THE INTERNATIONAL DRUGS FIFTH COLUMN

The sensational disclosure that the former deputy drug czar Mike Trace
has assembled a secret network to pressurise governments into
legalising drugs lifts a veil on an operation as sinister as it is
extensive.

The implications are simply astounding. Despite his official role in
combating drugs in Britain, Europe and the United Nations, Mr Trace is
revealed to be the driving force behind a co-ordinated international
effort to disband the world's anti-drug laws by stealth.

As a result of the relentless bombardment of legalising propaganda
disguised as 'harm reduction', the public in Britain and Europe have
become increasingly receptive to the idea that the real problem is not
the drugs themselves but the law that makes them illegal.

With the public thus softened up, the legalisers' main obstacle now is
the UN conventions on drugs, passed in 1961, 1971 and 1988. These
require countries to prevent possession, use, production and
distribution of illegal narcotics.

In 1998, the UN embarked on an ambitious ten-year programme to move
towards a 'drug-free world', committing itself to reducing demand and
preventing illicit drugs from becoming a way of life - the very
situation that 'harm reduction' policies institutionalise.

This April, countries are to review progress at a UN drugs meeting in
Vienna. Drug legalisers are now co-ordinating all their efforts to
getting repeal of these three UN conventions onto the agenda at that
crucial Vienna meeting. They are doing so by gaining a critical mass
of influence over all the principal participants in that debate.

Their campaign is like a vast iceberg. A small part recently became
visible in the European Parliament, when no fewer than 108 MEPS signed
a petition to abandon the conventions and legalise drugs.

Below the surface, campaigners are agitating covertly to manipulate
public opinion and government ministers through propaganda and
pressure. And at the centre of this, pulling the strings of an
operation linking Europe and the US, sits Mr Trace.

His positions give him unrivalled influence. Since 1997 he has been at
the heart of the British establishment, first as deputy drug czar and
then as Director of Performance at the Government's National Treatment
Agency. He is at the heart of Europe as chairman of the European
Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, the body which
effectively draws up EU drug policy. And now he is at the heart of the
UN as its head of demand reduction.

In all these posts, he is supposed to be upholding laws to reduce drug
use. Now he is revealed -- in his own words -- as a fifth columnist,
an underground agitator working covertly to undermine these very laws
and being secretly paid to do so by notorious international legalisers.

What stands revealed is not merely deep duplicity and a cynical abuse
of trust. The scale of the network he is co-ordinating is astonishing.
The British headquarters of his operation - created from the shell of
the ailing drug charity Release - is being financed in part by the
Open Society Institute, funded by the billionaire financier George
Soros.

Like other Soros-funded outfits, the OSI openly campaigns for 'harm
reduction' and legalisation on the grounds that the war on drugs
causes more harm than drugs themselves.

Mr Soros, whose billions have funded much of the legalising propaganda
that has been bamboozling Britain and Europe for years, wrote in his
autobiography that his remedy for drug abuse would be to establish a
'strictly controlled distribution network' through which he would make
most drugs legally available.

Meanwhile, the makeover of Release is being overseen by a telling
group of influential worthies -- including a former Home Office civil
servant who was involved in drugs policy. Just what have we come to
when such pillars of Britain's establishment are conniving at a
clandestine attempt to undermine UN efforts against drug use?

But that's not all. For Mr Trace's attempts to obtain additional funds
from European sources disclose a vast and intricate web of
non-governmental organisations, all beavering away at drug
legalisation.

In particular, Mr Trace sought funding from the Brussels-based Network
of European Foundations for Innovative Cooperation (NEF). This
innocuous-sounding grant-giving body has actually spawned a
proliferation of drug legalisation efforts through its offshoot ENCOD,
the European NGO Council on Drugs and Development.

ENCOD says that 'drug use as such does not represent the huge threat
for society as it is supposed to do'. The real threat, it says, is
posed by the war on drugs to the 'millions of peasants in Peru,
Bolivia and Colombia' -- the people cultivating the drug crops! So it
wants a legal framework to bring about the industrialisation of drug
production, no less. And to achieve this, it proposes that public
opinion should be softened up by 'harm reduction' policies which will
pave the way to eventual legalisation.

The appalling thing is that this crazy, nihilistic agenda is now being
accepted into mainstream thinking. Is the British government aware,
for example, that its favourite drug charity DrugScope, which
furnishes so much 'objective' information and advice on which the Home
Office bases its drugs policy, belongs to ENCOD and therefore
presumably subscribes to this shocking doctrine?

ENCOD, moreover, has close links to the Transnational Radical Party,
the drug legalisation outfit which has a toehold in the European
Parliament and which has been the driving force behind the MEPs'
legalisation petition.

If these MEPs can persuade the EU to adopt their position, the
legalisers' hand at the Vienna meeting will be immeasurably
strengthened. Meanwhile, Mr Trace is boasting that through his
influence over both the UN official responsible for drugs policy and
the Greek foreign minister -- the key EU functionary, since Greece
currently holds the presidency -- he will influence the Vienna meeting
from the inside towards legalisation.

These disclosures pose some urgent questions. How much influence did
Mr Trace exercise over the British government's reclassification of
cannabis and other lurches in drugs policy? Is the Home Office aware
of the web of deceit and manipulation which it has been helping to
fund?

Are the organisations Mr Trace works for aware of his covert
activities? How far has he influenced the vital European Monitoring
Centre and compromised its statistics? Are European governments aware
how they are being manipulated?

And will the world now finally wake up to the fifth column in its
ranks that is well on the way to making widespread and growing drug
addiction a permanent reality?