Home Office split: - dibs on who gets drugs

The media is full of reports that the Home Office could be split in two. Despite the fact that the idea was rejected by Blair when Charles Clarke was Home Secretary, it is apparently now back on the cards after another high profile Home Office debacle, this time to do with records of overseas offences not being recorded in the UK database.


The idea, apparently, is that the Home Office will be split into a ministry of justice and a ministry of security. Quite aside from the fight over which one gets the shiney new £700 million Home Office building (photographed below by my own fair hand), there will no doubt be an equally energetic scuffle over who doesn't get to keep the drug policy brief. Obviously the international illegal drugs trade is contributing to all sorts of security issues, fuelling conflict around the world and funding terrorism and violent organised crimainl networks. Its also causing havoc throughout the domestic criminal justice system. So with the drug strategy consistently undermining both security and justice, the new ministry's will be fighting to be rid of it. Its probably a safe bet that either camp would rather go back to their previous home in that nasty 70s tower block than take on the poinsoned chalice of enforcing prohibition.


One of the problems plaguing the Home Office is ofcourse the prison's overcrowding crisis, which is in large part the fault of the the UKs disaterous drug policy - as developed and implemented by the Home Office. Not only are 17% of inmates drug offenders of various kinds, mostly non violent, but probably at least half of the remainder are inside for drug-related offending - mostly aquisitive property crime to support a heroin and/or crack habit. The Home Office's own research, backed up by the Prime Ministers Strategy Unit Report on drugs, suggests that crime committed to support an illegal habit is valued at £11-16 billion a year. By coincidence the Home Office's entire budget is also £16 billion a year.


The Home Office also estimates that it spends £2 to £3.5 billion a year(of £16 billion a year total) enforcing the drug laws and dealing with all this drug and drug realeted crime (policing, courts, prison, probabtion etc), the vast majority of which is a direct result of the futile but dogged enforcement of prohibition.


If the Home Office wanted to dramatically reduce crime at all scales, reduce the prison population, and free up huge resources for dealing with all that tricky paperwork and pesky real-criminals, then considering some cautious phased drug policy and law reform might seem a sensible place to start. Then they wouldnt have to decide who carried the drug policy brief because they could hand it over to the Department of Health where it belongs.

IHRA website relaunches

The International Harm Reduction Assocaiton today relaunches its snazzy new website redesign.

It features an extensive collection of free-to-download papers on HIV prevention and care for drug users, and will continue to expand its impressive library of resources over the coming months.



There are also details of the upcoming harm reduction mega-conference in Warsaw, which this year features a plenary session on drug regulation chaired by Transform's very own Danny Kushlick.

And should you be happen to be academic/researcher/analyst/ninja interested in working on the cutting edge of drugs and harm reduction policy - there are details of three new posts in their London Office.

Meth is Class A - we can relax now.

So methamphetamine is, as of yesterday, a Class A drug. Well thank heavens for that, now we have nothing to worry about.

I am reliably informed that all the people who were really looking forward to trying it as a Class B drug have decided its just not worth the risk – the idea of 7 years in prison instead of a mere 5 was just too serious a worry. They are going to stick with old-school Class B amphetamines instead (but take twice as much).

And as for all the meth dealers and producers who before yesterday were lining up to cash in on the imminent meth epidemic, they too have apparently decided it’s just not worth the risk of life in prison and an ‘unlimited fine’ for nasty Class A dealing, and have decided to quit the life of crime go straight instead. Its just not like the good old days when meth was pansy-ish Class B and all they had to worry about was a piffling 14 years in prison and measely ‘unlimited fine’.

British kids saved from the meth epidemic by reclassification, photographed this-morning:



Hmmm. Maybe its time for a reality check.

Reclassifying will not prevent people producing it, selling it or using it. Meth has been Schedule 1 (equivalent of Class A) in the USA and Canada since way before their respective meth epidemics began, and over there people frequently get the obscenely long sentences the statute books threaten.

Maybe this suggests we should be even tougher? Maybe we should try the Thailand approach where selling the drug is likely to get you executed by the police. A horrific 2000 people were killed in Thailand's 2003 'drug crackdown'. Now that’s what I call tough! Nothing like those sissies in the Home Office.

Unfortunately, wholesale slaughter doesn’t seem to have worked either – the country still has the highest meth consumption in the world, in the region of 800 million tablets being consumed a year according to the Lancet .

