A response to Ian Oliver's anti-legalisation comments in the Independent

As the drug law reform position gathers mainstream momentum the number of people willing to publicly defend prohibition and critique regulatory policy alternatives is dwindling, along with the number of comment pieces attempting to make that case. Following former head of the UKs Anti drugs Unit Julian Critchley's piece in the Independent last week it was perhaps both inevitable and appropriate that space was given to one the old guard to attack Critchley's position and defend the prohibitionist status quo. In this case the honour fell to one of the brave few still willing to stand the their drug-war ground, Dr Ian Oliver, former Chief Constable of Grampian Police, now public speaker (for a mere 1-3K) , and author of 'Drug Affliction' , which the single (five star) review on Amazon describes as 'essential reading' (reviewed by Dr Ian Oliver).

You would hope that Dr Oliver, with his undoubtedly distinguished police career would have a pretty sophisticated and nuanced understanding of drugs policy, but if so it is not evident in his Independent comment piece, titled 'legalising drugs would only make matters worse' . Instead we are presented with a string of credibility-straining unreferenced 'facts' and a case against the legal regulation of drugs seemingly based largely on his own invented reality, bizarre inferences, and what I can only describe as a 'quirky' take on economics, maths and logic. A curiously distilled version of the Oliver's arguments can be seen in the BMJ discussion forums here.

(update 21.08.08: an edited version of Olivers Independent piece also appears in the Guardian's Comment is Free online today)

I welcome contributions to the debate such as these. Oliver's response, however well intentioned he may be, provides a striking contrast to Critchley's piece and I sincerely hope people will read both side by side, highlighting the yawning gulf in understanding. It also gives us the opportunity to pull apart the hopelessly lame arguments that prohibition's defenders continue to parrot despite the overwhelming intellectual and evidential case against them (see below - responses in small italics). I actually hope more of Oliver's colleagues will put righteous pen to paper and produce similar missives as they only invite ridicule and are quite brilliantly effective at undermining what little credibility the crumbling prohibitionist narrative still has, especially when so obviously juxtaposed against an eloquently put case for reform such as Critchley's.

Legalising drugs would only make matters worse

Recently, A great deal of media attention has been focused on a call for the legalisation of drugs by a former civil servant who was responsible for the Cabinet's anti-drug unit. In The Independent last week, Julian Critchley said that legalisation would be "less harmful than the current strategy" and that an "overwhelming majority of professionals in the field" agree with that view.

Now he has become a teacher, his dangerously naive views appear to be more harmful than an inadequate UK drug policy, and he must associate with a limited group of professionals if his assertion is not gross exaggeration. The majority of people in the UK do not wish to see drugs legalised, and only 6 per cent of the global population between the ages of 15-64 use drugs; this is hardly justification for legalisation.

Nor is this the justification Critchley makes. He argues for reform on the basis that the current policy is not only ineffective but makes things worse - and that our drug policy 'is dictated by tabloid irrationality, and not by evidence'. The fact that a position does not enjoy majority support does not nullify the arguments for it and appealing to the authority of opinion polls so early in the piece displays the intellectual weakness at the heart of the analysis. Whilst it is true that most people do not use illegal drugs , there are massive problems associated with significant minority who do - more specifically the sprawling criminal markets that supply them.

The UK has the highest rate of drug misuse in Europe and the abuse of illicit drugs is a major social problem, not least because of the public health implications.

Hardly a ringing endorsement for the policy status quo Oliver advocates

Aids/HIV and other blood-borne diseases are global pandemics and there is a huge ignorance in the UK about these.....

There is no HIV transmission or AIDS directly caused by any form of legal drug use. None. The use of prescribed heroin with clean needles is not associated with any HIV transmission, so let us be completely clear on this: drug related HIV transmission amongst injecting drug users is very specifically a result of prohibition and the use of dirty drugs with dirty needles in unsafe environments it promotes. Oliver is apparently defending the policy that has caused the widespread misery and death he is simultaneously condemning, whilst criticizing those who propose proven approaches that entirely eliminate the problem. This thoroughly unpleasant and offensively stupid argument was similarly pushed by Joseph Califano in the Financial Times and the BMJ recently, and - to their shame - the Home Office, particularly bizarrely given that they are currently funding a pilot study of Swiss-style heroin clinics in London.

and sexually transmitted infections, which are also linked with drug abuse.

er, predominantly alcohol abuse. But anyway the legal status of the drugs in question is irrelevant.

The legalisation of drugs would lead inevitably to a greater number of addictions...

There is no evidence that punitive drug laws are an effective deterrent to use and plenty of evidence to show that they are a marginal or negligible factor in drug taking decisions which are largely determined by a complex array of cultural and socio- economic variables. Drug use has risen consistently during prohibition, indeed faster than any time in history: Making the case for prohibition keeping drug use down it a tricky one, not that this stops Oliver (see below). For a more detailed discussion on the impact of drug law reform on prevalence see chapter 5 of 'After the War on Drugs Tools for the Debate'.

Critchley directly addresses this point with the example of the fall in smoking following more effective regulation and public health led interventions over the past two decades – a point Oliver entirely fails to engage with.

...an increased burden on the health and social services,...

Again – no evidence is provided to support this assertion. Prohibition is very effective at maximising drug harms by encouraging high risk behaviours amongst users (injecting, sharing needles etc), and ensuring drugs are of unknown strength and purity and used in dangerous environments. It actively increases drug harms to users. With such pressures removed overall harm would fall under a regulatory system in which lower risk behaviors (including non-use) could be encouraged through re-direction of enforcement spending into proven public health interventions: education, prevention, harm reduction and treatment.

.....and there would be no compensating diminution in criminal justice costs as, contrary to the view held by legalisers, crime would not be eliminated or reduced.

This is ridiculous. Even the Home Office – hardly the most emphatic supporters of legalisation – acknowledge that crime would be reduced. Currently we spend over 4 billion a year enforcing the drug laws, in turn creating somewhere between 11 and 16 billion in crime costs. We know from the experiments with heroin prescribing, in which problematic illicit drug users are brought within a legal regulated system, that their offending drops dramatically as does related illicit market activity. The crime costs associated with alcohol prohibition in Al Capone’s era largely disappeared when alcohol was re-legalised and regulated.

Perhaps it is not widely known that there is a global movement to overturn the United Nations Conventions and secure the legalisation of all drugs driven by people who see huge profits to be had from marketing another addictive substance.

An example of the daft evil-legalisation-conspiracy theories popping up with increasing frequency (as meaningful intellectual arguments prove increasingly hard to cobble together). It is a now familiar and rather sad gambit of those on the defensive in a public drugs debate to accuse the opposition of being corrupt or having sinister financial backers – usually being in the pay of Big Pharma or an evil anonymous billionaire. To note: If I have a sinister paymaster, the cheque has yet to arrive, and I honestly have no motive beyond our mission statement. Transform is a registered charity funded largely by charitable trusts (details freely available), the staff receive pretty measly salaries (grumble grumble), our many volunteers none, and unlike Dr Oliver, our books are all free online, and we don’t charge three grand for speaking engagements.

Critchley remember, whose article Oliver’s cut and paste rant is supposed to be a response to, is evidently not funded by anyone, indeed he only returned to the media spotlight reluctantly (8 years after leaving his post) because someone happened to spot an obscure blog comment post and alerted the media (wasn’t me boss). Oliver’s deliriously stupid and unfounded accusations do, of course, conveniently divert attention from having to actually engage with most of Critchley's arguments or analysis. So if you have a specific accusation about us Mr Oliver, I want to hear it. Otherwise, shut up, grow up, and lets stick to the policy debate please. With us – not some phantom enemy.

We also see a comparatively new arrival in the paranoid prohibitionist conspiracy canon, the equally risible suggestion that there is some sort of legalisation Illuminati attempting to ‘overturn’ the UN conventions, with unspecified and unstated aims left to the readers imagination, but we presume to be some sort of end of days global-hedonistic-anarchy-Sodom and Gomorrah type thing. (But who knows?).

Needless to say it’s all prize winning twaddle which would probably also be mildly offensive if it wasn’t so ridiculous. At Transform, its true, we do occasionally don hooded capes, sacrifice chickens, drink the blood of virgins and chant Latin incantations around candle lit pentagrams – but that’s just team building and nothing to do with our policy or campaigning work.

