A FRESH LINE ON DRUGS

The Government should appoint a royal commission to examine the nature of
Britain's drug problem and make recommendations. The "war" against drugs
may or may not be being lost; there is disagreement even about that, but
this is certainly one of the classic cases for a commission. A great social
evil is destroying the lives of many young people; there is no consensus on
the factual basis of the spread of this contagion, or on the medical
dangers of particular drugs; there is certainly no consensus on the best
way to deal with the problem. Without an authoritative examination of the
evidence, policy recommendations can only be speculative opinions.

The news from the front is bad. On Tuesday Customs and Excise announced
that heroin seizures in 1997 had increased by 135 per cent against the
previous year; there has been a steady rise in heroin seizures both by
Customs and police for most of the 1990s. This is the best guide we have to
the level of importation and abuse. It cannot be a precise one, but it
seems certain that heroin use has been rising rapidly. There are stories of
heroin dealers targeting the young with free samples and so on; the
evidence for this is less certain, but it seems only too likely to be true.

There has also been a large increase in seizures of cocaine and synthetic
drugs; the cocaine seizures are up by about 80 per cent. The recently
appointed "drugs tsar" Keith Hellawell says that "the overall use of
illicit drugs has plateaued"; this more optimistic view seems to be true
only of cannabis, where the seizures, though huge, were only slightly up on
the previous year. Paul Flynn, the Labour MP who is the vice-chairman of
the Drugs Misuse Group in the Commons, says that the seizure figures show
the "abject failure" of the present policies on drugs, and points to the
tripling of deaths from heroin over the past three years.

One of the benefits of a royal commission should be that such an inquiry
would distinguish properly between the different drugs. The attraction of
these illegal drugs, and of many legal drugs as well, is that they give
people a high. The drawback is that they present health risks or reduce
social competence. No two drugs have the same effect on the mood, and no
two drugs present an identical risk to health. For instance, nicotine is an
admirable drug in terms of mood alteration it gives a mild lift - and of
social competence. Cigarette smokers can actually concentrate better on
their work. Unfortunately it is highly addictive and has lethal long-term
effects on health.

One lobby, which has been led by The Independent, wants to take cannabis
out of the illegal group and put it with caffeine, alcohol and nicotine. It
is not possible to know whether this lobby is justified without better
information about the long-term effects on health of using cannabis. Some
doctors believe that substantial long-term use damages the brain, but this
is exactly the sort of issue a royal commission could examine in detail.

There are claims made for the drug policies of The Netherlands where the
decriminalisation of cannabis is said to have reduced the use of hard
drugs. Undoubtedly one of the dangers of including relatively mild drugs in
the illegal group is that users of these drugs are introduced to suppliers
who are criminals. If, by decriminalising cannabis, one could separate the
large number of cannabis users from the much more dangerous hard drugs
culture, that would plainly be a gain. Whatever its medical effects, there
are hundreds of thousands of people who have used cannabis, if only in
their student days, and now hold down responsible jobs. A royal commission
could examine the experience of The Netherlands in an impartial way.

Other drugs have different effects. Ecstasy can lead to sudden death; LSD
can produce bizarre and sometimes dangerous hallucinations, and can be
followed by recurrent incidents of a schizoid character; cocaine and heroin
are both major and damaging drugs of addiction. Yet even in these cases,
there is an argument for trying to take them back out of the hands of
criminals, and treating addiction primarily as a medical problem.

The drugs business is enormously profitable, and it is profitable because
it is illegal. If cocaine or heroin were ordinary refined agricultural
products, sold in the open market, they would be extremely cheap, as cheap
as any other processed plants. If they were cheap, no criminal fortunes
could be made from selling them, and no one would have a motive to seduce
children into addiction. Some people would still become addicts, simply
because the product was inexpensive and available, like laudanum in the
19th century. We cannot tell whether this state of affairs would produce
more or fewer addicts; it would, however, remove the criminal profit, and
not drive people to crime to pay for their habit.

The average heroin addict is said to steal goods worth more than #40,000
every year. Some police officers, who deal with these drug-related crimes,
believe that universal drug decriminalisation would both remove the profit
of dealing and remove the pressure to commit crimes to pay for drugs. These
arguments should be examined with an open mind.

Hard drugs are now available throughout the industrialised world; the only
countries where they are not almost universally available seem to be those
too poor to pay for them. In Boston it is easier for a college student to
buy drugs than alcohol; the laws restricting drugs are flouted, those
forbidding the sale of alcohol to people under 21 are successfully
enforced.

A few weeks ago I was reading the local paper in Somerset; it reported a
crack cocaine case in Midsomer Norton. If one can buy crack in Midsomer
Norton, one can buy it almost anywhere in Britain.

One of the side-effects of the global drug business is that it produces a
complex of corruption, ranging from the petty corruption of local
policemen, through the corruption of banking by money-laundering, to the
wholesale corruption of ministers and governments in some countries. As
with the experiment of prohibition of alcohol in the United States, the
prohibition of drugs naturally leads to the creation of criminal empires.
Sixty-five years after the United States repealed prohibition, these
organised crime networks still exist and flourish. Once they have been
brought into existence by huge criminal profits, they are extremely
difficult to get rid of.

The main concern for the Government must be the protection of the young.
The drugs culture is no respecter of social class; it is to be found in
prosperous suburbs as well as in inner-city estates. But the opportunities
for the drug culture to expand are greatest where there are few jobs and
strong local gangs. Some estates in Manchester seem to be under the virtual
control of these drug gangs. Strong policing and heavy sentences have been
tried in the United States to break these gangs; as a result there are
400,000 Americans, mostly young and mostly black or Hispanic, in prison on
drugs offences. They have often been sentenced to very long terms. That is
proportionately more people than are in prison for all offences in Britain.
Tough law enforcement may be necessary, but is not an answer.

Indeed the United States is an example of how not to deal with drugs. The
problem has to be tackled in social, medical and educational terms, as well
as in terms of law enforcement. The Americans have put too much pressure on
other nations to imitate their over-simple pattern of response.

Many people fear that any inquiry would in some way weaken the drive
against drugs. Yet Britain's policy is not working, and it is hard to see
how a state of ignorance can help to make it work. The present policy is
not protecting the young; it is not destroying the criminal network; it has
not prevented drugs becoming universally available in Britain. In any
social disaster on this scale, the natural course is to review the
evidence, listen to the arguments, establish the options and suggest which
might work best. That would be rational government. We cannot simply go on
sending each generation of children over the top to take their chance of
having their lives ruined and of being turned into criminals.