SMOKE AND MIRRORS

John Grieve on Contrasting Views of the Government's War on Drugs From
Keith Hellawell and Philip Bean

THE OUTSIDER, by Keith Hellawell, 400pp, HarperCollins,
UKP18.99

DRUGS AND CRIME, by Philip Bean, 224pp, Willan Publishing,
UKP16.99

In 1993 in this paper, Duncan Campbell reported what he saw as a
significant event in the war on drugs. During a workshop on prevention
held as part of a drugs conference run by the Association of Chief
Police Officers in West Yorkshire, a group of senior drugs squad
leaders concluded that what we were doing - seizing drugs, busting
dealers, confiscating assets - was not working.

Either, they reasoned, we had to have a real war on drugs, fought in
the bedrooms of our teenage children, or we had to think the
unthinkable. One possible solution was to take the profit from the
dealers and the motivation from burglars and street thieves by getting
the state to supply or license the supply of drugs, exactly the
position that the government reached a decade later after the failed
period with Chief Constable Keith Hellawell as "drugs tsar".

This was, and is, hardly molecular science because, as Philip Bean
points out, "during the 1960s the largest 'pusher' of drugs was the
National Health Service".

As leader of the prevention session, I reported its findings back to
Hellawell, who was chairing the conference, in advance of the plenary,
because at the time, this coming from the police would be tantamount
to asking Dolly the sheep to front the next DNA conference. Hellawell
smiled and said that if that was the group's finding, then it was an
important part of the debate and we should consider it. In fact it
would be cowardice not to.

As I presented our findings from one side of the stage to a hall full
of hundreds of professionals working in the field - from the drugs
squad to Customs and Excise - I was aware that the chairman was
stricken with a lively attack of what is known in the trade as "dock
asthma": spluttering, shock, amazement, and a "what's he talking
about?" expression. When I got back to my seat, the detective sitting
next to me said "If Knight Rider [Hellawell] had taken any more steps
backwards, John, he'd have been in the car park."

Next April, the UN will reconsider the international drugs conventions
for the first time in 15 years, and will review how close we are to
achieving a drug-free world by 2008. These are two timely, important
books that will contribute to our understanding of the debate. They
are very different books by very different men, written in very
different styles for very different purposes, but they are about their
converging life's work and what it all meant to them, and possibly to
us. Neither mentions the other by name, although they are juxtaposed
in time and space - in the same three decades and within 100 miles of
each other. I know them both.

Hellawell has written a sad book about a difficult and meandering
journey through life that sounds rewarding but clearly was not. His
childhood was appalling and his career and self-improvement inspiring.
He rose from being a bullied child, via mining and fast-track
promotion in the police, to become the first national drugs
coordinator.

His courageous struggle to reform the CID, the personal abuse and the
impact on his family are a case study for anyone embarking on change
and are mirrored elsewhere. Early on he claims his philosophy was that
"if you cannot say something positive about someone, you should keep
quiet", but the irony and lack of consistency in some of the positions
he adopts escapes him. I gave up counting the victims of his ire at
20.

Slightly more worrying is his ability to ignore the names of leading
players who have been described in detail some pages earlier, for
example when writing about the Yorkshire Ripper case and its
aftermath. So astounding is his account of his dealings with Sonia and
Peter Sutcliffe that I had to read it twice to make sure I had really
understood the context and situation in which Sonia could have "sat on
the floor by my side leaning her arm on my knee". Moreover, his
description of a powerful but violent and corrupt CID, immediately
followed by a nostalgia for its control of the streets, is tiresomely
familiar and ill thought-through.

Hellawell was a police reformer, and paid the penalties for it. He is
ready with his advice to politicians who are left behind, such as the
far more successful Mo Mowlam, whom he accuses of being a populist
without realising the value of the skill that it took to bring
representatives of both sides of the sectarian divide together. He
seems never to have learnt that, like the military, police officers
are subject to acute political about-turns and have to deal with the
personal consequences when the agenda changes.

Pretending that you were not party to and never acquiesced in any
changes in the drugs laws, that you have not changed your mind at
least once, is not an option - not with several police officers
available as witnesses. Dock asthma, even when practised on the Today
programme, does not work. We are given pages of exact transcripts of
dock asthma towards the end of the book. What he says wrongly about Mo
ironically applies with greater force to himself: "Such a talented
individual felt so insecure that she had to present herself in such a
manner."

He finishes his book with a familiar cry of the misused civil servant:
"What an ending, after more than 40 years of dedicated service to law
and order... the final act of a 'caring' government was to brand me a
liar. What a reward."

Hellawell is not a liar, however; he is confused, but then so are most
of us. It would not just be sad, but a wasted life, if this were
indeed his ending, his last word on the subject, other than soundbites
and on news programmes. He has much left to offer and some
conversations with Philip Bean would produce an even more important
book.

Bean, professor of criminology and a member of the professional
conduct committee of the General Medical Council, begins his journey
by dragging you steeply up into a statistical debate, but once you are
above the foothills the view and his directions to points of interest
on the plains below are rewarding.

I have been an avid reader of Bean's work over 25 years, for he is an
uncompromising analyst of the complexities, myths, ambiguities and
corruptions, big and petty, that bedevil the debate. He can be a
difficult companion on this journey. I can almost hear his irritated
"keep up, will you", but he does know the topography and the vital
landmarks, and his compare-and-contrast list of 16 models to help
explain the relationship between drugs and crime is the most complete
I have encountered thus far.

He briskly outlines the significance of the different models of, and
approaches to, substance abuse, its related social problems and policy
responses to them, before finding them all inadequate alone and
pulling elements from several together. After rejecting any causal
relationship (as distinct from interaction) between drugs and
criminality, Bean eventually identifies most closely with Paul
Goldstein's psycho-pharmacological, economically compulsive and
systemic (that is within the illegal market framework) account, and
his book explores how different crimes and criminal behaviour can be
explained using this framework.

This model is not far from the one set out in the 1980s by the
advisory council on the misuse of drugs, which connected the drug, the
individual, the situation or setting in which the drugs are taken and
the culture or community from which the situation springs. By
understanding each component and how they interact we can help
different communities design bespoke local solutions, based on a
central policy. The Lambeth project, designed by Brian Paddick to
maximise local use of scarce police resources, put this into practice.

Bean is at his best describing the criminals operating in the various
markets as "they take care of business" and avoid the informers and
the police. For all his uncompromising academic search for truth and
explanations, he is adept at finding sources himself. I was amazed to
find him happily ensconced at another police conference, this one on
informers, with that most difficult group of CID officers, the
informant handlers, sitting at his knee.

Unlike Hellawell, Bean does not try to have the last word. He
concludes that there are no easy solutions and that government targets
and aims have to be modest and realistic. His realism, coupled with
Hellawell's drive and vision, might provide someone with a way forward.