Despite these grim tales from around the world, in Wednesday's Home Office press release an ACPO spokesperson is quoted reiterating the evidence-free myth that ‘people will be deterred by the penalties for making, dealing or using methylamphetmine’ . ACPO also state that ‘production and use of this drug in all its forms will now be substantially easier to combat as a result of this reclassification’ because ‘It will also become possible to close down, for long periods, premises used as illicit 'meth' laboratories (a power for Class A drugs only).’ You have to wonder if ACPO have bothered to look at the experience overseas or not, because if they have they can hardly be filled with optimism. Surely, after all these years of failure with heroin and crack, they must know that this sort of enforcement approach simply does not work, and can arguably make things worse by further inflating price for users and correspondingly increasing the volume of crime committed by addicts to support their habits (ref; heroin and crack).

Infact it is amazing really that the Government and police are still trumpeting this reclassification as any kind of sensible core response to the methamphetamine threat - despite the lack of evidence from anywhere that it will make the slightest difference. The Science and Technology Select Committee recently took a long hard look at the classification system and found it ‘was not fit for purpose’, hadn't achieved its stated aims (infact it had done the exact opposite), was unevaluated and was based on a series of false assumptions about its deterrent effects. But you don’t really need a select committee inquiry to figure that out. The idea that the classification system provides any useful public health information to young people, is an effective deterrent, or reduces drug use, production or supply is frankly laughable – just look at our experience over the last 36 years. (I have blogged – in bordering on tedious detail - about the classification system and deterrence, the Sci/Tech Committee report and the Government’s pitiful response to it here and there is a Transform briefing on the problems with the classification system, with links to the committee report, here).

Classification is almost entirely irrelevant to levels of use and availability;

- Ecstasy use went from zero to 2 million pills a week in the late 80s early 90s, it was Class A all the time, now its going down
- Cocaine use is rising sharply and it has always been Class A
- Crack use went from zero to ‘epidemic’ use in a couple of years and it has always been Class A
- Heroin has risen by more than 1000% (that's three zeros) over a period of 30 years and has been Class A all along
- Availablity of all major Class A drugs has increased steadily year on year

Perhaps more suprisingly, major players in drug field also offer qualified support for the move, including Drugscope which supports it ‘as a sensible precautionary move’ and Addaction who repeat the ACPO line that it ‘will allow the police to tackle crystal meth more effectively’. Both Drugscope and Addaction caveat their support with eminently sensible calls for better treatment and education services to be developed in anticipation of rising meth use, although this does suggest they can’t be overly confident that the reclassification is going to be effective at preventing much. But this support, albeit qualified, does beg the question of whether they think it is useful or indeed ethical for problem meth users (the clients these organisations are set up to support) to be criminalised and imprisoned? By supporting increased penalties you have to assume that is their position (even though I dont think it is).

This seems especially odd for Drugscope, which has gone on the record calling for ‘Criminal procedures’ to ‘no longer be initiated for the possession of small amounts of any scheduled drug’ on the basis that ‘there is no evidence that the availability of imprisonment deters simple possession or that it is effective longer term in stopping drug use’.

OK, in the context of the classification harm-rankings system as it stands, the move makes 'sense' - and lets be clear that no one is denying meth use is a serious health risk - BUT the ABC ranking system itself has no established public health benefits and is primarily used to determine the hierarchy of penalties that form the core of our drug policy. It is grotesquely unfair, malfunctioning, unscientific, and yes, it actually makes things worse - It actively increases harms (not that the Government bothers to evaluate it against meaningful indicators).

Whatever you say about other service provision, supporting the re-classification means support for increasing criminalisation, punishment and imprisonment of users - fact.

MSP calls for reality check

Susan Deacon MSP, writes an encouraging, balanced article in the Sunday Herald. She urges fellow politicians to 'get real' and agree to a pragmatic approach to drugs policy, not a moralistic one.

She is a member of the RSA UK Commission on Illegal Drugs, Public Policy and Communities which reports in March.

Scotland's Futures Forum 2007 focuses on alcohol and illegal drugs

The Herald once again engages with the debate by calling for a fact-based, prejudice-free path to be taken by Scotland's Futures Forum. The main project of the 2007 forum is to seek out fresh perspectives on dealing with alcohol and illegal drugs. Ruth Wishart reports that the first conference highlighted as a barrier to progress a lack of long-term funding for a comprehensive community-led initiative, as well as too much meddling by external 'professionals'. This year-long project has a lot to do.

