REALITY BITES IN DRUG DEBATE

It looked like the first drop of rain in the desert of drugs policy.
Last week, the executive director of the United Nations office on
drugs and crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said what millions of
liberal-minded people have been waiting to hear. "Law enforcement
should shift its focus from drug users to drug traffickers ... people
who take drugs need medical help, not criminal retribution."

Drug production should remain illegal, possession and use should be
decriminalised. Many will have toasted him with bumpers of peppermint
tea, and, perhaps, a celebratory spliff. I didn't.

I believe that informed adults should be allowed to inflict whatever
suffering they wish on themselves but we are not entitled to harm
other people. I know people who drink fair-trade tea and coffee, shop
locally and take cocaine at parties. They are revolting hypocrites.

Every year cocaine causes about 20,000 deaths in Colombia and
displaces several hundred thousand people from their homes. Children
are blown up by landmines, indigenous people are enslaved, villagers
are tortured and killed, and rainforests are razed. You'd cause less
human suffering if instead of discreetly retiring to the toilet at a
party, you went into the street and mugged someone.

But the counter-cultural association appears to insulate people from
ethical questions. If commissioning murder, torture, slavery, civil
war, corruption and deforestation is not a crime, what is?

I am talking about elective drug use, not addiction. In the United
States, casual users of cocaine outnumber addicts by about 12 to one.
I agree that addicts should be helped, not prosecuted. I would like to
see a revival of the British program that was killed by a tabloid
witch-hunt in 1971: until then all heroin addicts were entitled to
clean, legal supplies administered by doctors. Cocaine addicts should
be offered residential detox.

But, at the risk of alienating many, I maintain that while cocaine
remains illegal, casual users should remain subject to criminal law.
Decriminalisation of the products of crime expands the market for this
criminal trade. We have a choice of two consistent policies. The first
is to sustain global prohibition, while helping addicts and
prosecuting casual users. This means that the drugs trade will remain
the preserve of criminal gangs. It will keep spreading crime and
instability around the world, and ensure that narcotics are still cut
with contaminants.

As journalist Nick Davies argued during an investigation of drugs
policy, major seizures raise the price of drugs. Demand among addicts
is inelastic, so higher prices mean they must find more money to buy
them. The more drugs the police capture and destroy, the more
robberies and muggings addicts will commit.

The other possible policy is to legalise and regulate the global
trade. This would undercut the criminal networks and guarantee
unadulterated supplies to consumers. There might even be a market for
certified fair-trade cocaine.

Costa's new report begins by rejecting this option. If it did
otherwise, he would no longer be executive director of the UN office
on drugs and crime. The report argues that "any reduction in the cost
of drug control ... will be offset by much higher expenditure on
public health (due to the surge of drug consumption)". It admits that
tobacco and alcohol kill more people than illegal drugs, but claims
that this is only because fewer illegal drugs are consumed.

Strangely, however, it fails to supply any evidence to support the
claim that narcotics are dangerous. Nor does it distinguish between
the effects of drugs themselves and the effects of the adulteration
and disease caused by their prohibition.

Why not? Perhaps because the evidence would torpedo the rest of the
report. A couple of weeks ago, Ben Goldacre drew attention to the
largest study on cocaine ever undertaken, conducted by the World
Health Organisation in 1995. I've just read it, and this is what it
says. "Health problems from the use of legal substances, particularly
alcohol and tobacco, are greater than health problems from cocaine
use. Few experts describe cocaine as invariably harmful to health.
Cocaine-related problems are widely perceived to be more common and
more severe for intensive, high-dosage users and very rare and much
less severe for occasional, low-dosage users ... occasional cocaine
use does not typically lead to severe or even minor physical or social
problems."

This study was suppressed by the WHO after threats of an economic
embargo by the Clinton government. Drugs policy in most nations is a
matter of religion, not science.

The same goes for heroin. The biggest study of opiate use ever
conducted (at Philadelphia General Hospital) found that addicts
suffered no physical harm, even though some of them had been taking
heroin for 20 years. The devastating health effects of heroin use are
caused by adulterants and the lifestyles of people forced to live
outside the law. Like cocaine, heroin is addictive, but unlike
cocaine, the only consequence of its addiction appears to be ... addiction.

Costa's half-measure, in other words, gives us the worst of both
worlds: more murder, more destruction, more muggings, more
adulteration. Another way of putting it is this: you will, if Costa's
proposal is adopted, be permitted without fear of prosecution to
inject yourself with heroin cut with drain cleaner and brick dust,
sold illegally and soaked in blood; but not with clean and legal supplies.

However, his report does raise one good argument. At present the trade
in class A drugs is concentrated in rich nations. If it was legalised,
we could cope. The use of drugs is likely to rise, but governments
could use the extra taxes to help people tackle addiction. But because
the wholesale price would collapse with legalisation, these drugs
would for the first time become widely available in poorer nations,
which are easier to exploit (as tobacco and alcohol firms have found)
and which are less able to regulate, raise taxes or pick up the pieces.

The widespread use of cocaine or heroin in the poor world could cause
serious social problems: I've seen, for example, how a weaker drug
khat seems to dominate life in Somali-speaking regions of Africa.
"The universal ban on illicit drugs," the UN argues, "provides a
great deal of protection to developing countries."

So Costa's office has produced a study comparing the global costs of
prohibition with the global costs of legalisation, allowing us to see
whether the current policy (murder, corruption, war, adulteration)
causes less misery than the alternative (widespread addiction in
poorer nations). The hell it has.

Even to raise the possibility of such research would be to invite
moves by the Congress to shut off the UN's funding. Drug charity
Transform has addressed this question, but only for Britain, and the
results are clear-cut: prohibition is the worse option.

As far as I can discover, no one has attempted a global study. Until
that happens, Costa's opinions on this issue are worth as much as mine
or anyone else's: nothing at all.