DRUG LAWS: BRITON TAKES A TIMID FIRST STEP

'It's moving further towards decriminalization than any other country in
the world,' warned Keith Hellawell, the ex-policeman who was the British
'drugs tsar' until the Labour government belatedly realized that his job
was as ridiculous as his title.

He was responding to British Home Secretary David Blunkett's announcement
on July 10 that being caught with cannabis will in future be treated no
more seriously than illegally possessing other Class C controlled drugs
like sleeping pills and steroids.

He was technically wrong, but in terms of its political impact he was
right. Numbers of smaller European countries have already decriminalized
various drugs, but what the Portuguese or the Dutch do will never have an
impact in the United States. Britain is one of the very few countries whose
example will ever be seen as relevant in the country that is the real home
of the drug war. Britain's decriminalization of cannabis, and even more
importantly its partial return to the old policy of prescribing free heroin
for addicts on the National Health Service, could finally open the door to
a real debate in the United States.

The actual changes in British law are rather timid. In future, British
police will generally confiscate cannabis and issue warnings to users,
rather than arresting them, but "disturb public order" by blowing cannabis
smoke in a policeman's face and you're in jail. Until the late 19th
century, all kinds of recreational drugs were legal throughout the Western
world. Florence Nightingale used opium, Queen Victoria used cannabis, and
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writes in a matter-of-fact way about Sherlock Holmes
injecting drugs with a syringe.

Then came the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), most powerful in
the deeply religious United States, which succeeded in banning one drug
after another (mainly on the grounds, they argued, that they were
associated principally with Chinese, blacks and other racially inferior
groups). By the early 20th century only the mainstream Western drugs,
alcohol and tobacco, were still legal in the U.S. For almost two decades,
in the 1920s and 1930s, the WCTU even succeeded in prohibiting alcohol in
the US.

Organized crime expanded tenfold to meet the opportunity created by this
newly illegal demand for alcohol -- Al Capone was just as much the result
of alcohol prohibition as Pablo Escobar in Colombia was of America's war on
drugs -- but eventually there was a retreat to sanity in the case of alcohol.

There will eventually be a return to sanity on drugs too, but Britain's
decriminalization of cannabis is only a very tentative first step. The "war
on drugs" as Canada and other Western nations sometimes refer to it, is one
of the most spectacularly counter-productive activities human beings have
ever engaged in. "We have turned the corner on drug addiction," said
President Richard Nixon in 1973, and predictions of imminent victory
continue to be issued at frequent intervals, but the quality of the drugs
gets better and the street price continues to drop.

As any free marketeer should understand, making drugs illegal creates
enormous profit margins and huge incentives to expand the market by pyramid
selling. When cocaine was still legal, annual global production was
estimated at 10 tons. Now it is estimated at 700 tons.

Drug prohibition greatly increases the number of users, fills the jails
with harmless people, channels vast sums into the hands of the wicked
people who work to expand the lucrative black market, and causes a huge
wave of petty crimes.

It is estimated that between half and two-thirds of the muggings and
property crimes in both Britain and the U.S. are committed by cocaine and
heroin addicts desperate to find the inflated sums needed to satisfy their
habit.

It will be many years yet before mainstream American politicians gain the
political courage to take on the prohibitionist lobby directly, but the
external environment is changing.