A 'WAR' WE SHOULD FIGHT NO LONGER

Obama and Cameron Are Wrong. the Momentum Is Building for a More
Rational Way of Dealing With This Problem

When Barack Obama and David Cameron wrote a joint opinion piece for
The Times last week, their first sentence was: "Both of us came of
age during the 1980s." Those of us of a similar age know what that
meant: an adolescence spent in a haze of post-punk, reggae, acid
house and dope. Obama has admitted smoking cannabis and taking
cocaine; Cameron refuses to confirm or deny that he inhaled anything,
but the nod and the wink are hard to miss.

Before he was President, Obama called the war on drugs an "utter
failure" and said we should think about decriminalising cannabis.
Before he was Prime Minister, Cameron said Britain's drug policy was
an "abject failure" and called for a debate on legalisation of all
drugs. Now that they're in power, though, both men have had an utter
and abject failure of nerve. They agree with the former Prime
Minister of Luxembourg, Jean-Claude Juncker, who once said, in this
context: "We know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected
once we have done it."

They are not just craven but wrong. For, inexorably, the momentum is
building for a more rational way of dealing with drugs. And it's not
only because baby-boomers and their successor generations now make up
three-quarters of voters. The big hitters are onside too. This week,
the Global Commission on Drug Policy will publish a report in New
York calling for a "paradigm shift" in the way we deal with drugs. It
will advocate not just decriminalisation, but also experiments with
legalisation and regulation. Its cast list of backers is stellar.

Step forward former Presidents of Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and
Switzerland; the former UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan; the former
US Secretary of State, George Schultz; the former EU High
Representative, Javier Solana; and - intriguingly - the current Prime
Minister of Greece, George Papandreou. Other luminaries include Paul
Volcker, ex-Chairman of the Fed, and Richard Branson (anyone for some
Virgin Gold?).

In Britain too, former politicians and policy-makers are calling for
change. The new All-Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform,
led by the redoubtable Baroness Meacher, has members who include a
former Tory Chancellor, Lord Lawson; a former head of MI5, Baroness
Manningham-Buller; and a former Director of Public Prosecutions, Lord
Macdonald of River Glaven.

These are people who have tried to win the war on drugs and failed.
They see the explosive costs of prohibition and are prepared at least
to contemplate the notion that the benefits of relaxation might be
greater. Even Mike Trace, who used to be the UK's deputy drugs tsar,
is on their side. He has written a paper for the Global Commission on
Drug Policy explaining why the policies he followed haven't worked.

So politicians understand all this before they take office. They are
prepared to admit it again after they leave office. But they are too
scared to do anything about it when they're there. Why?

You might sum it up in three words: the Daily Mail. But you would be
wrong. Even the Mail has been known to express rational views on drug
policy. In 2000, after the Police Foundation published a report
calling for the relaxation of drug laws, the Mail ran a thoughtful
leader entitled "Britain needs a serious debate". The following day,
The Daily Telegraph had a double-length leader arguing that "the
Government should draw up plans to legalise cannabis both for its
consumption and for its supply".

Social conservatives who disapprove of drug use can be persuaded that
outright prohibition doesn't achieve the aim they seek. If the war on
drugs simply needed more troops, then 20 to 30 Mexicans a day would
not now be dying at the hands of drug gangs. All President Calderon's
war on drugs has achieved is a level of violence that would shock
even the most callous of snuff-movie addicts.

Cracking down doesn't help. There is no correlation between the
strictness of a country's drug laws and its level of drug use. The US
has some of the toughest laws but also one of the highest rates of
drug consumption in the world. Portugal recently decriminalised all
drugs and has seen neither an explosion in use nor a rush of drug
tourists. None of the policies that governments have used in their
war on drugs has succeeded. Trying to stop the drugs being grown at
source merely moves them to another country. So the old golden
triangle of opium production in Laos, Burma and Thailand has
relocated to Afghanistan. When the Americans spent more than $7
billion trying to eradicate cocaine-growing in Colombia, all they
achieved was to shift production to Bolivia and Peru.

Maybe governments can squeeze the supply as it enters their countries
and streets? Suppress the retail market and perhaps the drugs will
become too expensive. The UK Government commissioned an economic
analysis on this, and found that 60 to 80 per cent of drugs would
have to be seized to make a real impact on price and availability.
The best it has ever achieved is around 20 per cent. When Australia
once had such success in seizing heroin that it created a heroin
shortage, all that happened was that use of cocaine and methamphetamine soared.

For the inescapable truth is that some people, particularly the
young, will always be determined to take mind-altering substances.
This happens in every culture and has happened in every period of
history. It is quixotic to pretend that you can stop it. All you can
do is try to minimise the harm that results.

And the evidence now is that the prohibition creates at least as much
harm as the drugs do - if not more. Even the UN Office on Drugs and
Crime, which is tasked with enforcing the UN Convention on drugs,
admits that there are serious "unintended consequences". The illegal
market in drugs enriches organised violent crime to the tune of
$300bn a year. Prohibition of moderate, recreational drug use turns
otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals. And we all suffer from
politicians treating drug addiction as a criminal-justice rather than
a health problem. Instead of addicts receiving treatment, they end up
having to steal or deal in order to finance their habit. They commit
half of all property crime in Britain and turn other people into junkies.

Meanwhile global drug law enforcement costs more than $100 billion a
year, at a time when all countries are trying to spend less. The
consequences of criminalisation can be hideously socially divisive
too. American coppers spend much more time enforcing drug laws in
black neighbourhoods than white ones. As a result, black American men
are 13 times more likely to be sent to jail on drug charges than
white men,despite having the same rate of drug use. Here's an even
more horrendous fact: more black Americans are now in jail or on
probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850.

There must be a better way, and Obama and Cameron know it. If they're
serious about representing a new generation, they should stop
bragging about their youth and start doing something about it. Those
of us who also came of age in the 1980s don't want to wait till
they're ex-leaders serving on a drugs policy commission. Like George
Papandreou, they should start telling truth from power now.