DRUG WAR RETREAT: ENGLAND MOVES TO DECRIMINALIZE NARCOTICS

For British Prime Minister Tony Blair, there might never be a more
opportune moment to stand down from a war that has grown increasingly
unpopular at home.

It may only have been a matter of time, but Britain, which has
enthusiastically assumed a co-leadership role in the "first war of the 21st
century," the War on Terror, has chosen this moment to quietly but
unmistakably begin a cessation of hostilities in the last and longest war
of the 20th: the war on drugs.

In late October, Home Secretary David Blunkett announced that the
government would soon stop arresting or even cautioning people for
marijuana possession. Blunkett also indicated that the Labour Party is
ready to discuss expanding the legal distribution of heroin to addicts and
reclassifying the drug ecstasy-thought to be used by as many as half a
million Britons each weekend-as a "soft" drug, with accompanying reductions
in penalties for its manufacture, sale and possession.

"The drug war, in Europe at least, is essentially over," says Paul Flynn, a
Labour MP from Wales. "Our course is irreversibly moving toward a more
pragmatic approach to substance abuse generally throughout Europe. Aside
from Sweden, the British are the last nation of the European Union to move
away from criminally enforced prohibition as front-line drug abuse
prevention." In the mid-'70s, the Dutch were the first Europeans to back
away from the U.S.-led drug war, with positive results.

"After 30 years under some of the harshest drug policies in the European
Union, Britain's drug problem is among the worst in Europe. And after 25
years of intelligent, pragmatic policies, drugs in the Netherlands seem to
cause the least harm to individuals and society," notes Flynn, who also
sits on the Health Committee for the Council of Europe, an advisory body
that makes policy recommendations to its 43 member nations.

Over the past five years, much of Western Europe has begun to move toward
decriminalization of drugs, at least as far as personal possession and use
is concerned. Spain and Germany are no longer arresting people for
possession of soft drugs, such as cannabis or psychedelic mushrooms, and
Portugal essentially has decriminalized drug possession altogether.
Portuguese law now requires those caught with up to 10 "daily doses" of any
substance to appear before a non-punitive commission, if they are cited at all.

Britain's next step could be to expand its system of legal distribution of
heroin to addicts. Under "opiate maintenance,"
registered addicts receive legal, measured doses of heroin along with other
health and social services. The programs are designed to help users
stabilize their lives, reduce crime and increase their chances of getting
clean. After a three-year trial that yielded impressive results,
Switzerland has installed heroin maintenance programs as part of its
overall health policy. The Netherlands has initiated clinical trials of its
own, and Spain, Germany and Denmark are expected to follow suit this year.

But as drug reform pushes forward in Europe, there are limits to how far it
can go. A 1961 U.N. treaty currently mandates global drug prohibition.
Although many believe that some nation, most likely the Swiss, will soon
attempt to overtly legalize their domestic cannabis market, legal,
regulated markets probably cannot be widely instituted while that treaty is
in effect.

The United States, for its part, has strongly opposed programs like opiate
maintenance, and the presence of three hard-line prohibitionists-John
Ashcroft as attorney general, Asa Hutchinson as DEA chief and John Walters
as drug czar-in the Bush administration means that position is unlikely to
change, internationally or domestically.

"At the moment, Europe, at least at the highest political levels, is still
afraid to stand in the way of the United States," says Joep Oomen, director
of the European NGO Council on Drugs and Development. "It is clear that
Europe will only be able to act independently if it stands together behind
what it has learned. Today, in every major city in Western Europe,
municipal authorities have come to the same pragmatic conclusions about
drug policy."

Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, says
that Americans and Europeans look at the issue differently. "In Europe, the
drug problem is viewed as a collection of consequences-AIDS, crime,
addiction-which must be dealt with," he says. "Not so here, where we tend
to look at drug use and intoxication as a moral issue. We justify the most
destructive and least effective of our drug policies as somehow sending an
important message to our children. That makes it difficult to import even
the most

Whatever Congress thinks about the wholesale rejection of drug war
orthodoxy taking place across the Atlantic, it doesn't seem as if it will
be able to do much about it. Some in Europe still call for "zero
tolerance," but their numbers and their influence are shrinking. "We have
come to the point," Flynn says, "where Parliament will either reform
Britain's drug policy, or the people will do it, and Parliament will be
irrelevant. The assumption inside the country is that the war is over."

Adam J. Smith is former associate director of the Drug Reform Coordination
Network, where he was founding editor of The Week Online.