AMERICA LOSING THE WAR ON DRUGS ON THE HOME FRONT

Since President Nixon began the battle, a trillion dollars and 40
years have been spent trying to end it. So why is the government
losing so badly?

Forty years ago this week, President Richard Nixon defined his
country's new drug policy with a military metaphor that stuck.

"Public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse," he
declared. "In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to
wage a new, all-out offensive." A trillion dollars and seven
presidents later, the war is still being fought, and lost, with
catastrophic results.

In its relentless prosecution of addicts, dealers and drug producers,
the US has no peer. Prohibition has failed all over the world, but the
consequences are most evident in the land of the free.

There are more than 500,000 people in US prisons for drug offences, a
tenfold increase since 1980. Drug overdose has become the leading
cause of death in the 35-54 age group. Four in five drug arrests are
for possessing small quantities, with no intent to sell. Whole
communities have been criminalised: more than half of the
African-American men in Chicago have a charge sheet, which
disqualifies them from public housing and student loans.

Even adjusting for inflation, Nixon's $100 million annual budget for
the "War on Drugs" has multiplied 50 times: the Obama administration
has asked Congress for $26.2 billion next year. Despite all this money
being thrown at the problem, narcotics are cheaper and more widely
available than ever, according to the government's own National Drug
Threat Assessment.

'When 1.9 million kids go to bed at night with one of their parents in
prison, the thing they're claiming to protect - the children - is what
they're harming'

Ian Bezman was a bright but insecure child. At 14, he started to
self-medicate. "First it was marijuana, then mixed with PCP, then over
the years it was meth, heroin, cocaine," says his mother, Suzanne Riordan.

After a brief stint in rehab, the state of California showed little
interest in treating his addiction, preferring to lock him up. "He was
in juvenile detention, then jail a number of times, never for more
than a few months, always for possession," Riordan says. "He was a
very sensitive young man, with pretty fragile self-esteem. Over
several years, he cut deeply into his arms, all the way to the bone.
Jail was hard on him."

Bezman came out of jail in 2005 drug free and determined never to go
back. He found a good job, working with the carpenter's union on the
Ronald Reagan Memorial Library. His girlfriend became pregnant and he
was excited by the prospect of being a father. Although checking in
with his probation officer every week was a hassle and he worried
about being sent to prison for a minor violation, he seemed to be
gaining some stability. Then, late one night, during a drinking
session at his foreman's house, he did a line of cocaine. Five days
later, he failed a mandatory drug test. "He was extremely upset and
frightened," Riordan says. "He disappeared that night and police found
his body three weeks later."

US prisons hold around 2.3 million people, meaning that a country with
5% of the world's population has 25% of its prisoners.

The shift towards punishment and away from rehabilitation in the
"corrections" system has been stunningly counter-productive. According
to the Bureau of Justice, half the prisoners released this year are
expected to be back inside by 2014. Last year, expenditure on prisons
was $68bn. The Supreme Court recently ruled that California's prisons
are so overcrowded that the constitutional rights of inmates are being
violated, ordering the state to release or transfer 32,000 people.

American prisons are notoriously violent places. According to a Bureau
of Justice Statistics survey, an estimated 70,000 prisoners are
sexually assaulted each year. In 2005, Bryson Martel testified to a
congressional committee that during his nine months in Arkansas state
prison he was raped repeatedly. His punishment for the crime of
cashing a forged cheque, to pay for crack cocaine, was the HIV virus,
contracted at knifepoint.

Richard Van Wickler, who runs Cheshire County jail in New Hampshire,
argues that sending non-violent addicts to prison is a colossal waste
of money and human life. He says: "62% of our prison population
receives prescription medication. 32% have been diagnosed with a
mental illness. Here in New Hampshire, if you're an addict and you're
trying to get help, it's almost impossible, so the only place left for
you to go is jail, which is the most expensive option."

VAN Wickler is a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP),
a group that believes all drugs should be legalised, taxed and
regulated. Neill Franklin, the organisation's executive director, is a
retired Maryland State Police Major who spent more than three decades
fighting the war on drugs. He started speaking out against it after a
close friend, working undercover, was murdered by the cocaine dealer
he was trying to bust.

