THE DRUGS STRATEGIES DON'T WORK

Almost anybody who takes a sustained, unprejudiced look at the current
drugs laws eventually reaches the conclusion that they are hopelessly
unfit for purpose.

The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 must be one of the least effective pieces
of legislation ever enacted. At that time, there were perhaps 10,000
problematic drug users in the UK; now there are nearly 300,000.

The Downing Street Strategy Unit concluded that "government
interventions against the drugs business are a cost of business rather
than a substantive threat to the industry's viability".

In April, an academic paper for the UK Drug Policy Commission warned
that imprisoning drug offenders for long periods was not
cost-effective. In March, a Royal Society of Arts commission - which
included a recovering addict, a senior police officer, a drug
treatment specialist and a Telegraph journalist - decided that "drugs
policy should, like our policy on alcohol and tobacco, seek to
regulate use and prevent harm rather than to prohibit use
altogether".

The authors would deny it, but the logic of these reports is that
cannabis, cocaine, Ecstasy, heroin and the rest should be legalised.

The harm the various drugs do is irrelevant. Their prohibition has
failed, just as prohibition of alcohol once failed in America. Calls
for politicians to "get tough" are, as the RSA observes,
"meretricious, vapid and out of date".

Since 1995, the numbers imprisoned for drug offences have risen by 111
per cent and the average length of their sentences by 29 per cent. A
different approach, based on regulation, offers a chance to reduce the
harm done by drugs, and at lower cost.

Yet politicians just fiddle with the classifications of substances,
moving them up or down the rankings as though they were running a
hotel guide. So Gordon Brown has asked the Home Secretary, Jacqui
Smith, to look again at the classification of cannabis, which,
scientists report, is probably more dangerous than generally thought
when it was downgraded three years ago.

The result is another parade of politicians coming forward to confess
to youthful cannabis use which, oddly, none of them enjoyed at all.

Cannabis is an example of the nonsenses created by the 1971 act"s
simplistic classification system. Stronger types of cannabis are now
on sale, we are told, and research shows a link with
schizophrenia.

This is like saying Chablis should be banned because cognac is much
stronger and because some people become alcoholics, with dire effects
on themselves, their families and society.

All drugs, legal and illegal (including gambling and pornography),
vary in their effects according to how strong or pure they are, who
takes them, and where, when and how they take them. The classification
system cannot allow for this and is, in any case, full of anomalies.

Coca leaves are in class A, alongside crack cocaine, even though the
drug in its raw state is largely harmless. Ecstasy is also in class A,
though it causes 25 deaths a year against 652 for heroin, which is
taken far less widely.

Magic mushrooms, another class A drug, do nothing more than make
eccentrics more eccentric. If we are trying to send "messages" to
young people about the dangers of drugs, as press and politicians
claim, we do it in a pretty confusing way. Many who try one class A
drug without ill effects may well conclude they can all be taken freely.

The RSA commission proposed scrapping the 1971 act and putting all
drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, within a single regulatory framework.

Some drugs in some forms might remain illegal but their illegality
would be placed in a coherent continuum, making some drugs available
to certain groups in controlled circumstances, as most prescription
drugs are, and others more freely available under licence, as alcohol
and tobacco are.

But as the Transform Drug Policy Foundation (www.tdpf.org.uk) says,
nobody should pretend that legalisation would solve "the drugs
problem", however it is conceived. Many - perhaps most - users handle
drugs without significant harm to themselves or others.

Where drugs lead to crime, addiction and family breakdown, they are
nearly always associated with wider social problems. The best way to
wage war on drugs is to step up the war against poverty.