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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Editorial: Make Love Not War
The Guardian
Wednesday 22 May 2002 MPs Plot A New Approach To Drugs Like many other decent and developed nations, Britain has spent the past 30 years fighting a war on drugs against an enemy it has never fully understood. It has been a well-intentioned war, and it would have been wonderful if it had been crowned with victory. But it has not been. On the contrary, by almost every yardstick, the war has failed. Those who make policy face a genuinely difficult question. Do they go on fighting a principled but ineffectual campaign, or do they accept the war is unwinnable, and choose the least worst way of living with the existence of harmful drugs? Politicians are afraid of being thought soft. So the MPs of the home affairs select committee deserve real credit for being the first serious politicians in decades to break the drugs policy taboo. The report they publish today is neither soft-headed nor reckless. It acknowledges that drug policies that centre on enforcement will not succeed. It faces up to the reality, which many non-users are uneasy about, that different drugs cause different degrees of harm and that most drug users stop of their own accord as they get older. And it concludes that harm reduction, not retribution, offers a more effective way of dealing with drugs. In that spirit, the MPs' key conclusions are that ecstasy should be reclassified downwards and that the highly structured prescription of heroin should be attempted, but that legalisation, though not unthinkable, would be simply too dangerous. The government, headline fearful, has already rejected the new report as too radical. Decriminalisation supporters, too blind to drug harm, will damn it as too cautious. Both responses are gloomy echoes of old failures. The MPs will get a bad press, but they are facing the world as it is, not pretending it can be perfect, and for that they deserve wide support.
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