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UK: Column: The War Our Leaders Are Happy To Forget
Simon Jenkins The Times
Thursday 20 Sep 2001 Remember, there is a war on. I refer not to one war but to two. The British and American Governments are fighting two wars, openly declared by both over the past decade. One is in response to the American air disasters of last week. The other, against drugs, was declared by America in 1990 and by Britain in 1994. Both wars are in response to assaults on the integrity of Western society. Both have been called "total" and "long-term", demanding the global projection of military, diplomatic and economic power. Both are fought against shadowy foes mostly operating in regions where anarchy and poverty march hand in hand. In each case the rhetoric of violence has been easier to deploy than that of reason. The War on Drugs has been lost but defeat is not admitted. Its battle plans still lie on dusty shelves, its ships are mothballed, its generals cashiered. Yet the two wars are closely linked. They finance each other. Just as the IRA was recently arrested talking to FARC guerrillas in coca- growing Colombia, so 95 per cent of Europe's heroin came last year from Afghanistan. The Taleban regime would not exist were it not for opium. Part of its rage against America is at Washington's failure to send aid after the Taleban agreed to eradicate this year's crop. The War on Drugs is not fought in the open, any more than is that on terror. Aircraft carriers and Tomahawk missiles are no help against mobile cells, agents, sleepers and mules. The lumbering weapons of military might are what a Middle East diplomat of my acquaintance calls "enemy- makers". They send potential allies running for cover and make police action near impossible. That is why warmongering rhetoric is so absurd. The cry to "Do something violent even if it's stupid" merely enslaves strategy to emotion. Richard Nixon declared the first War on Drugs in 1969. Operation Intercept was launched and troops deployed to search 100,000 cars at the Mexican border. Elvis Presley offered his support and held a celebrated "hugging meeting" with Mr Nixon. The war lasted three weeks. It was revived by Ronald Reagan with "zero tolerance" and a futile "45-day war" in 1986. The first George Bush declared the current War on Drugs in 1990, demanding the execution of all drug dealers. He sent a carrier task force to the Caribbean to "interdict supply". The hills of Colombia were sprayed with defoliant and napalm in the belief that this would somehow stop New York stockbrokers snorting cocaine. Bill Clinton did not dare withdraw this armada (or cancel its $2 billion a year cost) for fear of having to admit defeat. In 1994 John Major joined in. He declared a three-year nationwide War on Drugs, "a battle we cannot afford to lose". He appointed a Cabinet minister to lead the campaign. The prison population soared, cocaine consumption doubled and heroin consumption trebled. Undaunted, Tony Blair signed up to the same crusade. A drugs czar, Keith Hellawell, was appointed with much fanfare. Cabinet units and task forces leapt into being. Ministers trooped through the sitting rooms of the British Embassy in Bogota, baffled and bemused. Drug dealers are not terrorists. They are supplying a worldwide demand for drugs which governments persistently refuse to regulate, tax or restrain. Terrorists offer something for which there is no demand. They offer mayhem and death. But the deployment of terror against civilians is no less hallowed by history. Its goals may be political not commercial. But it too feeds on social alienation and human misery. The terrorist has his reasons. As with the drug dealer, those who would combat him must understand those reasons or get beaten. I know of nobody involved in the War on Drugs who believes it has been won, despite a quarter-century in the waging. Since the warmongering of the early 1990s, the world drugs trade has soared, now surpassing in estimated value that of motorcars and oil. Since the trade is by definition confined to criminals, it has become the prime sponsor of conflict and terror. Whether in Chechnya or Burma, Colombia or Iraq, Afghanistan or Northern Ireland, look for the cash and you will find drugs. Never in modern history can one industry have underpinned so much sheer evil. Governments declare war on it, but seem careless of defeat. In his recent book Ending the War on Drugs, Ronald Reagan's one-time adviser Dirk Eldredge concluded that it was policy-makers, not drug users, who are "locked up in Alcatraz for 50 years". The repeal of inter-war alcohol prohibition had been a testament to American democracy's ability to admit and rectify mistakes. Democracy appears to have regressed. Rather than have the courage to admit that the criminalisation of a staple world product is now counter-productive to social stability and world peace, the American Government sticks to a failed policy and asserts that victory is just round the corner. Britain is no different. Its War on Drugs was still couched in the same military terminology that is being deployed against world terrorism. Symptoms are attacked rather than causes. Supply is targeted rather than demand. The reason is depressingly simple: enforcement is sexier than social work. Any politician prefers to be photographed with his boot on a trafficker's neck than helping to detoxify an addict. The war has failed. The drugs czar has been sacked. The enemy may be packing the prisons, but drugs are plentiful and cheap. Heroin addiction, the greatest harm of all, is rising and penetrating ever younger age groups. I find it hard to imagine a more catastrophic outcome of war, a more devastating symbol of defeat, than that. An astonishing example of the collapse of British drugs policy landed on my desk this week. It is a proposal from Alan Milburn's Health Department that will bring about the closure of roughly half the drug rehabilitation centres in Britain. These units, most of them run by charities at a fraction of the cost of prison, have proved by far the most effective way of combating drug addiction. Mr Milburn is said to want to ingratiate himself with the Genghis Khan of drugs policy, Mr Blair's Alastair Campbell. The new rules are pure nanny statedom. They lay down how everyone should run a residential home for young people. They order no more room-sharing, insist that rooms be private and lockable, allow unrestricted private visits and install a mass of "health and safety" devices. The cost of implementing the regime will drive many homes into bankruptcy and force all to reduce capacity by some 50 per cent. More to the point, the rules undermine the essence of drugs treatment. The European Association for the Treatment of Addiction, representing half of all rehabilitation units, simply cannot believe what is about to happen. It pointed out this week that the rules will "increase self-harm and suicide among people in treatment", especially in denying 24-hour monitoring of addicts. The rules are bureaucratic meddling at its most destructive. The essence of public administration should be to make links. I imagine some tunnel-visioned health official will have pushed the rules past Mr Milburn with a reassuring murmur that they "look tough". That they cut off the legs of the only institutions struggling to rectify the Government's failure on drugs is of no account. The logical outcome of the new policy will be to drive thousands of heroin addicts back on to the streets or into prison (where addiction is endemic). It will increase heroin consumption and push up the world price of opium. This will fund global crime and help the Taleban to protect terrorists. Is that government policy? Such linkage must blow the intellectual fuses in Mr Blair's "joined-up" Cabinet Office. The policy on care homes means another avoidable defeat in the War on Drugs. But that war is embarrassing and forgotten. It ripples no political muscles. It floats no frigates and fires no missiles. It is the wrong war. Today's politician thinks terrorist. The Government's conduct of the War on Drugs has had all the subtlety of a Taleban conclave. Hundreds of young people are still dying in that war, but the Government is bored. Instead it is bringing us the War on Terror. I wonder for how long.
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