BRITAIN'S TIMID MOVE BIGGEST CRACK IN US PROHIBITIONIST DAM

It's moving further towards decriminalisation than any other country in the
world," warned Keith Hellawell, the former policeman who was the British
"drugs tsar" until the Labour Government belatedly realised that his job
was as ridiculous as his title.

He was responding to British Home Secretary David Blunkett's announcement
last week that being caught with marijuana will in future be treated no
more seriously than illegally possessing other Class C controlled drugs
such as sleeping pills and steroids. He was technically wrong, but in terms
of its political impact he was right.

Hellawell was technically wrong because Britain is not leading the parade
of European countries who have broken away from the prohibitionist United
States approach. Even after Blunkett's changes, Britain will lag behind
other European countries such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and
Portugal in its laws on recreational drug use.

But he was right because Britain is (a) still more or less a great power,
and (b) speaks English.

The main engine of the war on drugs is the US, which managed to enshrine
its prohibitionist views in international law during the Cold War by a
series of treaties that make it impossible for national legislatures to
legalise the commonly used recreational drugs.

All that other countries can do without Washington's agreement is to
decriminalise the possession and use of at least some of the banned drugs.

Numbers of smaller European countries have already decriminalised various
drugs, but what the Portuguese or the Dutch do will never have an impact in
the US. 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 decriminalisation of marijuana, and even more importantly its
partial return to the old policy of prescribing free heroin on the National
Health Service for addicts, could finally open the door to a real debate in
the US.

The actual changes in British law are rather timid. In future British
police will generally confiscate marijuana and issue warnings to users,
rather than arresting them, but "disturb public order" by blowing marijuana
smoke in a policeman's face and you're in jail. Moreover, only a small
fraction of Britain's 200,000 heroin users will get free prescriptions.

Nevertheless, this is by far the biggest crack that has yet appeared in the
prohibitionist dam.

Until the late 19th century, all kinds of recreational drugs were legal
throughout the Western world. Florence Nightingale used opium, Queen
Victoria used marijuana, 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, most powerful in the
deeply religious US, which succeeded in banning one drug after another
(mainly on the grounds that they were associated with Chinese, Blacks and
other racially "inferior" groups) until by the early 20th century only the
mainstream Western drugs - alcohol and tobacco - were still legal in the US.

For almost two decades, in the 1920s and 1930s, the WCTU even succeeded in
prohibiting alcohol in the US. Organised 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
decriminalisation of marijuana is only a very tentative first step.

The war on drugs 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 10 tonnes. Now
it is 700 tonnes.

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 US are committed by cocaine and
heroin addicts desperate to find the inflated sums needed to satisfy their
habit.

Decriminalising marijuana only nibbles at the fringes of this problem, for
marijuana users are overwhelmingly neither addicts nor criminals.

The more significant part of Blunkett's initiative is his willingness to
revive the old policy of prescribing heroin to addicts (now around 200,000
in Britain, compared to around 500 when that policy was dropped at
Washington's behest in 1963).

He's willing to let only a small proportion of them have it on prescription
for now, but since those will be the only heroin addicts who stay alive and
for the most part stay clear of crime, the rest will also be back on
prescription sooner or later.

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.