TIME TO WIPE THE DRUGS BARONS' SMILE

Francis Wilkinson Calls For Effective Regulation

The illegal drugs business is now believed to be worth $500 billion [UKP
309 billion] a year. And, being formally untaxed, its global profits may
well be larger than those of any other business.

It is no surprise that countries are corrupted by "narco-dollars" and their
regimes maintained in co-operation with those who run the drugs industry.
Such people are out of reach of national law enforcement. Their existence
has influenced the globalisation of US law enforcement with its troublesome
effects in Central and South America.

At national level, drug importers and wholesalers need to protect their
businesses and they are not in a position to turn to the police for help.
So they do their own protecting, or pay for someone else to do it with the
consequent danger for business survival of relying on someone else for
muscle in a field where the strongest muscle rules.

Second to domestic violence, drug-related violence is the largest category
of killing in the UK. It has engendered a gun-carrying sub-culture in
Britain which, it is reasonable to think, would not otherwise be here on
this scale.

The drugs business employs a lot of people. Some facts indicate its size.
The illegal drugs include cannabis (the most popular, used by almost half
of 20-24 year-olds, according to the recently-published British Crime
Survey report), chemical drugs, cocaine (the use of which has doubled over
the past two years, having also doubled in the previous two) and heroin.

There is a remorseless upward trend in all kinds of drug use (apart from
LSD) so that we have, for the first time, reached the point where a quarter
of 16-29 year-olds are users of one or more illegal drugs.

That age group thus provides six million users in the UK. This scale of
business can only be maintained by a network of suppliers reaching into
every town, every secondary school, every club, every university in the
country. Nothing from this vast business goes to the Exchequer.

The drugs business destabilises the producing countries, provides
extravagant lifestyles for those who are successful in it, introduces gun
law to parts of our inner cities, supplies its products to anyone who can
pay regardless of their age, and is associated with other forms of crime
throughout.

There is hardly a professional criminal who has not been involved in the
drugs business in some way. It is so enormously profitable. The point of
this outline is to indicate that the global approach of tackling the drugs
problem through the criminal law has had no success. There is no serious
suggestion that seizures are doing more than keeping pace with the level of
supply, and drug purity levels suggest that they are not even doing that.
The US experience of prohibiting alcohol earlier this century gave the
Mafia the financial clout it needed to gain the power and reputation for
which it is remembered.

Until and unless a comprehensive and effective regulatory regime is put in
place for the drugs that are illegal, the drugs barons will continue to be
more successful than the drugs czars.

All those drugs from cannabis to heroin should certainly not be made freely
available. Heroin is a powerful and dangerous drug and the regime
controlling its supply needs to be equally powerful.

But many other illegal drugs are of much less power. A regime - like that
used for alcohol, tobacco and legal pharmaceuticals - which involves legal
controls on importation, manufacture, wholesale and retail supply, with
rules about hours of supply and ages of those who can buy, with duty and
tax extracted at each level and with health and safety controls to ensure
standard strengths and remove impurities would at least stand a chance of
being effective.

It would bring a very substantial business within the law, something which,
apart from anything else, must have social-psychological benefits for the
country. Perhaps this seems naive. It was only last year that the United
Nations reaffirmed its commitment to keeping illegal drugs that way. No
doubt the drugs barons rubbed their hands, confident that their profits
would be safe for the next ten years.

The UK is a signatory to the UN agreement on prohibited drugs, and a
unilateral withdrawal from that is not to be seriously considered. What is
necessary, what is urgent, is that an informed and thoughtful debate is
conducted on how best to deal with this global problem.