The Guardian: legalisation is a no-go area

This short response to today's UKDPC report appears in the Guardian's Comment is free section. Comments can be posted on the Guardian site for the next three days. The online copy is an edited version of the submitted text and the title and subheading are by the copy editors.

Legalisation is a no-go area

A report on drug policy, like so many before it, fails to recognise the simple fact that prohibition is actually part of the problem

Steve Rolles. Wednesday July 30 2008

The publication today by the UK Drug Policy Commission (UKDPC) of its thorough review of existing literature on the failure of efforts to tackle the supply of illegal drugs, whilst welcome, is yet another example of a report that fails to notice the elephant in the room. Prohibition and its enforcement not only fails to restrict the availability of drugs but is itself the root cause of many of the most significant drug-related harms.

For the UK's lawmakers and enforcers it will make yet more grim reading, telling a familiar story of the systemic failure of UK supply-side drug enforcement to have any positive impact, with drugs becoming progressively cheaper, more available and more widely used over the past four decades. Whilst usefully restated, this critique is nothing new, following in the footsteps of numerous other reports including those from the Police Foundation (2000), the Number 10 strategy unit (2003) and the RSA (2007).

All of these reports, however, suffer from the same conceptual flaw: they begin their analysis with the assumption that prohibition is a given rather than a policy option. It is not just that enforcement of prohibitions on drug production and supply are merely expensive and ineffective, or even that they often have disastrous unintended consequences, but rather that their enforcement actually creates the problem in the first instance. Failing to acknowledge the primary role prohibition has in creating the problems of illegal markets dooms any policy recommendations that follow.

The UKDPC report, for example, highlights how more strategic enforcement may be able to reduce the negative social impacts of drug dealing by shifting it geographically or changing dealing behaviors (from open street markets to less bothersome closed markets). Whilst these changes, if they can be achieved (and the report cautions that even here the evidence is flimsy), would be beneficial, there is something self-defeating and illogical about trying to minimise the harm caused by enforcement inside a framework that works to maximise it. It is effectively a policy at war with itself.

It is disappointing that when the UKDPC report does touch on the policy alternatives to absolute prohibition it does so only very briefly, with a mention of the legalisation debate tucked away in its final paragraph. When the report's most optimistic conclusion is that better enforcement may be able to "at least ameliorate the harms associated with visible drug markets", it's a shame that an opportunity to explore alternatives – legal regulation and control of drug production and supply that would largely eliminate these socially corrosive illegal markets – was missed.

The broader calls for a greater focus on public health and better evaluation of the outcomes of enforcement policy are obviously sensible, but if we are to have any progress beyond "marginally less disastrous" thinking about policy, we have to look further than prohibition. The contemporary reality that certain drugs can only be purchased from unregulated, untaxed and uncontrolled criminals is the result of policy choices. By treating the debate on alternatives to maintaining organised crime's monopoly as a no-go area, this report helps entrench the view that the basic tenets of prohibition cannot be challenged. In doing so it actually helps perpetuate the policy whose failure it describes so eloquently.

Transform in the Guardian CIF: Coaker's line on Cocaine

Coaker's line

It is not coca growing per se that fuels the conflict in Colombia, but the fact that cocaine is illegal - a point lost on most policymakers

Emily Crick 7.00am May 22, 2008

Home Office minister Vernon Coaker announced a new anti-cocaine initiative yesterday. Coaker and the Colombian vice president, Francisco Santos, along with former Blur bassist Alex James, were in Trafalgar Square to attend an exhibition that aims to highlight the environmental and social destruction that cocaine causes.

Coaker's new initiative, backed with a £1m Frank campaign aimed at 15-18 year olds, is running in conjunction with the Colombian government's "shared responsibility" project that attempts to link consumption in the west with the carnage created by illicit markets in producer countries. The idea is to appeal to consumers' ethical conscience, rather than the more familiar health concerns. Alex James, the former blur drummer and bon viveur who once claimed he had personally spent a £1m on cocaine, has been recruited to the cause after visiting Colombia to see the problems with illicit cocaine firsthand.

Earlier this year Antonio Costa, head of the UN office on drugs and crime (UNODC), also got in on the act when he wrote an article in the Observer entitled "Every line of cocaine means a little part of Africa dies", highlighting the chaos caused by western consumption in emerging transit countries like Guinea Bissau, specifically pointing the finger at those "fashionistas", including Amy Winehouse and Kate Moss, who he accused of glamorising cocaine use.

This rather ludicrous argument ignores the general consensus that Amy Winehouse is at her least cool and sexy stumbling out of hotels in blood-stained slippers. More significantly what Costa, Coaker and Santos fail to make clear is that it is not actually the coca growing per se that fuels the conflict in Colombia but the fact that cocaine is illegal.

It is the massive untaxed profits on offer, created by the policy of prohibition, that attract the violent unregulated gangsters and are the real cause of the devastation that affects Colombia. The cocaine trade is estimated to be worth $56bn-$70bn globally and the UNODC estimates that 14 million people worldwide take it.

Furthermore, whilst use is falling in the US, it is still on the rise in Europe - particularly Britain and Spain. It has been suggested that the profit margin in cocaine is between 2,000%-3,000%. With profits like these, is it any wonder that the illegal drug trade attracts insurgents and paramilitaries, eager to find new ways the fund their war?

In 2001 Jaime Ruiz, senior advisor to the then president of Colombia, Andrés Pastrana said, "From a Colombian point of view ... just legalise it [cocaine] and we won't have any more problems. Probably in five years we wouldn't even have guerrillas." This may be somewhat simplistic but with depleted economic resources there would be more incentive for those involved in armed combat to negotiate for peace.

It is this fundamental issue that Coaker and his cohorts are failing to address when they call for a "boycott" on cocaine. It is their shared irresponsibility that gifts the cocaine trade to organised crime and those involved in violent conflict from Bogota to Brixton.

Add comments on the Guardian CIF website here (closes after 3 days)

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Emily is Transform's new research associate


Related reading:

When all else fails: blame Amy Winehouse

Traditional coca use: caught in the cross fire

Section on crack cocaine in Transform's 'Tools for the debate' (p.41)


Other news (maybe the debate isn't as closed as some suggest?)

