ADDICTED TO FAILURE IN FIGHT AGAINST DRUGS

Like Canute the forces of law and order command the tide of traffickers,
dealers and junkies to retreat. How long can we afford to pursue a policy
that has not worked for the past 35 years?

THERE is one feature of illegal drugs that we can all agree about. Their
abuse causes untold misery, blights lives and costs the taxpayer a fortune
- - money that could and should be spent on schools, hospitals, housing and
roads. Because of drugs abuse that money is spent instead on prosecution,
prisons and funerals. For, make no mistake, drug abuse kills. Especially
the young.

There are also many living losers, including the families of the users.
There are huge numbers of crimes committed by addicts to finance their
addiction; the victims of those crimes - mugging, robbery and theft - are
also losers. The only winners are the very small number of suppliers, the
Mr Bigs: they seldom get caught. The abusers get caught and appear before
the higher courts on their way to prison. They are mostly miserable addicts
engaged in hand-to-mouth street-level trading to feed a habit or to repay a
debt, or simple users being paid relatively small amounts to warehouse
drugs on behalf of bigger dealers.

There's a touch of the black hole about hard drugs: once you're sucked in
it's extremely difficult to get out and stay out. The few who succeed will
usually by then have lost their jobs, their families, their friends and
their future. So it is not difficult for us all to agree that the problems
are horrendous and getting worse. Something must be done.

It is when we start to devise ways of tackling the menace that we fall into
chaotic disagreement. No surprise there. People always disagree about
society's response to grave threats. Sincere opponents of the rise of
Nazism under Hitler advocated a bewildering variety of responses from
pacifism and isolationism via appeasement to re-armament and armed
intervention. No real consensus was reached until it was too late.
Sincerity and disagreement often go hand in hand. I believe that we ought
to clear the ground by conceding the sincerity of those who hold and
advance different views.

However, what we need above all is to bring the whole subject out into the
light of day. We have to talk about it in an adult way. The present posture
of too many politicians is sincere but fundamentalist - a dangerous
cocktail. Their preferred technique appears not to be to try to convert
those who disagree with their views, but to avoid debate altogether. Those
who dare to suggest that the policies that have been pursued for the past
35 years are wrong find themselves dismissed as cranks or heretics
misguidedly sending out the wrong "message" to the young or giving
encouragement to the Mr Bigs (Are the young listening to our messages? Do
the Mr Bigs really need encouragement?).

To add insult to injury, sincere critics of the prevailing posture of
government over recent decades find themselves routinely accused of having
no sympathy for the victims, the grieving families of those who have died
from drug abuse. This is the methodology of the Spanish Inquisition: don't
argue the point, don't explore the facts with an open mind; just brand
those who disagree as heretics, silence them and excommunicate them.

Fortunately, in our society, if you are a private citizen and bold enough
to suggest that the Emperor has no clothes there's not too much they can do
to you. Those employed in the public sector tend to be more circumspect.
Their participation in any public debate has to be more tentative and
restrained. Which is a pity; for the vital ingredient of an informed debate
is accurate information, statistical and personal, about everything to do
with drug abuse. Who better to provide it than the police, prison staff,
doctors, social workers and those daily engaged in the criminal justice
system?

We need the best information we can get about just how harmful the popular
and widely used 'soft' and 'recreational' drugs are. Do we know for certain
which soft drugs, if any, lead the user on to 'hard' drugs? Do we
exaggerate the risks associated with some drugs, thus devaluing the
warnings we try to give about others? Does the classification of drugs into
A, B or C drugs make sense at the practical level? Do the legal definitions
of offences fit the reality? We have to know the answers to these and many
other questions. And we have even not begun to discuss in an open way the
pros and cons of decriminalising any of the drugs now banned. We just keep
adding to the list of banned substances.

Above all, we need to find out if the present system for detection and
punishment works? It looks to me as if it has conspicuously failed; but we
need to know for sure. If it has failed, should it be revised or scrapped?
These are the end questions. I want to start nearer the beginning.

Some mood-altering drugs intoxicate. Some do not. Some mood- altering drugs
are addictive. Some are not. Some people try drugs and become addicted.
Some people try drugs and don't become addicted. Producing or dealing in
some intoxicating drugs, even consuming them, is a criminal offence.
Producing or dealing in some other intoxicating drugs is regarded as an
honourable trade or profession; and consuming them is a popular activity,
advertised on television, and bringing billions in revenue to the
government. The paradox is that government raises huge amounts in taxes
from the public's appetite for some drugs. It then spends huge amounts of
tax income on trying to stop people consuming other drugs, and in keeping
them in prison if they do.

The most obvious permitted drugs are alcohol and tobacco. The best-known
forbidden drugs are heroin, temazepam, diazepam, LSD, cocaine and cannabis.
There is also an explosion in the manufacture and marketing of 'designer'
drugs such as Ecstasy.

