THE REALLY TOUGH WAY TO CONTROL DRUGS IS TO LICENSE THEM

A young American friend last week visited Camden Lock, north London,
and returned amazed. In a hundred yards he was offered brazenly in
the street just about every drug he could imagine. It was easier to
buy cannabis or cocaine than a cigarette or a can of beer. The
experience could have been repeated in any city centre in Britain.
The drug market is totally unregulated and as a result totally
dangerous. Welcome to 10 years of Tony Blair's "war on drugs".

This war makes the war on terror look like a pushover. The latest
figures from the European drug monitoring agency indicate that
Britain leads the continent in cocaine and heroin use and is equalled
only by Denmark for cannabis. Given how often prohibitionists abuse
Holland's proactive drugs policy, it is worth noting that twice as
many Britons as Dutch use cocaine and a third more use cannabis. With
327,000 so-called "problem users" (up a quarter on the last
estimate), Britain is far worse than France, Germany and Italy.

Meanwhile, despite billions being spent on policing, trade in these
substances is booming and price plummeting. Adjusted for inflation,
the prices of ecstasy and heroin are both down by a half in five
years. Cocaine is down by 22% and cannabis down by 19%. In Britain a
gram of cocaine cost UKP65 in 2000 and UKP51 today. An astonishing
10% of 15 to 34-year-olds admit to using cocaine in the past year,
topped only by 30% who admit to using cannabis. This renders any
statistics of "the incidence of crime in Britain" meaningless. A
third of the population are guilty. Last year alone 14 new
psychoactive drugs were detected by the police, led by the powerful
"crystal meth".

Carel Edwards, the European Union's drug enforcer, reflected last
week that "after 50 years of a moral international crusade to reduce
the drugs problem, the results are not exactly brilliant". To add to
his woes, Europe is about to be hit by a record Afghan opium harvest,
supplying 90% of its consumption. After the 2001 invasion,
suppressing Afghanistan's poppy crop was hilariously assigned to the
British government. It was like the United Nations assigning Libya
and Zimbabwe to its human rights committee. Why should Britain
control supply abroad when it refused to control demand at home?

British drugs policy is a disaster. Parliament's refusal for more
than a third of a century even to amend the prohibitionist 1971
Misuse of Drugs Act is the most damning comment on the state of
politics today, in thrall to the tabloid mob. The 1971 act must be
the only criminal justice statute not to have been rewritten a dozen
times by Tory and Labour governments. Charles Clarke and John Reid
pass four terrorism acts a year, yet not one to tackle the drug
market. The act contributes to the deaths of hundreds of young people
each year. It stokes violent crime and impoverishes families and
communities, while giving Britain the biggest prison population in
Europe. Yet nobody in politics has the guts to touch it.

The police are clearly fed up: 60% of all recorded crime is estimated
to be drug related. Last Wednesday Howard Roberts, chief constable of
Nottinghamshire, pleaded for the umpteenth time for reform. To a
policeman it is crazy for the Home Office to ignore a legal
prohibition that contributes to 432 offences at a cost of UKP45,000 a
year per addict, including stabbings and murders. The total price of
hard drug prohibition is put by the Home Office itself at a
staggering UKP 15 billion a year.

Roberts pointed out that the much vaunted treatment by methadone
substitution has not worked, with a cure rate of barely 3%. Since
local authorities must pay for treatment from their discretionary
budgets, they are going for the cheaper methadone substitution
option, as result of which more costly residential places in heroin
treatment centres lie empty. Yet to the nation the latter programme,
costing UKP12,000 a place but with a success rate of more than a
third, is far better value for money. The Dutch and Swiss have
achieved significant reductions in heroin addiction by treatment
through controlled prescription. They have also achieved a marked
fall in crime by addicts. Yet Downing Street seems unable to "join
up" its drugs policy as can other countries.

Not just policemen but judges, prison reformers and charities such as
DrugScope, Drugsline, Addaction, Adapt, and Action on Addiction cry
continually for a review of policy. There have been enough
independent reviews to fill a library. I served on one myself, the
Police Foundation inquiry into the 1971 act in 2000. Professor David
Nutt of the government Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs told
MPs last Wednesday about the absurdity of ecstasy, used by 500,000
young people each week, being graded alongside heroin. Yet all Vernon
Coaker, the hapless drugs minister, could reply was that drugs policy
was "a matter of political judgment". In other words, he had
delegated it to the staff of The Sun.

This week an international group of present and former police chiefs
called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition is in Britain to lobby for
reform. Jack Cole, its American spokesman, points out that when
alcohol prohibition was ended in 1933 "we put Al Capone out of
business overnight - and we can do the same to the drug lords and
terrorists who make over $500 billion a year selling illegal drugs
round the world".

Prohibitionists respond that "if only" these policemen enforced the
law and threw all drug users in jail there would be no market for the
dealers and no need for addicts to commit crime. Thus a Yorkshire
magistrate last week complained about a 15-year-old accused of
murdering his brother after seven cans of lager and "several" joints.
He blamed government leniency towards cannabis - rather than the
magistracy's notorious leniency towards drunkenness.

The prohibition lobby has held the floor for more than 30 years and
has run out of both arguments and time. The home secretary could hire
gangs of vigilantes to roam every community and shoot drug users on
sight. This might increase street prices, stem consumption for a year
or two and deter some middle-class offspring. But this is not serious
debate. Southeast Asia has capital punishment for drug use and yet
drug use is rife.

I have studied the impact of drugs and regard them as varying from
the mildly harmful to the utterly lethal. I would recommend nobody to
use them other than medicinally, like amphetamines. But to call for
the ruthless enforcement of a law that has patently lost consent
(even among opinion pollsters) is not "tough on drugs", merely a cop-out.

There must be more drug enforcement bureaucrats in Whitehall and
police headquarters across the country, achieving nothing, than there
are workers combating addiction in the field.

The prohibitionists think that by passing laws they are curing a
problem. In reality universal drug availability ensures just two
things. An industry catering to almost a third of Britons (reputedly
with a turnover similar to that of the petrol or drinks industries)
prospers uncontrolled and untaxed. At the same time the quality of
its product is unregulated and therefore at risk of adulteration. The
dilution of cocaine has recently been shown to be highly
carcinogenic. Crooks are making millions out of killing people.

Most drug users can handle the harm it undoubtedly does them
personally. To this extent there is no justification for the state
interfering in a private activity. As with the control of alcohol,
the regulation of outlets should be required only to protect minors,
prevent adulteration and collect taxes. Other European countries are
moving in this direction, at least with ecstasy, cannabis and heroin.

Britain must find a way of legalising supplies. Only then can
smuggling and racketeering be suppressed. How this is achieved is a
subsidiary matter and a good subject for a committee. But the
prohibitionist softies must first be outgunned. They are the true
enemies of drug control. This market will never go away. The only
tough policy is to regulate it.

More people die each year from adulterated drugs than from terrorism.
The cost of prohibition both to the state and to the community is
colossal. The illicit market in drugs undermines Britain's
communities and subverts British values far more than any Muslim
cleric or rucksack bomber.

It will never be confronted until the counterproductive
prohibitionist 1971 act is repealed.