DRUGS: LEGALISE, REGULATE AND TAX

The cover of the latest report from the Commons home affairs select
committee asks: "The government's drugs policy: is it working?" But no
committee is required to answer that question.

The government's drugs policy is not working, and nor is any other
government's. Governments have declared a war on drugs.

Politicians love to declare wars: on terrorism, crime, litter, teenage
pregnancy, street begging, hooliganism - just about anything generally
agreed to be bad. Wars allow politicians to inflate their importance and to
strike dramatic, decisive poses; dissenters may be dismissed from public
debate as traitors who undermine the war effort or even as enemy agents.

But these wars are rarely won. The war on drugs has been a Waterloo for
almost every government on the planet.

The victims, as always, are not the politicians themselves but the poor.

The select committee proposes prescriptions of heroin for addicts and an
experiment with "safe rooms" for injections - a sensible and urgent reform.
The rest is tinkering.

The MPs want cannabis reclassified - but only so that the constabulary
cannot burst into your home to inspect your plant pots and so that you may
be imprisoned for a mere two years, instead of five. The maximum penalty
for possessing Ecstasy, under the committee's proposals, would be down from
seven to five years, and supplying it would no longer carry a risk of life
imprisonment. Even that is too much for David Blunkett, who has simply
declared a new war. It occurs neither to him nor to the select committee
that any debate should start from John Stuart Mill: "Over himself, over his
own mind and body, the individual is sovereign."

In other words, when it comes to individual behaviour, the onus of proof
should always be on those who wish to legislate.

Nobody denies that drugs, legal and illegal, can ruin lives; tobacco alone
is implicated in more than 100,000 deaths a year. It was alcohol, in the
form of gin, that was thought most ruinous in Victorian times (though
opium, in the form of laudanum, was also widely available). This was what
led to the fierce temperance campaigns of the early 20th century, and
ultimately to the strict English licensing laws and to prohibition in America.

But prohibition proved to be one of the greatest public policy failures in
history. The alcohol trade continued to flourish, but in the hands of
criminal gangs.

It became an unregulated free market and, as in all such markets, the
consumer was mercilessly ripped off: alcohol was frequently adulterated
with methylated spirits (which explains the prevalence of blind blues
singers in that era). Exactly the same happened with heroin, which was not
actually banned in the US until 1924, four years after alcohol.

In its pure form (and, even more so, in its unconcentrated form as opium,
smoked through a pipe), it is, to quote a Department of Health official who
gave evidence to the select committee, "not particularly dangerous". Mixed
with drain cleaner, sand or cement dust - common tricks among street
entrepreneurs - and injected into the veins with an unsterilised needle, it
becomes, unsurprisingly, lethal.

Worse, heroin, sold illegally, becomes a threat to the rest of us. Because
the black market charges a premium price to cover the risks of illegal
trading, and because heroin is highly and progressively addictive, users
need to spend ever higher proportions of their income on the drug. They
therefore turn to crime to finance their habit.

They also themselves become suppliers, seeking out new users.

As the journalist Nick Davies told the select committee, this is the most
effective form of pyramid selling ever invented: since the laws on
prescribing heroin were tightened in 1971, the number of users has grown
from a maximum of 1,000 to anything between 200,000 and 500,000.

There is room for genuine doubt and disagreement over the dangers of
various drugs; even cannabis (fashionably regarded as less harmful than
either tobacco or alcohol) may turn out to be associated with lung cancer
and mental illness, and possibly also with a loss of drive and ambition.

The argument for legalisation of drugs is not about their safety but about
the best ways of controlling their dangers.

The wars against them have failed utterly. Drugs are more widely available
and more widely used than ever. The various classifications should
determine not a hierarchy of criminal penalties but different forms of
supply: prescription only, say, or wide availability on specifically
licensed premises.

The argument should be about degrees of regulation, not about degrees of
criminality. The penalties should be reserved for antisocial behaviour -
driving cars or beating people up under the influence of drugs - not for
the use of the drugs themselves. The restrictions should be on sales to
children, not to consenting adults. The deterrents that we emphasise should
be health risks, not spells in our already overcrowded prisons.

We follow all these principles for tobacco and alcohol. Perhaps
legalisation would lead to more young people taking up more drugs (probably
the same young people who now smoke and drink to excess). Or perhaps not.
Any fool knows that, to many, drugs are more attractive precisely because
they are forbidden.

The select committee concludes, rather pathetically, that "however forceful
the arguments . . . no other country has yet been persuaded to legalise and
regulate". And to move effectively to a new regime, Britain would need
international agreement.

But if Mr Blunkett cannot be persuaded of its merits, perhaps Gordon Brown
can. The drugs market is worth an estimated ?6.6bn, all of it at present
going into the pockets of criminals.

The Chancellor can work out for himself what the duty from a legalised
supply would yield, and how many of his public spending problems it could
solve.