Of course there are a many individuals and NGOs seeking to reform and adapt the UN drug conventions and related institutional structures so that they are better able to deal with the challenges faced today – challenges that are dramatically different to the era in which the conventions were conceived and drafted (going back to the 40's). Indeed the need to make the conventions ‘fit for purpose’ has been highlighted at the very top of the UN drug control infrastructure. This UN drug control reform debate is both entirely appropriate (indeed encouraged and funded by the UNODC - an organisation whose initials Dr Oliver likes to put after his name having done consultancy work for them) and urgently needed given the all to obvious failings and unintended negative consequences of current global approach Oliver apparently wants to defend (consequences also acknowledged within the UNODC system itself).

Amongst the reform minded NGOs are some, including Transform, that seek UN level legal reforms that allow greater flexibility within the system for individual countries – or groups of countries - to opt out of some of the rigid prohibitionist strictures, if they democratically determine it to be in their best interest. This is a freely, widely and publicly stated position and Transform, amongst others, are welcomed by the UN to the debating forum to make their case, having been awarded ECOSOC special consultative UN status in 2006. We seek to reform and improve the obviously failing UN drug control systems, not to 'overturn' them.

Research has demonstrated that the dependency rate for "legal" drugs among those who chose to use them would be around 50 per cent, the same as tobacco, which is why major companies are turning to developing countries in order to encourage smoking.

Different populations of drug users (by drug, geography, demographics, social class, sex, ethnicity etc) display dramatically different behaviors and experience dramatically different levels of harm. Legal status has little or nothing to do with addiction rates, and to suggest that when illegal drugs are brought within a legal framework addiction rates for all drugs will magically change to 50% - on the basis that 'that’s what’s happened with tobacco’ (again referring to some mysterious unreferenced ‘research’ ) is, well, non-congruent with any conventional understanding of addiction science that I'm aware of.

Recently, a TV programme discussed the issue, and several members of the public phoned in their views, most of which were responsibly opposed to the misuse of drugs.

Supporters of legal drug regulation are all ‘responsibly opposed to the misuse of drugs’. Unlike many who share Oliver’s punitive prohibitionist position, however, they are able to make a distinction between use and misuse, or problematic and non-problematic use, (the mainstream public, media and political discourse does not struggle to make this distinction with alcohol) and also think that proven public health interventions are likely to be a better way forward than mass criminalisation of young people.

However, it was alarming to hear several people say that they thought that legalising drugs would be the most effective way of dealing with the problem. All of these good people believed that such action would defeat the traffickers, take the profit out of the drug trade and solve the drug problem completely.

No, not ‘solve the drug problem completely’, rather dramatically reduce the problems specifically associated with the illegal market. Legalisation and regulation does not claim to be a silver bullet or a panacea – merely reduce the carnage directly created by prohibition and the criminal control of a multi billion pound market in dangerous drugs. Also worth pointing out that random phone ins on an unnamed TV show do not necessarily represent the extensive body of expertise in the drug law reform movement.

There was no consideration given to the fact that there is a thriving black market in the legal drugs of alcohol and tobacco,...

The criminal market for tobacco is around 20% of the total market, and most of that is smuggled and at least produced legally in the first instance, even if tax and excise is being avoided. The illegal market for alcohol is pretty insignificant as it is so cheap and available anyway. Would Dr Oliver prefer 100% of the illegal market to be controlled by violent criminal profiteers, or 20%? Even if we conservatively use the tobacco market breakdown as our model, with a global illicit drug market turnover estimated at £300 billion a year, we would still be looking at £240 billion a year worth of criminal opportunity being eliminated and brought within the legal sphere. Illegal markets would not disappear entirely but the extraordinary profits on offer to organised criminal networks under the current system would dramatically fall. Its basic supply and demand economics. Drugs like heroin and cocaine are worth - literally - more than their weight in gold because only because of prohibition. Without it they are just basic low value processed agricultural products.

..and no awareness of the huge administrative burden that would be created by setting up a government department to tax and administer drugs if legalisation had occurred.

Billions saved annually from criminal justice enforcement expenditure would eclipse any regulatory administrative expenses by a vast margin, and the billions generated in tax revenue would also feed positively into the equation.

There was no awareness of the devious ways in which drug traffickers would circumvent the legislation and no thought given to the huge increase in addiction/dependency that would automatically follow such an ill-advised move, with the tremendous damage that would be visited on the health services in perpetuity. The tax demands would rocket as a consequence.

Harm would fall, as would health costs, as already outlined. Financial savings across government would be huge.

It is always asserted that legalisation would take the profit out of drug trafficking and would result in a huge drop in crime but, short of the Government distributing free drugs, those who commit crime now to obtain their drugs would continue to do so if they became legal.

Under a legally regulated system the Government is in the position to determine pricing and the balance would have to be struck between keeping prices low enough to discourage illicit market activity and high enough to discourage use – the ongoing dilemma faced with tobacco pricing policy. None the less this is a a key intervention that Government are completely powerless to do under the existing unregulated criminal free for all Dr Oliver advocates. Drugs supplied under a medical prescription model to small minority of long term problematic users (this model already exists and functions both effectively and legally) would indeed be effectively free, but would only represent a small part of the total market. Worth noting that almost zero crime is committed by tobacco and alcohol addicts to support their habits. Oliver again misunderstands basic economics; Expensive drug habit = stealing, cheaper drug habit = less stealing.

It is seldom made clear which drugs the legalisers are referring to and to whom they should become available.

It’s perfectly clear if you can be bothered to read the relevant documents rather than inventing your own reality based on TV show phone ins. The lack of clarity is your own private domain of willful ignorance.

Is it the position that they wish to legalise "crack" and will all people, regardless of age and mental condition, be able to buy them?

Obviously not. You clearly don’t understand the concept of 'regulation' .

The cumulative effects of prohibition and interdiction, combined with education and treatment during 100 years of International Drug Control, have had a significant impact in stemming the drug problem.

Im sorry, but comments like this are basically beyond satire. LOOK AROUND YOU and tell me again that you think prohibition has been effective.

Legalisation would be likely to convince people that any legal activity cannot be very harmful,...

Again, utter nonsense. A key element of future policy is that part of the redirected enforcement expenditure would be spent on educating key vulnerable populations about drug risks, and encouraging responsible lifestyle choices. There is nothing about pragmatic law reform that precludes a stong anti drug message, indeed it is the enforcement of prohibition that devours the lions share of precious drug policy resources better spent on evidence based public health measures, as well as actively preventing the development of social and cultural norms around safer, more responsible drug use (or indeed abstinence).

... increase the availability of drugs...

legal regulation allows some degree of control over the availability of drugs, currently we have none at all as prohibition has abdicated all control to violent gangsters and unregulated street dealers.

...increase the harmful consequences associated with drugs and remove the social sanctions normally supported by the legal system.

Rubbish. See above.

All drugs, including prescription and over-the-counter medicines, can be dangerous if they are taken without attention to appropriate medical advice.

Obviously true – and equally obviously why they need to be appropriately legally regulated rather than left in the hands of criminals and street dealers.

Instead of calling for legalisation, it would be far more sensible, as Nick Harding suggested in his article about cannabis use in yesterday's Independent, to seek improved policies. The compassionate and sensible approach should be that we do everything possible to reduce addiction and drug abuse, not encourage it.

No one in drug law reform movement is opposed to sensible prevention measures if they can be shown to be effective, in fact the entire thrust of the movement is to realign policy towards public health interventions that can be shown to work and away from criminal justice measures that are proven to be futile and counter productive.

For more on the drugs debate, and how to respond to frequently raised concerns about drug law reform please see Transform's recent publication: After the war on Drugs; Tools for the Debate.

Former Police Chief of Seattle critiques the War on Drugs

From Reason TV

Norm Stamper is a cop who saw it all during his 34 years on active duty. As police of Seattle from 1994 through 2000, he was in charge during violent World Trade Organization protests in the Emerald City.

Stamper, who holds a Ph.D. in leadership and human behavior from United States International University, has emerged as one of the most thoughtful and outspoken critics of the war on drugs, which he believes causes untold misery, undermines effective law enforcement, and doesn't begin to pass any sort of cost-benefit analysis. As important, the libertarian Stamper believes that the drug war—and other wars on the behaviors on consenting adults—does great violence to the idea that we own our bodies.