Colombian vice-president calls for debate on cocaine

Transform in the Guardian: commentary on the new drug strategy

The following article is in todays Guardian online Comment is Free. Theres an open debate taking place below - the usual CIF knockabout stuff. There was also an abridged 'teaser' version in the Guardian print edition.

Policy Narcosis
The government keeps returning to a punitive-prohibitionist stance on drugs when every informed view, including its own analysts', advises otherwise

Steve Rolles

Despite the headline-grabbing new announcements, the new drug strategy is essentially a restatement of the previous one, and doomed to perpetuate the same disastrous failings, primarily because - as Paul Flynn observes - it remains dogmatically rooted in the outdated principles of a punitive prohibitionist approach. The big new initiatives on seizures of criminal assets, and linking benefits to treatment uptake, will operate at the margins of the strategy and will not have any meaningful impact on overall efficacy.

Asset seizures are nothing new and the move to seizures on arrest, as opposed to charge or prosecution, is quite simply illegal and unlikely ever to happen. The strategy's target is to raise asset seizures to £350m a year - a minor tax on the £7bn a year UK illegal market's turnover, even in the doubtful event of it being achieved. Notwithstanding the fact that it is the prohibition that creates the assets in the first instance, there is no evidence that asset seizures are a significant deterrent to the violent gangsters who control the trade (although the US experience demonstrates how linking seized funds to policing budgets or service provision can corrupt and distort policing priorities).

Linking benefits to uptake of treatment provision similarly bears the hallmarks of populist posturing. The reality is that, in any one year, the vast majority of problematic users are not ready or willing to stop. Coercing the least able or willing is offensive to most people's definition of treatment (despite the treatment industry's collusion with it), and its results no better than non-coerced interventions. Obvious concerns arise that the policy might lead to the withdrawal of benefits from some of the most desperate and needy members of society, most of whom already suffer multiple problems with mental health, housing and employment. The negative consequences could be serious: increased offending, increased social exclusion and decreased likelihood of engagement with treatment and support services.

The new strategy restates a series of highly misleading claims for the success of the previous one, based on misrepresented and cherry-picked statistics, or process successes that have no bearing on policy outcomes. The inability of the Home Office to tell the truth about what has worked, and what has not, is at the heart of the problem with the new strategy; there has been no critical analysis of past failings and no serious engagement with any new policy ideas or alternative approaches. Indeed, no policies were presented during last year's consultation on which to consult, certainly not the headline initiatives announced today. Forget the mature debate about legalisation and regulation that the Home Affairs Select Committee (including David Cameron) called for back in 2002. Nowhere in the consultation was there even any mention of the less contentious incremental reforms that have an extensive evidence base from around the world such as moves to civil, rather than criminal, penalties for drug possession, or proven harm-reduction measures such as supervised injecting rooms.

The strategy's most alarming failings are in the arena of supply-side drug control, where the Home Office claims of success have been the most outrageously misleading and the restatement of previous policy in the new strategy the most alarming. As Transform has repeatedly highlighted, a number of high-level internal documents, along with a whole series of authoritative parliamentary, academic and independent NGO analyses have demonstrated that not only are supply-side interventions hugely expensive (£3bn a year) and ineffective (drugs are substantially cheaper and more available than ever before), they are actively counterproductive - creating £16bn a year in crime costs. Assuming government maintains its commitment to prohibition, crime costs could approach £200bn over the next decade.

Can we assume ignorance on the government's part with regard to the counterproductive nature of their policy at home and abroad? Absolutely not. In June of 2003, the cabinet was presented with the PM's Strategy Unit drugs report, which informed them in devastating detail that supply-side enforcement was the major cause of drug-related harm, not only in the UK, but in Afghanistan and Colombia, too. The new strategy demonstrates, yet again, how evidence and sound analysis have become the latest casualties in the ongoing war on drugs and drug users.

note: this version is an edited version of what I submitted. The title and subheading are by the Guardian editor.

Also in CIF today:

Duped on dope

Amid all the hype about the government's new 10-year drug strategy, does anyone remember that the last one failed?

from Drug law reform legend Paul Flynn MP

Transform in the Guardian: The drug laws don't work

A nice curtain raiser for tommorow's ACMD cannabis reclassification evidence sessions from Duncan Campbell at the Guardian. See the article at the Guardian site along with an active debate here

The drug laws don't work

The real 'softies' are the politicians who refuse to engage in a sober debate on cannabis

Duncan Campbell
Monday February 4, 2008
The Guardian

Fifty years ago, Lenny Bruce, the American comedian who was pursued relentlessly by the police for his drug use, remarked that cannabis would be legal soon, "because the many law students who now smoke pot will some day become congressmen and legalise it in order to protect themselves". Since then we have had at least two US presidents and countless congressmen who have used drugs, but changes in the punitive US drugs laws seem as remote as ever.

In Britain, many cabinet and shadow cabinet members have admitted to using cannabis but, rather than relaxing the laws concerning the drug, they are planning to tighten them. Today the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs is due to hear evidence on whether or not cannabis should be reclassified from class C up to class B. The council considered this issue in 2005 and concluded then that "although cannabis is unquestionably harmful, its harmfulness does not equate to that of other Class B substances either at the level of the individual or of society".

This time the hearings are pointless. Gordon Brown and the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, have already indicated that they are minded to reclassify the drug upwards, whatever the council has to say. Brown has said that "drugs are never going to be decriminalised". The received wisdom, inside the cabinet and among much of the media, is that it was an error on the part of the then home secretary, David Blunkett, to reclassify cannabis down from B to C in 2004, because it "sent the wrong message". And the increased strength of hydroponically grown skunk is cited as one reason for the change. The sunny climate in which Rosie Boycott launched a legalise cannabis campaign in the Independent on Sunday in 1997 has clouded over. The IoS itself has recanted and issued an apology.

There is no dispute that cannabis can cause significant harm. Teenagers, heavy users and those with a predisposition to mental health problems are at risk. No one denies that. Transform, one of the most rational of the organisations monitoring UK drug laws, will be submitting evidence to the advisory council, saying that "the fact that [cannabis] is produced and supplied via a profit-driven underground criminal market has been the driver for the increasing prevalence of more potent strains, which deliver increased profit-to-weight ratios".

