THE DALLAGLIO AFFAIR: DON'T MENTION THE DRUGS WAR

There could scarcely have been a better advertisement for the government's
more reasonable approach to drugs, announced yesterday, than the miserable
fate of England's glamorous rugby captain.

After some early rhetoric about drugs tsars and drugs wars, the government
appears to have accepted what most professionals in the field have been
saying for years: that you can't fight drugs with tanks but you can persuade
people that taking drugs is short-sighted and self destructive, and you can
help people who have got involved to quit.

It seems preposterous that it should have taken so long, but let's not carp:
at least in this respect, the government appears willing not to follow the
US lead: there, years of neo-military bluster and expenditure of the order of
$100m a year, the government has failed to win the `war" against drugs.

Here, after years of similar hardline rhetoric, much of it from the last
government, drugs are now more entrenched in youth culture than ever before.

In this country, young people appear to be taking up to five times more
illegal drugs than young people in the rest of Europe, particularly
amphetamines and ecstasy. According to a survey by the Standing Conference
on Drug Abuse, the consumption of illegal drugs has increased eight-fold among
15- year-olds in the past 10 years and five-fold among 12-year-olds. So much
for the war.

The conference found that 70% of club-goers in Edinburgh were had used drugs
in the previous year and 93% of those who had used drugs mixed them. The age
of drug users had fallen by two years, to the 18- 20 age group. Most of
them, like their counterparts who drink too much alcohol at the same age,
will grow out of it. The minority will need help.

At present they stand little chance of getting such help: waiting lists for
treatment are long and growing and treatment costs money. But a treatment
based approach, as the research has demonstrated, more than pays for itself.

It benefits the individuals, of course, but it also produce tangible social
and economic benefits that far outweigh its cost. According to a report
published last year by the National Treatment Outcome Research Study, the cost of
treatment is repaid fourfold by savings in the cost of crime, findings
confirmed by recent research projects that have showed that crime rates
halved when treatment was offered.

It clearly works, so why has it taken so long? One reason is the fear of the
reaction of those who like to grandstand on the need for a punitive
approach,while profiting from the problem, the culture of rampant hypocrisy in which
sections of the press lives off the human failings that it affects to
condemn. Dallaglio is just the latest victim.

Drugs are a problem, but they are a health problem more than a moral
problem. The problem is that if they were approached that way, it would
deflate the affected moral outrage that is the most nauseating aspect of the
tabloid headlines.

Thirty years ago, the News of the World was peddling Vicar in Sex Romp
stories. Now even vicars are assumed to have sex lives. So what is a poor
tabloid editor to do? Fortunately there are the new targets - paedophiles
and drug dealers make good copy and better still if the subject is a hero who
can be toppled from his pedestal.

Dallaglio does not earn his huge salary just by his outstanding skills on
the rugby field. He earns it because he fulfils the need, perceived by the
marketing managers of sport, that sportsmen should be personalities who
conform to the image they wish to sell - that of the gladiator, the clean
cut, handsome hero.

But the glamour of sport is as artificial as the glamour of the show
business that it has come more and more to resemble. The underside of the
overblown rhetoric that surrounds international sport is the fact that it is
a business that depends on the inflammable fuels of drugs and money in which
considerable quantities of effort and cash go into devising untraceable
means of doping sporting superheroes to enhance performance. It is hypocrisy to
pretend otherwise, but we do so because to see it as it is would undermine
the fairytale qualities of the Olympian hero that is the key to its
commercial success.

Pity the country that needs heroes. And pity the heroes, too, in a culture
that only creates them for the pleasure of destroying them. `I feel very
sorry for the man. I can't deny that," the editor of the News of the World
said yesterday. And we all believe him, don't we?