Stamper is the author of the Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing (2005) and now works with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), a nonprofit created by former cops to "reduce the multitude of unintended harmful consequences resulting from fighting the war on drugs and to lessen the incidence of death, disease, crime, and addiction by ultimately ending drug prohibition."

For an audio podcast version, go here.

Typical of the US debate it is heavily cannabis skewed, a doubtless reflecting his experience on the front line, and also reflects his libertarian sensibilities. Interesting stuff from a senior police officer.

How the Daily Mail dealt with the Julian Critchley story

As reported on our blog on Wednesday, the former head of the UK Anti-drug Co-ordination Unit (UKADCU – UK Anti-Drug Co-ordinating Unit) Julian Critchley, called for the legalisation of drugs. It was reported in the Daily Mail online thus ’Legalising drugs would cause less harm AND cut crime, says former senior civil servant’. It is fairly straight reportage with some entirely unexceptional quotes from the usual suspects.

For a number of weeks now, Transform has been talking about policy climate change – the developing environment, increasingly toxic to prohibition and more nurturing toward fundamental reform. So how does the Mail story stack up? Firstly the headline is not rabid, it is absolutely neutral with a nicely capitalised ‘AND’. Secondly, the majority of the story just reports the key parts of Critchley’s analysis. It isn’t until the end that the unreconstructed ‘drugs are bad’ nonsense kicks in - the comments - copy and paste soundbites - seeming extreme and rather bizarre relative to the more nuanced Critchley analysis. Thirdly, no leader comment to undermine what Critchley said and no rant from Melanie Phillips (I know she’s on holiday, but my guess is that they have a bank of Mel sound-alikes that they could have drawn on).

For me this explodes the myth that the Mail-type reactionary tabloids will destroy anyone that calls for significant reform and shows that policy climate change is happening. As I have said many times before, it would be bizarre for any tabloid to seriously attempt to defend prohibition (aside from the un-useful ‘drugs are bad’ generalisations) because there is no line of reasoning or evidence to support it. Indeed the Mail has historically been equivocal and sometimes supportive of debate.

I was called by the Mail.

It is crucial that we, as commentators on the drug policy issue, challenge the rhetoric that the tabloids have created, an atmosphere where it would be ‘political suicide’ for senior politicians to call for prohibition to be replaced with legal regulation of drug production supply and use. As we are calling for the evidence to prevail on the policy issue, we should also review the evidence on ‘political suicide’. David Cameron will, in all likelihood be our next Prime Minister. Not only is he on the record calling for a genuine debate on legalisation at the highest level, he’s also a former cannabis user. Added to that, his friend and cabinet colleague Alan Duncan, is a supporter of legalisation, as he proudly displays on his web site. This is the next Tory Government folks, not some parliamentary candidates for the Green Party. Forming the next Government is not ‘political suicide’. Paul Flynn MP, the most outspoken advocate of drug law reform in the House has been reelected three times with increasing majorities.

My conclusion - the Daily Mail is not responsible for closing down the debate on drugs and drug policy – politicians are. It is their cowardice, opportunism and careerism that they prioritize over telling the truth about the failure of prohibition and the need to bring the drugs trade within the law and the ambit of state regulation. And that applies not just to Labour and the Conservatives. The Lib Dems have hidden their far more enlightened drug policy so deep as to render it effectively invisible, for (misplaced) fear of taking flak from political opponents.

Politicians cannot continue to blame the media for their reactionary positions and overwhelming silence on drugs policy reform. And we must not let them off the hook by repeating the myth that they are basically in hock to The SUN and the Mail. It is incumbent on our elected officials to subject any long standing policy to substantive analysis and fundamental review – especially when it has been subject to such long running authoritative critique from a wide range of academic, parliamentary and NGO bodies.

It’s our money that they’re spending on the drugs war, and they’re fighting it essentially in our name. Buying into the rhetoric about ‘what the tabloids will say’ is to collude with political cowardice and opportunism. The tabloids are in fact potential allies in communicating policy failure and the need for change to the wider public. The target of our ire must be our elected officials and their dangerous propaganda. Don’t let’s shoot the messenger.

blog by Danny Kushlick - Posted by Steve

Loads of people taking drugs shock!

There are two main official UK drug use surveys each year, the British Crime Survey, and the Department of Health drug use school survey, now compiled together by the NHS Information Centre each year published today along with various other data from the DoH, the Home Office, Office for National Statistics, the Health Protection Agency and NTA. Notably (pay attention journalists) 'most of the data contained in the bulletin have been published previously', in fact the only unpublished figures are on drug-related admissions to hospital.

It is now a calendar fixture that each time these surveys are published the media will run 'loads of people taking drugs shock!' stories, demonstrating their goldfish-like ability to forget the 4 monthly repeated fact that, unbelievably, loads of people are in fact taking drugs. As regular as clockwork, this morning sees the Independent lead with one of its tabloid style front page headlines:

None of these facts are new or significantly different from last year, when loads of people were similarly taking drugs. The Home Office, with similar predictability will spin the prevalence figures as best they can, and try and show that drug use is actually falling, when it clearly isn't - especially when you look at the area that matters most - problematic use of heroin and cocaine which remains more or less stable at its historic Euro-league topping high.

The Sun front page has a similar theme:

As does the Daily Mail

If anything this tri-annual media ritual only serves to highlight, yet again, what stunningly poor value for money we are getting from our disastrous drug strategy and just how hollow all that political posturing about 'cracking down', 'getting tough', 'turning the corner' and 'zero tolerance' really is. But nothing it seems will prompt the Government to change course or give alternative approaches even fleeting consideration (even though many evidently think we should in private). Not the relentlessly bad news on drug use, misuse, drug related crime, or the spiralling catastrophes in Afghanistan or Colombia, nor the endless stream of authoritative high level reports spelling it all out in tedious detail. More of the same is all we are promised, with a bit of populist window dressing if you're lucky.

The DoH is quoted in the Independent parroting the usual line that:

"More people than ever before are getting into and staying in treatment, drug-related deaths are down and the level of drug-fuelled crime has fallen substantially."

Scratch beneath the surface and even these claims are either untrue or misleading. They dont measure drug related crime, drug deaths are not down, and even if treatment numbers are up no amount of throwing money at the problem or diddling the stats can hide the fact that treatment outcomes remain obstinately awful.

The Independent at least gives the Transform position a nod in its coverage :

Danny Kushlick, the head of policy at the drugs think-tank Transform, said the Government was burying its head in the sand by refusing to acknowledge that millions of people used drugs safely. "In order to maintain its position on prohibition, the Government has to show that all drug use is dangerous. Politicians find it very difficult to admit that 90 per cent of those who use drugs either have a boring or a fun time. Drug policy is overwhelmingly focused in a very skewed way on problem drug users. We should focus our attention more on managing use rather than mismanaging misuse.

"We need legal control and regulation of drug use. That is how we manage use of alcohol and we need the same for drugs."

Why we need a cost-benefit analysis part II

The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) has recently released a report 'Towards a better understanding of drug-related public expenditure' which backs up calls for a cost-benefit analysis of the current drugs laws.

Click on image to read the report

The report argues that,

'Quantifying a government’s drug-related expenditure is a first step in formulating an economic evaluation of drug policy interventions. This evaluation will provide information that can be used to determine whether or not intended outcomes have been achieved.'

The report also recognises that any form of CBA must also look at the alternatives to prohibition in order to fully evaluate the most viable options.

'Public expenditure figures are ultimately intended to enhance policymakers’ decision-making on drug policy. But decisionmakers must be very careful and refrain from taking decisions based on raw public expenditure figures without carefully trading-off the alternatives involved or without a sufficient evaluation of the possible consequences of spending choices. The simple identification of an area of low (or high) expenditure cannot in itself suggest inefficiency. An inefficient allocation of resources exists when the resources concerned could generate greater benefits if used elsewhere, but without an understanding of the benefits gained, it is not possible to assess whether expenditure in a particular area is efficient or not.'

This report is welcomed by Transform who have consistently called for a CBA (see my previous blog on why we need a cost-benefit analysis).