Some senior former police officers, like Tom Lloyd, former chief constable of Cambridge, have also argued for a change in the laws. "This is about taking the control of drugs in this country out of the hands of criminals and into the hands of responsible authorities," Lloyd has said. Many still in the police privately agree.

But it would take a brave politician to suggest a sober debate on cannabis, let alone the whole basis of the drug laws. The Lib Dems and the Green party still favour that debate. The former's policy is to seek "to put the supply of cannabis on a legal, regulated basis, subject to securing necessary renegotiation of the UN conventions". It opposes the government's decision to reclassify regardless of what the ACMD has to say.

But what of the two main parties? Shadow cabinet member Alan Duncan wrote in the book Saturn's Children that "logic suggests that the only completely effective way to ameliorate the problem, and especially the crime which results from it, is to bring the industry into the open by legalising the distribution and consumption of all dangerous drugs, or at the very least decriminalising their consumption". In 2002, the home affairs committee examining drugs policy recommended that "the government initiates a discussion within the Commission on Narcotic Drugs of alternative ways - including the possibility of legalisation and regulation - to tackle the global drugs dilemma". David Cameron was a member of that committee. But this is not Conservative policy now, nor will the party dare to offer it for debate for fear of being called soft on drugs. It now backs the government on reclassification.

It is time for politicians to take a deep breath and say in public what many say in private: that the drug laws are not working, that the illegal trade is responsible for much of our most corrosive crime, and that it is time to have a debate nationally and internationally about addressing the catastrophic effects of prohibition. Reclassifying cannabis upwards is a grandstand gesture with no relevance to those whose lives are damaged by drugs or by the drug laws that compound and exacerbate that damage. The country does face an urgent addiction problem. But the name of our addiction problem is alcohol. If the government wants to send messages, the first message should be in a bottle.

The real "softies" when it comes to drugs are the politicians who refuse to engage in debate for fear of being called soft on drugs. So now, instead of that debate, we appear to be heading towards Reefer Madness II.

ACMD opens its doors to the public.

The Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs, the Government appointed panel of experts established under the Misuse of Drugs Act (MDA) 1971 to advise ministers on drug policy and law, yesterday opened its doors to the public for a full meeting (or at least part of it) for the first time. I went along and it wasn't nearly as boring as I expected.

The Home Office: 'come on in' (actually the meeting was in a Hotel in Victoria)

The impressively knowledgeable and diverse panel of 30 or so experts from the drugs field spent several hours discussing a range of current concerns and how best to respond to them including a detailed discussions on the growing use of anabolic steroids, the threat of GBL (a precursor of GHB), implementation of the Council's recent 'Pathways to Problems' report, needle exchanges, and the upcoming reviews of the classification of ecstasy (MDMA), cannabis (again - at the request of the Home Secretary) , and, we were told, all drugs covered under the MDA. A full agenda is available here.

This last point I found interesting as a quick look at the drugs covered under the MDA reveals that there are over 400. No timetable was given but at the Council's going rate of reviewing about 2 drugs a year, and I'm being generous here and assuming the Government doesn't ask them to undertake pointless re-reviews (a la cannabis), we can therefore look forward to the process being finished sometime around 2200.

Even if they are only looking at, say, the top 20 problem drugs we are still looking conservatively at the process ending sometime around 2020 and lets face it, that's just not good enough. At one point during the public Q&A session Professor Nutt said, in response to a question about why they weren't looking at cocaine given the worrying growth in its use, that they had 'a lot on their plate' and couldn't do everything. It was a fair point to which I, rather supportively I think, suggested that it was about time the Home Office provided the appropriate resources to give the them the required research capacity to deal with all that stuff on said 'plate'. ACMD Chair Micheal Rawlins curiously said he didn't feel increased funding/capacity was necessary and that the Council would increasingly be working with the MRC and other research agencies. To me this was an odd answer: there are some specific tasks, like the 400 classification reviews, that only the ACMD can do.

I noticed Alan Travis from the Guardian was amongst the public audience and his report appears in todays Guardian, titled: Boys of 12 using anabolic steroids to 'get girls'. (it is probably worth noting that a lot of boys are also using steroids to 'get boys' but anyway). Travis quotes me at one point:

Challenged by Steve Rolles, of the drugs legalisation campaign Transform, to look at the whole system of drug classification, Rawlins remarked that the notes detailing the basis for each classification from A to D dating back to 1973 had been lost. But he confirmed the council is reviewing the legal status of ecstasy as part of a systematic look at the classification of each illicit drug in turn. The ecstasy review began in September and involves the Health Technology Association in Plymouth appraising 750 scientific papers on the harmful effects of the drug in relation to similar illicit substances.

He rather misunderstands the thrust of my question (as well as the fact that the classification system is A-C, not D). I observed that the most of the ACMD meeting had been considering, in detail, the evidence of harms for various drugs and the implications of this analysis for whether they should be brought within the MDA or have their classification changed. My point was that there was major flaw in the Council's thinking if the impacts on key public health and criminal justice indicators of such changes were not being evaluated (as we have discussed in detail in previous Transform briefings). I then pointed out that the Government had called for, and indeed fully prepared, a comprehensive root and branch review of the classification system, a move that had been supported by the ACMD itself, The Sci-Tech Select Committee, Drugscope, and as far as I am aware everybody in the drugs field. Since the Government had since canceled the review (for transparently political reasons), but the need for such a review remained pressing, would the ACMD itself undertake such a review itself?

Rawlins answered that yes there were anomalies in the system but that the systematic review of classifications was underway, including ecstasy, and that the ACMD did not have the power to change the law.

I responded that I was not talking about the anomalies, but rather the more general efficacy of and the ABC system and its nominally harm based hierarchy of penalties. I also noted that it is specifically in the ACMD's remit under the MDA to call for 'changes in the law' as they see being necessary, and also that they can undertake reviews of drug policy if they deem it 'expedient'. Rawlins replied rather vaguely that they would take my points on board and look at the question but this didn't translate into any firm commitment to make it an agenda item (although one member of the committee I spoke to afterwards was very supportive and said they would raise it in the 'closed' afternoon session). We'll wait and see, but I don't have much cause for optimism.

