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UK: As long as drugs are illegal the problem won't go away
Polly Toynbee The Guardian
Wednesday 04 Dec 2002 Addicts should be given drugs free so they don't have to mug and burgle Ann air of wild unreality permeates most drug policy, so every glimmer of good sense among the nonsense is to be welcomed. Yesterday David Blunkett produced his new drugs strategy, which is a slight but important shift from his old drugs strategy. It targets the 250,000 hard drug users who cause most of the crime and social mayhem, costing 99% of the £10bn to £18bn a year officially guesstimated as the social cost of drugs. That is the right place to begin, but a target to treat just 200,000 of them by 2008 is hardly ambitious. Spending on treatment will rise by 40% by 2005 and it takes time to train people with the right skills. But this lacks a sense of crisis. The worst estates, which Labour is dedicated to reviving through the New Deal for Communities, see heroin and crack as their deepest problem, both the cause and effect of their plight. The crack houses, the crime and drug-addicted prostitution, and the growing gun crime causes well-grounded terror among tenants. While a handful of middle-class children become addicts, hard drugs are an emblem of poverty, the final apocalypse that descends upon urban estates or wherever heavy industry vanishes and heavy drugs move in to fill the void of those deprived of significant work. Drugs campaigners often point to the success of Holland's drug policy where heroin users are a shrinking and aging group, kept well under control. But Dutch success may be due less to their drugs policy than to the good effect of a more equal society with an absence of gross poverty. Britain has the worst drugs problem in the EU because it has the most poverty. Curing inequality may take time, but there is no excuse for Labour's still-rising prison population - due not to rising crime but to the Straw/Blunkett punitive sentencing climate. Five years in office and Labour still has only half the addicts in prison under treatment, the very people who commit the crime and should be treated first. Although there will now be money, overcrowded prisons are bad places for doing good. Much of the double-think of drugs policy starts with the UN. It has a target to eradicate all cultivation of coca, cannabis and opium by the year 2008. "A Drug Free World - We Can Do It!" is their dotty slogan. But for as long as dirt-poor countries can grow crops the rich world wants, they will. Considering the relative ease with which people traffickers get thousands of living, breathing humans across borders, small bags of drugs can never be prevented. More drugs are seized, yet the price of heroin and cocaine keeps falling, revealing how much keeps flowing in. Yet abject failure of drugs policies is met with calls for more of the same. Some 90% of Britain's heroin comes from Afghanistan and the new drugs strategy blithely promises "to reduce opium production and to eliminate it by 70% by 2008 and in full by 2013". How? "Improving security and law enforcement capacity and implementing reconstruction programmes which encourage farmers away from poppy cultivation." No details of how this miracle is to be accomplished were forthcoming, nor explanation of these random dates. Tony Blair gave Hamid Karzai's interim government £20m early this year to pay farmers not to plant opium, but to plant wheat. The farmers duly pulled up their crops, but they never received the money which stayed in the hands of the war lords. As a result they have now planted a double crop for this year. The opium-growing areas are far beyond the reach of the Karzai government, whose writ does not run far. Why not? Because the west is now too preoccupied with Iraq: only this week at a meeting in Bonn the west again refused Karzai's plea for the 5,000-strong international force, ISAF, to be increased and deployed beyond Kabul to other cities. His own nascent army is neither ready nor equipped to keep order and his whole annual budget this year is only $460m: the west offered neither extra forces nor funds - so how is Karzai supposed to prevent opium growing? And why should it be a priority in a country with nothing else to export? Poor countries cannot and should not be expected to bear the brunt of rich countries' internal social failures. Columbia and growing numbers of other countries are being politically destabilised and destroyed as crime takes over, due to the impossible western market that both demands drugs and outlaws them. The contrariness of drug law is spelled out by Transform - the group that thinks only total decriminalisation of all drugs can stop the harm done by them. They pose a simple question: if you have a very dangerous substance, what is the best way of controlling it? Sell it over the counter (aspirins and tobacco), sell it in off-licences (alcohol), give it out in pharmacies on prescription (valium or temazepam) or give it to criminal gangs to dispense (heroin and crack)? The real social danger of drugs comes from their prohibition which gives them to criminals and forces addicts to turn to crime to pay for it. Most people are not unduly worried about the welfare of the 250,000 addicts: 150,000 people die a year from smoking, which is their choice. The trouble with addicts is the huge volume of crime and violence they commit to support their habit. Eradicating drug abuse seems to make scant headway - but limiting the crime that addicts commit might work, by giving them the drugs free so they don't have to mug and burgle to get them. At last the government is quietly inching along this road. They whisper it, it is tucked away in the new strategy. When asked, ministers are quick to say that only very few addicts will have heroin prescribed. But the Department of Health is now setting out to train large numbers of GPs in heroin prescribing so that addicts for whom all other treatments fail can be sustained safely and live orderly lives with their addiction. So far only 300 addicts can get heroin prescribed, but many more will now - and why not, if it reduces crime? Why not prescribe cocaine too, since crack addiction is exceptionally hard to cure? If drugs could be progressively eased out of the hands of the crime gangs as they have been in Holland where they are prescribed, then there is a chance of improvement. Improvement would be a triumph, while all talk of "eradication" is destined for disappointment. Meanwhile, down in the drug foothills, Blunkett retreated before the Mail on cannabis. First he downgrades it to class C, but then he makes possession of any class C drug potentially arrestable, which they were not before. Accept a sleeping pill from a friend and you could now be nicked. The police assure us that people will only be arrested for flagrant defiance - waving a sleeping pill in the face of an officer - but while there is local discretion, there will be local injustice. However, few doubt there will be a drastic cut in the current 90,000 arrests for cannabis possession. Little by little, things are getting more sensible. · Email p.toynbee@guardian.co.uk
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