THE differences in approach to the two groups of drugs - illegal and
permitted - would all be very puzzling but for the fact that we have
somehow accepted it and ceased to be surprised. We seem to able to live
with the striking anomalies without questioning them. Yet they are worth
thinking about. Alcohol, in its various forms, is a mood- altering drug.
Everybody knows that it is addictive, intoxicating and seriously damaging
to human health: it even kills. Tobacco is proved to have comparable
properties. It is so damaging to human health that we print a message to
that effect on every packet before it is sold. Heroin in its various forms
is mood-altering, addictive and potentially threatening to health and even
to life. So is cocaine. And the other so-called 'recreational' drugs like
cannabis or Ecstasy have comparable effects, though probably the harm they
do is substantially less: for cannabis seems not to kill; Ecstasy
tragically, but only very occasionally does so.

What should we be doing about these drugs? Should we be banning them all,
licensing them all, or banning only some and, if so, which, and why?

Think about the best known of the potentially harmful intoxicants,
alcoholic liquor. Traditionally, of all the mood altering drugs, alcoholic
liquor was seen to be the most widely dangerous and anti-social. For it not
only damages the user; it frequently turns him into an angry, uninhibited,
violent and irresponsible creature who disrupts his family, fights with his
neighbours and kills strangers on the streets and highways. Without any
shadow of doubt, the abuse of liquor was the greatest single cause of
violent crime in Scotland throughout my career. Emboldened and disinhibited
young men fought and killed in drunken brawls in all our major cities and
elsewhere. Other men deprived their families of the necessities of life to
indulge their passion for drink. When they did come home from the pub they
used violence on their women and children. If there was a drug that needed
to be banned, alcohol was that drug.

One measure of the degree of failure in Scotland is to count the number of
drug-related deaths. The government's pamphlet, 'Drugs in Scotland: Meeting
the challenge' (1994), reported that there were 53 drug-related deaths in
Glasgow in the year from November 1991. When, in the early 1960s,
Westminster passed the Dangerous Drugs Acts - to give effect to obligations
undertaken by signing an International Convention in 1961 - the numbers
were much smaller. Yet in 1999 there were 85 drug-related deaths in
Glasgow, and many of them occurred among men recently released after being
in prison for drug-related offences. By the mid-1990s drug deaths in
Scotland as a whole were occurring at the rate of about 250 per year.
Between 1981 and 1993 the number of drug offences recorded by the police
rose by more that 1,100%, most of them relating to cannabis. In a speech to
the House of Lords in June 1997, the Lord Advocate announced the results of
a survey by Glasgow's Centre for Drug Misuse Research, showing that of the
young people selected at 'rave' events, 95% had taken cannabis, 87% ecstasy
and 11% heroin. That is a lot of lawbreakers among the young. It is also a
new development.

For my first 25 years practising in the High Court as an advocate I saw no
drugs cases. I doubt if there were any. I encountered my first in 1981. Now
they dominate the business of the High Court. Many police forces now
operate on the basis that between 50% and 70% of all acquisitive crime is
drug-related. In other words, addicts are committing other crimes to feed
their expensive drug habits. For the Mr Bigs the profits are enormous, and
as the profits grow so the market grows. And, as the young decide to
experiment and take the drugs their peers are taking, a whole generation
grows up thinking that the law is out of touch, 'uncool', and that obeying
or disobeying it is optional.

Why on earth do we not have the wit, the honesty to admit that the policies
and enforcement techniques that we have been deploying for the last 35
years are failing? We are not winning the war on drugs. We have to stop
telling ourselves fairy tales about the success of anti-drugs initiatives
when the ruins of past initiatives are mocking us from the funeral parlours
of Glasgow.

YET it would be a tragedy if we finally lost. In my view, the logic is
compelling. We have to engage in a radical re-think. We have to cease to
behave in a Canute-like fashion. We have to find a battleground on which
the resources we can deploy have some real prospect of success. The war
aims have to change. When we have defined what we can realistically expect
to achieve, the tactics have to change. It is a truism that Prevention is
better than Cure. Of course it is. But if the methods used to prevent are
manifestly not working, and if repeated applications of more of the same
are also seen to fail, then Control, coupled with spending more on Cure,
might well be the better option. The police and agencies such as Customs &
Excise devote huge resources to fighting, with only modest success, against
the importation, cultivation and supply of cannabis. The resources so
deployed are necessarily diverted from the substantially greater threat
posed to society by heroin and the like. Is the current policy not a waste
of scarce resources?

If, as I believe, we have to re-think the whole matter, there is no better
way to collect the necessary information, from policemen, scientists, and
other democracies that to establish a Royal Commission. We have had such
bodies before. The last Royal Commission to be set up examined the
Non-Medical Use of Drugs in South Australia.

The nearest UK equivalent was the Wooton Sub-Committee on cannabis which
reported in 1968. Lady Wooton, who chaired the distinguished and expert
sub-committee of the Advisory Committee on Drug Dependence, received much
hysterical abuse when the committee published its conclusion that the use
of cannabis had not been shown to lead to crime or aggressive behaviour and
was considerably less dangerous than alcohol.

Of the hysterical reactions, similar, as she pointed out, to those stirred
up when proposals were made in relation to sexual crimes, she said that,
"they are always liable to occur when the public senses that some critical
and objective study threatens to block an outlet for indulgence in the
pleasures of moral indignation". Nothing new under the sun.