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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Make drugs legal and save lives Simon Jenkins This Is London Thursday 05 Jul 2001 London's illicit drugs trade must be brought under control. It is a chaotic, idiotic, crime-infested, dangerous free-for-all. The police cannot control it. Young people are dying from it. Lives are being wrecked by it. The 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, unreformed by Michael Howard and Jack Straw when Home Secretaries, has made London the most lucrative and drug-ridden city in Europe. Statistics may be unreliable, but the recent National Criminal Intelligence Survey reports that cannabis, cocaine and heroin are now more plentiful and cheaper in London than ever, and than anywhere. Those who prefer anecdote can ask any reasonably street-wise person under 25. If drugs were part of the retail price index, inflation would not exist. A joint, which was £5 ten years ago, is now nearer £1. Ecstasy is being sold in ever more complex (and potentially dangerous) compounds. Crack, the most profitable market, is proliferating so fast that its "manors" have become anarchic, with an unprecedented gun war across south London. Britain's median age of heroin use is falling faster than anywhere in Europe, a ghastly comment on our lack of regulation. The market price of a gram of heroin has halved in real terms since 1995. For heroin addiction still to be treated as a "crime" is a measure of how far Britain has slipped back towards the dark ages. Nobody who watched last month's brilliant Channel 4 series by Nick Davies, The Phoney War, can doubt that taking heroin off prescription and onto the black market in 1971 was a disaster. Apart from other costs, the NHS loses millions in treating HIV and hepatitis C from dirty needles. This free market is totally unacceptable. The complacency of the Home Office and Downing Street leads me to wonder if Whitehall has money in the cartels. (Nothing corrupted American drug enforcement more than paying agents a percentage of their seizures.) When I served on the Runciman Committee, I came to regard all drugs, legal and illegal, as variably dangerous. The most dangerous in every sense, alcohol, can also be the least dangerous. Cannabis, taken in excess, can screw up young people at a crucial stage in their lives. Cocaine, more popular worldwide than Coke, is a recreational drug used by millions, yet in crack compound it can reduce many to mental dereliction. Heroin can be used by mature, balanced people as pain relief without ill effects. For others, it is a sickness for which they desperately need help, not incarceration in a drug-infested Home Office prison. None of this is any longer to the point. All these substances are freely available to the public without taxation or regulation, in pubs, clubs, newsagents, fruiterers, concert venues or through the "Tupperware" network of dealers' flats. No product in the world is more intensively and successfully marketed door-to-door than illegal drugs in Britain. The Misuse of Drugs Act has failed completely. In London it has spawned a trade reputedly second only to financial services and tourism, enriching more villains than any law in history. Introduced by Sir Edward Heath, it will rank with American Prohibition as an all-time classic of counter-productive legislation. The traditional sign of weak government is that it only acts when its police go on strike. After the departure from the Home Office of the complacent Mr Straw, David Blunkett must now decide whether to continue Mr Straw's policy of denying bail to all drug users and impounding their passports. This is in line with lawmakers chopping off the noses of Chinese opium smokers and deporting laudanum users to Australia. The decision by Brixton's police commander, Brian Paddick, to "go it alone" with a hands-off policy towards cannabis may have seemed courageous. But it was instigated by his own constables asking him how they could patrol the streets when it took them half a day of paperwork and £10,000 to prosecute one cannabis user under Home Office rules. He not unreasonably said, to hell with it. The law is unenforceable. Yet we now face a new lunacy. The police are told to concentrate on suppressing the supply of drugs whose consumption is accepted as ubiquitous. This is merely to move from one nonsense to another. While some users undoubtedly commit crimes to maintain their "habit", most pay for drugs from normal income. The social menace lies in the criminalisation of supply. As long as there is demand, and demand is massive and endemic, there will be supply. The question is simple. Does London want this supply legal and controlled, or illegal and uncontrolled? I regard most of these drugs, though probably not cannabis, as harmful enough to merit some regulation. Since control plainly cannot be exercised through the criminal law, other means must be found. These are available both through Customs and Excise and through the drug orders regulating pharmacies. This will mean a constantly monitored mix of licensed outlets, taxation, prescription and, for heroin users, intensive treatment. London must get used to legal conduits for the drugs trade through bars, shops and pharmacies. It must join much of the rest of Europe in re-establishing the pre-1971 controlled prescription of heroin, with free needle exchange and treatment. It must accept that cocaine is the drug of choice for hundreds of thousands of otherwise law-abiding young people, but it must be taxed, made more costly and quality controlled. Legal supply will make it far easier to stamp out the real menace, the crack cocaine houses that are a nightmare to police officers and neighbourhoods alike. As for the party pill-popping , what do parents and the public want? Do they want the Labour government's policy of cheap, uncontrolled, adulterated and plentiful supply, untaxed and sold at random by criminal gangs? Or do they want some attempt at regulation and market control? These are the choices. The rest of Europe is talking, struggling towards the second option. Britain is stuck with anarchy. There is only one argument against going down the route of legalisation and regulation. It is that control would devastate London's criminal community and impoverish estates and neighbourhoods that have come to depend on the trade. I say, too bad. Unlike ministers, I am not prepared to live and let die. This market must be brought back to sanity.
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