HOW DRUGS HARM US

Time was, British prisons housed the criminal elements of the white
working class.

Immigrants were generally well behaved, and foreign criminals were
simply deported. Now, however, one in seven prisoners is a foreign
national and, as we report today, their numbers are growing at four
times the rate of the British-born prison population.

The steep rise in foreign prisoners is largely the consequence of
Britons' apparently insatiable appetite for drugs. Forty per cent of
foreign male prisoners and 80 per cent of females are serving
sentences for drug offences, mainly trafficking. These men and women
are mostly at the bottom of the criminal pecking order: hapless fools
from rural backwaters, coerced or bribed or bamboozled into carrying
narcotics on an airplane, often secreted inside their bodies.
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These pathetic "mules" suffer the penalty for the far greater crimes
committed on the supply and demand side of the drug trade: the drug
lords overseas, and the consumers here. Transporting drugs is a
serious crime, deserving of stiff penalties. But in locking up the
mules, we are simply punishing the messenger; and there are countless
more messengers where they come from. To reverse the trend for more
and more foreign national prisoners, four steps must be taken.

First, there should be a redoubling of efforts to curtail drug use in
Britain, through a clear-sighted determination to punish possession.
Second, we must disrupt the production of drugs abroad. This will take
concerted international effort and meaningful strategies to replace
poppies and coca with legal cash crops. Third, we must revert to the
policy of deporting to their countries of origin foreign prisoners
convicted of minor offences.

Most foreigners in British jails are from Commonwealth countries: let
us invoke the relationship to negotiate deals whereby, for instance,
Jamaicans convicted of crime in Britain serve their sentences in
Jamaica. Finally, we need effective border security to ensure that
those we admit to these shores add to, rather than steal from, our
national wealth and health. Britain is an entrepot of world trade: let
us make sure we deal in respectable goods and labour, not the products
and purveyors of death.