BRITAIN IS QUIETLY TURNING INTO A DRUG CULTURE

It's the nightmare of so many parents with teenage children. The arrest of
Nicholas Knatchbull's three friends on suspicion of possessing drugs was
the latest in a series of drug incidents concerning Prince William's social
circle.

The routine availability of illegal substances is now a fact of life for
young people. Keith Hellawell, the "drug tsar", said last week that
drug-taking among well-educated teenagers from stable families was the
fastest growing part of the drug racket. Forget cannabis - these kids are
going straight for cocaine.

This is a disaster in which the adult world is utterly complicit. The fact
that, as Hellawell noted, middle-class parents are pressuring independent
schools to relax their anti-drug rules says it all. Wordly success matters
more to them than the health of their young; the use of discipline or law
to deter or punish is thought oppressive.

The bottom line is that adults aren't sure whether drugs are a great evil
at all. Why, isn't half the professional world snorting lines of cocaine at
smart dinner parties?

This normalisation of illegality merely gives drug-taking added chic for
the ever rebellious young. There aren't many issues left, after all, over
which the young can rebel. Sex, for so long the revolt of choice, is now
reduced to a banal spectator sport for all the family.

Drugs are an easily available source of pleasure. Their catastrophic
downside can be easily disregarded by young people whose trademark
assumption of invincibility is deepened by the message they've picked up
from the adult world that many drugs are no worse than alcohol.

The prime minister has said that drugs are the most evil industry
confronting modern society. Yet they are tolerated to an astonishing
degree. There's zero tolerance of squeegee merchants and neighbours from
hell, but zero intolerance of drug use. The police mount all-out campaigns
against burglary, domestic violence or racist attacks, but none against
drugs. On the contrary, they have effectively decriminalised cannabis and
turn a blind eye to other drugs.

Ecstasy, cocaine and cannabis are, after all, an intrinsic part of the club
scene. Why aren't the police raiding all such places every night? Maybe
they don't because too much is at stake.

It's hardly an exaggeration to say that some of our inner cities have been
regenerated on the back of drug money. The litmus test of a cool British
inner city is its night life, which generally means its all-night life, its
clubs and dance scene whose sleepless success is oiled by drug-taking. A
real war against drugs would close many of these places down.

Yet there's much more than commercial interest behind the official
ambivalence towards drugs. Our libertine elites, responsible for creating
so many of our social problems, are now intent on creating another.
Politicians, police officers, judges, clerics, academics and journalists
are flirting openly with legalisation. The implication is that the smartest
people think legalisation is the answer, but debate is being prevented by
the forces of prejudice.

The greater the hold of drugs on our society, the more the rates of
addiction and deaths and car accidents rise, the more calls there are to
make drugs legal. This is truly idiotic. It's as if grievous bodily harm,
say, had got out of control, and people were urging the legalisation of
assault on the basis that all that was really needed was better hospital
facilities for the injured and counselling for their attackers.

It's no accident that there's this growing acceptance of drugs
legalisation. There's a vast amount of money behind it. George Soros, the
billionnaire financier, has invested millions of dollars in influential
charities that are pushing legalisation. Soros wants to make most drugs
legally available; he says he would first destroy the drug trade by keeping
prices low and then would keep raising prices, like taxes on cigarettes,
making an exception for registered addicts "to discourage crime".

This is utter nonsense. Lower prices would attract new customers.
Governments would be turned into drug traffickers. Addiction would be
institutionalised. Legalisation wouldn't end drug taking; all it would do
is take work away from the police and make billions instead for big business.

Yet these insanely dangerous arguments are gaining critical mass. In 1998,
an advertisement in The New York Times was signed by hundreds of activists
who said - fantastically - that they thought the global war on drugs was
"causing more harm than drug abuse itself", and contrasted "fear, prejudice
and punitive prohibitions" with "common sense, science, public health and
human rights".

The push to create a legal drugs trade rests on two false assertions. The
first is that the worst harm done by drugs is through the crime associated
with its supply. This completely ignores the death, destruction and social
danger produced by the drugs themselves.

The second false claim is that there is such a thing as responsible and
safe drug-taking. This belief has taken firm hold in Britain and is behind
the shift that has taken place from prevention to "harm reduction".

Clearly, there's a place for harm reduction in treating individual addicts;
but the idea that drug-taking can be made safe is utterly wrong. There's no
such thing as a harm-free drug. Yet drug "education" is all about telling
the young how to take drugs "safely".

Such classroom materials normalise and encourage drug use, while providing
minimal information on harm. They say, for example, that cannabis isn't
addictive and is less harmful than tobacco. Yet it is addictive; moreover,
cannabis is smoked with tobacco, is itself carcinogenic and, used with
tobacco, causes cancer much faster than tobacco alone.

These materials don't tell young people that hash is more damaging than
alcohol. Cannabis hits the immune system. Far from helping multiple
sclerosis sufferers, there's evidence that it does them harm. They don't
tell young people that one joint every other day causes permanent brain
damage, whereas one point of beer or glass of wine every other day does not.

They don't tell them that people aren't fit to drive or fly a plane 24
hours after one joint, and that cannabis stays in the blood for weeks. They
don't tell them that, in 1990, the Dutch minister of justice admitted that
marijuana-tolerant Holland had become the crime capital of Europe, with a
dramatic rise in the use of cannabis, cocaine and opiates. Or that in
Alaska, where cannabis was decriminalised for 10 years, use of hard and
soft drugs soared along with crime, and 2,000 people were hospitalised with
cannabis-induced psychosis.

Hard facts, however, have little hope of success against the pull of the
pleasure principle and the power of money. If this country really wants to
wage war on the drug culture, the most effective strategy would be to
attack its huge profits by cutting off the money-laundering routes
established through secret banking and offshore shell companies.

Would any government though, have the bottle to take on those City
financiers who, after a hard day making a fortune out of laundered drug
profits, go home to snort a line or two of cocaine with their fashionable
friends?

Melanie Phillips: melaniephillips@msn.com