THE WAR AGAINST DRUGS MUST BE FOUGHT IN SCHOOLS AND HOMES

No industry exists in which the laws of the free market operate so freely
and so purely according to the conditions that Adam Smith described in his
Wealth of Nations, than the trade in illegal drugs - "Consumption is the
sole end and purpose of production; and the sole interest of the producer
ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting
that of the consumer."

Yet seeking to control the market at the producer end - which is to say,
banging up the dealers - has nevertheless been the consensus among
policy-makers in recent years. The Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes summed up the
view of many when he spoke of "catching more big-time drug dealers and
middlemen", as if no one had thought of this before.

But no home secretary has devised a Big Idea of the slightest efficacy for
dealing with the consumption end of this nasty chain of supply and demand,
however much David Blunkett wants to empower the police to burst into homes
and seize the so-called "lesser" drugs. Oliver Letwin's plan - to fund
"abstinence-based treatment" - can mean almost anything. Who decides who
qualifies to go to the top of the very long queue? (I should declare an
interest in treatment, having experienced its manifold varieties.)

The misuse of drugs that are already legal causes enough distress to the
guardians of public health. Can it be long before a sans serif,
black-on-white health warning defaces the homely label on the bottle of
Bristol Cream that your maiden aunt decants into a schooner on "special
occasions"? Warning people off things they're already keen on is the wrong
way round: much better to stop people plunging into a life of illegal drug
addiction in the first place.

The tobacco companies were held to account for denying, for years, the
addictive properties of cigarettes and for vigorously promoting smoking.
Eighty per cent of the adult population smoked a few generations ago. Now
the figure is down to 30 per cent. But the hard-sell techniques - now
outlawed - that blighted the reputation of Big Tobacco do not apply to the
illegal drug producers. Dealers make no claims about their wares - the
product sells itself.

Pablo Escobar, the late Colombian cocaine baron, took special delight in
the irony that his billions derived from the despised Yankees' unquenchable
demand for his product. Like the Hydra, for each Escobar who gets the chop,
plenty more monstrous heads sprout. For every 20 "mules" arrested at
Heathrow, their bellies pregnant with drug-stuffed condoms, another 20 will
be "persuaded" to make the trip.

And it's hard to stop the producers. Send pilots to spray insecticides over
the plantations, and the planes receive guided missiles in return. These
men are not amateurs. A new trick is to import "fibreglass" dog kennels.
Once through Customs, the kennels are crumbled down into their priceless
constituent: pure heroin. Adam Smith could have explained it to any modern
home secretary: what producer would go to such lengths of risk and
ingenuity, unless demand was huge and the rewards for its supply exceeded
Croesus's maddest fantasies?

Yesterday's "last chance" sentencing of Angelika Dodd, one of three addict
sisters from Tunbridge Wells, is not the way forward. Prevention has come
too late for most convicted addicts, but there is one hope for the addicted
criminal, in a development that is far from new.

In America in the early 1960s, under the direction of President Kennedy,
researchers developed naltrexone, which blocks the receptors in the brain
that give the opiate high: it is an antidote to heroin. Medicine is not the
only answer. Some psychological treatments are proven to work; there is
often an inherited component to addiction, and some addicts share certain
psychological features, though the concept of an addictive personality is
now largely discredited.

But naltrexone treatment has been shown in countless studies, especially in
parts of the world other than Britain, to be rapid, cheap and effective.
Astonishingly, some NHS GPs have never heard of it. At least some of the
mess may be cleared up with naltrexone, even if only a single percentile
could be turned around. Think of the money that might be saved: sending
offenders on rehabilitation courses of spiritual and psychological
intervention costs thousands, and even then the relapse rate is high, as it
is for drug supervision orders.

But how do you really go about cutting drug addiction? Demand for drugs
sets in at an early age. At my own school, some 20 years ago, I took up
smoking at 11. And, as one of the country's leading addiction specialists,
psychiatrist Colin Brewer, told me recently: "The first drug heroin addicts
are introduced to is nicotine."

The desire to copy the cool kids begins at school. Teachers may say that it
is not their responsibility to test children for drugs, or discover whether
the children are drinkers, or smokers of cigarettes, or cannabis, or
whatever. The family, pleading lack of control over fractious children, may
say the same as teachers. But what if a probation officer conducted a
non-invasive hair test for cannabis or ecstasy, say, which proved
conclusively that little Jack or Jill was breaking the law? Might a
positive result not cause a few privileges to be withheld, even in the most
recalcitrant of households?

"Prevention is better than cure" is an aphorism that home secretaries would
do well to study. Curbing demand for drugs is, naturally, easier to
accomplish if you start before demand is engendered. Policemen bashing in
the doors of low-level dealers and users create headlines. For Mr Blunkett,
however, to address demand for drugs while children are still at school age
would require him to confront the issue of what these children are doing in
the periods when they are out of school as well. This would include the
times when they are in the care of that doddering institution, the family:
even if nobody is suggesting that troops bash down anyone's door to find
out what their offspring are up to.

It was once said that Jesuit teachers could take any child and turn him
into a lifelong believer. Drug dealers have unwittingly appropriated that
principle, and their little charges are only too eager to learn.