WE ARE LOSING THE WAR ON DRUGS AND POLICY SHOULD BE STOOD ON ITS HEAD

DURING a series of radio interviews this week, Gerry Cameron, a
former American police chief, described the current war on drugs as a
complete failure.

He knows what he is talking about, having spent 17 years in drug enforcement.

"We'll spend $69 billion in the United States this year," he said.
"We'll arrest over a million and a half people for drugs this year in
the United States. Little over half of that will be for marijuana and
approximately 80% of that will be charged with simple possession.
We've got tremendous police resources being diverted to put people in
the penitentiary that have never done a violent act towards any
person or their property." While I was at university in Texas from
the mid 1960s to the early 1970s the penalty for possession of any
amount of marijuana - or cannabis as it is more commonly called here
- - was a jail sentence of from two years to life. Yet a survey
conducted at the university found that 80% of the senior class smoked
marijuana.

Some months later there was a sensation when 95 federal agents
dropped out of the university. They had been brought in undercover to
investigate the drug scene in the guise of students. This was an
enormous waste of resources, as well as a disturbing police intrusion
into university life, but otherwise the whole thing seemed to make no
difference at all.

After a Houston court sentenced a black man to 35 years in jail for
possession of less than an ounce of the drug for personal use, the US
Supreme Court ruled that the Texas law permitting such jail sentences
for possession of marijuana was unconstitutional. President Richard
Nixon had already launched his war on drugs by then. More than 35
years later, after three trillion dollars have been wasted, there are
more people than ever dabbling in drugs in the US, but the level of
addiction has remained essentially the same - 1.3% - since 1914.

Only a fool would say the Americans are winning the war on drugs, or
that we should emulate them, but that is exactly what we have been
doing. One of the first columns I wrote here - on April 5, 1995 - was
on the drug scene: "The United States has had the same kind of drug
problems for the past quarter of a century," I wrote then. "It has
spent billions of dollars on drug enforcement, but this has just been
throwing good money after bad. Things are as bad now as they have ever been.

"We do not have that kind of money, but even if we did, it is
pointless adopting methods that have failed so dismally elsewhere. If
our leaders persist in making the same mistakes they will deserve
nothing but contempt."

All of the major parties in the Dail have been in power since then.

Cameron explained on RTE last Sunday: "Every time we arrest someone
and drive up the price of drugs, we drive up the incentive for
someone else to get involved with it, and we have done this over and
over in the United States for 40 years. I can't see anything that has
been accomplished." He added: "What is amazing is that we have
continued to do the same thing. And I believe this is because we have
created a symbiotic relationship between the dealers and the
bureaucracy. The dealers need us in the police to keep their
competition down and their profits up, and the bureaucracy needs the
drug traffickers to have a reason to exist."

If we were able to cut off the entire drug supply into the country
tomorrow, have people considered what would be likely happen? Addicts
would go frantic to get what drugs were still available within the
country. The price would soar, and addicts would become desperate and
steal more. More innocent people would become vulnerable to these
desperate people.

We have not been facing up to the reality of drugs. A great many
people do not realise that tobacco and alcohol are drugs also and, as
Cameron noted, cannabis is "a rather benign substance" compared with
alcohol. "We tried alcohol prohibition in the United States and we
got all of the benefits that we are getting from the war on drugs,"
he said. Cameron, a former US chief of police, said along with
"violence in the streets, gang wars, drive-by shootings" the US had
all the other things associated with the golden era of the American
gangster during prohibition.

WHEN the prohibition on the sale of alcohol was removed, the social
decay that some predicted never happened. Prohibition of other drugs
has proved just as disastrous in fostering dangerous criminal
activity. We now have organised crime, drive-by shootings and gang
warfare in Dublin, Cork and Limerick. Selling drugs over the counter
in pharmacies would certainly be preferable to what is going on at the moment.

There is a case for legalising cannabis because it is less harmful
than alcohol, but it would be dangerous to permit the open sale of
heroin, cocaine and the like.

But what we should do is put the dealers and drug barons out of
business by dealing with addiction as an illness. A diabetic becomes
addicted to insulin, which he gets from a pharmacy on prescription.

Addicts of other drugs should be permitted to purchase them on
prescription from authorised outlets. This would knock the dealers
out of business because they could not sell their drugs at
extortionist prices. This would eliminate the monetary incentive for
drug dealers to get anybody hooked on drugs as addicts would be able,
legally, to get them cheaper.

We have been using discredited and ineffective methods that have been
failing for more than 40 years, and it is time we adopted a new
approach rather than facilitating the likes of John Gilligan to make
millions. They, in turn, have been corrupting our institutions.

In another column on June 17, 1998, I wrote: "The gardai has a
virtually unblemished record, except for the scandal involving Garda
John O'Neill who was jailed recently for corruption after he pleaded
guilty to accepting bribes of more than UKP16,000. His conviction was
described as a severe embarrassment to the gardai, but his assertion
that two gardai in one station were involved in the importation of
over UKP3m worth of heroin should be even more worrying.

"There have been major police scandals in recent years in Australia,
Britain, Canada and the United States. Why should we be any
different? There are literally millions of pounds changing hands in
the illegal drug trade and people should not be reassured by virtue
of the fact that only one garda has ever been prosecuted for
corruption. There are bad eggs in every walk of life. Think of the
number of horrific cases involving the clergy recently. Yet there has
been practically no corruption involving gardai. Are we particularly
lucky, or should we be really worried?"

Of course, when I wrote that more than eight years ago, it was my
belief that we should be really worried. Now we know of the massive
garda corruption in Donegal, and the Morris tribunal has concluded
that the problems are not limited to there.

Using tried and tested tactics that have failed so dramatically is a
cause of, not the answer to, our problems.