As Transform have said before, the work the ACMD does is of the highest quality. The recent 'Hidden Harms' and 'Pathways to Problems' reports being fine examples of this. The problem with the Council is not the work they do, but the questions they don't engage with, and nothing demonstrates this better than their equivocation over reviewing the efficacy of punitive ABC classification system, and indeed a broader cost benefit analysis of the MDA - and prohibition as the basis of UK drug policy. Given the disaster that has unfolded over the last 36 years, such a review would seem to be 'expedient'.

Transform in the Guardian's Comment is Free

The following article from Transform director Danny Kushlick was published in the Guardian's online comment is free section yesterday evening. There is an active discussion forum below it to which you can contribute for the next three days (after which it closes - this blog forum remains open of course). Note: The slightly odd title to the piece is the work of the Guardian copy editors BTW, not Danny.

A drug on the market

Today's report, revealing the extraordinary scale of the UK's drug trade, admits only one conclusion: the policy of prohibition has failed

A Home Office report published today estimates the size of the UK illicit drugs trade at over £7bn. Using phrases like "market dynamics" and "enterprise structures", the report reads rather like a large business's annual report to shareholders. Except that this trade is entirely illegal and therefore totally beyond the reach of HM Treasury and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. It is the ultimate in deregulated markets, with absolutely no red tape for traffickers, suppliers and dealers.

To quote from the report (pdf): "There were very large mark-ups along the supply chain, from production to street level, for cocaine (circa 15,800%) and heroin (circa 16,800%)". Yes, you read it correctly, that's 16,000% mark-ups, unheard of in any other commodity market. The reason, pure and simple, is global prohibition. Is this a surprise to anyone in government? No.

The PM's Strategy Unit produced a report (pdf) in 2003 demonstrating in detail how this happens: it explained that "over the past 10-15 years, despite interventions at every point in the supply chain, cocaine and heroin consumption has been rising, prices falling and drugs have continued to reach users. Government interventions against the drug business are a cost of business, rather than a substantive threat to the industry's viability." (p94)

What the Downing Street report shows is that prohibition cannot prevent drug production, cannot prevent drug-trafficking, cannot prevent drug use, but that it does create huge volumes of acquisitive crime. But worse than all this, prohibition actually creates the vast unregulated market and all the misery and degradation that goes along with it from Afghanistan and Colombia to New York, Moscow and London.

These illicit profits are one of the single greatest corrupting economic forces in operation globally today. It is a policy of mass destruction, with dodgy dossiers to support its continuation and a group of senior politicians the world over which proclaims its success, despite its all-too-obvious horrors.

Now, however, there is an increasingly influential group of individuals and institutions demonstrating their opposition to the status quo. Given this growing opposition and sustained critique, one wonders why the Home Office continues to draw attention to prohibition's shocking failings. But, to the extent that they do, it gives us all the opportunity to see the reality of prohibition's impacts for what they are - and to let government know that the "war on drugs" is not being fought in our name.

SHOCK : non-hysterical cannabis story makes headlines

'Cannabis use down since legal change', the Guardian reports today on its front page. And its true, at least if you believe the British Crime Survey. The report also knocks holes in a number of other recently hyped skunk-cannabis panics perpetuated by various tabloids and the Independent on Sunday (with its road-back-from-Damascus re-conversion to the wisdom of mass criminlisation of young people as the sensible policy response).

The Guardian report, in a welcome break from much of the reefer madness of the last year, highlights the fact that trends in reported cannabis use amongst 16-24 year olds (including frequent users), and 16 to 59 year olds, have declined steadily in recent years.

Of course, the BCS is not without its methodological flaws; it is generally acknowledged to under-estimate total use because it is a household survey and consequently misses out on certain groups – students, and those with no fixed address - with generally higher levels of use. That said, it is at least consistent in its methodology so there is no reason to think the general trends it describes are not for real.

There are, however, a couple of further observations that today's broadsheet coverage miss out on. Firstly, overall prevalence of use is not an especially useful measure of overall harm related to use. If patterns of more intense or risky use are increasing it is quite possible that falling use could be associated with increasing harm. Similarly rising prevalence could potentially be associated with decreasing harm in the opposite scenario – you just don't know without some more detailed research on using behaviours. Some research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, (also published this week) shows how heavy use can cause real problems, but also highlights the links between such patterns of problem use and social deprivation.

Secondly, the fact remains that the BCS prevalence data shows the downward trend in reported cannabis use predates the reclassification from B to C in 2004, in fact beginning around 2001/2. This rather undermines the suggestion of the Guardian headline that the reclassification might in some way be a factor in falling use, just as many others have suggested it is a factor in rising use (see this blog post from January about a Daily Mail story that reported how 'the "softly softly" approach is contributing to a huge rise in cannabis use.' )

Both of these observations point to a more important analysis: that classification of cannabis appears irrelevant to either overall levels of use, or levels of problematic use. As Transform has long argued patterns of use are determined predominantly by a complex interplay of social, economic and cultural variables, there is no evidence to suggest changing classification has a meaningful impact on deterrence, and enforcement and drug policy more generally can -at best- only have a marginal impact on levels of use. There may well be an increase in problematic cannabis use occurring, but it remains hard to quantify and whatever its true scale the appropriate response should be always be public health led rather than based on an criminalisation /enforcement approach already tried for three decades with demonstrably disastrous outcomes. If, as the research suggests, the key determinants of problematic drug use are related to social deprivation then any long term response must focus on addressing these underlying social causes.

Classification seems to have become a symbolic talisman in the ongoing culture wars, dominating political discourse over the past five years in a fashion that grossly overstates its relevance in practical terms. Should cannabis be B or C has somehow, ridiculously, come to represent an ideological position, namely whether someone is 'pro' or 'anti' drugs. Support C and you are part of a sinister Soros-funded conspiracy to legalise drugs and make crack available in school tuck shops, support B and you are a tireless warrior in the crusade to create a drug free world. Meanwhile in the real world classification remains almost entirely irrelevant to young people, dealers, and indeed the police, who still have the flexibility to enforce the laws regards cannabis as they see fit.

Correction 02.11.07:

In the original posting of this blog I claimed that:

In more than twenty cannabis panic features in the IOS since March the BCS figures have never been mentioned.