The new report, in conjunction with the Eurobarometer poll (blogged here) that asked young people their opinions about support for the control and regulation of drugs, suggests that within the EU and EC there is a willingness to look at alternatives to the status quo.

Unfortunately the UK goverment has repeatedly rebuffed calls for a CBA. In 2003 at a press conference, Danny asked the then drugs spokesperson at the Home Office, Bob Ainsworth MP, whether the government would support a cost benefit analysis of drug law enforcement. Quick as a flash his reply came back: "Why would we want to do that unless we were going to legalise drugs?"

Well it seems that within Europe those important questions are being asked now with a view to creating an evidence-based policy rather than one based on outdated, and irrational solutions.

Former Director of UK Anti-drug Co-ordination Unit calls for legalisation

The former head of the UK Anti-drug Co-ordination Unit (UKADCU - the Home Office department in charge of drug policy), Julian Critchley, posted to BBC Home Affairs correspondent, Mark Easton's blog last week, 'The War on Drugs' , calling for the legalisation of drugs.

Media Update: 14.08.08

• Guardian coverage
• Danny Kushlick writes for Comment is Free in the Guardian (168 comments and counting)
  
• BBC online coverage
• Critchley on the BBC Radio 4's Today (audio)
• Telegraph coverage
• Daily Mail coverage
• Julian Critchley writing in the Independent
  

In his post he also reports how those he met during his time at the Unit knew that criminalisation was causing more harm than the drugs themselves. (This comes as no surprise to anyone who has read the damning report from the PM's Strategy Unit from 2003.)

"I think what was truly depressing about my time in UKADCU was that the overwhelming majority of professionals I met, including those from the police, the health service, government and voluntary sectors held the same view : the illegality of drugs causes far more problems for society and the individual than it solves. Yet publicly, all those intelligent, knowledgeable people were forced to repeat the nonsensical mantra that the Government would be 'tough on drugs', even though they all knew that the Government's policy was actually causing harm."

Julian Critchley is to be congratulated for speaking out with such candour on the issue. One can only wonder how many other former civil servants are of the same opinion, but haven't gone public.

we live in hope

There is nothing to suggest that things have changed at the highest level in drug policy development in the UK, even if the name of the department has changed a few times (to show 'something is being done') since Critchley's stint in charge. During the recent 'consultation' on the ten-year drug strategy, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs described the Government's consultation document thus:

"it is unfortunate that the consultation paper’s ‘key facts and evidence’ section appears to focus on trying to convince the reader of success and progress; rather than providing an objective review and presentation of the current evidence. The ACMD found the consultation paper self-congratulatory and generally disappointing."

Plus ca change...

Critchley, having retrained as a teacher, concludes with the following:

"I find that when presented with the facts, the students I teach are quite capable of considering issues such as this, and reaching rational conclusions even if they started with a blind Daily Mailesque approach. I find it a shame that no mainstream political party accords the electorate the same respect."

Critchley's posts are copied below in full.

73. At 7:25pm on 30 Jul 2008, JulianCritchley wrote:

Several years ago, I was Director of the UK Anti-Drug Co-ordination Unit in Cabinet Office (which sounds a lot grander than it was). Our job was to co-ordinate Government policy across the Departments, supporting the then Drugs "Tsar", Keith Hellawell. I joined the Unit more or less agnostic on drugs policy, being personally opposed to drug use, but open-minded about the best way to deal with the problem. I was certainly not inclined to decriminalise.

However, during my time in the Unit, as I saw more and more evidence of ?what works?, to quote New Labour's mantra of the time, it became apparent to me that the available evidence pointed very clearly to the fact that enforcement and supply-side interventions were largely pointless. They have no significant, lasting impact on the availability, affordability or use of drugs. In the Spending Review we undertook, we did successfully manage to re-allocate resources towards treatment programmes, but even then I had misgivings about the effectiveness of those programmes. Many hear the word "treatment" and imagine medical intervention or "cures", yet many of these programmes were often supported largely by anecdotal evidence of success, and the more successful interventions were simply too expensive to use widely, given other pressures on health budgets.

It seems apparent to me that wishing drug use away is folly. The only sensible cause of action is to minimise the damage caused to society by individuals' drugs choices. What harms society is the illegality of drugs and all the costs associated with that. There is no doubt at all that the benefits to society of the fall in crime as a result of legalisation would be dramatic. The argument always put forward against this is that there would be a commensurate increase in drug use as a result of legalisation. This, it seems to me, is a bogus point : tobacco is a legal drug, whose use is declining, and precisely because it is legal, its users are far more amenable to Government control, education programmes and taxation than they would be, were it illegal. Studies suggest that the market is already almost saturated, and anyone who wishes to purchase the drug of their choice, anywhere in the UK, can already do so. The idea that many people are holding back solely because of a law which they know is already unenforceable is simply ridiculous.

Ultimately, people will make choices which harm themselves, whether that involve their diet, smoking, drinking, lack of exercise, sexual activity or pursuit of extreme sports, for that matter. The Government in all these instances rightly takes the line that if these activities are to be pursued, society will ensure that those who pursue them : have access to accurate information about the risks; can access assistance to change their harmful habits should they so wish; are protected by legal standards regime; are taxed accordingly; and ? crucially - do not harm other people. Only in the field of drugs does the Government take a different line, and as a direct result, society suffers truly enormous consequences in terms of crime, both petty and organised, and harm to individuals who are criminalised and unprotected in the pursuit of their drug.

I think what was truly depressing about my time in UKADCU was that the overwhelming majority of professionals I met, including those from the police, the health service, government and voluntary sectors held the same view : the illegality of drugs causes far more problems for society and the individual than it solves. Yet publicly, all those intelligent, knowledgeable people were forced to repeat the nonsensical mantra that the Government would be 'tough on drugs', even though they all knew that the Government's policy was actually causing harm. I recall a conversation I had with a No 10 policy advisor about a series of Whitehall-wide announcements in which we were to emphasise the shift of resources to treatment and highlighting successes in prevention and education. She asked me whether we couldn?t arrange for 'a drugs bust in Brighton' at the same time, or 'a boat speeding down the Thames to catch smugglers'. For that advisor, what worked mattered considerably less than what would play well in the Daily Mail. The tragedy of our drugs policy is that it is dictated by tabloid irrationality, and not by reference to evidence.

77. At 9:38pm on 30 Jul 2008, JulianCritchley wrote:

Re : post 75, RandalCousinsI agree with you, as it happens. It's not as simple as some legalisers would have it. It would be a step into the relative unknown, and we should never be glib about that. It might involve having to legally recognise some very nasty people who are currently involved in the trade, but I suspect that the main difference would be that they would be pursued by the taxman rather than the police. There are international obligations, there would be people who would self-harm through drugs and would blame the change of policy. It would take a mature society to accept that some individuals may hurt, or even kill themselves, as a result of a policy change, even if the evidence suggested that fewer people died or were harmed as a result. I'm not sure our media society is ready to deal with that degree of reason. It would take a brave Government to face down the tabloid fury in the face of anecdotes about nice middle class children who bought drugs legally and came to grief, and this is not a brave Government (see the reclassification of cannabis against all evidence and the advice of its own panel of experts).

However, the Government accepts that its job is to confront and challenge ignorance in other fields such as homophobia and racism, and the equality agenda was also once very unpopular with the tabloids (maybe still is in some parts). So I was thoroughly disillusioned to see so many people who had sought power, refusing to exercise the responsibility which went with that power. What is the point in seeking office in order to improve the lot of society, if you refuse to act on something which would dramatically improve the lot of society, especially those with the least ?

I left the Civil Service and retrained as a teacher, in no small part due to my experiences of having to implement policies which I knew, and my political masters knew, were unsupported, or even contradicted, by evidence. I find that when presented with the facts, the students I teach are quite capable of considering issues such as this, and reaching rational conclusions even if they started with a blind Daily Mailesque approach. I find it a shame that no mainstream political party accords the electorate the same respect.

The Transform Miniblog

In the right sidebar you will notice that the blog has spawned a new 'miniblog'.

