WAR THE ENFORCER CAN'T WIN

The new drive against drugs will actually do more harm than good, says
Edward Pearce . A different approach is needed - and we could start by
legalising soft drugs

In seeking to limit availability, "our aim is to reduce access to all
drugs amongst young people significantly, and to reduce access to all
drugs which cause the greatest harm, particularly heroin and cocaine,
by 25 per cent by 2005 and by 50 per cent by 2008".

The words, precise in the way of the silliest undertakings, are those
of Dr Jack Cunningham, not altogether a bad chap, not really the idiot
he is making himself here on behalf of a collective Cabinet idiocy.
But he is proclaiming the Blair Government's latest contribution to
the profits of drug dealing and making, amid the cumulus of futile
aspiration, one verifiably wrong statement. Heroin and cocaine are not
the drugs which cause the greatest harm. The nameless substances with
which heroine and cocaine are frequently cut do that. Taken regularly
in pure form, heroin and cocaine are not liquorice allsorts, but they
can actually be lived with, attend a steady working career, can matter
less than excitable politicians think.

And with Mr Blair's mind, Mr Straw's instincts and Dr Cunningham's
Bittern boom at work, expect the harm caused by taking heavy drugs to
increase.

The idea underlying yesterday's preposterous statement is the seizure
of more drugs and their profits to finance what are called Drug Action
Teams and a Drug Prevention Advisory Service, titles in capital
letters to speak resonant purpose - new Faberge Easter eggs for the
"Drugs Czar"! And if another drive against drugs - ie more policemen,
more undercover operations, more false heroics - should in any degree
succeed, it will be met by an appropriately greater adulteration of
the drugs sold, and a corresponding increase in that "greater harm".
Caused, let us add, by fools of politicians.

The standard way to handle any shortfall in the turnover of
shirtbuttons is to increase profit per unit sold. There are two ways
of doing that with drugs. A higher price multiplies petty crime;
cutting kills people.

There was a time when homosexual relations were thought unspeakably
horrific. Decent people flinched in nausea. The most compassionate
talked of illness rather than crime, but policemen were employed to
haunt public urinals to hunt for smiles and smile back, to engage in
part-way complicity and to lie their heads off when hauling off the
morally deformed to social ruin in the courts.

This is what the tabloids now do with any celebrity who can be
crucified for drug consumption. The accompanying hatreds are much the
same. "He'll have his hair cut now," cackled a group of prostitutes at
the manacled Oscar Wilde. Perm any three News of the World headlines.
The viciousness of virtue is quite special. We don't do that any more,
and indeed homosexuals have grown a bit boring. We don't do it because
our morality has changed. Sexual variance is seen as legitimate.

Let's spell this out so that it can't be misunderstood. The time is
not far away when our already changing morality will have moved quite
as far on drugs. We are going to reach quite soon a consensus that
drugs are a choice the way whisky and beer are choices, that addicted
involvement is not wisdom, but that drug-taking will be the chosen
recreation of many people and that railing against it is pointless.

Only one MP, Paul Flynn of Newport, had the courage on Tuesday to
offer any resistance to the Enforcer's noisy assertion of received
standard fallacy. But go back to debates about sexual deviancy in the
1940s, read DJ West's absurd Pelican book of 1955, and you will see
the same fixed, unreflective horror, the same statutory intolerance.
Mr Flynn suggested heretically that soft drugs should be legalised.
Cannabis at least should be legal the way beer is legal. Apart from
inducing pacific and inert moods rather than belligerence, your
unadulterated spliff is on a rough metabolic par with your
unadulterated pint of Deuchars.

Somebody once tried to prohibit the drinking of beer. Step forward the
Jack Cunningham of his day, United States Congressman Andrew Volstead.
The act bearing his name passed the American legislature in 1918.

It established 14 festive years of corporate criminality as the needs
of the market were met by rather obvious looking mafiosi in
error-of-taste suits, facilitated by systemic bribery of the police
and local government and, with a spiked commodity terrors were added
beyond the resources of ordinary alcohol. There was a market for beer
and whisky then which was always going to be met and was accommodated
through black channels. There is a similar demand for every kind of
drug today and it is met by the black market.

Consider Sydney Smith's account of Mrs Partington of
Sidmouth: "In the winter of 1824 there set in a great flood
upon that town ... Dame Partington who lived upon the beach,
was seen at the door of her house with mop and patterns,
trundling her mop, squeezing out the sea-water and
vigorously pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was
roused. Mrs Partington's spirit was up; but I need not tell
you the contest was unequal. The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs
Partington." Have I quoted that before? It is all politics.

Smith was talking about electoral reform, a grander thing than
substances. But there is no real difference. Demand is demand - for a
commodity or forms of government. Any minister orating about the war
on drugs stands exactly where Mrs Partington stood - up to the knees!
There exists, not perhaps the Atlantic, but a fair-sized sea, and it
will beat Dr Cunningham.

There are three problems in this field - the harm done to users,
criminal distribution and the great volume of theft committed to meet
the criminals' price. Given pure drugs, almost certainly the physical
harm would decline heavily. That can be achieved by opening a legal
market and given individual financial strictures, prescribing free.
The legal market will not adulterate cocaine any more than it now
adulterates TCP, and who steals to go to Boots?

So what should we do now that Blairism in all its argument-proof
prissiness never will? Refusing any longer to do what we cannot
usefully do, we legalise soft drugs. We expand widely on the field
experiments of the two Drs Marks who have been guiding patients to
legally supplied hard drugs, to monitor how people will cope who rely
on drugs but not on criminal suppliers. If, over two years, those
tests validate the point that life improves with lawful regularity, we
should proceed to the legalisation of all drugs.