This claim is incorrect, as I have subsequently spotted that in this article from July 29th 07: The great cannabis debate: 50 top experts confirm mental health risk it is noted that:

The number of 16- to 24-year-olds who smoked cannabis in 2006 has fallen by a quarter since 1998 – the last time the Government published its drug strategy. And among 11- to 15-year-olds cannabis use is also down: 10 per cent of pupils had smoked cannabis last year, down from 13 per cent in 2003, 2002 and 2001.

So even though the figures aren't sourced (the first being from the BCS and the second from the DoH schools survey - both not without flaws), I retract the specific claim, with apologies to the Independent on Sunday.

That said, I don't retract or apologise for Transform blog critiques of all the other skewed, misleading and sensationalist reporting of this issue since March, or the shortsighted editorial analysis and comment that has accompanied it.

Transform in the Guardian's 'comment is free'

Progress prohibited

The government's drug policy over the last decade has comprehensively failed, delivering the exact opposite of its primary aims.

Danny Kushlick

October 18, 2007 2:30 PM

It comes as no surprise that some drug treatment is being administered in an unethical manner, or that government is hyping claims of success for drug treatment. The entire edifice of government drug policy is unethical. It is based upon the lie that criminalisation reduces crime, when, in fact, it creates it. According to its own figures, government-enforced prohibition has resulted in crime costs of over £100bn in the last decade. Prohibition is bound to result in thefts and robberies that arise from the high cost of maintaining an illegal heroin or crack cocaine habit. Rather than the health needs of patients, drug treatment is based on the government's obsession with reducing crime, crime that is created by the official policy of prohibition in the first instance.

As we enter the closing stages of the government's 1998 10-year drug strategy, we had hoped there would be a meaningful review and consultation process, but the document that accompanies the consultation process (which closes on Friday) has spun pernicious failure as overwhelming success. The simple fact is that the UK drug strategy has failed to reduce drug use or drug supply. Class A drug use by young people is at its highest ever level and is the highest in Europe. The use of heroin and cocaine, the drugs identified by the government as causing the most harm, have seen a dramatic rise in use over the last 10 years. At the same time, illegal drugs are cheaper and more available than ever before. The strategy has delivered the exact opposite of its primary aims.

Yet the government, preoccupied with partisan law-and-order posturing, remains committed to a drug policy that maximises the harms associated with drug use, that criminalises the poorest and most disadvantaged in our community, that grants a multibillion-pound monopoly in dangerous drugs to gangsters and that dramatically increases the crime harms suffered by our communities. A genuine consultation process would have enabled a meaningful debate to take place on real policy alternatives to the catastrophic failure of prohibition while an honest review of the last 10 years would have provided the empirical basis for that analysis and debate. Tragically, we have had neither. The fact that the government has chosen to spurn meaningful engagement with any new ideas, and put propaganda in place of a real review, can only perpetuate the failures of the past decade.

Guardian Online version, with comments and debate below

Guardian: article on Afghanistan from Transform

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Below is the printed version of the today's response column in the Guardian, which I'm pleased to say, I wrote. It has been heavily edited and lost some clarity I think, so I will post the unedited version in discussion just for the record. The article is also in the Guardian's Comment is free section so please feel free to add comments there (as well as here).

Medical use of Afghanistan's opium won't solve the problem

Prescribed heroin for long-term addicts would be a better way of reducing the drug trade, says Steve Rolles

Thursday September 6, 2007
The Guardian

This week's alarming UN reports on the Afghan opium crop, showing that it now accounts for over 93% of global illicit production, prompted much debate. A Guardian leader (The drugs don't work, August 27) acknowledged the futility of eradication efforts, but gave qualified support to the Senlis Council plan to pilot the licensing of Afghan opium production for medical use.

Superficially, the idea has great appeal, potentially helping Afghanistan toward political stability and filling the apparent shortfall in medical opiates. Yet the Senlis vision is both ill-conceived and impractical.

As other experts identified in another article (Eradication or legalisation?, August 29) the plan faces a raft of political and practical problems relating to Afghanistan's chaotic status as a failed state and war zone. Furthermore the medical opiates "shortage" is primarily related to bureaucratic and licensing issues for UN drug agencies leading to underuse of existing stocks, rather than a shortage of raw opium. Flooding an already saturated market would potentially cause precisely the supply/demand imbalance that the UN control system was designed to prevent.

Simon Jenkins (Britain is stoned at home and sold out in Helmand, August 29) identifies the core problem common to all of the solutions being widely discussed: where such huge demand and profit opportunities exist, criminal profiteers will always find a way to supply. The only real solution is reducing domestic demand for the illicit product.

The government has spent billions trying achieve this through supply-side enforcement and coerced treatment. And yet UK heroin use rose from 1997 to 2001 before stabilising at its current historic high. The alternative, one that can collapse the Afghan opium market and largely eliminate illicit supply, is to repeal the global prohibition on non-medical production, supply and use. In the short term this process can begin by dramatically expanding the prescribing of heroin in a clinical setting to the UK's long-term addicts. This does not require "legalisation", merely an expansion of existing legal frameworks. Longer-term falls in problematic use can only be achieved by addressing the underlying causes rooted in social deprivation.

Such a move has the support of numerous senior police and policy makers, and a long international track record of success on key public-health and criminal-justice measures. The only obstacle is political cowardice in confronting the failure of a US-inspired "war on drugs".

While undoubtedly useful in stimulating debate, the Senlis proposal is now casting a shadow over more thoughtful and cautious policy work being undertaken by other drug-policy NGOs. There may be a place for smaller-scale licensing of Afghan opium at some point in the future. But there is a danger that an overhyped but ultimately doomed "legalisation" plan is potentially undermining a reform movement struggling to promote a more nuanced exploration of realistic models for regulated drug production and supply that includes non-medical use.

· Steve Rolles is the Transform Drug Policy Foundation's information officer steve@tdpqvbcbf.org.uk

'Smoke and Mirrors'. Sue Blackmore in the Guardian

The article below by Transform patron Sue Blackmore appeared in today's Guardian (Transform is linked twice). There is some interesting discussion following the online 'comment is free' version.