The idea of the miniblog is to allow the Transform team to post interesting links, with a very brief comment and description, when they don't really need a more detailed post on the main blog or when we just don't have the time to write one. It provides a snap shot of the river of information flowing into our computers each day: news reports, writing on reform, drug war lunacy, archived material we have stumbled into, other peoples blogs, images and videos, and other weird and wonderful cyber-detritus that washes up in our inboxes or otherwise catches our eye. It will be updated as often or rarely as often as interesting material appears.




The miniblog is a feed of the 10 most recent posts from our del.icio.us bookmarking page and you can view all previous bookmarks on its own page here. You can subscribe to the miniblog RSS feed by clicking here

Unfortunately you can't post responses to the miniblogs (unlike the main blog posts) but if it raises questions or issues do let us know, and if there are links you think we should include please flag them up by sending us an email from here.

Enjoy.

Why we need a cost-benefit analysis

A testimony published by RAND CORP earlier this year reflects what Transform has long been calling for – a cost-benefit analysis of all the policy options for the control of drugs.

‘What Research Tells Us About the Reasonableness of the Current Priorities of National Drug Control’

The testimony was given by Rosalie Liccardo Pacula a senior economist at RAND CORP’s Drug Policy Research Centre to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Domestic Policy United States House of Representatives.
She goes straight to the point arguing that,

‘The current mix of enforcement, prevention and treatment strategies is not the optimal for managing the drug situation we have today. But the problem is not just one of balance in the budget, which implies that simply re-allocating monies across the three primary objectives would fix the problem. The problem is also one of waste. In several areas, the 2008 National Drug Control Strategy advocates continuing or new support for programs that have either (a) never been scientifically proven to be effective and which on analytic grounds seem unlikely to be successful or (b) have already been shown to be completely ineffective.’

This line of argument is backed up not only by Transform (see What is the true cost of drug law enforcement? Why we need an audit for one example) but also by another economist in Informing America's Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Don't Know Keeps Hurting Us.

"It is unconscionable for this country to continue to carry out a public policy of this magnitude and cost without any way of knowing whether, and to what extent, it is having the desired result. Our committee strongly recommends that a substantial, new, and robust research effort be undertaken to examine the various aspects of drug control, so that decision-making on these issues can be better supported by more factual and realistic evidence."

Many economists, and indeed The Economist (see here for example) and the FT (here) amongst others have been calling for, at the very least, a rational evidence-based evaluation of the true costs of the war on drugs.

Even the Government’s drugs spokesman in the House of Lords, Lord Bassam of Brighton, discussed the relevance of a cost-benefit analysis in looking at the full range of policy options in October last year, although he also rules it out.

‘…we believe that our policy is not only right but evidence-based [sic] and that we are making progress.... It is for that reason that we have begun to set out our strategy and decided to consult further on the way in which that strategy should be perfected [sic].

To make our position plain—it is worth putting this on the record—we do not accept that legalisation and regulation are now, or will be, an acceptable response to the presence of drugs [how can they know if they haven't conducted a CBA]. As I said earlier, my right honourable friend the Prime Minister reinforced that view at the recent Labour Party conference when he said that,

“drugs are never going to be decriminalised”.

Legalisation is not open to us in view of our international obligations… The current policy of prohibition on drugs is international and is governed by UN conventions that make unlawful the production and supply of many harmful drugs and limit possession exclusively to medical and scientific purposes. It would be wrong for us to lose sight of that perspective. There is no effective cost-benefit analysis of such a policy, if one could be made. Any such policy would need to address the international dimension.

The impact of legalisation on levels of consumption globally is key to any meaningful cost-benefit analysis. Without accurate figures for this, it is impossible to ascribe meaningful figures to the likely public and individual health cost or properly to assess the impact on productivity and industry or on the level of industrial or traffic accidents. Such fundamental difficulties call into question whether the task is an appropriate use of research funding. The impact of drugs on health is the only legitimate reason for control…

The Government, like the international community generally, believe that the prohibition of narcotic and psychoactive drugs is a crucial element in keeping the level of drug use under control. Such drugs would become easier to access if they were to become legally available, and we would expect levels of use and the resultant harm and costs to individuals and society to expand significantly in the way in which alcohol and tobacco use has done... We acknowledge that there are apparent benefits to an alternative system to prohibition, such as taxation, quality control and a reduction on the pressures on the criminal justice system, but in our view these are outweighed by the costs to the physical and mental health of individuals and society that result from dependence on, and addiction to, what are mind-altering drugs. Legalisation would not safeguard these very real public health interests or allay the concerns; nor would it necessarily significantly undermine international organised crime. For this reason, the Government will not pursue legalisation either domestically or internationally. It is all too easy to lay the problems of the use and misuse of drugs here and abroad simply at the door of prohibition.’

Transform once asked the then drugs minister Bob Ainsworth MP whether he would commission an audit of the effectiveness of drug enforcement spending, to which he tellingly replied:

“Why would we want to do that unless we were going to legalise drugs?”

Finally, I’m going to leave it to Daniel Craig in the opening monologue of the gangster movie Layer Cake to explain who really benefits from the present system of prohibition and who will lose out when they are legally regulated again (first two minutes).

Transform blog transformed with wordle

This image is words from the Transform blog RSS feed graphically transformed using the ingenious wordle website

All wordle images are covered by a creative commons license.

Thinking outside of the box

Martin's recent post on policy Climate Change is backed up by the publication of a couple of the articles below. Whilst the pieces by serving and former police Tim Hollis (The Times) and Brian Paddick (Mail on Sunday) reveal a singularly stubborn commitment to the war on drugs by completely ignoring the obvious flaws inherent in prohibition, Allan Wall and Silver Donald Cameron present rational positions to suggest that it is the prohibition box itself that is the problem. It is well worth looking at the Hollis and Paddick op-eds to see how supporters of merely tweaking the status quo argue their position by not questioning the overarching regime of criminalisation. It is this unwillingness to think outside of the box that constrains their analysis to effectively rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

• Brian Paddick

Three words that explain why the Rausings (and thousands of others involved in drugs) are getting away with it

"A billion pound fortune buys you many things, it seems, including, as we learned last week, immunity from prosecution for possessing crack, cocaine and heroin."

"First there are tip-offs. These bust big shipments and generate wonderful headlines but barely put a dent in supply. Second are operations against street dealers. They take weeks of police time and, within hours of dealers being taken off the street, others have replaced them.
What has been used, and must be used again, is co-ordinated action to take out entire supply chains from import to street dealer.

I’ve seen it succeed in North London in an operation involving the former National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS), the security services, the Met’s Drug Squad and local officers.
With the use of intelligence, undercover officers and street coppering, everyone from importer to street dealer can be identified and prosecuted."

• Tim Hollis

Think tank: Fight smart in the war on drugs -A chief constable calls for a fresh strategy

"That’s why I’m in favour of what I call smarter enforcement – involving more intelligence, more research and more dialogue."

Positioning herself somewhere between these two sets of articles is Melanie Reid in the The Times who throws everything but the kitchen sink into the blender and sets it to turbo, without really coming up with a coherent solution, but at least asking some of the right questions:

• Melanie Reid

Blame the rich for feeding the drug industry: The police will never be able to win the war against drugs. It's the culture of tolerance that is the real problem

"At what point do we start to look at legalisation as an exit strategy in a war we cannot win? Is it possible to turn drugs into a health rather than a crime issue? Or should we blame Britain's excess of tolerance for turning it into one of the most drug-blighted countries in Europe? As one leading expert, Neil McKeganey, of Glasgow University, puts it, at what point do we stop regarding illegal drug use as human right, and start seeing drugs as a destructive social cancer?

These are uncomfortable questions for both the Left and the Right but it is time we started asking them. We have to accept that this is no longer an argument about drug availability; this is about the existence of a drug culture that has spread to every corner of society. The poor old police can plug away at reducing supply until they are exhausted, but they cannot begin to address something that undermines them at every turn."

Family Security Matters , (that carries the Allan Wall piece) "is dedicated to men and women who are seeking answers to the most important question of our time: How to keep our families and our country safe and secure. Here you can find the vital information , the understanding and the solutions you need to conquer fear and combat the enemies who threaten our freedom!"

You wouldn't have expected to see this on their website:

• Allan Wall

Exclusive: Searching for Paradigms and Parallels in Mexico’s Cartel War

"Maybe it’s time that our own leaders look the problem squarely in the eye, and ask if drug prohibition is really the right strategy after all.

