Sunday Thinkpiece: the war on drugs

The war on drugs is over, and we were on the losing side. Let us now put aside our weapons, and work out how to manage what will be an uneasy peace.

For a long time there had been talk of drugs, but mainly among the well-to-do, including several members of the Royal Family in the last century. Sherlock Holmes was of course a cocaine addict. But I suppose the war on drugs really started in the 1960s.

Now, half a century later, there are drugs in our prisons, drugs in our schools, drugs on our council estates and drugs on the street being sold to children. Who better to sell them to? Perhaps pushers are the only people investing in our children. ‘Give me a child when he is seven..’ to misquote St Francis Xavier, ‘and I will give you the lifelong addict’.

In America, the war on drugs has cost $1 trillion, that’s a million dollars a million times over, and they are no further forward than we are.

So what, if anything, are we to do? It is obvious that drug use has been increasing, not even staying the same, while we chuck money and the time of the police, courts and prison service into a bottomless pit.

For me, a turning point in my thinking was the passing of the Suicide Act in 1961, making suicide legal. For the first time our bodies were our own. It is why I think the car seatbelts law is wrong: it is perfectly ridiculous that I should be allowed to slit my throat with a carving knife and yet not by going through the windscreen of a car (before you complain, I don’t say it is wrong to wear a seatbelt, just that it is wrong to be made a criminal if you don’t).

For this reason, and the stupidity of fighting a war we can never win, I think drug taking should be legalised. Discouraged, of course, but decriminalised. An addict’s body is his own, not the State’s.

What would be the effect? Most people point to the Netherlands, where pot smoking is allowed in ‘coffee shops’. What is good about it is that the purchase of marijuana is taken out of the hands of the street pusher, who would normally groom a child from marijuana to heroin. Where, however, it is a bad example is that the coffee shops have to buy the weed from the black market, maintaining the criminal connection. Drug use is rising, as are incidences of drug-based gang violence.

A better example is Portugal, where until the turn of the century an astonishing 1% of the population – that’s 100,000 out of ten million – were addicted to illegal drugs. The problem was quite out of control. In 2000, however, a new law decriminalised possession of drugs for personal use. Drugs are still technically illegal, but users are sent for treatment, not to the courts. Essentially the drug problem has been turned from one of criminality to one of public health.

What happened?

There were small increases in illicit drug use among adults, but decreases for adolescents and problem users, such as drug addicts and prisoners.

Drug-related court cases dropped 66 percent.

Drug-related HIV cases dropped 75 percent. In 2002, 49 percent of people with AIDS were addicts; by 2008 that number had fallen to 28 percent.

The number of regular users held steady at less than 3 percent of the population for marijuana and less than 0.3 percent for heroin and cocaine: decriminalisation brought no surge in drug use. The number of people treated for drug addiction rose 20 percent from 2001 to 2008.
(figures courtesy of Associated Press)

Worldwide, some 93 countries offer alternatives to prison for drug use, mainly needle exchanges and the like. The Portuguese go further: their system is not perfect – aspects of the forced treatment leave something to be desired by libertarians – but they have taken a bold step towards doing something sensible: fighting a different war, one they might just win.

The rest of us should follow them.