GIVE PEACE A CHANCE. FORGET THE WAR ON DRUGS

We Need a Radical Approach to Tackling Crime on British Streets

When a newly appointed minister arrives at his office in Whitehall,
the first thing his permanent secretary gently tells him is to avoid
simple answers to complex problems.

What I am about to say therefore guarantees that I will never be
asked to join a government advisory panel or Royal Commission; but
since I can earn a decent living without having to impress
politicians, let me break the taboo. The fact is that many complex
problems do have simple answers. What politicians mean when they say
"there are no simple answers" is that the simple answers are not the
same as easy ones. The easy answer to almost any political problem is
to highlight its complexity, plead for patience, appoint a policy
czar and set up a Royal Commission. The simple answer is often to do
something bold and previously unthinkable. In other words, to cut the
Gordian knot instead of trying to untie it.

Simple answers have resolved many of most intractable problems.
Gordon Brown should know this better than anyone, having rescued
Labour's economic reputation by the simple, though far from easy or
riskless expedient of Bank of England independence. John Major, by
contrast, allowed his Government to be paralysed because he rejected
the simple answer to the ERM currency blunder, which was to pull
Britain out voluntarily before it was expelled. That experience was
eerily reminiscent of the far greater interwar disaster of deflation
caused by the gold standard, ultimately resolved in the same simple
way - by pulling out. This action prompted Sidney Webb's famous
lament on behalf of the ruined Labour Government: "Nobody told us we
could do that."

Simple solutions are just as important in diplomacy as in economics.
The simple answer to Hitler was the one urged by Churchill, but
rejected by Chamberlain: urgent rearmament. The simple answer to the
reconstruction of postwar Europe was the Marshall Plan: instead of
demanding reparations from Germany, give it aid. The answer when
George Bush asked for Tony Blair's support in his ill-considered Iraq
invasion should have been even simpler: Just Say No.

This famous slogan from America's War on Drugs brings me to my main
subject. As has been so apparent from the past week's events, Mr
Brown now faces a host of problems more daunting than any he imagined
at the Treasury. Yet there is a common thread linking the British
Army's failure to bring order to large parts of Afghanistan
controlled by the Taleban and the British police's failure to bring
order to large parts of our inner cities controlled by gangs of
gun-toting youths. That common thread is drugs.

The UN report published this week on the huge expansion of opium
production in Afghanistan's lawless Helmand province has turned into
common knowledge what British diplomats and generals have been
whispering for years: the Taleban and al-Qaeda are making vast
profits from the international drug trade. Official efforts to
eradicate poppies are not just failing but are actually promoting
more opium production by turning many remote regions of the country
into anarchic no-go zones, completely beyond the control of coalition
forces. The anti-drug campaigns are also strengthening the Taliban
militarily by turning local populations against the allied forces and
the Afghan Government, since these threaten the opium farmers' meagre
livelihoods.

Under these conditions, it is hardly surprising that efforts to
promote economic development, education and political reconstruction
in Helmand are failing. Such efforts may be necessary to win the
"hearts and minds", but development campaigns cannot even get started
so long as local people see government officials and British soldiers
as alien interlopers, bent on destroying the only economic and social
structures that actually work in their communities, which happen to
be based on drugs.

Back on the streets of Britain we see a similar process. Why have the
police lost control of the streets in so many British cities to armed
gangs with easy access to weapons and growing propensities to
violence? Partly, perhaps, the violence is due to failures in the
criminal justice system: mismanaged police priorities, excess
bureaucracy, lax sentencing and so on. Partly, the inner-city anarchy
stems from poor education, joblessness and family breakdown. Rampant
consumerism, our winner-takes-all culture and violence in music and
videos no doubt play a part. The list of underlying causes for social
breakdown and teenage alienation is endless.

This complexity would seem to suggest that we cannot even think about
the violent crime wave, until all of our society's manifold economic,
psychological and educational problems can be resolved. That, of
course, means we must cede our city streets to gangs more or less for
ever - which is precisely the attitude adopted by many police forces,
judges and politicians until now.

But what if, instead of looking for the root causes of crime and
social breakdown, we consider what might have changed in recent years
to encourage more teenagers to carry weapons? The answer then becomes
much simpler. As in Helmand, many inner-city estates have created an
alternative social order where the economics of the hugely profitable
drug trade are far more attractive than any other choice.

And just as in Helmand, the efforts to suppress drug-use and trading
have distracted the police and the courts from the infinitely more
important tasks of preventing violence and keeping control of the
streets. For example, tougher sentences for carrying knives or guns
are pointless when the law already imposes even longer prison terms -
up to life for large quantities - on people who carry drugs, which
many of the teenage gangs habitually do. Similarly, zero-tolerance
policing, which could certainly help to get weapons off the streets
in the right conditions, is of little use if prisons are so
overcrowded with drug offenders that there is no room for violent
criminals carrying knives and even guns.

All these observations point to a simple conclusion: simple, though
not easy. The global war against drugs is in contradiction to the war
against violent crime at home and the war against terrorism
internationally. Legalising, or at least decriminalising, drugs
would, not on its own, end terrorism or gang violence - and it is no
substitute for long-term measures to promote development abroad or
improve education at home. But a ceasefire in the war against drugs
would at least give peace a chance - not only in Afghanistan, but
also in the streets of Britain.