Smoke and mirrors

Here we go again, another politician forced by our stupid laws to say that drugs are wrong and unpleasant.

July 20, 2007 7:00 AM

Oh no, not again. Another poor politician (and I don't very often feel sorry for them) has been forced by our stupid laws to say: It was wrong; I have learnt my lesson; drugs are wrong; and I did not particularly enjoy smoking cannabis. Really? Is Jacqui Smith lying?

I expect so. And who can blame her. What if the home secretary were to say, "I smoked cannabis sometimes like most of my Oxford friends. I enjoyed it a lot. I had fun, explored my mind, and learned things, but then grew out of it"? Or even if she said that taking drugs was not intrinsically wrong if it hurts no one else? Well, if that were what she really thought, and she said it, then she would almost certainly lose her job.

A law that makes millions of ordinary people into criminals and risks even driving our own politicians to lie has to be a bad law. It should be changed.

Messing about with the classification of drugs is never going to provide a real solution to the problems we face (street crime, over-filled prisons, lack of treatment, lack of proper drugs education). I welcome Colin Blakemore's scientific examination of the harm drugs do and the subsequent attempt to make drug classification reflect more accurately the harm each drug does. But Jacqui Smith wants to bring down crime, and for that there is only one real solution: to take drugs out of the hands of criminals and make them legal.

Just imagine this brave new world. Anyone over a certain age can go to a drugs shop and buy sensibly priced, properly taxed, clean drugs. Drugs cartels have to give up and half the street crime is gone. Tax revenue pours in, prisons have plenty of space and ... what about the politicians?

Perhaps we might hear on the news that a new home secretary has said: "I smoked cannabis at university and I loved it. It was fun and interesting, and wonderful for listening to music, but it's no good for studying, and now I'm more interested in my career and how to do my job well."

And wouldn't this set a better example?

Drugs and Health Alliance editorial in the Guardian

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Increment of Harm

Government obsession with drug crime has overshadowed the needs of the truly marginalised

Danny Kushlick
Wednesday May 16, 2007
The Guardian

UK drug policy is unique. In no other area of social policy do we criminalise at one stroke both recreation and disadvantage. In no other area have we seen so much evidence of the counterproductive effects of a predominantly criminal justice response to a public health problem. And we have seen almost no genuine debate or evidence-based scrutiny from ministers. The last 10 years of this parliament's tacit and active support for a policy based on moral panic has finally broken the camel's back. As the Home Office reviews its last 10-year strategy - results are expected next month - the Drugs and Health Alliance has been formed to bring together organisations committed to bringing about a public health-led approach for the next decade.

In the mid-80s the Conservative government, in the face of a potential HIV/Aids epidemic, initiated a proactive harm reduction strategy that led to the UK having one of the world's lowest rates of HIV. It was based exclusively on a pragmatic public health and harm reduction approach to dealing with unsafe sex and injecting. No one suggested that we should ramp up penalties for injecting drugs or make unsafe sex illegal. How times have changed. Twenty years later there are significant political taboos among senior policymakers who dare question the prevailing tough criminal justice line on drugs. The result has been that most of the drugs initiatives in the last decade have had draconian law-making at their core.

Our current policy is completely at odds with social and legislative norms, a strategy based on criminalising drugs in order to reduce social harm. Yet, as the PM's strategy unit drugs report of 2003 showed, it is the very illegality of the supply and use of drugs that causes harm. Despite our commitment to harm reduction, drug use exists within a political and legal framework that is harm maximising; hepatitis C remains at 80% among injecting drug-users and HIV, while still very low, is on the increase.

Throughout the last decade government has shown a pathological unwillingness to debate the efficacy of the current approach. Witness the lack of genuine engagement with the Police Foundation drugs report of 2000, the Home Affairs Select Committee report of 2002, the Science and Technology Committee report on drug classification of 2006 and the recent RSA report, as well as the announced and then withdrawn public consultation on the drug classification system and the lack of consultation or parliamentary scrutiny of the Drugs Act 2005. The list is endless. One concern is that the upcoming consultation on the future of the UK drug strategy will end up looking strikingly similar to the last one.

The frustration of many working in the drugs field is that the obsession with crime reduction has overshadowed the need for improvement of individual and public health. We are demonising some of the most marginalised people in the UK rather than offering them effective treatment. For commissioners of services, this ought to look perverse and bizarre: enforce the drug laws in such a way as to increase the offending of problematic users of the most dangerous drugs, "identify" them through the criminal justice system and finally spend money on "treatment", as ordered by the court, as a way of reducing their offending. The £13bn to £16bn in crime costs associated with the current drug policy should suggest an urgent reallocation of the billions spent on counterproductive heavyhanded enforcement, toward education, dealing with underlying social problems and treatment in a primary care setting.

Ultimately, we need a new paradigm for drug policy development, one based around health and wellbeing rather than macho posturing and knee-jerk, short-term responses to the failures of the current criminal justice-based policy. The UK sits atop the rankings for levels of problematic heroin and cocaine use. The Dutch, Spanish, Swiss, Portuguese and numerous other nations have all adopted a more public health-focused approach. The average age of heroin users in the Netherlands is 40. They have half the rate of cannabis use compared to the UK. Isn't it time that we joined them?

The consultation on the new strategy offers a window of opportunity for change that will close again soon. This is our chance to let government know that tough enforcement does not reduce harm, it creates it. We should grab the chance with both hands.

Danny Kushlick is spokesperson for the Drugs and Health Alliance
Drugshealthalliance.net
dannykushlick@yahoo.co.uk

Note: Danny Kushlick is also director of Transform Drug Policy Foundation

The anatomy of a drug panic

On Friday the Guardian ran a news article that came perilously close to the classic ‘new killer drug’ panic stories we are more used to seeing in the tabloids. It’s a hackneyed old journalist trick when reporting drug stories that risk bening a bit dull or are maybe too complicated for an 800 worder. The basic things to remember to do are:

• Pre-decide your narrative arc: e.g. deadly new drug must be banned
• (rotten) Cherry-pick all the worst sounding, most scarey bits of information from the source material
• Especially look for facts that involve suffering, rape, and death (preferably of teenaged girls)
• Ignore context, more positive/ambiguous harm assessments, and key facts if they don’t suit the drama of your ‘new killer drug’ story
• Come up with a suitably high impact headline, preferably including one of the following ‘crazed’, ‘rapist’ , ‘kill’ or ‘death’
• Try and mention that the drug can be bought...ON THE INTERNET!!

