U.S. VS THEM

Treat Or Get Tough? Britain Tries Again

BRIGHTON, England -- This windy seaside town, once known as an elegant
summer retreat for well-heeled holidaymakers, has lost its gloss.

With the highest level of heroin-related deaths in Britain, Brighton has an
unseemly reputation as the country's drug mecca.

"Brighton is top of the league when it comes to drugs," says Ray Jenkins, a
38-year-old reformed heroin addict who manages a substance misuse program
for a local charity called Crime Reduction Initiative. "It's not something
we are proud of."

Like their counterparts in the United States, Jenkins and other drug
charity workers are critical of the lack of government money for drug
treatment programs. They say that proper treatment services could reduce
the spiraling crime and health costs associated with drug addiction.

But unlike their counterparts in the United States, they are growing more
optimistic about winning the debate.

"The government is just beginning to realize that we need to have better
treatment services," Jenkins says. "It's a time of great expansion and
great activity."

After experimenting with repressive U.S.-style criminal justice measures to
crack down on drug abuse, the government has come under increasing pressure
to adopt a softer approach more in line with its European neighbors.

With one foot in each camp, the British drug debate provides a useful
barometer on where international drug policy is headed.

For years Britain was at the forefront of the "harm reduction" approach to
the drug problem, which advocates treating addiction as a public health
issue and not a criminal one.

Britain led the world in the 1980s by adopting a government-paid needle
exchange. Today, the program distributes about 3-million syringes a year to
addicts from 2,000 centers around the country.

But cocaine and heroin use, as well as drug-related crime, have risen in
recent years, the rise a product of high unemployment in parts of Britain
coupled with the greater availability of drugs. Advocates of better
treatment for addicts have lost ground to political pressure for more
repressive criminal justice measures.

In the late 1990s, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government began to
incorporate drug policy into a "get tough on crime" strategy that even
proposed mandatory drug testing for all criminals.

"We have gone through several stages and gone through them very quickly. We
might look as though we have a foot in every continent," says Gerry
Stimson, a professor who heads the drug research center at Imperial
College, one of London's top medical schools.

The tide is turning again.

After a top British Cabinet minister suggested the government might
consider relaxing its stance on drugs, a national newspaper poll found 37
percent of Brits favored legalizing marijuana -- a dramatic increase over
previous surveys.

The outgoing chief inspector of prisons called for the legalization of all
drugs, and leaders across the political spectrum have since chimed in.

The left-wing mayor of London, Ken Livingstone (known as "Red Ken"),
described the war on drugs as a failure and called for greater emphasis on
treatment. The former deputy leader of the opposition Conservative Party,
Peter Lilley, also broke ranks to advocate the sale of marijuana in
licensed outlets.

Marijuana possession carries a maximum five-year jail sentence and a $7,000
fine. Police complain that dealing with marijuana drains their ability to
police more dangerous Class A drugs.

An independent inquiry last year, the first in 30 years, was set up to
examine marijuana laws. Headed by a member of the government's advisory
council on the misuse of drugs, the inquiry recommended substantial
reductions in penalties for marijuana possession.

But the report was largely dismissed by the Blair government.

This month, police in the London borough of Lambeth took matters into their
own hands, announcing a radical six-month experiment. Instead of arresting
pot smokers, officers will confiscate their drugs and issue only a caution.

Robert Broadhurst, head of the Brixton police, one of Lambeth's toughest
neighborhoods, says the experiment has helped his officers devote more
resources to the area's crack cocaine problem, which has dealers selling
crack right from the train station platform. "We are overwhelmed by it," he
says. "It's an open drug market."

In the last year, Lambeth police spent about 5,000 hours processing 680
arrests for marijuana possession, only to see most offenders let off with
small fines.

"The courts don't use the powers they have," Broadhurst says. "When we know
there's no tangible results some of the PCs (police constables) are saying,
"Why are we doing this?' "

Critics of government policy hail the Lambeth experiment.

"Legalizing cannabis would be a sensible step, but what is more urgently
required is a fundamental overhaul of the prohibitionist policies on drugs
such as heroin and cocaine that successive British governments have
imported from the United States," says John Gray, a professor at the London
School of Economics.

"When drug use is commonplace and widely seen as normal it makes no sense
to prohibit it. The result can only be to make criminals of otherwise
perfectly ordinary people."

But policymakers are wary of any march toward legalization, arguing that
removing the ban would likely lead to wider drug use.

"Quite frankly we don't know enough about these drugs when they are used in
an unsupervised manner," says Detective Geoff Monaghan, a drug policy
expert with the Association of Chief Police Officers, which advises the
government.

About 1,800 criminally active drug users are in the Brighton area, which
has a population of about 350,000. Social workers estimate that every
cocaine or heroin addict enrolled in a needle exchange saves more than
$100,000 in health costs. Dirty needles are what cause most drug-related
infections, including AIDS and hepatitis C.

In recent years, Britain has succeeded in dramatically reducing the AIDS
infection rate among intravenous drug users, down to 130 new cases last year.

"I'm glad as a country we are moving away from "Just Say No,' " says
Jenkins, the Brighton substance misuse worker. "It's about taking the lid
off it. We have to get to grips with the fact that kids are going to try this."