At a recent workshop in a juvenile detention centre, Franklin asked
the kids, almost all of whom were African-American, what would happen
to their neighbourhoods if drugs were legal. "The number one answer
was, 'We would have no money' - because that's what they see as
employment," he says.

The drug war has a disproportionate impact on minorities: more than
half of the 50,000 people arrested for marijuana possession in New
York last year were black or Latino.

Franklin's home town, Baltimore, is best known in Britain as the
setting for The Wire, a television series that portrays a violent,
dysfunctional city, in which black communities are abandoned to
addiction, incarceration and civil war between rival drug gangs. "I
liken that show to a documentary where the names have been changed,"
Franklin says. The only part that isn't realistic, he offers, is the
episode with a decriminalised zone, nicknamed Hamsterdam, where
pushers and junkies do as they please. In real life, a needle exchange
programme was the only experimental approach Baltimore's mayor was
prepared to sanction.

Although LEAP's manifesto - cannabis in corner shops, heroin and
cocaine at official dispensaries - is no longer considered to be as
radical as it once was, most of the alternatives to prohibition that
have been tried, in Portugal and Switzerland, for instance, have
involved decriminalising drugs, rather than regulating their sale.

Earlier this month, the Global Commission on Drug Policy - a panel
including former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, 11 former
presidents, and Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State, George Shultz -
released a report that declared "the war on drugs has failed" and
called for fundamental policy reforms. Although the eminent names made
the findings difficult to dismiss, the Obama administration rejected
their central premise. "Making drugs more available - as this report
suggests - will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and
safe," said drug policy spokesman Rafael Lemaitre.

SEVEN years ago, on the campaign trail, Obama called the drug war an
"utter failure," although he added that he did not favour legalising
marijuana. In office, he has reduced the disparity between sentences
for crack and powder cocaine possession and ended a ban on federal
funding for needle exchange programmes, but he is otherwise following
the same policies as his predecessors.

Every president since Nixon has endorsed the war on drugs. Bill
Clinton spent $1.3bn on Plan Colombia, which financed paramilitary
crackdowns and sprayed cocaine crops with herbicide. George W Bush
signed the Merida Initiative, which committed $1.4bn in aid to Mexico,
with the specific aim of breaking up the narcotics business.

Obama has doubled down, sending billions more, without loosening the
grip of cartels or stemming the violence. In the four years since
Mexican president Felipe Calderon announced a military offensive
against the traffickers, at least 40,000 people have been killed.

Terry Nelson, who spent most of his career in the US Customs Service
and Department of Homeland Security disrupting drug routes in Central
America, is scathing about the effectiveness of the cross-border
efforts, noting that cocaine production increased in the Plan Colombia
era. "Even if you manage to wipe it out in Colombia and Peru and
Bolivia, this stuff will grow in sub-Saharan Africa," he says.

Nelson is a lifelong Republican, unlike most in the legalisation
movement, but he says conservatives are coming around. At a recent
party meeting, the organiser told him that regulating marijuana should
be on the manifesto for the next election. Former Speaker Newt
Gingrich has formed a group called Right On Crime, which calls for
non-violent offenders to be sent to treatment, not prison.

"The war on drugs means the destruction of the American family,"
Nelson says. "When 1.9 million kids go to bed at night with one of
their parents in prison, the very thing they're claiming to protect -
the children - is what they're harming."

There are signs that public opinion is changing. In a recent Rasmussen
poll, 42% of respondents said marijuana should be legalised, while 45%
disagreed, with 13% unsure. In Congress, a marijuana legalisation bill
is being prepared, but it stands no chance of passing.

If the law does change it will be too late for Ian Bezman and too late
for Jeff Cullen, another troubled young man who died of an overdose,
not long after leaving jail.

His mother, Denise, is a member of Moms United To End The War On
Drugs. "Addicts have nowhere to turn, so it's just a cycle, in and
out, to keep the money going in the prison industry," she says. "They
look at drug users as 'those people,' even though they are often good
kids, from loving families. There are so many casualties of this war.
Every day I get a new call from somebody who has lost someone."