ADDICTED TO FAILURE

Britain's Drug Problems Demand a Serious Rethink

The most optimistic reading of the remarks by Europe's top anti-drugs
official yesterday was that the war against drugs is in a quagmire.
In Britain, new government statistics suggest that there is a serious
and growing drug problem. Although the illicit nature of drug use
means that no calculation can ever be wholly accurate, the Home
Office estimates are probably more robust, and more alarming, than
anything previously published. The number of problem drug users is
reckoned to be 327,466, which is a tally of directly damaged and
destroyed lives. They put the illicit drug market in the UK at about
UKP5.3 billion, and the economic and social cost to the country at a
staggering UKP15.4 billion. This is failure on a colossal scale.

What should be done? The sheer size of the drugs industry is often
used to argue that prohibition is doomed to fail. And it is certainly
true that, on the basis of these Home Office figures, UK Drugs Inc is
around the same size as British Airways - a huge and powerful (and
legitimate) organisation - with UK Drugs Inc presumably making
exponentially higher (and untaxed) profits.

The drug barons' grip does not seem to have been shaken by the record
hauls of illicit substances bagged by customs officers in recent
years: falling prices suggest that supply has barely been dented. Nor
do our legal sanctions seem to have had much success in deterring
demand. Government surveys show large numbers of young people
apparently happily admitting to having experimented with a range of
drugs. And this illicit industry fights hard and dirty to expand its
market. Many addicts become pushers in order to fund their habit, and
they have few scruples about where they sell their dangerous wares -
on the street or at the school gate. Drugs have become the lifeblood
of organised crime, and inevitably associated with prostitution,
shootings and standover tactics. The Home Office finds that the
largest component of the social cost of drugs, around 90 per cent, is
drug-related crime.

It is tempting to hope that legalisation might cut out much of this
violence and crime, by removing most of the profit margin from the
drugs barons. However, while the legalisation lobby makes a
persuasive case, there is a lack of clarity about how exactly its
ideas would work in practice. If harm reduction is the aim, can one
be sure that harm reduction would really be achieved? Reducing prices
might remove incentives for criminals to supply the market. But would
it not also result in an increase in addicts, because drugs would be
even more easily available more cheaply? Would the act of legalising
in itself send a powerful signal that Parliament is condoning drug
taking? And might regulated companies acting above-board not be even
more effective at marketing these substances than the drugs barons
have been, with their access to more conventional methods of
advertising? And if half of all beds for drug treatment are empty, as
we report today, is the Government really doing all it can to treat
addicts successfully?

More debate is needed. There is no point in pretending that all is
well with current policy. That Pete Doherty keeps returning to court
with no more than a community sentence, for example, shows that
heroin has almost been decriminalised. It is time to confront
practical realities in both the sheer scale of our failure, and the
hard choices to come.