WE CAN'T GO ON PROHIBITING DRUGS!

Our policy is based on the belief that the war against drugs is
winnable. It is not

The first I ever heard of drugs was "Just Say No". Coined by Nancy
Reagan, the phrase became a rallying cry for prohibitionists and
preachers of abstinence on both sides of the Atlantic. I was five when
the cast of Grange Hill used the slogan as the title of a spin-off
chart hit. Though at least one of the young actors was using illegal
substances at the time, their preaching earned them a trip to the
White House. That the cast of a "progressive" BBC children's drama and
the First Lady were united in the Rose Garden shows just how messed up
things had become. Nancy's words, even now, continue to colour public
discourse.

Never mind that the sentiment is patently fatuous. Never mind that 30
years ago Britain had around 1,000 "hard" drug addicts while we now
have 270,000. Never mind the fact that whole nations - from Colombia
to Afghanistan - are enslaved by the fetid corruption of murderous
drug lords. "Just say no", was designed to help get the fat-cat
abstinence-peddling Christian Republicans on side, to build a two-term
coalition and to foster the Reagan Democrats. Right about the time her
husband's administration was funding the Contras with drug money. She
was just saying no - but not, of course, to that.

It beggars belief that the Western world - the free world as it was
then - chose its approach to drugs policy from the populist
sloganeering of the ageing wife of a B-movie actor. It's like asking
Al Capone to fill in your self-assessment tax return: you won't pay
much tax but you will go to jail. Nevertheless, the UK and US drugs
policies have germinated from the theory that abstinence will save
all, that we are engaged in a "war on drugs" - another slogan, this
one coined by Nixon - and that the war is winnable. It is not.

Tomorrow officials of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs will convene
in Vienna to discuss all this. They did the same 10 years ago and set
an ambition of extreme vacuity - "a drug-free world". In a
show-and-tell expression of Einstein's definition of insanity, they
will most probably say the same thing this time, expecting a different
result. They won't get one. We can deduce this by comparing their
stated aims with the real results.

This is called evidence-based analysis and the sooner international
policy makers get their head around it the better. The UN hoped to
achieve their goals by "eliminating or significantly reducing" the
production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008. Well, here we are,
so let's see how they have been getting on. Today the UN places a
value on the international drugs trade at around $320bn (UKP 227bn) a
year - that's more than twice the annual budget of the European Union
- - while the US spends $40bn in fighting it. We are hopelessly out-gunned.

Since 1998 we've read a Downing Street strategy memo which admitted
that the UK government seizes less than 20 per cent of the hundreds of
tonnes of cocaine and heroin that enters our country, and that to make
trafficking unprofitable would require us to capture 80 per cent - a
plain impossibility.

So, why did we lose the drugs war? The answer is simple economics.
Demand will find a supply. That the political parties on both sides of
the Atlantic who preached prohibition were the same ones that
advocated market liberalism is no small irony. While Nixon, Thatcher
and Reagan pointed to the Reds in the East and said you can never be
free without free-markets, the freest market of all was the one they
created with the war on drugs. There is no regulation of actual
consumption, no regulation of production, no enforced quality
standards, no labour rights and no money-back guarantee.

Instead we have an international drug mafia more powerful and wealthy
than any organised criminals in the history of human society. They are
the beneficiaries of the alchemy of prohibition which turns virtually
worthless crops into a commodity worth its weight in gold. And,
unsurprisingly when the product is so valuable, they will stop at
nothing, literally nothing, to get it to market and realise the
profit. If you were not stung by the banking crisis and are still
looking for a justification for market regulation, this is it. The
results are all around us.

We lose around 2,600 people to drug poisoning every year. More than
half of all property crime is drug-related. And while one in eight
members of the prison population arrives there on drug-related
charges, tens of thousands more are users - able to service their
habits in our prisons. A sick joke and a criminal waste of life this
may be, but - relatively speaking - we are the lucky ones.

To see the real horror show, look at the drug gangs who closed Sao
Paolo, in Brazil in 2006, the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan
after the poppy crop was threatened by coalition troops; or even the
West African narco-state of Guinea Bissau which lost both a President
and the head of the army to assassins last week.

This is a devastating toll, given that drugs policy is, basically, a
matter of public health not national defence. Our politicians do not
see it that way.

However, they will have to try a different approach eventually, for
one very good reason: Mexico, which is already increasingly unstable.
The US cannot afford to allow its nearest neighbour to become a Guinea
Bissau. The only question is how much resources the US will commit to
its "war on drugs" before trying something that works.

Before the last UN convention more than 100 political and community
leaders, including the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan
Williams, wrote to the UN Secretary General to call for an open,
honest and rational debate about drugs. Last week, this plea was
repeated by 26 peers, who seek the immediate creation of an
intergovernmental panel to do the same. They perceive, rightly, that
our nations are addicted to a policy which is ruining the lives of
their own people while enslaving the peoples of others.

Tomorrow, in Vienna, the UN has another opportunity to stage an
intervention. Like any addict, their first step should be to admit to
themselves that they have the problem.