The issue recalls another historical parallel – the American prohibition of alcohol from 1920-1933. During alcohol prohibition there were powerful gangsters, such as Al Capone and Bugs Moran, who distributed the prohibited substances, and fought with each other and with the U.S. government.

The argument for legalization is that at least it would take the big money out of the drug trade, and drug addicts could be treated as patients and not as criminals.

Legalization is not a perfect solution. The real solution is that people don’t abuse drugs. But whether you have prohibition, legalization, or something in between, it’s likely that there will always be drug abusers. The trick is to stop these addicts from dragging down the rest of our societies with them."

• Silver Donald Cameron

'Dumb drug policies enrich criminals'

"In short, the law has essentially made itself irrelevant. If anything, the law benefits the business. To a large extent, the industry is profitable precisely because it is illegal. All entrepreneurs take risks, but if the risks include jail time, only the boldest entrepreneurs will enter the business — and they’ll demand a premium for the extra risk.

The net result of our irrational drug policies is that we enrich the criminals and criminalize ordinary citizens. We control tobacco and alcohol far more effectively than we control any illegal drugs. If those are the results we want, these policies are perfect."

Argentine president calls for decriminalisation of drug use

Earlier reports of more substantive drug law reform in Argentina (see blog coverage / discussion here) are gathering pace, with the president and justice minister now calling for decriminalisation of drug users.

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner

Kirchner is quoted in the CNN report saying:

"I don't like it when people easily condemn someone who has an addiction as if he were a criminal, as if he were a person who should be persecuted,"

But in common with similar calls (and actual policy change) in much of South America and around the world, she caveats proposals for the decriminalisation of addiction and personal use with a call for a crack down on dealing and trafficking.

"Those who should be persecuted are those who sell the substances, those who give it away, those who traffic in it."

Typically the bigger debate around closing down the illegal trade altogether through moves towards legal regulation of production and supply is not approached directly but her call adds momentum to the growing decriminalisation trend and a shift in focus in world drug policy away from persecuting users and heavy handed enforcement, towards a more public health / treatment driven approach.

The Argentine minister of security and justice, Anibal Fernandez, clarified the presidents position noting that:

"Decriminalization of the consumer should include what are called second-generation human rights, but at the same time there should be a strong policy of prevention, so that no one falls in the situation of consuming any substance,"

Again demonstrating how a position on decriminalising personal use is in no way incompatible with a strong prevention message or a moral view that drug use (specifically problematic use) is socially unacceptable. There is an important debate to be had around the utility and sustainability of decriminalising use but leaving supply in the hands of organised crime, but it has to be viewed as a positive step and a clear sign of a maturing and more rational approach - to drug users at least. The zero tolerance approaches of the absolutist drug-war discourse are clearly on the wane. It all makes the ridiculous 'get tough' posturing of most mainstream UK politicians look ever more remote from reality.

Leading US drug policy reformer Ethan Nadlemann is then quoted:

"The evidence generally shows that the decriminalization of possession is not clearly associated with any increase in illicit drug use,"

"A few years ago, then-Mexican President Vicente Fox proposed decriminalizing possession of drugs combined with a crackdown on traffickers, but a harsh reaction from the Bush administration caused him to retreat"

"Brazil and Colombia have passed laws decriminalizing drug use in an effort to combat the spread of HIV among injecting drug users"

"Politicians recognize that you basically need to get those people out of the underground and into health systems,"

"This would be part of a growing number of countries in Latin America where there is, either for political or judicial reasons, a push toward decriminalization of personal possession, sometimes combined with initiatives to crack down harder on bigger drug traffickers," he said.

"It typically involves both lessening the criminal sanction for possession of cannabis while also providing for alternatives to incarceration for people addicted to drugs who are arrested for drug possession or other minor offenses."

Obama TV ad spoofs 90s anti-drug campaign

A new ad for the Obama 08 campaign has recently appeared on US TV that mocks some of the glossy anti-drug ads from the 80s and 90s, notably the much derided 1987 'this is your brain on drugs' fried egg Public Service Announcement (PSA).



It is worth noting that this ad is produced and funded by the grass roots MoveOn organisation, and not by the Obama campaign itself, but none the less it surely represents the first time a mainstream presidential campaign has mocked the silliness of the drug war in order to bolster credibility. This is not of course suggesting that drugs prevention / education is a bad thing per se (or that it is incompatible with a progressive drug law reform position) , rather that some of the ill-considered but iconic campaigns of the 'just say no' era have now become the staple of mainstream satire.

Tipping points are notoriously difficult to predict, but in hindsight often seem obvious and inevitable (e.g., the fall of the Berlin Wall). I saw the ad on Comedy Central late last night (reaching what the Daily Show calls the 'stoner demographic'), but if it continues to be aired on other channels/times (MTV is up next) and resonates with voters, we could be witnessing a watershed moment. Now that's change I can believe in!

Thanks to Sanho Tree

Transform transformed - our new strategy and structure

Transform’s Board has recently carried out a comprehensive review of the organisation and the challenges we face over the next few years.

It has become clear that attaining a rational drug policy cannot be achieved by an exclusive focus on the Home Office and relevant politicians. To accomplish change we need to engage with opinion formers and decision makers on a much wider basis. We need to achieve policy climate change. Transform’s Board has agreed to prioritise work over the next five years in three key areas.

Firstly we will be highlighting the international dimensions to drug policy. Drug policy in the UK and other states is underpinned by a number of international treaties that are based on the principles of prohibition. The harms caused by drug policy and the ‘war on drugs’ are international, with the trail of harm generated by prohibition stretching from producer countries, through transit nations to user countries. In all cases these harms are disproportionately experienced by the poorest and least powerful members of society. As well as highlighting these international consequences within Transform’s work we will be looking at developing a number of alliances, that will include both organisations based and operating in other countries and UK organisations who work internationally.

Secondly Transform will be focusing on promoting wellbeing as the key paradigm for drug policy. In partnership with a number of academics we are looking at developing methodologies that allow the wellbeing impact of both existing and proposed drug policy regimes to be evaluated. This work will underpin our continued campaigning for the transfer of drug policy responsibility away from criminal justice agencies to public health authorities. The law enforcement strategies central to current drug policy generate considerable additional harms and have clearly failed. A public health and wellbeing approach to drug policy would be much more effective. However, to achieve this we need to build a wide coalition within the heath and allied professions in support of such an approach.

A major aspect of this work will be supporting the development of the Drugs and Health Alliance (DHA). The DHA is a coalition of agencies campaigning for drug policy to move away from failed criminal justice approaches and instead adopt a public health approach. Transform provides the secretariat for the DHA and in that capacity has recently received funding from the Pilgrim Trust which has enabled us to recruit Francesca Solmi as its co-ordinator. Francesca has a BA in International Relations from Sussex University and a Masters Degree in International Relations and Health Policy from SAIS – Johns Hopkins University. Before joining the DHA she worked with the World Health Organisation on Child Environmental Health issues. She has also interned for the Food and Agricultural Organisation in Rome, and for the United Nations Development Program’s liaison office in Washington DC. Francesca will be based in London and will be working for the Drugs and Health Alliance 2.5 days per week.

Thirdly we will be focusing on the economic impact of prohibition based drug policies. We will be carrying out or commissioning a number of studies to identify the cost of existing policies; both to public finances and to the wider economy. These will be supplemented by further work identifying the benefits of alternative policies based on legal regulation and control. This strand of our work will set out the strong economic case for adopting rational drug policies and further broaden the coalition supporting drug policy reform.

In addition to this refocusing of our research and campaigning work we have reviewed how we are organised and established a new organisational structure. This structure will see Transform’s staff organised into three teams, Research, Policy and Communications, and Operations. The Research team will be responsible for developing Transform’s ‘product’ both through directly produced work and by managing commissioned research projects. Steve Rolles, who has been the lead author of all our major publications would become the Head of Research and will work with Emily Crick our Research Associate. Steve is based in London and Emily in Bristol.

