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Now the drugs laws don't work (they just make it worse)*

The news today that the police are fighting a losing battle against drug crime cannot have come as a surprise to anyone who ever ventures outside their front door.  Despite all the time and effort spent on drug crime, the report from the UK Drug Policy Commission says that seizures are having little impact on reducing supply or demand.

The report concluded that despite the doubling of seizures of Class A drugs in the past decade, the market for such drugs had proved to be “extremely resilient”. If their supply was disrupted, dealers maintained their profit margins simply by reducing the purity of the drugs, often increasing risks to users.

The current cost of fighting Class A drug sale and use is estimated at £4 bn per year. That’s a huge amount of money that could, for example, be spent on totally ending the ‘postcode lottery’ in healthcare and have plenty of change left over. And what does it achieve? Absolutely nothing, it seems.

Five years ago, the No10 Strategy Unit produced a detailed report on drug policy. The report concluded, “Despite interventions at every point in the supply chain, cocaine and heroin consumption has been rising, prices falling and drugs have continued to reach users. Government interventions against the drug business are a cost of business, rather than a substantive threat to the industry’s viability.” It also estimated that drug-motivated crime resulting from prohibition is costing the UK £19 billion per year – almost a third of the total cost of UK crime.

Let’s take a step back and ask why we make the sale and use of drugs illegal – in some cases totally illegal and in other illegal to sell without a licence? Listening to a couple of phone-ins and reading web messages this morning, it appears that many people think drugs are illegal to stop people stealing to get the money for their next fix and to stop junkies littering the streets. Yet these are the symptoms of a market where drugs are sold at such a premium price that people have to turn to crime to pay for them – and then have very little idea what they are getting. Just as in 1920′s USA, prohibition doesn’t stop people using the drug, it simply turns the market into a personal fiefdom of the gangsters. A market that is now worth 5% of the world’s economy – and rising.

We need to look nationally and internationally at other drugs policies and amongst those is legalisation.

Think about it. If the price of heroin and cocaine fell to say the price of alcohol and was available from official outlets, what would happen? No dealers (no profit in it any more), so no requirement on them to grow the market by selling to kids. Fewer people use in the first place and they can do so safely. The Government gains tax revenue and saves a fortune on paying for the criminal justice system. Users know that their drugs will not be badly cut and expose them to excessive harm. Ordinary, otherwise law-abiding people would not be drawn into the criminal justice system for the occasional recreational use of drugs.

Most importantly maybe to most people is that our inner-city areas will not be plagued by addicts committing crimes simply to feed the fix and the streets will not be home to gangs literally fighting for their ‘share’ of the lurative trade. And just a tiny proportion of the money that we saved would be able to get those addicts that want to get clean to get appropriate treatment.

Contrary to received wisdom, treatment for those who want to give up drugs is difficult to get hold of and often involves several weeks waiting. Unsurprisingly, it has become a revolving door, with just 3% who enter treatment staying clean.

So would legalisation work. I don’t know enough to be able to say or to call for a particular change in policy, although there has to be a change. I would support any sensible policy that reduced crime and fear on our streets and put the dealers out of business – wouldn’t you?

But others with first-hand knowledge have their own views. Edward Ellison, former Operational Head of Scotland Yard’s Drugs Squad has seen the futility of prohibition at first hand. He said, ‘’I say legalise drugs because I want to see less drug abuse, not more. And I say legalise drugs because I want to see the criminals put out of business.’’

It may make sense, but there are no votes to win in an open debate on drug policy, only to lose.  So no-one will ever even think about it.

The author would like to confirm that she has never so much as smoked a cigarette, let alone taken illegal drugs!

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