August 22, 2010

War on drugs: Bring out the peace pipe

Editorial
The Guardian, Wednesday 18 August 2010
Article history

Sir Ian Gilmore is a distinguished physician. Nicholas Green is a leading barrister. Pillars of society, they share a radical opinion: they believe drugs should be decriminalised – not from any dogmatic position but from their own experience in medicine and the law.

Sir Ian, a liver specialist and the outgoing president of the Royal College of Physicians, told the BBC yesterday that current policy aggravated the harms associated with drug abuse and cited approvingly a BMJ article by Stephen Rolles of the pro-legalisation organisation Transform. In June Mr Green suggested that if the government was serious about cutting the prison population it should consider decriminalising individual drug use.

When the UN first sounded the alarm about the global drugs trade in 1961, it warned of the threat it posed to the world's health. It was President Nixon, swiftly backed in Britain, who converted the concern into a moral crusade. His war on drugs, both nationally and internationally, has caused harm that far exceeds the unquestionable damage of drug abuse. In ripples and surges from Mexico's catastrophic turf wars to gangland murders in Detroit and drive-by shootings in Birmingham, civil society is undermined and in places destroyed by the profitable lawlessness of the illegal drugs trade. It is time to sue for peace.

This is a global war, and ultimately it needs a global solution. The first step has to be to acknowledge that the moral evil is drug trafficking, not drug abuse. The best way to undermine the traffickers is to tackle demand for their product. And as part of holistic policy that has to tackle wellbeing more widely, decriminalising individual drug use would be a good start. Portugal, where drug use was decriminalised nearly 10 years ago, is showing the way. Its evidence suggests the most persuasive argument against changing policy – that it would increase the numbers abusing drugs – is baseless. There has been no significant increase in drug use, while take-up of treatments has increased and health has improved.

Politicians could prepare public opinion for change by a public assessment of what Britain's war on drugs has achieved. It should ask whether better results could have come by a less damaging route. A policy that results, via the Afghanistan poppy harvest, in financial support for the Taliban, boosts international organised crime and is the underlying problem for more than half of the UK prison population will require some defending. Decriminalisation would not be an answer in itself. Legalisation is no quick fix. But prohibition's defenders need to show how, against its dire results, their policy can still be justified.

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