Here are some highlights for the Guardian piece in bold, with commentary. And theres some discussion afterwards.

Warning on legal dance drug that experts say can kill

· Health Loophole in law allows BZP to be sold as 'fertiliser'
· Report urges EU to consider imposing ban

Rupert Neate
Friday April 27, 2007
The Guardian

A dance drug described as "legal ecstasy" faces a possible Europe-wide ban after a report catalogued a number of deaths and serious injuries linked to the stimulant.

As we shall see ‘linked to’ in no way translates to ‘caused by’

Two people have died after taking the drug with ecstasy and it has been found during postmortems on two road accident victims in Britain.

Some key details missing here. The EMCDDA source document being cited notes that:

“In both cases BZP was quantified in blood and urine samples, but a number of other psychoactive substances were also found e.g. cannabinoids, cocaine, ephedrine, MDMA, ketamine, amphetamine, diltiazem and ethanol. Therefore, it could be assumed with a high level of certainty that the possible role of BZP in these cases was negligible”

and that

“In New Zealand, it has been argued (Candor Trust – road safety group) that party pills enhance driving and are, in fact, ‘saving lives’ because they provide a legal and safer alternative to controlled stimulants such as methamphetamine.”

Medical experts warn that benzylpiperazine (BZP) can cause convulsions, anxiety, abnormal heart rates, stomach pain and even death through over-stimulation of chemical pathways in the brain.

All drugs can have side potential effects – read the tiny print on that folded up bit paper in any over the counter or presciption medicine (In case of slow news day: list them in a headline for a ready made scare story on your product of choice). Paracetamol for example can kill, and unlike BZP actually has. I could equally unbalancedly have quoted the EMCDDA report saying BZP “is reported to produce arousal, euphoria, wakefulness, improved vigilance and feeling of wellbeing” (presumably the reason why people take it) and then not mentioned the negative/toxic side effects.

It can also be legally imported into Britain from foreign websites, mostly operating from New Zealand, where it is a multimillion-dollar industry and 20% of the population have taken the drug, which is sold under names such as Pep Twisted, Legal E, Nemesis and Euphoria.

DRUGS ON THE INTERNET!!

Reported deaths in New Zealand from scary new killer drug that 20% of population have tried, with approx 8 million doses consumed : zero

If the assessment, which will be released in June, finds the drug to be dangerous it could be banned throughout the European Union. If the drug is not banned by the EU, the Home Office could add BZP to the list of substances controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act.

Its very unclear what is meant by ‘dangerous’ here. All active drugs have risks and all drug are 'dangerous’ to some degree, indeed most 'can kill' if you try hard enough. But not all drugs are banned, most are strictly regulated to manage and minimize the dangers.

[the Lancet paper] describes the case of an 18-year-old who bought tablets from a dealer in a nightclub thinking they were ecstasy or amphetamines. She collapsed after taking five of them and appeared to have a seizure lasting 10 minutes. When she arrived at hospital her pupils were dilated, her heart was racing and her body temperature and blood pressure had plummeted. She was treated in hospital with tranquillisers and within 12 hours had recovered and was discharged.

The single case described in the Lancet is of a teenager who had unknowingly taken BZP, and furthermore had taken a substantial overdose. So technically this was an accidental 'overdose’ resulting from a ‘poisoning’, and in no way characteristic of informed BZP users who are capable, indeed likely, to exhibit rational overdose-avoiding behaviour if appropriate advice on dosage etc is given at point of sale or on the packaging. Note also that 12 hours later she was fine and went home apparently fully alive.

The Lancet also does not use the term ‘plummeted’ with regards blood pressure and body temperature opting for the less dramatic ‘she was apyrexial (35·9°C).’ (normal body temperature is 37) and reporting ‘a blood pressure of 150/51 mm Hg’. Whilst the systolic figure of 51 is low , 150 systolic pressure is technically in the ‘high blood pressure’ category (>140) if I remember my O'level biology correctly.

The paper says that standard medical tests may not pick up BZP, and warns it is potentially life-threatening.

Test don't pick it up because it is a new drug and not tested for yet. The Lancet quotes a 2005 New Zealand study of 80 BZP related emergency room admissions noting that ‘Three patients had potentially life-threatening recurrent seizures’. I took a look at the referenced paper, and it mentions that of the 80 admissions ‘Two displayed airway compromise and metabolic derangements that were potentially fatal.’ In the study the average patient experiencing adverse effects had taken 4.5 pills (a toxic overdose) and the majority were teenagers.

One of the report's authors, John Ramsey, a toxicologist at St George's hospital in London, told the Guardian: "We have no real idea how widespread the use of this drug is, as it is rarely reported. But it is quite clear it should be a controlled drug."

BZP is a controlled drug. As described earlier in the article it is controlled under the medicine act and is now illegal to sell. I assume he isn’t referring to it being ‘controlled’ by gangsters and criminal profiteers as are other drugs ‘controlled’ under the Misuse of Drugs Act’.

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs discussed the legal status of BZP in November but no action was taken.

It was a preliminary review to see whether more action was required. They agreed to look at the issue in more detail.

Phil Willis, chairman of the Commons science and technology select committee, said: "BZP gives the government the perfect chance to play new drugs with a straight bat. They should look into the harm they cause and give drug users proper information about the drug. It is then up to the criminal justice system to decide how illegal the drug should be based on criminality."

Despite the rather confusing last sentence, Phil is onto something here. The Government does indeed have the opportunity to choose the regulatory and legal framework for this substance that would minimize its potential harms. Unmentioned in the article is the fact that in new Zealand the Government established a new class D (appended to the UK-like A,B,C system) that allowed the drug to be sold under licensed conditions including:

- Where the drug can be sold (e.g. not near schools)
- Age of purchaser controls
- In what doses, strengths and quantities it can be sold (based on a risk assessment)
- How the product must be packaged
- How the product must be stored, and how much can be stored in each location What
- Information must be given to the customer at the point of sale (including information about possible interactions with other drugs and medication)

Interesting information that might have been useful for Guardian readers

The European report lists a series of deaths and serious injuries linked to the drug, including a 23-year-old Swiss woman who took BZP together with ecstasy and drank more than 10 litres of water. She died of hyponatraemia, or water poisoning.

