By Camilla Cavendish (THE TIMES, 04/05/06):
PARTS OF AMERICA declared war on Mexico yesterday for its decision to decriminalise the personal use of cocaine, LSD, heroin and other drugs. This “hostile action by an ally”, as San Diego’s mayor screamed, could send Americans rushing to party in Cancún — and addicts preying on Americans to fund their habit. What’s new?
The Mexicans are wrong to think they can stamp out drugs barons just by reprieving small-time users and refocusing police resources. But they have at least recognised that most recreational users do little harm to themselves, or others. The Americans have got to stop peddling the line that the war on drugs is working, and refusing to countenance any other approach. It’s a habit that is proving increasingly lethal for all of us.
Hundreds of Mexicans have been killed in the past year, including many police officers, as the drug cartels battle for control of lucrative smuggling routes. The Mexican Government is sensible to stop wasting time on recreational users who do little harm to themselves or others. But it is hopeless to expect that more police can sweep away a multinational industry that is bigger than Coca-Cola, and which bribes and shoots to protect its profits. This business is simply too big and too profitable.
Illegal drugs are now the lifeblood of organised crime in most countries. In Britain, gun violence has spiralled as a result. Whole swaths of Nottingham, where PC Rachael Bown was shot in February, are out of control. London sees one shooting and ten firearms offences every day. There are now so many contract killers on British streets, one policeman told me, that you can hire one for £200. The University of York has put the cost of drug-related crime at between £10 billion and £18 billion.
Criminals have merely filled the niche so thoughtfully created for them by politicians. Before the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 we treated addiction as an illness. Heroin addicts got their fix on prescription. After 1971 we handed them over to unscrupulous gangs who had every incentive to expand the market. Like any savvy marketeer, they have offered free samples to children, given discounts for trading up to harder substances and created a generation of desperate salespeople. Junkies, forced to turn to crime to fund their habit by prices that can be as much as 2,000 per cent above the wholesale price, have had every incentive to become pushers themselves. The result? Our laws have created the most effective pyramid-selling scheme in history: one that has turned between 6,000 and 15,000 addicts into closer to 250,000, in only 30 years. Pass it on, pass it on.
Something similar happened under Prohibition. The ban on liquor sent alcohol prices soaring, increased the number of hard drinkers and spawned an entirely new criminal class of bootleg suppliers and corrupt police. Do not underestimate just how corrupting this new form of Prohibition is, or how widespread the corruption. Take the drug problem in prisons. Visitors are proudly shown how post is screened for narcotics, and told about random tests, strip searches and sniffer dogs. Many conclude that the only way so many drugs can still circulate in jails is with the connivance of prison officers. Add to this the fact that random drug tests tend to push inmates into replacing cannabis, which stays in the body for weeks, with heroin or opiates, which can be sweated out in the gym overnight, and it is hardly surprising that our jails have become part of the pyramid. In whose interest is that, except those who make higher margins on harder stuff?
More than half of American prisoners are in jail for drug-related offences. They outnumber the entire European prison population. Nearly half of all women in British prisons, and 17 per cent of men, are there for drug crimes. The numbers just keep growing. More than half of the women have a child under 16, two thirds have a drug problem and many are suicidal. Most need treatment, not punishment. But more than 40 per cent of prisoners with drug problems who want treatment are not receiving it, according to the Prison Reform Trust. Where methadone is being prescribed — a success that Government is shy to talk about — crime is falling. But for those on the new drug treatment and testing orders, reconviction rates are running at 80 per cent. We are spending a fortune to get nowhere.
According to Transform, a drug policy foundation, we spend four times more on problematic drug users than on problematic alcohol and tobacco users. But the public health costs are the other way around: there are about 130,000 alcohol and tobacco-related deaths a year, compared with around 3,000 for all other drugs combined. Some of those deaths are avoidable, because they are caused by drugs being cut with cheaper substances by unscrupulous dealers. That would not happen if supply were legalised and controlled.
Mexico is not alone in breaking ranks. The Portuguese Government decriminalised the consumption of heroin, cocaine and other drugs six years ago, and has seen no rise in crime or addiction. Large-scale trials in Switzerland and the Netherlands suggest that legally regulating supplies of heroin can reduce property crime by half. Parts of Canada have introduced free heroin programmes for addicts, producing more squawks of outrage from America and wilder and wilder proclamations from the UN, whose conventions on drugs seek to dictate domestic policies in far greater detail than most international treaties.
The Church of Prohibition cannot just keep chanting “war on drugs”. The narcotics industry can only be beaten by governments taking over its market. Give Boots and Superdrug the right to supply cocaine, and the price would plummet. Place it next to the support tights, and it would cease to be glamorous. Take away the illicit profits and you would remove the associated violence, corruption and prostitution too. Some people will always be irresponsible, whether they are drinking gin or sniffing glue. So take aim at the law, not at Tijuana. Otherwise we’ll just have another blinkered, pointless, violent Mexican standoff.