NEVER MIND THE EVIDENCE - A DRUG-FREE WORLD IS NIGH

The harm caused by prohibition is staggering, yet still politicians
cling to the blinkered ambition of a global 'war on drugs'

This year marks the 100th anniversary of global drug prohibition, and
what an inglorious centenary it is when we consider the millions of
lives that have been blighted as a consequence of the war on drugs.
And yet the majority of governments have supported a worldwide ban on
the cultivation, distribution and use of psychoactive substances ever
since the signing of the Shanghai convention, which aimed to target
opium use, in 1909.

Next week, political leaders gather in Vienna to contemplate the state
of international drug policy and sign up to new accords. It is a
decade on from the last UN General Assembly special session (UNGASS)
on narcotics in New York, which took as its ridiculously gauche slogan
"A drug-free world - we can do it". The reality of the past 10 years -
from the poppy fields of Afghanistan to Manchester street stabbings -
could not have been more different.

UNGASS is accused by some of being little more than a talking shop -
its recommendations are, after all, non-binding. But this meeting is a
crucial barometer and, for better or worse, will codify the consensus
around global drug policy for the next decade. As the International
Drug Policy consortium notes in a recent briefing, it's hard to
overestimate the devastation caused to individuals and societies
across the world by this strict prohibitionist stance.

Excluding Africa, one in three HIV infections results from the use of
contaminated injecting equipment. But, while countless studies have
concluded that provision of sterile equipment reduces needle-sharing
but does not promote drug use, in many countries drug control
continues to trump public health. In Russia, which has the fastest
growing HIV epidemic in the world, users don't even have the option of
weaning themselves off illegal drugs using a substitute such as
methadone, because it is itself illegal.

Despite a global trend towards the abolition of capital punishment,
the number of regimes applying the death penalty to drug offences is
increasing, in contravention of international human rights law. More
broadly, punishing drug users doesn't work; it costs the taxpayer
billions and keeps prisons dangerously overcrowded. Mike Trace, the
former deputy UK drugs tsar, says successive studies show minimal
correlation between the severity of law enforcement and demand for
illegal drugs. Some of the toughest countries, such as the US, still
have the highest rates of use.

Then there are the devastating environmental effects of coca
crop-spraying in Colombia. Or the forced detoxification of thousands
of users in China. Or the fact that the illegal drugs market gifts
millions to organised criminals and paramilitaries who destabilise
entire countries. These are the consequences of prohibition, and a
"drug-free world" has not been one of them.

Until recently there had been strong indications that the Vienna talks
would consider a more pragmatic and compassionate approach. EU
countries, backed by some Latin American states, Australia and New
Zealand, have been lobbying for the new declaration to explicitly
mention harm reduction for the first time. But such optimism has
evaporated, as the EU line founders, with the Vatican issuing a
statement that harm reduction leads to the liberalisation of drug use
and so is "anti-life", while the US, Japan and Russia continue to veto
anything other than zero tolerance.

Although the Obama administration has indicated a more progressive
attitude than the Bush-led war on drugs - the president has already
lifted the ban on federal funding for needle exchanges - it's unlikely
that this new approach will filter through to the US negotiators in
Vienna, which risks sealing the fate of global drug policy for another
decade.

Harm reduction - needle exchanges, prescription of substitute drugs
and management of addiction - is no panacea, of course, but in
individual countries where such interventions are long-established,
they have saved many lives. The tragedy is that a consensus already
exists among experts in drug policy, as well as among many senior
politicians and police, but is only acknowledged in private. And that
consensus is that the illegality of drugs causes more harm than good,
and that the sanest response would be a system of regulation and
taxation, bringing drugs into line with the other harmful choices that
people make, like smoking and drinking.

As Danny Kushlick, of the drugs reform charity Transform, says: "No
amount of counselling, clean needles or methadone makes up for the
fact that [a user's] drugs cost more than their equivalent weight in
gold, that they are of unknown purity and that their possession is a
criminal offence. And sadly, safe injecting rooms and heroin
prescribing will not help the plight of Afghan and Colombian opium and
coca growers."

But legalisation and regulation is not a debate that will be going
public in Vienna, nor anytime soon in Britain, given the way the
government has ignored its advisory committee on the misuse of drugs
in the last two reclassification exercises. Those who have seen the
consequences of prohibition at first hand are still praying for a
miracle in Vienna. And the rest of us will have to take slim comfort
where we can get it. Like the story about a home affairs select
committee session in 2001, during which one eager young backbencher
was surprisingly vocal about the need for a mature discussion about
legalisation. That MP was David Cameron. Now that really would be a
turn-up. Though I won't be holding my breath.