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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Drugs Inc has easily won the war on our streets
Camilla Cavendish The Times
Tuesday 24 Feb 2004 Choose your poison, our parents used to say. My generation chose cocaine, cannabis and Ecstasy over Bristol Cream. In doing so, we have financed a billion-pound business that is, some estimate, bigger than the oil industry. We can't buy shares, because society is still pretending to fight a war on drugs. But the State is almost as confused as the addicts. The Government downgrades the legal status of cannabis one day and proposes drug testing in schools the next. And the General Medical Council hauls up doctors, who have kept addicts off the streets, for committing an unforgivable crime - of treating, not punishing, and so acknowledging that the war is lost. Like it or not, drugs are now part of the fabric of society. When almost a third of 16 to 24-year-olds admit in official surveys to taking drugs, you can only marvel at the success of a business that shifts its stock with no conventional advertising. The strange thing is not that so many respectable people use drugs as a social fix. Most people know the risks and use drugs, like alcohol, as friendly recreation rather than lonely addiction. What is bizarre is that the middle classes who seek this particular oblivion are so oblivious to the violence that results from their purchasing power. The link between drugs and violence is becoming harder to ignore. A friend who lives off Uxbridge Road in West London regularly complains that the 'oppressive' police presence in the area is lowering the tone. Yet had she checked on house prices in her local Winkworth's last year, she would have found the entire shop front obliterated by the getaway car which had hurtled through it after a shoot-out in Nando's restaurant opposite. The Jamaican drug gang murdered their target, seriously injuring a waitress and a passing motorcyclist in the process, and narrowly missing the estate agent who had fortunately gone to make a cup of coffee - it being four o'clock in the afternoon. Gun violence has spiralled as drugs have become the chief commodity of organised crime. Police report that the price of contract killings has fallen to as little as 200 pounds and that the killers are now more likely to be drug addicts than professional assassins. More than 15 per cent of all prisoners sentenced last year were banged up for possession or supply of drugs. Of suspects arrested for theft and robbery, 58 per cent test positive for heroin or cocaine. Research by York University suggests that drug-related crime costs Britain between 10 billion pounds and 18 billion pounds a year. The market is so lucrative that there is no real possibility of stopping the vicious gangs who are fighting for a slice of it. In 1999, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimated the size of the worldwide drugs market at $400 billion, second only to the arms industry. The Economist was more restrained two years later, putting global retail sales of drugs at $150 billion, not far behind tobacco sales of $204 billion and alcohol sales of $252 billion. Whatever the exact figures, in little more than 30 years it looks as though drug barons have built a business on roughly the same scale as Coca-Cola. Few admen would have foreseen how easily so many people could be persuaded to cut up white powder with a credit card in a public lavatory and sniff it through a used 20 pounds note, relying entirely on a dealer's word that it has not been mixed with something lethal. What an intriguing business school case study that would make. There is no shortage of applicants to work in a business in which dealers can make 1,000 pounds a day. It is hard for teachers to convince pupils to stack supermarket shelves rather than to follow the men flaunting their gold jewellery at the school gate. No matter how meticulous the police operations to remove dealers from the streets, a new wave will fill their shoes within weeks. Police and Customs officers are seizing more hard drugs every year, but 90 per cent still reach their destination. There is no point in trying to make teachers and doctors police society when the police have been handed an impossible task. London police are said to have spent 74,000 hours a year tackling people for cannabis possession alone. When the law is mocked, the consequences can be farcical. I recently met a bathroom fitter who is doing a roaring trade because clubs and restaurants feel they must discourage cocaine users by removing all flat surfaces from their toilets. He is inventing a bumpy lid for lavatory seats to fill a gap in the market. The logical conclusion of the drugs war might be to raid such clubs and jail half the top earners in the media and the City for recreational drug use. But, apart from being grossly unfair, this might have an unhealthy effect on Britain's GDP. The better answer is one that many policemen - and politicians - already privately concede. It is to make drugs legal and tax them. A legalisation policy would acknowledge that drugs are endemic in society, not an aberration. It would remove most of the profit from the drug barons and generate cash that could be used to help addicts of all substances, including nicotine and alcohol. Users would not be forced into crime by black-market prices; prisons would not be full of people needing treatment rather than punishment; school pupils tempted to experiment would not be in the hands of dealers with an interest in locking them in forever; and we could all walk more safely in the streets. This is, after all, what happened when the American authorities finally came to their senses in 1933 and repealed Prohibition. The attempt to stamp out drunkenness had been a hopeless waste of money which spawned an entirely new criminal class of bootleg suppliers and corrupted the police. It sent alcohol prices soaring and increased the number of hard drinkers. The analogy seems all too clear to me. But what is obvious to one generation can be taboo to another. The difficulty for today's politicians is that the risks of some drugs, and the deterrent effect of criminalising them, continue to be so exaggerated. No drug is harmless, and some are more dangerous than others. But our current laws are needlessly penalising recreational users and doing nothing to help the minority of vulnerable people who do become hopelessly addicted. Some of the greatest dangers, in fact, are posed by impure supplies. These would be greatly diminished if the market were legal. Under regulated, controlled conditions it would also be much easier to find, and treat, those for whom drug-taking has become a threat to their sanity and their life. The doctors who are being tried by the GMC have used prescriptions to keep addicts living relatively normally and out of the underworld. A similar attitude has helped heroin addicts in Switzerland and the Netherlands, where the policy has also dramatically reduced burglaries. In 2000 the Portuguese Government went further and decriminalised the consumption of drugs, including heroin and cocaine. Last July it decided to carry on the experiment after a review showed there had been no increase in the number of people taking drugs, but a significant increase in addicts receiving treatment. Since the partial legalisation of cannabis in the Netherlands in 1978, the number of younger people trying heroin has fallen. The average age of Dutch heroin users is now about 45 compared with about 25 in the UK. Yet countries wishing to experiment in this way are heavily restricted by three United Nations conventions that prohibit the production, trade, use or possession of a wide range of plant-based and synthetic substances. These conventions seek to dictate domestic policies in far greater detail than do most international treaties, insisting that all countries criminalise possession for personal use. Many drugs charities in Britain believe that decriminalising and taxing drugs would provide them with more resources to treat addicts. They feel that the Government's fear of signalling that taking drugs has become 'acceptable' is completely misplaced when these practices are already part and parcel of social life from Brixton to Shropshire. If politicians believe that drugs are dangerous, they should wrest control back from the criminals. Regulated companies would surely be no more distasteful than the tobacco giants. We could then let the technocrats argue about health warnings, advertising and age limits. We could even buy shares, cash in. After all, that's human nature - and the war on drugs can never be won precisely because it is a war on human nature.
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