DEAD CHILDREN ARE NOT RELIABLE COUNSELLORS: IT IS TIME TO LEGALISE HEROIN

They were heart-rending photographs. A young girl, whose sweet face sang of
the hope and joy of youth; a couple of years later, she is a broken,
beggarly creature, who perishes in squalor and despair.

What is this hideous strength which can transform good into evil? Surely we
must deploy all the power of the law to curb its malignancy.

If only the drug question were that simple.

But emotion and dead children are not reliable counsellors. If prohibition
could have solved the problem, Rachel Whitear would still be alive.

Her death was further evidence that our present policy has failed and is
doomed to unending failure; that however well-intentioned its authors may
be, they are adding to the sum of human misery.

Let us take the hardest case: heroin.

A generation ago, there was no heroin problem in Britain. A few doctors,
most of whom were themselves junkies, kept a few thousand addicts supplied
with heroin, on prescription. In those days, there was, if anything, a
negative correlation between heroin addiction and crime.

Then the Americans agitated for a tough UN Convention on heroin.

Like most proposals to erode our national sovereignty, this appeared to
emanate from high-mindedness; it is not easy to generate the political
courage to dissent from a widely supported proposal to tackle drug abuse.
So the UK agreed, thus creating a heroin problem and a crime problem.

It became almost impossible for doctors to prescribe heroin.

Instead, the addicts were offered methadone, which is almost as dangerous,
but much less pleasurable. In response, the junkies went elsewhere.

Their consumer demand then created an industry, whose annual turnover is
now estimated to be almost UKP5 billion.

There are some 270,000 addicts, and most of them resort to theft to pay for
their drugs.

The best estimate is that the average addict steals about UKP13,000 a year,
but that understates the problem.

If an addict is stealing goods rather than cash, it needs an awful lot of
mobile phones to raise UKP13,000.

In response to all this, the law has not been silent.

The criminal justice system is eloquent with heroin-related pains and
penalties: up to seven years in prison for possession, a possible life
sentence for supply. But it is not working.

The rewards for trafficking are so great; the craving of the addicted is so
intense.

The cash and the customers pour into the black market, giving dealers and
addicts, some of whom raise money by recruiting new customers, every
incentive to prey upon the vulnerable young, like Rachel Whitear.

There are two further issues, one practical, the other philosophical. A
heroin addict who has the equivalent of a lucky liver can live an almost
normal life for an almost average lifespan, as long as he only indulges in
good-quality heroin.

But if the trade is illicit, there is no guarantee of quality.

Addicts who sell to other addicts are especially likely to deal in
adulterated heroin, and those who inject themselves with adulterated heroin
are playing Russian roulette with their blood supply.

That may have helped to kill Miss Whitear.

But there is a more fundamental objection to the present arrangements. They
are based on no coherent theory of the state.

The anti-libertarians have a clear and respectable case; it is possible to
argue that the state should regulate the private behaviour of adults. If
so, however, why stop - or start - with the currently illegal drugs?
Nicotine addiction is responsible for more deaths than all other drugs
combined and multiplied; broken families create far more human misery;
abortion is a much greater moral evil. If all mood- altering substances
were legal, alcohol might well give rise to the greatest number of social
problems.

So a practical and consistent authoritarian ought to regard bans on
abortion, adultery, cigarettes, divorce and drinking as greater priorities
than prohibiting heroin or cocaine.

The counter-argument maintains that the private behaviour of adults is none
of the state's business.

This is acknowledged in many other areas, so why not in hard drugs?

It is the only position consistent with the rest of the workings of the
modern state.

Perhaps drug-users should launch a class action against the government, in
that its behaviour has violated the implicit separation of powers between
the modern state and its citizens - while the victims of drug-related crime
press another lawsuit, to demand compensation for their sufferings, which
have arisen from the state's failure to observe the contemporary social
contract.

I have concentrated on heroin, because it is the major cause of drug-
related crime.

Few people rob to sustain a cocaine habit, and the principal difficulty
about legalising cocaine is the ease with which it can be turned into crack.

Given that crack induces psychopathic/psychotic behaviour, even an ardent
libertarian should have no difficulty in arguing for a continued ban;
legalising crack would be the equivalent of allowing drunks to drive at
80mph in a built-up area. But if heroin and cocaine were legalised for
adults, it would be easier for the police to concentrate their fire on
crack - and on other criminal acts. On Tuesday, the Lord Chief Justice
implored the judiciary to take account of the bursting prisons before
passing gaol sentences.

If heroin were legalised, Harry Woolf would have no need to worry: the
prisons would be full of empty cells.

As for marijuana, the law is already spliffed.

Decriminalisation is now virtually universal.

Yet it is the most foolish of all solutions. It leaves the market in the
hands of the criminals, some of whom use their increasingly easy takings to
move into the much more lucrative heroin market.

There is only one solution to the marijuana conundrum: to tax it as heavily
as is possible without encouraging a black market, and then allow it to be
sold to those over 18, while banning advertising - and with swingeing fines
for any sale to under 18s (the same rules ought to apply to tobacco).

In an ideal society, drugs would be freely available, and no one would take
them. In the actual world, legalisation is complicated and dangerous. The
first complication is age. Given that the young are now allowed to buy
cigarettes or be sodomised at the age of 16 while they can vote or die for
their country at 18, which also used to be the age at which the death
sentence applied, it must be illogical to place a higher age limit than 18
for the purchase of heroin or cocaine.

Yet we know how young in judgment the average 18-year-old can be. So those
of us who advocate legalisation have to take one argument on the chin. The
legalisation of hard drugs would encourage experiments by some youngsters
who are currently deterred by illegality. Through folly or metabolism, a
quota of those youngsters would move on to addiction. Some would be destroyed.

That price would have to be paid; it is worth paying.

It might seem cold-bloodedly Benthamite, but there is a trade-off between
harm and usage. At the moment, we are trying to suppress both, and failing
to deal with either.

By tolerating usage, we would find it easier to minimise harm.