BUSTED STRATEGY OF THE WAR ON DRUGS

THE admission that the war on drugs in Scotland has already been lost,
made in these pages today by the man at the head of the battle, is to
a large extent a statement of the obvious. Who could legitimately
argue otherwise when 50,000 Scots are addicted to drugs, mostly
heroin, or when it was disclosed last week that an eight-year-old was
among 548 Scottish children who were treated for addiction last year?

It was, nonetheless, brave of Tom Wood to become the first significant
figure to come out and state what so many others quietly believe -
however clear we are that drugs are a scourge on our society, they are
never going to go away. The chair of the Scottish Association of
Alcohol and Drug Action Teams, and a senior policeman with decades of
experience at the sharp end, Wood has to be taken seriously when he
says that the 'Just Say No' tactic will not work in a country where 5%
of 12-year-olds have experimented with drugs.

Inevitably, in speaking out, Wood threw himself into another drugs war
- - the ongoing wrangle between those who pursue an absolutist agenda
and those who favour harm reduction. Graeme Pearson, director of the
Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency, said he "fundamentally
disagreed" with Wood, while Alistair Ramsay, former director of
Scotland Against Drugs, insisted there should be even more emphasis on
enforcement to tackle the menace.

The failure of the anti-drugs industry, which has blossomed over the
past 10 years in Scotland, has been its inability to marry this
hardline viewpoint with the equally clear need to offer a pragmatic
approach to rehabilitation and care for those already suffering from
drug abuse. Too often, the harm reduction lobby has fought with the
drug prevention groups in an unseemly turf war, squabbling over who
gets the most government cash. All the while, the number of
drug-related deaths has risen by 30% since the mid-1990s, at a time
when it is falling across the rest of the UK.

On this occasion, Wood is largely, if depressingly, correct. We do
need to get real about drugs and target resources better. As with so
many of Scotland's social ills, drug misuse largely hurts the poorest
the hardest. Problematic drug use varies from 2.9 people per 1,000 in
Orkney, to 30.8 people per 1,000 in Glasgow. Over the past decade,
there was an average of 460 hospital admissions per 100,000 people in
Glasgow, compared with a mere 20 per 100,000 in the most affluent
areas. If this government is genuinely serious about tackling the drug
abuse, then it needs to bring an end to the ghetto-isation of
Scotland's poor through stimulating the kind of opportunity culture
which provides the only real antidote to drugs.

The other main target must be the young. Great strides have been made
in the way we educate children about the risks attached to taking
drugs. As Wood stresses, the only way the message will be taken
seriously by teenagers is if they are treated seriously and given the
information they need to make up their own minds. We can only hope
they then make the right decision.

Educating younger children - such as the seven-year-old who collapsed
in class after taking methadone - is more problematic, but all the
evidence suggests that, despite the problems associated with
introducing them to drugs through education, it is preferable to
letting them discover these particular facts of life through
ill-informed playground chat or even at the hands of the local drug
dealer.

But we cannot entirely back Wood. There is a danger that his words
will be seen as the forces of law and order giving in to those who
profit from the misery of addiction.

In part, we define our society by declaring those things we simply
will not condone, no matter how popular they may be with a minority of
people. Therefore, while the war on drugs may not be winnable - and
perhaps, as Wood believes, may already be lost - we must continue to
fight it with every means at our disposal. And we must never declare a
surrender.