WHAT DO WE DO NOW? - THE DRUGS WORLD WAR

While governments wage unwinnable war against drugs, ordinary people are
facing the truth: the 'enemy' is already among us and, accepted if not yet
acceptable, is here to stay.

THE world war on drugs has been lost because everyone under-estimated the
power of the profit motive on the supply side, and the attractions of drugs
on the demand side. We have seen how all the law enforcement agencies in
the world cannot impede a business where the mark-up can be as high as
22,000 per cent.

At any given time some $5bn made from drugs is sloshing around the
international monetary system. Inevitably, some of it filters into the
world of legitimate finance. As a result, many businessmen who would be
horrified to be accused of profiting from drugs nevertheless do so -
becoming another casualty of the war.

Take the City of London. Worried about all those billions trying to find a
legitimate home, the Government has authorised the Bank of England, the
British Bankers' Association, Customs and Excise, the Serious Fraud Office,
Scotland Yard, the City of London Police, the Security Service and the
Secret Intelligence Service - all liaising through the National Criminal
Intelligence Service - to crack down on drugs money laundering.

If you were wondering why you missed all those high-profile cases at the
Old Bailey, where the drugs barons and the organisations which tried to
wash their money in Britain were sent to jail for 10 years, then wonder no
longer - because there haven't been any. The problem is that no one is
willing to give a firm answer to the question: at what point does dirty
money become clean?

A City financial institution may suspect that a couple of million dollars
it has just been asked to handle may not be clean - and the law obliges it
to report such suspicions. But if it does so, it risks losing a valuable
client. John Gibb, who specialises in writing about this area, says: "Which
City institution would refuse to do business with a wealthy charitable
foundation based in the Far East which is, on the surface, working to
support persecuted nationals around the world? How far should that City
institution investigate to discover whether the charitable foundation is a
front for laundering the proceeds of drugs?"

Gibb offers one example of how an American drugs baron could launder his
money. He begins by flying to Moscow with suitcases containing a couple of
million dollars. The Russian customs don't give a damn about dollars coming
into the country. Theirs is a cash-based economy, and American dollars are
the unofficial currency. There is an enormous demand for them.

The drugs baron changes his dollars at a very favourable rate, then uses
Russian underworld friends to buy a copper smelting plant in the Ukraine.
If he needs more capital, he raises it from a hedge fund in the Bahamas,
itself probably financed with drugs money. Copper ingots from the plant are
then shipped to London as the property of an off-the-shelf British company
the drugs baron has bought and which has an account with a high street bank.

The ingots are stored in a warranted or bonded warehouse which issues him
with a certificate of ownership. He then trades the metal on the London
exchange. The profits are lily-white, ready to be invested in a perfectly
legitimate business.

There are two views on how much the City of London is knowingly involved in
deals like this. Christopher Dickson, deputy director of the Serious Fraud
Office, says that it is because of its reputation for honesty and integrity
that criminals choose the City of London to sanitise their money. "If the
City's reputation is damaged, the political and economic consequences will
be appalling."

But elsewhere in Europe, experts say that City institutions actually relish
the flood of dirty money pouring in from places such as Russia. They say,
further, that it may be safer in the long-term that drugs money is
laundered and goes into legitimate financing, rather than moving
unaccountably through the black economy.

WHAT is it that makes drugs so attractive to so many people? As one whose
drug is alcohol, I can only report on what some users of other recreational
drugs have to say about their appeal. Here are some of them talking about
Ecstasy:

"I got a huge rush and the feeling of well-being went on for six hours, it
doesn't stop when you leave the club. It's the whole thing of piling off to
the 24-hour garage, buying milk and biscuits and going back to someone's
flat to drink tea, smoke spliffs, listen to techno and waffle all night.
It's one of the best memories of my friends at university. It's better than
sex because you are in love with the whole world. I felt more intelligent,
more attractive, freer with my emotions. I was eloquent, able to speak on
any subject, recall information from my subconscience. It was brilliant."

