of drugs to end, the
entire international illegal drug economy would end. Were the state to
legalise these drugs and supply them, then, at a stroke, a vast web of
crime, the huge costs of policing and the trillion-dollar illicit
trade would be wiped out.

In this scenario, drug users would be left in no doubt as to the
physical consequences of drug use but if they persisted, they could
acquire their supplies legally.

Of course, the scenario is high-risk, but, while one might be left
with a large number of addicts, would it be much larger than the
current number? Besides, the vast criminal subtext to the illegal drug
trade and the size of its criminal economy would disappear.

A slightly different approach is that registered addicts could be
supplied by the state to end their need to commit crime.

In the beginning, this controversial notion was dismissed as madness,
but as the failure of the present approach becomes more and more
evident, it is beginning to attract some attention.

Of course, it puts the wider good of society above the fate of the
individual, but isn't it time that we examined approaches that are not
just about enhancing the currently failed strategy?

We can go pouring resources and rhetoric about the failure of
politicians or police or whoever into the argument, but where has it
made any long-term viable difference to what is now increasingly
menacing our society?