The Policy and Campaigns team will disseminate our material and communicating the case for change. Danny Kushlick moves to a new post as Head of Policy and Communications to head up this team and will be working with Martin Powell, our new Communications Associate. Martin brings with him extensive experience of working in the charitable sector having spent over ten years at environmental and international development campaign groups including Friends of the Earth, the World Development Movement and as Co-Chair of the Jubilee Debt Campaign. Martin has a degree in applied chemistry and a postgraduate diploma in environmental science, policy and planning. Office based volunteers, student placements and interns will supplement these teams. Francesca Solmi the DHA’s co-ordinator will be based in this team.

The third team, Operations will focus on Transform’s funding and organisational management. A new post of ‘Director of Operations’ is being established with overall responsibility for management of the organisation. This post will work closely with Jane Slater, Operations Co-ordinator and they will both focus on human resources, funding, finances and project management. John Moore is currently filling this post on an interim basis.

The new strategy opens up a range of exciting possibilities for Transform and the restructuring utilises the strengths of our staff, enabling us to maximise Transform’s impact and influence.

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.

Is Drug Policy Climate Change Happening?

I am new to drug policy campaigning, but have been struck by how easy it is convincing individuals that regulation and control, rather than prohibition would deliver huge benefits. But if I have learned one thing from meeting politicians around the world during years working on environmental and international development campaigns, it is that being right is never enough, you need the right political climate too.

So I was not surprised to hear that when Transform asked then UK Home Office Minister Bob Ainsworth MP to audit the costs and benefits of different drug control options, he said; “Why would we want to do that unless we were going to legalise drugs?” In other words the government has no intention of letting the facts get in the way of a terrible policy that enables them to play “tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime”, when the war on drugs is precisely the opposite. Or perhaps equally the Labour Party was not going to do anything to undermine the UK’s Siamese-twin foreign policy relationship with the Bush Administration.

So to end prohibition we need the public and political climate to change to one supportive of evidence based drug policy. Well, Obama has made some interesting noises as mentioned on this blog before, and if he was elected that might give a bit more latitude for governments to at least audit their drug policies properly without being threatened with US shock-and-awe. But in the end politicians must believe that climate change around drugs policy is happening out there in the real world. And at Transform, after ten long years working on this issue, we see strong hints that it finally is.

Now I don’t pretend we are there yet, but there is a steadily increasing chorus of voices from across the political spectrum, from individual Joe and Mary Public and media voices to senior officials either advocating an end to prohibition, or making statements and producing evidence that underpin regulation and control as the solution. For example, just a small selection from the news over the last couple of days:

• Manchester Evening News : reporting a former drug addict in Manchester saying; "In a way, legalising drugs could help cut burglaries, drug dealing and a lot of gun crime and turf wars."
• The US Conservative Voice: “In addition the government needs to … eliminate the 'War on Drugs' which is creating criminal activity on an unprecedented scale."
• The Canton Rep: Ohio: “The entire "war" on drugs has done nothing except increase demand and fill our prisons and jails while those who should be in prison are on the streets. If you want to control anything, then legalize it and tax it.”
• Usnews.com : “Regulation can reduce drug use. In two generations, we've halved the number of cigarette smokers not through prohibition but through education, regulated selling, and taxes. And we don't jail nicotine addicts. Drug addiction won't go away, but tax revenue can help pay for treatment.”
• Gay Byrne, in the Irish Independent: “For how long more than 40 years do you continue to apply a solution [drug prohibition] to a problem, which not only doesn't work, but also which makes the problem worse with every passing day, before someone, somewhere, says that maybe - as in perhaps - there might be a better way?”
• The New York Times: “Today, a dizzying array of armed groups lord over the farmlands of Nariño [Columbia]…Their presence reflects the symbiotic nature of the armed groups and the drug trade, each drawing strength from the other… [C]oca growers have nimbly sidestepped almost a decade of fumigation efforts by reorganizing industrial-size farms into smaller plots that are much harder to find and spray from the air. They are taxed and protected by forces on the various sides of the conflict…The FARC and other groups will survive as long as there are safe havens, the flow of drug money and large, remote regions unconnected to the broader economy.”
• Irish Times: "Illicit substances have been in demand here for at least 350 years; no legal measures have ever made a difference."

Despite politicians paddling desperately against the tide, the reality that we have not just lost the war on drugs but that it is actually making things worse, is seeping into the popular consciousness. And with it the climate in which drug policy is made is changing to one that is increasingly toxic to prohibitionist sound-bite solutions. Eventually, first one, then more and more countries will systematically count the costs of their drug policies, and compare them with alternative regimes. And that, as Bob Ainsworth and his colleagues know only too well, will be the beginning of the end of prohibitiion

Congress Struggles To Come Up With Cool Name For Anti-Drug Initiative

From the ONN*


Congress Struggles To Come Up With Cool Name For Anti-Drug Initiative

Onion News Network

UN asks NGOs for our view

A fortnight ago I attended the Vienna NGO Committee UN event that will feed into the review process for the UN’s ten-year drug strategy. With our newly gained accreditation from the UN I was invited to take part with 300 other NGOs to create a consensus document that will contribute (albeit in a very limited way) to the UN review.



In the room were NGOs from supporters of blanket prohibition to those supporting legalisation and regulation. I'm not going to go into the detail of the session, which was tortuous in the extreme, as we went through three draft resolutions line by line and word by word. Only time will tell whether it was worth the time and resources spent on the process. Although it could be the start of a more serious engagement by the UN with civil society.

For some intelligent video footage of NGO participants at the event, see the excellent work of the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union: Here and here

Other NGOs have already commented comprehensively in their blogs:

The American Civil Liberties Union

The International Harm Reduction Association

and The US Harm Reduction Coalition


image copyright Steve Rolles

The War on Drugs - A Dangerous Fiction

The war on drugs is a non sequitur - and is equally harmful to both producers and consumers, says Misha Glenny in Yesterday's Guardian.

An excellent piece by the author of McMafia. In the article he says:

"The time has come to shout from every rooftop that the war on drugs hands billions of pounds on a plate to criminal syndicates and terrorist organisations every year. Senior policymakers, police commanders and politicians have all told me in private that the war on drugs does nothing to halt the flow of product to market. But they are all too frightened to speak out against the prevailing orthodoxy."

The article trailed a well argued BBC Radio 4 programme on the failure of the war on drugs. Click here to listen again - 'How Crime took on the world.'

UK produces more opium than 24 of Afghanistan's 35 provinces

According to Dr. Liam Fox, Shadow Defence Secretary, in 2007 the UK was the 11th largest producer of opium poppy.

Fox, writing a blog on the CentreRight website says,

'... figures recently released by the Government show that when the United Kingdom is compared with the 34 provinces in Afghanistan the UK ranks an astonishing 11th place in the amount of opium poppy production in 2007.
Figures released by the U.S. State Department show that in 2007 the UK grew more opium poppy than Pakistan.'

Astonishing? Not really, in fact its a pretty daft comparison. The UK production is all legal and for the medical market whilst the Afghan is all illegal and all for non-medical use. Also Helmland alone produces more than half of the country's opium with over 100K hectares, then there's a pretty dramatic fall off with number 8 being only 3K hectares, and UK 2.7K hectares.

I have recently stumbled into one of these opium poppy fields across 'acres of rolling Hampshire fields' as referred to by the Daily Mail and Liam Fox.

I photographed this opium poppy field in Hampshire at the weekend

The Transform blog has previously discussed the hysteria that is occasionally whipped up by media reporting (the Mail's ridiculous coverage in particular) of these 100% legally grown Class A poppies here.

Fox finishes his blog with a reference to the Senlis Council's Poppy for Medicine proposal,

'Not only are we failing to eradicate it [opium poppy], we are growing it at home when we could be buying it from farmers in Afghanistan before it ends up on the black market. The Government tells us that they have to grow poppy in the UK as part of a strategic reserve. I find this ironic considering that the UK is supposed to have the strategic and tactical control of one of the biggest poppy producing places in the world: Helmand Province!'

