WE HAVE TO MEAN BUSINESS TO WIN THE BATTLE AGAINST DRUGS

Are British soldiers killing more people in Scotland than in
Afghanistan? An unintended consequence of our current "surge" in the
war-torn country has been a massive increase in cultivation of the
opium poppy in Helmand province.

Afghanistan now provides 92% of Europe's street heroin.

Meanwhile, back home there has been a 40% increase in the death rate
among Scottish addicts.

I wonder if there could be a connection? Nothing could better
illustrate the failure of our "war against drugs" than the fact that
even the British Army seems to be making things worse.

But anyone who knows anything about the drugs business, like former
deputy chief constable Tom Wood, knows the war was lost years ago.
This is a thriving multinational industry; one of the fastest-growing
and most profitable in the world.

Its captains earn the kind of money that chief executives of private
equity firms get out of bed for. Drug barons have their own hedge
funds, and have been recycling their cash in the booming property
markets of London, Birmingham and Edinburgh. Soon they'll be joining
the Rotary club and chambers of commerce. Meanwhile, their streetwise
lieutenants turn places like Croxteth in Liverpool into war zones.

The killer of Rhys Jones is believed to be a member of one of the drug
gangs fighting for control of the streets.

These hooded pharmaceutical warriors carry guns as a matter of
routine, and don't fear the penalties because they believe the police,
and everyone else, has largely given up trying to catch them. The
occasional high-publicity drug seizure is what the police look for
now, like last month's record seizure of opium en route to Aberdeen.
The estates of Scotland are left fending for themselves. In a way, the
drug gangs have become a kind of delinquent police force.

The gun-carrying, cycling hoodies are on the periphery of this chaos,
maintaining a kind of territorial order.

It's not an easy life, but if you work at it and have the bottle, it's
a living.

Drugs have become a kind of job-creation programme of the
dispossessed, a mainstay of the local economy in the estates.
Scotland's 50,000 addicts (plus those we don't know about) constitute
an entire social system based on addiction, with an underworld work
ethic.

Since they need UKP1000 a week to maintain their habit, addicts are
responsible for 75% of property theft.

Lock 'em up and throw away the key, you say - well of course we do.
Our jails are filled to overflowing - as we also learned last week -
and most of the inmates are prostitutes, drug dealers, gang members,
murderers, burglars and fine defaulters connected to the industry in
some way. And those who aren't are soon introduced to drugs when they
are incarcerated. This is because our jails are awash with hard drugs,
smuggled in with ease. The young from the estate will discover that
prison is a pretty good finishing school - a university of crime,
where they will learn advanced techniques of coercion,
money-laundering, firearms, sources of supply, even accountancy. Yes,
financial management is as relevant to this multi-million pound
industry as it is to the brewers or pharmaceutical giants. Back
outside, they will use their expertise and contacts to spread the
drugs into the community, enlisting children who are too young to be
prosecuted as look-outs and carriers who will also be encouraged to
become users.

For this is a unique trade in which the consumer is also the sales
force - the young pusher sells drugs to feed his own habit.

This is why the drugs business spreads so rapidly, like an
epidemic.

It is also why, like cancer, it needs a radical solution. And I don't
mean just law enforcement - the war on drugs has been as ineffective
here as in Afghanistan. The only way to destroy the drugs trade is to
destroy it as a business - use the laws of supply and demand. It is
the exponential growth of consumption which is key to the burgeoning
drugs industry.

Kill the demand, and you kill the supply. This means two things:
decriminalising hard drugs and devoting the kind of resources that
presently go into the "war" into rehabilitation. Addiction is an
illness, and should be treated as such, with drugs available to
addicts under prescription from the NHS. Users would come under the
protection of health professionals who would get them into proper
rehabilitation programmes. As soon as users can get cheap and reliable
narcotics from licensed outlets, the entire industry will start to
collapse.

The hoodies will be out on the streets, as it were, forced to go to
college, join the army, even get a job. The drug lords would become
bankrupt.

Of course, this involves an act of faith.

We have to believe most junkies want to get off drugs somehow,
sometime.

Very few want to spend their lives hooked up to this death machine
suffering physical, financial and psychological decay.

Given the chance, we know from research that the vast majority would
eventually get clean with proper rehab.

But rehabilitation only works if the communities they return to are
also clean.

It is often reacquaintance with a lifestyle that makes ex-junkies
relapse.

With the drug industry wiped out there wouldn't be the same temptation
on the street corner, and the patient's associates wouldn't lure them
back to addiction.

Yes, some may choose to stay on drugs, even to their own destruction -
but in the end, we can't stop people destroying themselves Some
surprising historical figures have been lifelong addicts: the
anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce was a devout Christian
evangelical who disapproved of dancing and theatre, yet took opium
every day. I'm not suggesting he should be a role model - we
understand the risks of long-term drug use far better than in the
early 1800s - but the point is that addiction is a disease that can be
managed.

Anyway, what is the alternative? Existing policies are not working,
and the situation is running out of control. The only people
benefiting are the Taliban and the traffickers. We need to apply the
successful methods used against that other great addiction, smoking,
to hard drugs.

Management and control - above all, keeping it out of children's hands
and robbing gangsters of their profits - is the key. The battle
against nicotine is being won, while the battle against heroin is
being lost, and the dead are littering the streets of Scotland as well
as Afghanistan.