TAKING THE HARM OUT OF DRUGS

At long last some sense about drugs. The independent Royal Society
for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, or RSA,
published a report last week in the hope of influencing a government
drugs strategy review due next year. The report states that
(surprise!) drugs policy has failed - and that it was driven by
"moral panic" in the first place - and should be replaced with a
system that recognises, among other things, that alcohol and tobacco
can cause more harm than some illegal drugs.

"Whether we like it or not, drugs are and will remain a fact of
life," the report says. "On that basis, the aim of the law should be
to reduce the amounts of harm caused to individuals, their friends
and families, their children and their communities."

The report, compiled by a panel composed of academics, politicians,
drug workers and a senior police officer, also asked for jail
sentences to be given for only the most serious drug-related crimes
and for addicts to be given jobs and housing as part of treatment.
Crucially, to my mind, the report calls for an end to "the criminal
justice bias" of drugs policy, whereby addicts are treated as
criminals and as causes of crime, rather than as ill people who need help.

Instead the report suggests treating addiction as a health and social
problem. It also proposes educating children about drugs at primary
school instead of, as now, in secondary school; and - you can see
this one might be a bit contentious - establishing "shooting
galleries", as in eight other European countries, as a way of
avoiding overdoses and offering treatment and help to severe addicts.

Iain Duncan Smith predictably called the report "worryingly
complacent", but I think it's nothing less than inspired and driven
by a desire to help those who need help, instead of sticking them in
the corner and pointing at their failures. The government's approach
to the question of drugs is due a radical overhaul: its attitude is
questionable at best and occasionally unintentionally hilarious.
What, for example, is a "drugs czar"? Does it ride a big horse and
wear jackets with scarlet braiding? Or what about the babyish idea of
a "war on drugs"? Drugs aren't beings - they are plant or chemical
extracts. You can't smite them down with your mighty sword. The "war
on drugs" is a tabloid fantasy that successive governments have taken
up with zero success: what it means in effect is that you criminalise
users and toss them into an environment where drugs are
super-desirable, like prison.

It's absurd and really hard to see how this approach helps anyone at
all. You can - and should - have a "war" on the social factors that
make people susceptible to drug taking - and by "social factors" I
mean poverty and boredom, rather than membership of swanky London
clubs - and a war on the criminal networks that flood Britain's
streets with cheap drugs and bring havoc (and gun crime) in their
wake, but you can't have a war on drugs themselves.

You would have thought this would be blindingly obvious; but this
government, like the one before it, seems intent on viewing each
pill, each leaf, each bit of resin as possessed of its own forked
tail and cloven hooves.

And you know, it ain't necessarily so. Professor Anthony King of
Essex University, the RSA panel's chairman, said last week: "The
evidence suggests that a majority of people who use drugs are able to
use them without harming themselves or others", which is absolutely
true, but which one is never allowed to say without being accused of
being dementedly irresponsible, or some kind of junkie in denial, or
at least an obsessive recreational drug user.

The truth of the matter is that hundreds of thousands of people like
a spliff with their glass of wine after a hard day's work, and those
people don't have a problem. They're not in the pub necking down
triples and getting into fights, they're not sicking up in the
street, they don't suddenly decide to stab the person who
accidentally bumped into them. Plus, they're unlikely to die
prematurely of liver failure.

And while you would obviously prefer your teenager to be doing a bit
of extra maths instead of a little extra ecstasy, there are worse
things than feeling all cheery and affectionate for a few hours and
then sleeping it off - like taking up smoking and dying of lung
cancer. As for the cocaine epidemic that we're constantly reading
about: being addicted to cocaine isn' t nice - neither is being an
alcoholic, except that's legal - but the truth is that the vast
majority of recreational users don't have an addiction problem.

I'm not saying taking drugs is a marvellous idea, obviously it isn't,
but the point is that people do take them, in vast numbers, and it's
about time our reactions stopped being so hysterical and ignorant.

The RSA report also recommends that the drug classification system
should be replaced by an "index of harms", based on the damage that a
drug causes the user and society, and that said index should, for the
first time, include prescription drugs as well as alcohol and
tobacco. It recommends, for instance, that alcohol and tobacco should
be rated as more dangerous than ecstasy or cannabis. Heroin, cocaine,
barbiturates and street methadone would top the list, followed by
alcohol - ahead of ketamine and amphetamines. Tobacco would be ninth,
ahead of cannabis (11th), solvents, LSD and ecstasy.

Responding to the report, the Home Office said John Reid, the home
secretary, had no interest in scrapping the current system, whereby
you can drink yourself to death freely. He has done no better than
his predecessors when it comes to imposing a degree of intelligent
adult thinking on this subject. Our ignorance about the reality of
drug taking - fed by a media intent on publishing horror stories of
the kind that could just as easily be written about people dying from
allergic reactions to penicillin - may actually have contributed over
the past 20 years to the worsening of life for those people inclined
by misfortune to abuse drugs.

We think, like toddlers, in exclusively black and white terms: all
drugs are evil, all drug takers are evil, ban all drugs, lock up all
drug takers. That approach demonstrably doesn't work - aside from
anything else, it makes drugs seem glamorous, when frankly a lot of
them are less dangerous than a night out in the pub. And that is
where all this infantile thinking becomes fatal.