So again 'linked', not 'caused by'. The best (worst) example the author can find is clearly a water toxicity death, not a toxic BZP death. The most thorough review of the drug has was produced by the New Zealand Expert Advisory Committee on Drugs (the equivalent of our ACMD), which goes unmentioned in the Guardian coverage. Commenting on this particular death the EACD notes that: “No linkage with the BZP was made and the death displayed all the characteristics of an ecstasy related death” adding that “Other than this one case, no other fatalities are known of, therefore BZP's known potential to cause death is low , or as yet unknown”

Originally designed as a cattle wormer, the drug is considered so dangerous by US authorities that it is classified as schedule one, the same category as heroin.

Schedule 1 is also the same catagory as - less scary drug - cannabis, indeed the US sheduling system is arguably even more riven with anomalies and bad science than our own. According to the EACD review, the DEA decision to put BZP in schedule 1 was in part based on the same water toxicity death, mentioned above, (the one with which ‘no linkage with the BZP was made’).

It should also be noted that the DEA scheduling decision was based on an error in assessing the drugs potency (overestimating it by 20,000%): The DEA initially claimed that:

“BZP acts as a stimulant in humans and produces euphoria and cardiovascular changes including increases in heart rate and systolic blood pressure. BZP is about 20 times more potent than amphetamine in producing these effects. However, in subjects with a history of amphetamine dependence , BZP was found to be about 10 times more potent than amphetamine. ” [ref]

The DEA then produced a revised BZP profile in 2004 stating:

“BZP acts as a stimulant in humans and produces euphoria and cardiovascular effects, namely increases in heart rate and systolic blood pressure. BZP is about 10 to 20 times less potent than amphetamine in producing these effects .”^[ref]

The EMCDDA report also notes that BZP is one tenth the potency of amphetamines. Again unmentioned in the Guardian story.

The report also gives anecdotal evidence that BZP was used in an alleged drug-induced rape case in Britain.

A single piece of scary but unsubstantiated annecdata. The EMCDDA report says the following:

“there has been an alleged drug facilitated sexual assault case in which BZP and 1-(4-methoxyphenyl) piperazine (pMeOPP) were detected in a urine sample. The concerned individual declared to have taken pills called ‘PEP Love’”……. And that “No further details about the case are available.”

So it was an unspecified and alleged ‘sexual assault’, not specified as a ‘rape’, and the wording suggests the user took the pills voluntarily, and there are no further details, about the nature of the assault, whether charges were brought, or whether other drugs (including alcohol) might have been involved.

The authors of the report are concerned that many of the injuries caused by the stimulant may go unreported because it is not routinely tested for and clubbers are unlikely to tell doctors they have taken it.

This is a problem for all illegal or quasi-legal drugs

But despite several raids by the agency and police, including the seizure of 64,900 tablets from a car in London, online shops are still selling thousands of pills a day.

DRUGS ON THE INTERNET!! (refrain)

Finally this quote from a user at the end:

"But I would imagine the legal status and its availability is the main reason people take it."

Morphs into this more dramatic, almost viz-like, pull quote,

'Its legal status is a big reason for people taking it'

helping to back up what the author's apparently pre-decided narrative: this is a killer drug which should be banned.

Just to be clear about this. BZP use has risks, and given its relative newness on the party scene these risks are relatively poorly understood. However, there have been a number of published studies, and governmental reviews that describe what is known thus far. Almost any drug can kill if misused, but BZP, whilst being linked to a number of deaths, does not appear to be linked by way of direct toxic fatality – even following overdose – to any of them. It is evidently possible, but hasn't happened yet. Drug death stats are a minefield at the best of times, but given that BZP has been consumed by significant numbers of people (probably millions) over a number of years, this would suggest to me that compared to similarly placed drugs including ecstasy and amphetamines, it may be at least comparatively less risky.

From a harm minimisation perspective this raises important issues. If people are substituting BZP use for more dangerous illegal drugs, the net effect may be reduced harm (including the harm of a drug conviction). The fact that BZP appears to be fairly dose specific - with unpleasant side effects kicking in at a level only marginally higher than the active dose, (according to the EACD report; at 2.5 times the average dose) as well as following attempts to re-dose as effects ware off - may actually have a self limiting effect on use of the drug: it doesn’t appear to lend itself to patterns of binge use or problematic dependent use. If users are educated about the dangers and have clear safety and dose information available at point of sale or on the packaging potential harms can be reduced further.

Journalists find justification (and a self-congratulatory follow up story) when ‘clampdowns’ are announced in the wake of a decent media drug panic. But if the drug is brought within the Misuse of Drugs Act as this piece seems to be suggesting users may either return to potentially more dangerous drugs, or be buying BZP of unknown strength and purity with no safety information from a harm maximising illegal marketplace. Overdosing teenagers turning up in emergency rooms would seem more likely in this scenario. Bad reporting of drug stories can end up harming people by politicising descisions and making rational evidence-based public health interventions more difficult and less likely.

There are other options of-course. Whilst unregulated sales of the past are clearly unacceptable, the drug could be strictly regulated for sale from licensed vendors, with age of purchaser controls, in plain packaging, with appropriate safety information and warnings, and in units of known dosage – enabling users to make informed decisions and minimise risks. Something like this has, as mentioned, been tried in New Zealand with the class D idea. Maybe the Guardian should be covering that too – and its not like they are unaware of it. The author of this piece contacted me a couple of weeks ago, we had a long chat about all the points raised above, and he had read Transform’s briefing on piperzines produced last year, which discusses all this in detail. Unfortunately, the only detail he uses is in the Guardian online blog item on the same story where he references a scary stat about DRUGS ON THE INTERNET!! from the briefing.

I rate the Guardian. People take it seriously and much of the misinformation in this news piece will probably be cropping up in future coverage - (just watch out for more ridiculous references to date rape, car accidents, death, 'worming tablets' and 'fertiliser').

For the Guardian this was all very.....dissapointing.