What he fails to point out, as Steve has argued previously is that UK, NATO and Afghan forces in Helmand province (and elsewhere in Afghanistan) don't have the infrastructure, or security situation, to prevent leakage into the illegal market which is fueling the conflict and lack of security. Even if they could, demand for the illicit product would remain and economic forces would inevitably lead to cultivation elsewhere, either in Afghanistan (most likely by the same people), or elsewhere (the 'balloon' effect identified recently by the director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. )

Hampshire police (and other UK police forces in counties where poppies are grown) on the other hand have a better grip on 'security' than their counterparts in Afghanistan, as well as substantially less to worry about; there seems to be no problems with legally grown opium poppies being diverted into the illegal market in the UK. However, having found no fences to prevent me accessing the field (and what use would they be anyway), I can only conclude that those involved in the production of medical opiates rely on the fact that the general public has no idea what is growing across our purple and pleasant lands. Or, more likely, couldn't care less.

Either way it demonstrates that there is absolutely no need for Afghanistan to be growing any of the opiates consumed in the UK. This problem is one of our own making and an alternative path that doesn't involve any terrorists, wars or dead British soldiers is there for all to see. Here's the one line version for those who have not worked it out yet:

legal production for non-medical use.

The choice is ours, and I have the photos to prove it.

Rolling Stone: Obama on ending the drug war

An interview with Barack Obama is the centre piece of this month's Rolling Stone magazine. Unsuprisingly, given the the magazine's youth culture niche and long history as vocal critics drug war (see brilliant feature articles here, here and here), they hit the likely next US president with a serious question about its failure and what he plans to do about it:

RollingStone: The War on Drugs has cost taxpayers $500 billion since 1973. Nearly 500,000 people are behind bars on drug charges today, yet drugs are as available as ever. Do you plan to continue the War on Drugs, or will you make some significant change in course?

Obama: "Anybody who sees the devastating impact of the drug trade in the inner cities, or the methamphetamine trade in rural communities, knows that this is a huge problem. I believe in shifting the paradigm, shifting the model, so that we focus more on a public-health approach. I can say this as an ex-smoker: We've made enormous progress in making smoking socially unacceptable. You think about auto safety and the huge success we've had in getting people to fasten their seat belts.

The point is that if we're putting more money into education, into treatment, into prevention and reducing the demand side, then the ways that we operate on the criminal side can shift. I would start with nonviolent, first-time drug offenders. The notion that we are imposing felonies on them or sending them to prison, where they are getting advanced degrees in criminality, instead of thinking about ways like drug courts that can get them back on track in their lives — it's expensive, it's counterproductive, and it doesn't make sense."

The language of Obama's response is very positive - first up he is talking about change, more significantly, a paradigm shift towards a greater focus on public health, implicitly away from the criminal justice focus of the past four decades 'war on drugs'. Interestingly he uses as examples of policy success; smoking and seatbelts, where sensible regulation (using civil rather than criminal law) combined with public health education has delivered remarkable outcomes. He does not use criminal justice crackdown examples, and the tough punitive language of zero tolerance, and rhetoric of war that has dominated the political discourse on drug policy in the US is conspicuously absent.

The policy positions he actually identifies address some of the more egregious negative outcomes of the drug war's long term systemic failure - namely the horrendous human and financial cost of mass incarceration of non violent drug offenders. 'It's expensive, it's counterproductive and it doesn't make sense' he concludes, hopefully - even if he is not saying it at this stage in his political journey - an analysis he will be able to apply to entire prohibitionist paradigm. We wouldn't realistically expect him to advocate for, or even bring up as a debate, the idea of progressive moves towards legal regulation and control of drug production and supply at this stage, but he has shown a willingness to think, to change and to lead.

The significance of a more rational voice in drug policy based in the Whitehouse cannot be underestimated. The US utterly dominate the international drug policy arena, and where they go others follow so maybe we can be cautiously optimistic that a significant global paradigm shift really is on the horizon.

As long as that other bloke doesn't win in November.

see also: Barack Obama supports cannabis decriminnalisation

Drugs, knives and moral panics

The problems society faces with drugs and knives, and the solutions required, are dramatically different, but there are very marked similarities in the media and political discourse around both. Comparing the current moral panic about knife crime to the recent moral panic about cannabis in particular we can see much in common.

Both media panics erupted on the basis of individual tragedies, stories of young people developing mental illness in the case of cannabis, stories of young people dying after stab wounds for knives. In neither case was there actually a dramatic nation-wide culture shift that prompted the respective media frenzies; levels of cannabis use have been quite stable or falling for since 2002, and whilst knife crime has indeed been rising, it has been at a small but consistent rate over the same period, during which gun crime has experienced a comparable fall and violent crime overall is down (if notoriously problematic stats on drugs and crime are to be believed). Both examples have shown how statistics can be misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented to serve a particular given end, and for the tabloids that end is shock headlines that shift copy. They will ensure that there is something to panic about, whether it’s there or not. Last week’s four knife murders in 24 hours was portrayed almost as if it was the End of Days, but when you have around 70 knive murders a year it is inevitable there will be some clusters on a few days; unsurprising statistically but great for panic mongerers.

Sometimes it is difficult to understand what precipitates a media panic, although in the case of cannabis it was clearly centered around political opportunism from Government opponents exploiting the 2004 reclassification to accuse Blair/Brown of being soft on drugs/crime. ‘Soft on drugs’ is a charge that is far more powerful if the dangers of drugs are hyped with statistical shenanigans, and backed up with scary headlines (see above) and heart rending anecdotes of lost or wasted youth. It’s the old trick of stoking up fear and then politically exploiting the hell out of it. Old, but still brilliantly effective.

The knife panic, by contrast, seems to have been more tabloid driven, going into overdrive when one of the victims turned out to be the brother of a soap celebrity (who just happens to be a lad's mag ‘stunna’). Not that this has stopped mainstream politicians of all hues jumping on the bandwagon.

More depressing are the similarities in how politicians respond to endless series of media panics about Britain’s 'feral youth'. The usual response is the time honoured knee-jerk criminal justice crack-down backed with ubiquitous deployment of sound bites featuring the word ‘tough’. Inevitably the two main parties, in their attempts to placate the baying tabloids, then get into a bidding war over who can sound the toughest. The unfortunate but inevitable outcome is yet another ill-thought out, politically driven, reactive, short term, populist criminal justice response – or ‘crack down’. Just as inevitably this response will not be based on more enlightened current research or any evidence of effectiveness and will entirely fail to consider the wider social problems that underlie the symptomatic crises obsessed over by the headline writers. Alternatives to custody, restorative justice, investing in social capital, mental or wider public health based initiatives, addressing social exclusion, provision of recreational facilities for young people etc – all derided as ‘soft’ and weak responses. No, we obviously need to build more prisons.

Knife crime is a terrible problem (as I well know, being one of its victims) but it’s certainly nothing new. Yet the recent media frenzy has led to a raft of new initiatives being announced within an amazingly brief time period, in the last week almost on a daily basis. Meanwhile there is no media panic about, for example, spousal abuse and violence (which kills and injures far more than knives) and no significant policy responses being announced or even contemplated. The same could be said for any number of social problems that, for whatever reason (not sexy enough, gory enough, and/or don’t involve lad’s mag 'stunnas' or Amy Winehouse), don’t merit the attention of the newspaper editors.

Moral panics can be whipped up with quite astonishing speed, prompting the predictably stupid pro-forma government criminal justice led crack down / initiative, and then apparently disappearing from public view almost as quickly. Since its reclassification back to B cannabis has barely warranted a single mention in the media. The level of problems associated with its use amongst young people or the ‘cannabis factories’ run by evil foreign people have not diminished one bit, but there is just no political capital in it anymore, no conflict to get excited about, and the story has blown itself out. The media panic achieved its goal: It’s been re -classified now, everything is OK. Result!

"NEXT! "

And unless some more celebrity relations get stabbed, or an attractive white young female is the next victim, knives will be old news in a few weeks, and disappear just as the recent panics about guns, alcohol, hoodies, cannabis, and child abductions (etc) all have, to be replaced by something new, or recycled after a period of lying dormant (maybe satanic messages in heavy metal records are due a come back?)

If we are ever going to get real solutions to some of these seemingly intractable problems on the streets of Britain’s cities – and no one is denying they exist – what we need is for politicians to have the courage to defy the populist rantings of tabloids or political opponents and to deal with the complex social problems we face as policy scientists rather than pollsters. You are supposed to be our leaders; How about showing some leadership?

It might even help make people respect you again.

photo - thanks to Dean Morrison
cartoon - thanks to Steve Bell, the Guardian