Subj: UK: Sco: Opinion: Addicted to failure in fight against drugs



Date: 13 Feb, 2000



Source: Scotland on Sunday



Author: Lord McCluskey, former Solicitor-General







Addicted to failure in fight against drugs



Like Canute the forces of law and order command the tide of

traffickers, dealers and junkies to retreat. How long can we

afford to pursue a policy that has not worked for the past

35 years?



THERE is one feature of illegal drugs that we can all agree

about. Their abuse causes untold misery, blights lives and

costs the taxpayer a fortune - money that could and should

be spent on schools, hospitals, housing and roads. Because

of drugs abuse that money is spent instead on prosecution,

prisons and funerals. For, make no mistake, drug abuse

kills. Especially the young.



There are also many living losers, including the families of

the users. There are huge numbers of crimes committed by

addicts to finance their addiction; the victims of those

crimes - mugging, robbery and theft - are also losers. The

only winners are the very small number of suppliers, the Mr

Bigs: they seldom get caught. The abusers get caught and

appear before the higher courts on their way to prison. They

are mostly miserable addicts engaged in hand-to-mouth

street-level trading to feed a habit or to repay a debt, or

simple users being paid relatively small amounts to

warehouse drugs on behalf of bigger dealers.



There's a touch of the black hole about hard drugs: once

you're sucked in it's extremely difficult to get out and

stay out. The few who succeed will usually by then have lost

their jobs, their families, their friends and their future.

So it is not difficult for us all to agree that the problems

are horrendous and getting worse. Something must be done.



It is when we start to devise ways of tackling the menace

that we fall into chaotic disagreement. No surprise there.

People always disagree about society's response to grave

threats. Sincere opponents of the rise of Nazism under

Hitler advocated a bewildering variety of responses from

pacifism and isolationism via appeasement to re-armament and

armed intervention. No real consensus was reached until it

was too late. Sincerity and disagreement often go hand in

hand. I believe that we ought to clear the ground by

conceding the sincerity of those who hold and advance

different views.



However, what we need above all is to bring the whole

subject out into the light of day. We have to talk about it

in an adult way. The present posture of too many politicians

is sincere but fundamentalist - a dangerous cocktail. Their

preferred technique appears not to be to try to convert

those who disagree with their views, but to avoid debate

altogether. Those who dare to suggest that the policies that

have been pursued for the past 35 years are wrong find

themselves dismissed as cranks or heretics misguidedly

sending out the wrong "message" to the young or giving

encouragement to the Mr Bigs (Are the young listening to our

messages? Do the Mr Bigs really need encouragement?).



To add insult to injury, sincere critics of the prevailing

posture of government over recent decades find themselves

routinely accused of having no sympathy for the victims, the

grieving families of those who have died from drug abuse.

This is the methodology of the Spanish Inquisition: don't

argue the point, don't explore the facts with an open mind;

just brand those who disagree as heretics, silence them and

excommunicate them.



Fortunately, in our society, if you are a private citizen

and bold enough to suggest that the Emperor has no clothes

there's not too much they can do to you. Those employed in

the public sector tend to be more circumspect. Their

participation in any public debate has to be more tentative

and restrained. Which is a pity; for the vital ingredient of

an informed debate is accurate information, statistical and

personal, about everything to do with drug abuse. Who better

to provide it than the police, prison staff, doctors, social

workers and those daily engaged in the criminal justice

system?



We need the best information we can get about just how

harmful the popular and widely used 'soft' and

'recreational' drugs are. Do we know for certain which soft

drugs, if any, lead the user on to 'hard' drugs? Do we

exaggerate the risks associated with some drugs, thus

devaluing the warnings we try to give about others? Does the

classification of drugs into A, B or C drugs make sense at

the practical level? Do the legal definitions of offences

fit the reality? We have to know the answers to these and

many other questions. And we have even not begun to discuss

in an open way the pros and cons of decriminalising any of

the drugs now banned. We just keep adding to the list of

banned substances.



Above all, we need to find out if the present system for

detection and punishment works? It looks to me as if it has

conspicuously failed; but we need to know for sure. If it

has failed, should it be revised or scrapped? These are the

end questions. I want to start nearer the beginning.



Some mood-altering drugs intoxicate. Some do not. Some mood-

altering drugs are addictive. Some are not. Some people try

drugs and become addicted. Some people try drugs and don't

become addicted. Producing or dealing in some intoxicating

drugs, even consuming them, is a criminal offence. Producing

or dealing in some other intoxicating drugs is regarded as

an honourable trade or profession; and consuming them is a

popular activity, advertised on television, and bringing

billions in revenue to the government. The paradox is that

government raises huge amounts in taxes from the public's

appetite for some drugs. It then spends huge amounts of tax

income on trying to stop people consuming other drugs, and

in keeping them in prison if they do.



The most obvious permitted drugs are alcohol and tobacco.

The best-known forbidden drugs are heroin, temazepam,

diazepam, LSD, cocaine and cannabis. There is also an

explosion in the manufacture and marketing of 'designer'

drugs such as Ecstasy.



