WHY NOT COKE FROM BOOTS?

PARTS OF AMERICA declared war on Mexico yesterday for its decision to
decriminalise the personal use of cocaine, LSD, heroin and other
drugs. This "hostile action by an ally", as San Diego's mayor
screamed, could send Americans rushing to party in Cancun -- and
addicts preying on Americans to fund their habit.

What's new?

The Mexicans are wrong to think they can stamp out drugs barons just
by reprieving small-time users and refocusing police resources.

But they have at least recognised that most recreational users do
little harm to themselves, or others.

The Americans have got to stop peddling the line that the war on
drugs is working, and refusing to countenance any other approach.
It's a habit that is proving increasingly lethal for all of us.

Hundreds of Mexicans have been killed in the past year, including
many police officers, as the drug cartels battle for control of
lucrative smuggling routes.

The Mexican Government is sensible to stop wasting time on
recreational users who do little harm to themselves or others. But it
is hopeless to expect that more police can sweep away a multinational
industry that is bigger than Coca-Cola, and which bribes and shoots
to protect its profits.

This business is simply too big and too profitable.

Illegal drugs are now the lifeblood of organised crime in most
countries. In Britain, gun violence has spiralled as a result.

Whole swaths of Nottingham, where PC Rachael Bown was shot in
February, are out of control.

London sees one shooting and ten firearms offences every day. There
are now so many contract killers on British streets, one policeman
told me, that you can hire one for UKP 200. The University of York
has put the cost of drug-related crime at between UKP 10 billion and
UKP 18 billion.

Criminals have merely filled the niche so thoughtfully created for
them by politicians. Before the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 we treated
addiction as an illness.

Heroin addicts got their fix on prescription. After 1971 we handed
them over to unscrupulous gangs who had every incentive to expand the market.

Like any savvy marketeer, they have offered free samples to children,
given discounts for trading up to harder substances and created a
generation of desperate salespeople. Junkies, forced to turn to crime
to fund their habit by prices that can be as much as 2,000 per cent
above the wholesale price, have had every incentive to become pushers
themselves. The result?

Our laws have created the most effective pyramid-selling scheme in
history: one that has turned between 6,000 and 15,000 addicts into
closer to 250,000, in only 30 years.

Pass it on, pass it on.

Something similar happened under Prohibition. The ban on liquor sent
alcohol prices soaring, increased the number of hard drinkers and
spawned an entirely new criminal class of bootleg suppliers and
corrupt police. Do not underestimate just how corrupting this new
form of Prohibition is, or how widespread the corruption. Take the
drug problem in prisons.

Visitors are proudly shown how post is screened for narcotics, and
told about random tests, strip searches and sniffer dogs. Many
conclude that the only way so many drugs can still circulate in jails
is with the connivance of prison officers.

Add to this the fact that random drug tests tend to push inmates into
replacing cannabis, which stays in the body for weeks, with heroin or
opiates, which can be sweated out in the gym overnight, and it is
hardly surprising that our jails have become part of the pyramid.

In whose interest is that, except those who make higher margins on
harder stuff?

More than half of American prisoners are in jail for drug-related
offences. They outnumber the entire European prison population.
Nearly half of all women in British prisons, and 17 per cent of men,
are there for drug crimes.

The numbers just keep growing.

More than half of the women have a child under 16, two thirds have a
drug problem and many are suicidal.

Most need treatment, not punishment. But more than 40 per cent of
prisoners with drug problems who want treatment are not receiving it,
according to the Prison Reform Trust. Where methadone is being
prescribed -- a success that Government is shy to talk about -- crime
is falling.

But for those on the new drug treatment and testing orders,
reconviction rates are running at 80 per cent. We are spending a
fortune to get nowhere.

According to Transform, a drug policy foundation, we spend four times
more on problematic drug users than on problematic alcohol and
tobacco users. But the public health costs are the other way around:
there are about 130,000 alcohol and tobacco-related deaths a year,
compared with around 3,000 for all other drugs combined.

Some of those deaths are avoidable, because they are caused by drugs
being cut with cheaper substances by unscrupulous dealers.

That would not happen if supply were legalised and controlled.

Mexico is not alone in breaking ranks.

The Portuguese Government decriminalised the consumption of heroin,
cocaine and other drugs six years ago, and has seen no rise in crime
or addiction.

Large-scale trials in Switzerland and the Netherlands suggest that
legally regulating supplies of heroin can reduce property crime by
half. Parts of Canada have introduced free heroin programmes for
addicts, producing more squawks of outrage from America and wilder
and wilder proclamations from the UN, whose conventions on drugs seek
to dictate domestic policies in far greater detail than most
international treaties.

The Church of Prohibition cannot just keep chanting "war on drugs".
The narcotics industry can only be beaten by governments taking over
its market. Give Boots and Superdrug the right to supply cocaine, and
the price would plummet.

Place it next to the support tights, and it would cease to be glamorous.

Take away the illicit profits and you would remove the associated
violence, corruption and prostitution too. Some people will always be
irresponsible, whether they are drinking gin or sniffing glue. So
take aim at the law, not at Tijuana. Otherwise we'll just have
another blinkered, pointless, violent Mexican standoff.