THE CASE FOR LEGALISING ALL DRUGS IS UNANSWERABLE

The Extreme Profits to Be Made From Narcotics - a Direct Result of
Prohibition - Fuel War and Terrorism. Legalisation Is Urgent

The war on drugs is a failed policy that has injured far more people
than it has protected. Around 14,000 people have died in Mexico's
drug wars since the end of 2006, more than 1,000 of them in the first
three months of this year. Beyond the overflowing morgues in Mexican
border towns, there are uncounted numbers who have been maimed,
traumatised or displaced. From Liverpool to Moscow, Tokyo to Detroit,
a punitive regime of prohibition has turned streets into
battlefields, while drug use has remained embedded in the way we
live. The anti-drug crusade will go down as among the greatest
follies of modern times.

A decade or so ago, it could be argued that the evidence was not yet
in on drugs. No one has ever believed illegal drug use could be
eliminated, but there was a defensible view that prohibition could
prevent more harm than it caused. Drug use is not a private act
without consequences for others; even when legal, it incurs medical
and other costs to society. A society that adopted an attitude of
laissez-faire towards the drug habits of its citizens could find
itself with higher numbers of users. There could be a risk of social
abandonment, with those in poor communities being left to their fates.

These dangers have not disappeared, but the fact is that the costs of
drug prohibition now far outweigh any possible benefits the policy
may bring. It is time for a radical shift in policy. Full-scale
legalisation, with the state intervening chiefly to regulate quality
and provide education on the risks of drug use and care for those who
have problems with the drugs they use, should now shape the agenda of
drug law reform.

In rich societies like Britain, the US and continental Europe, the
drug war has inflicted multiple harms. Since the inevitable result is
to raise the price of a serious drug habit beyond what many can
afford, penalising use drives otherwise law-abiding people into the
criminal economy. As well as criminalising users, prohibition exposes
them to major health risks. Illegal drugs can't easily be tested for
quality and toxicity and overdosing are constant risks. Where the
drugs are injected, there is the danger of hepatitis and HIV being
transmitted. Again, criminalising some drugs while allowing a free
market in others distracts attention from those that are legal and
harmful, such as alcohol.

While it is certainly possible that legalisation could see more
people take drugs, a drug user's life would be much safer and
healthier than at present. There is no room for speculation here, for
we know that a great many users lived highly productive lives before
drugs were banned. Until the First World War, when they were
introduced under the banner of national security, there were few
controls on drugs in the UK or America. Cocaine, morphine and heroin
could be bought at the local chemist. Many were users, including
William Gladstone, who liked to take a drop of laudanum (an alcoholic
tincture of opium) in his coffee before making speeches. Some users
had problems, but none had to contend with the inflated prices,
health risks and threat of jail faced by users today.

Though politicians like to pretend they embody a moral consensus,
there is none on the morality of drug use. Barack Obama has admitted
to taking cocaine, while David Cameron refuses to answer the
question. Neither has suffered any significant political fall-out.
Everyone knows drug use was commonplace in the generation from which
these politicians come and no one is fussed. What is more bothersome
is that the tacit admission by these leaders that drug use is a
normal part of life goes with unwavering support for the failed
policy of prohibition.

Producing and distributing illegal drugs is a highly organised
business, whose effects are felt throughout society. The extreme
profits that are reaped corrupt institutions and wreck lives. Dealing
drugs can seem a glamorous career to young people in desolate inner
cities, even as it socialises them into a gang culture in which
violence is normal. The Hobbesian environment of anarchic street
gangs, crooked politicians and put-upon, occasionally corrupt cops
portrayed in The Wire may not be immediately recognisable in most
European countries. But it is not all that far away.

It is in the world's poorer societies that drug prohibition is having
its most catastrophic effects. Mexico is only one of several Latin
American countries where the anti-drug crusade has escalated into
something like low-intensity warfare, while elsewhere in the world
some states have been more or less wholly captured by drug money.
Narco-states are one of the drug war's worst side-effects, with small
countries like Guinea-Bissau in West Africa being hijacked (as Ed
Vulliamy and Grant Ferrett reported in these pages in March of last
year) to serve as distribution points for Latin American cocaine.
Narco-capitalism is one of the less advertised features of
globalisation, but it may well emerge strengthened from the recent
dislocation in global markets.

Not only in Afghanistan but throughout the world, the extreme profits
of the drug trade have a well-documented role in funding terrorist
networks and so threaten advanced countries. No doubt terrorism will
remain a threat whatever drug regime is in place, but the collapse in
prices that would follow legalisation would make a big dent in the
resources it can command. It is hard to see how the countries where
most drug users live can be secure while counter-terrorist operations
are mixed up with the ritual combat of the anti-drugs crusade.

What is required is not a libertarian utopia in which the state
retreats from any concern about personal conduct, but a coolly
utilitarian assessment of the costs and benefits of different methods
of intervention. The scale of the problem suggests that
decriminalising personal use is not enough. The whole chain of
production and distribution needs to be brought out of the shadows
and regulated. Different drugs may need different types of regulation
and legalisation may work best if it operated somewhat differently in
different countries. At this point, these details are not of
overriding importance.

The urgent need is for a shift in thinking. There are hopeful signs
of this happening in some of the emerging countries, such as
Argentina, Mexico and Brazil (whose former president Fernando
Henrique Cardoso last week argued forcefully in this newspaper that
the war on drugs has failed). There is no reason why these countries,
which bear much of the brunt of the drug wars, should wait for an
outbreak of reason among politicians in rich countries. They should
abandon prohibition as soon as they can.

It remains the case that without a change of mind in the leaders of
rich countries, above all in the United States, the futile global
crusade will continue. The likelihood that the American political
classes will call a halt any time soon must be close to zero. Yet it
is pleasant to dream that President Obama, in the midst of all the
other dilemmas he is facing, may one day ask himself whether America
or the world can any longer afford the absurd war on drugs.