Or, as the columnist Charlotte Raven put it: "The kids who take Ecstasy are
nicer, in general, than the ones who swill beer and pick fights. One of the
things I liked most about the drug was the way it encouraged the user to
enjoy the company of others without shagging them, stabbing them or singing
loud songs in the street."

But what about the dangers, the deaths, the ruined lives? It turns out that
Ecstasy, after cannabis, is one of the safest of all drugs to take. Despite
the hysterical outcry from the tabloids that followed the death of
18-year-old Leah Betts in 1995, Ecstasy is linked to only 0.0002 per cent
of deaths in a year. Compared with tobacco, which kills 0.9 per cent, and
alcohol, which kills 0.5 per cent, this is minuscule. As the Economist -
hardly a raving, pro-drugs publication - has pointed out: "Flying on a
civil airliner is one-and-a-half times as dangerous as dropping an 'e'."

Heroin, however, does deserve its bad reputation. It is addictive and
delivers such a powerful sensation that even those who have suffered from
addiction to it and managed to beat it say that they will miss it for the
rest of their lives. (One girl told me: "It's like an hour-long orgasm.")
It is the most dangerous drug, and kills about 1.5 per cent of its users
each year. Yet despite the documented risk, use of heroin has tripled since
1985.

One reason has been social deprivation. Andrew O'Hagan, writing about
Glasgow, says that heroin appeals to young folk who have no firm sense of
the future, or of any day beyond the one they are inside. "To folk in this
position, the effects were meaningful and comforting. Heroin was, in a way,
more glamorous and less negotiable than anything that had come to their
streets before."

Glamorous? Heroin glamorous? Absolutely. Something has happened to make
heroin suddenly fashionable, smart, chic and, above all, socially
acceptable, both in Britain and the United States. The origins of this
important change can be traced back to events in Cali, a busy industrial
city in south-western Colombia, in 1990.

COLOMBIA used to mean cocaine, the Medellin cartel and its boss, the late
Pablo Escobar. But in Cali, a group of rival drugs barons, noting that the
cocaine market was becoming too competitive, decided to switch to heroin.
They concentrated on producing the best heroin in the world, so pure that
when it first arrived in Britain three years ago, few could handle it and
some 24 addicts died from overdosing in one week.

It was the quality of the Colombian heroin that changed public perception
of the drug. Because it is so pure, you do not have to inject it - you can
smoke or snort it. Almost overnight, out went the image of "'dirty
druggies" with their needles, track marks and Aids. Instead, wasted,
pale-faced models are now described in serious newspapers as embodying
"heroin chic".

So when the British Government put out an anti-drugs poster featuring a
painfully-thin, surly-faced young man above the headline "Heroin Screws You
Up", it became a pin-up for thousands of teenage girls and had to be
withdrawn.

ONE REASON why the war against drugs has gone on so long is that many
people have no interest in victory or defeat, only in the fight continuing.
Ethan A. Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith Center, a drugs policy
research institute in New York, says that the American drug
enforcement/treatment complex has become so hooked on government money that
the anti-drugs crusade has become a vested interest.

That has not yet happened in Britain, but it could. The Americans spend
$17bn of public money on the anti-drugs war while, at the moment, Britain
spends only £500m a year. But this is rising rapidly and it does not
include our indirect contribution to the army of international civil
servants involved in the war, those who run the United Nations Drug Control
Programme (UNDCP) or those who work for the International Narcotics Control
Board.

And then there are others with an interest in the war continuing - the
prison builders, the drug-testing companies, the professional anti-drugs
education programmes, the extra police and parole officers called up for
the battle. Not to mention those who have been corrupted, like the five
American police officers convicted last year of beating and robbing drug
dealers they had encountered in the streets of New York. At their trial,
angry and defiant, the officers said: "Everyone is doing well out of drugs
except us. These guys were the enemy. Why should they get to keep all the
money?"

SINCE THE WAR on drugs has been lost, it is logical that we should be
planning what to do next. There is no chance in the immediate future of
such a discussion taking place in the United States. The Surgeon General,
Jocelyn Elders, suggested it - and was quickly hounded out of office. But
even if, in the end, the US pulls nations such as ours into line over our
treaty obligations, there is no reason why we should not at least discuss
more effective strategies against drugs.