THE differences in approach to the two groups of drugs -

illegal and permitted - would all be very puzzling but for

the fact that we have somehow accepted it and ceased to be

surprised. We seem to able to live with the striking

anomalies without questioning them. Yet they are worth

thinking about. Alcohol, in its various forms, is a mood-

altering drug. Everybody knows that it is addictive,

intoxicating and seriously damaging to human health: it even

kills. Tobacco is proved to have comparable properties. It

is so damaging to human health that we print a message to

that effect on every packet before it is sold. Heroin in its

various forms is mood-altering, addictive and potentially

threatening to health and even to life. So is cocaine. And

the other so-called 'recreational' drugs like cannabis or

Ecstasy have comparable effects, though probably the harm

they do is substantially less: for cannabis seems not to

kill; Ecstasy tragically, but only very occasionally does

so.



What should we be doing about these drugs? Should we be

banning them all, licensing them all, or banning only some

and, if so, which, and why?



Think about the best known of the potentially harmful

intoxicants, alcoholic liquor. Traditionally, of all the

mood altering drugs, alcoholic liquor was seen to be the

most widely dangerous and anti-social. For it not only

damages the user; it frequently turns him into an angry,

uninhibited, violent and irresponsible creature who disrupts

his family, fights with his neighbours and kills strangers

on the streets and highways. Without any shadow of doubt,

the abuse of liquor was the greatest single cause of violent

crime in Scotland throughout my career. Emboldened and

disinhibited young men fought and killed in drunken brawls

in all our major cities and elsewhere. Other men deprived

their families of the necessities of life to indulge their

passion for drink. When they did come home from the pub they

used violence on their women and children. If there was a

drug that needed to be banned, alcohol was that drug.



One measure of the degree of failure in Scotland is to count

the number of drug-related deaths. The government's

pamphlet, 'Drugs in Scotland: Meeting the challenge' (1994),

reported that there were 53 drug-related deaths in Glasgow

in the year from November 1991. When, in the early 1960s,

Westminster passed the Dangerous Drugs Acts - to give effect

to obligations undertaken by signing an International

Convention in 1961 - the numbers were much smaller. Yet in

1999 there were 85 drug-related deaths in Glasgow, and many

of them occurred among men recently released after being in

prison for drug-related offences. By the mid-1990s drug

deaths in Scotland as a whole were occurring at the rate of

about 250 per year. Between 1981 and 1993 the number of drug

offences recorded by the police rose by more that 1,100%,

most of them relating to cannabis. In a speech to the House

of Lords in June 1997, the Lord Advocate announced the

results of a survey by Glasgow's Centre for Drug Misuse

Research, showing that of the young people selected at

'rave' events, 95% had taken cannabis, 87% ecstasy and 11%

heroin. That is a lot of lawbreakers among the young. It is

also a new development.



For my first 25 years practising in the High Court as an

advocate I saw no drugs cases. I doubt if there were any. I

encountered my first in 1981. Now they dominate the business

of the High Court. Many police forces now operate on the

basis that between 50% and 70% of all acquisitive crime is

drug-related. In other words, addicts are committing other

crimes to feed their expensive drug habits. For the Mr Bigs

the profits are enormous, and as the profits grow so the

market grows. And, as the young decide to experiment and

take the drugs their peers are taking, a whole generation

grows up thinking that the law is out of touch, 'uncool',

and that obeying or disobeying it is optional.



Why on earth do we not have the wit, the honesty to admit

that the policies and enforcement techniques that we have

been deploying for the last 35 years are failing? We are not

winning the war on drugs. We have to stop telling ourselves

fairy tales about the success of anti-drugs initiatives when

the ruins of past initiatives are mocking us from the

funeral parlours of Glasgow.



YET it would be a tragedy if we finally lost. In my view,

the logic is compelling. We have to engage in a radical re-

think. We have to cease to behave in a Canute-like fashion.

We have to find a battleground on which the resources we can

deploy have some real prospect of success. The war aims have

to change. When we have defined what we can realistically

expect to achieve, the tactics have to change. It is a

truism that Prevention is better than Cure. Of course it is.

But if the methods used to prevent are manifestly not

working, and if repeated applications of more of the same

are also seen to fail, then Control, coupled with spending

more on Cure, might well be the better option. The police

and agencies such as Customs & Excise devote huge resources

to fighting, with only modest success, against the

importation, cultivation and supply of cannabis. The

resources so deployed are necessarily diverted from the

substantially greater threat posed to society by heroin and

the like. Is the current policy not a waste of scarce

resources?



If, as I believe, we have to re-think the whole matter,

there is no better way to collect the necessary information,

from policemen, scientists, and other democracies that to

establish a Royal Commission. We have had such bodies

before. The last Royal Commission to be set up examined the

Non-Medical Use of Drugs in South Australia.



The nearest UK equivalent was the Wooton Sub-Committee on

cannabis which reported in 1968. Lady Wooton, who chaired

the distinguished and expert sub-committee of the Advisory

Committee on Drug Dependence, received much hysterical abuse

when the committee published its conclusion that the use of

cannabis had not been shown to lead to crime or aggressive

behaviour and was considerably less dangerous than alcohol.



Of the hysterical reactions, similar, as she pointed out, to

those stirred up when proposals were made in relation to

sexual crimes, she said that, "they are always liable to

occur when the public senses that some critical and

objective study threatens to block an outlet for indulgence

in the pleasures of moral indignation". Nothing new under

the sun.