ADMIT IT: THE WAR ON DRUGS IS A FAILURE

Prohibition Creates The Link Between Drugs And Crime

It's a funny thing, perspective. Another $65m pours into the Millennium
Dome and the world shakes with fury. But pour another couple of billion
into a war gone bad, a war of obvious futility, and nobody says a dicky bird.

William Hague's new Believing in Britain manifesto contains just one
sentence on drugs. The equivalent Liberal Democrat document mentions the
subject only in passing. Year after year, far into the next parliament,
Britain will spend ever more cash - maybe Pounds 2.4m ($3.3bn) by 2003 - on
a struggle we don't debate. The blackest hole of the lot.

Some gallant souls, of course, deserve their bows. MPs Mo Mowlam and Simon
Hughes, and Keith Hellawell (Blair's drugs "tsar") occasionally break
cover. But argument-wise, that's about it. This issues file is closed -
just as it is in the country where most of our battleground metaphors come
from: a United States about to turn martial rhetoric into real conflict as
it ships 63 helicopters and hundreds of special advisers to Colombia in a
$1.3bn expedition to close down the peasant farms that grow the crops.

I have two witnesses for you. They are both - please note - Republicans,
one a congressman running to be senator for California, the other a hugely
popular state governor. I was there recently when they starred on Arianna
Huffington's shadow convention circuit, and I took detailed notes, because
I have never heard an elected British politician say anything so bold.
First, Representative Tom Campbell from California: "Look at our drugs war
over the last 20 years and measure drug availability by the street price of
heroin and cocaine. This price is one-quarter of what it was 20 years ago.
Since 1980 the number of drug overdose deaths has increased by 540%. The
proportion of high school seniors reporting that drugs are readily
available has doubled. Incarceration for drug offences has risen tenfold.
The purity of heroin on the streets has increased more than four times.
We've spent a quarter of a trillion dollars since 1980 . . . and this war
on drugs is a failure."

Campbell finds only 115,000 methadone maintenance slots available in the US
for 800,000 heroin addicts (and 2,500 for 14,000 in crisis areas such as
San Francisco). He's desperate to shift the emphasis from crime prevention
to treatment, and he lets a recent Rand Institute research study do his
arguing for him. Spending that $1.3bn on treatment would be 23 times more
effective than trying to eradicate Colombian production.

But that seems almost conventional when you hear Governor Gary Johnson of
New Mexico. He says there were 450,000 American deaths last year from
tobacco, 150,000 from booze and 100,000 from legal prescription drugs. "You
know how many people died from marijuana? Well, I'm sure there were a few.
You know how many died from heroin and cocaine? Five thousand. Now, where
is the bogy man here?"

So, legalise marijuana: and stop at the minimum with strategies that reduce
the harm other drugs contrive. And treatment? If you're a heroin addict,
you need "to have a prescription to get your heroin. You have to go to a
clinic. You ingest the heroin in the clinic. You know what? A number of
bases have been covered here. First, the heroin costs a tenth of what it
does out on the street - so you do away with the crime of having to go out
and get it. You do away with the disease - hepatitis C, Aids, overdoses,
dirty needles. You do away with the incentive for those addicts to go out
and recruit other heroin users. Tell me, isn't that better in this world
than tens of thousands of addicts waking up in the morning with only one
thing on their minds?"

Conclusion: "Drug prohibition is what's tearing this America apart, not
drug use - and that's not to diminish the problems of drug use. What's this
phenomenon of kids with 75 pounds of cocaine or 50 pounds of marijuana?
It's a prohibition phenomenon. We've made the penalties so stiff for adults
that they're going down shooting - and they're making kids the mules . . .
We need a bottom-line strategy . . . Let's reduce the crime done in the
name of illegal drugs . . . Let's reduce the violent drug offenders in jail
. . . This is about saying 'no' to drugs - as in 'know.'"

To repeat, Campbell and Johnson are Republicans, followers of the burning
Bush. Yet they are also both close to a tragedy that haunts them; and they
are prepared to speak out. Is that a debate? Not really, while Clinton and
George W compete to send more choppers to Bogota. Central cowardice rules -
just as it rules in Britain, as change only comes under cover of silence.
Some of the extra 3.5bn Pounds announced last summer will go on treatment
and education, but Jack Straw makes little of it. Changing the law wouldn't
be "tough" commando stuff. What would I tell Parliament while Wee Willie
cries for three more strikes?