The Economist says such a discussion should start with the fundamental
question: why are some drugs illegal in the first place? The standard
answer is that illegal drugs are illegal because they are dangerous. We
have seen that this is not always the case. Most young people know it is
not so, which is why they do not trust official information on the subject.
They know the danger varies widely from drug to drug, and many drugs are
not dangerous at all - the Economist says that some drugs are not as
dangerous as, for example, riding a motorbike.

Well then, because they are addictive - if they do not kill you now, then
long-term addiction may damage your health. This may be so, especially with
heroin, but no more than for alcohol and tobacco. The Economist - not some
wishy-washy, liberal publication - says: "if addictiveness is truly the
criterion for a ban, then booze and cigarettes should be banned, not
cannabis and ecstasy".

How about the argument that drug-taking is not a matter for individual
decision because it has social consequences? True enough, but not enough to
justify the current list of illegal drugs. The Economist again: "The
National Health Service has to cope with many accidents and diseases that
are largely self-inflicted (not least from tobacco and alcohol). Those
caused by illegal drugs are a small fraction of them."

So, how about the suggestion that our kids would have stuck to legal drugs
such as tobacco and alcohol, if only drug pushers had not corrupted them?
The few studies on this issue show that most first-time users are
introduced to a drug not by a pusher, but by a relative or a friend. The
music and club magazine Mixmag asked 4,000 young people how they first came
to try Ecstasy. Only 2.9 per cent were persuaded by a dealer, while 85 per
cent had been "pushed" by a friend.

These friends would be horrified to be described as pushers. Lifeline, the
Manchester drugs information agency, interviewed one group of students who
were facing prosecution for dealing in drugs. Lifeline's manager, Alan
Haughton, says: "They were really indignant about being prosecuted. They
didn't consider themselves pushers and criminals. They thought that they
were helping out their friends so that they didn't have to get involved
with the criminal fraternity."

NONE of the commonly-used arguments in support of the war on drugs stands
up, and the list of serious, respectable people across the political
spectrum and from both sides of the Atlantic who now accept that the war
has been lost grows daily. If these realists were to persuade their
governments to at least try a new approach, what might this be?

Let us take the views of two ultra-conservative publications, the National
Review in America, and the Economist in Britain. Both insist that they do
not favour drugs. The National Review: "We deplore their use; we urge the
stiffest feasible sentences against anyone convicted of selling a drug to a
minor." The Economist: "It is possible that the world would be a better
place if nobody took anything that could harm them."

But both agree that the war on drugs has failed, and that there should be a
movement towards legalisation. Ethan A. Nadelmann writes in the National
Review: "The time has come to abandon the concept of a 'drug-free' society.
We need to focus on learning to live with drugs in such a way that they do
the least possible harm."

The Economist suggests that there should be licensed sales outlets (a sort
of drugs off-licence) initially for cannabis and Ecstasy, with minimum ages
for purchase, just as there is now for alcohol and tobacco. The drugs would
be supplied by licensed manufacturers to ensure the purity, and thus the
safety, of the product. Driving under the influence of the drugs would
carry the same stigma and sentence as driving under the influence of
alcohol. If the experiment worked, it could be extended to other drugs.

The Economist believes the benefits would be enormous. Police and customs
would no longer waste time and money chasing users and traffickers. It
would cut Britain's prison population by 10 per cent at a stroke. It would
reduce crime and violence, forcing drugs barons out of business and end
their often deadly battles over territory. It would save Britain £500m a
year spent on enforcing anti-drugs laws. And if licensed drugs were taxed
at the same rate as alcohol and tobacco - even though the price would drop
dramatically - they would provide revenue of at least £1bn a year.

The war against drugs is part of the last great authoritarian campaign of
this century - the attempt to tell us what one can and cannot do to one's
own body. The debate is raging over abortion and euthanasia, but not drugs.
It cannot be too early to discuss what we should do when the crusaders
against drugs finally admit defeat.