Sweden: a prohibitionist success story?

Sweden is often regarded by many people as having some of the most progressive social policies in Europe. So it may come as a surprise to those who lack an encyclopaedic knowledge of European drug policy to learn that Sweden operates one of the most staunchly prohibitionist drug control policies in Europe.

It is probably less of surprise to learn that Sweden’s orthodox drug policy, and relatively low level of drug use, means that prohibitionists often use it as an example of a successful prohibitionist drugs policy.

In September 2006 the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) published a report praising Sweden’s drug control policies claiming that Sweden’s low drug use was a direct result of it’s drugs policy.

A comment piece by Peter Cohen, published on the Centre for Drug Research website, has questioned much of the UNODC report. His main criticism is that the report lacks scientific legitimacy because it fails to provide any evidence for a link between drug policy and drug use. He also criticises it for hand picking data, failing to make a distinction between drug use and drug abuse, and ignoring some of the negative consequences of Sweden’s drug policy.

Daily Mail gets confused on cannabis (again)

The Daily Mail today continues its long history of fuzzy headed cannabis news reports with a piece today entitled Cannabis warnings improve police-youth relations, Yard argues. Unfortunately what appears to be a potentially promising title (assuming we think that improved police-youth relations are a GOOD THING) immediately stumbles into statistical nonsense almost before it is out of the blocks.

We are told that it is a 'fact' that 'the "softly softly" approach is contributing to a huge rise in cannabis use.'; the data presented to support this 'fact' is that there was a 12% rise in cannabis arrests in 2005.



Let's be absolutely clear about this: arrests are NOT a measure of levels of use. There is no direct causal relationship; an increase in arrests is most likely to be the result of changes in policing policy or the intensity of policing efforts. It could be suggested that the 2004 reclassification has meant people are more open in their cannabis use and, not really understanding the new law, are being arrested more often as a result. But the Mail's analysis isn't that sophisticated, instead opting to present and entirely spurious link between arrests and prevalence as fact. Which it isn't.

A more reliable way of measuring levels of cannabis use is to ask a suitably large number of people if they use cannabis and then tot up the results - a so-called 'survey of drug use'. There are lots of these in the UK, the biggest official ones being the British Crime Survey, and one done annually by the Department of Health. They are not without methodological flaws and are generally acknowledged to underestimate the totals, but they do at least show year on year trends fairly well. If Ben Taylor of the Daily Mail had consulted the figures he would have discovered that cannabis use has actually levelled off or even (if you believe the BCS) fallen marginally since 2004. So not quite the 'huge rise' he reports.

Its not the first time the Mail have gotten all in a spin on cannabis and ended up with news story that is some distance from representing reality. Last year, under the headline 'The deadly downgrade' (blogged here) they reported that 'drug deaths spiralled after Labour downgraded cannabis' on the basis that drug deaths had increased marginally between 2003 and 2004. This whole story looks pretty ridiculous when you consider that:
- none of the deaths were cannabis related (they were almost all opiate related)
- the drug death data covered a period before reclassification occurred
- cannabis use fell marginally after 2004 anyway

There was also a another piece of hopeless news coverage (also blogged) about a campaigning Vicar (who amusingly penned the Sinitta disco smash 'So Macho' back in the 80s) who is uncritically reported blaming all sorts of terrible things on the reclassification of cannabis (not the drug itself - the actual policy change) from murder to mass insanity.

This latest report, like the various others before it, seems to be an attempt to have a go at UK drug policy and in doing so make the Government look bad. Fair enough I suppose if that's your political/editorial position, but if so then the really baffling thing about the Daily Mail's ongoing rubbish reporting and bad science in its coverage of the cannabis issue is that there's just no need for it. There is so much wrong with UK drug policy that they could be running all manner of withering coverage without having to misrepresent and twist statistics. The drug strategy has been a disaster on almost every indicator you could choose from, so it seems downright odd that the Mail repeatedly chooses to direct its ire at one of the very few bits of Government drug policy that the police can legitimately argue has been vaguely successful.

The Ipswich murders and the drugs debate

The terrible murder of five street sex workers in Ipswich over the past fortnight has provoked a burst of media debate on the prohibitions of both drugs and sex work - and the potential impacts of our current criminal justice oriented policies that attempt to control the respective trades.

The media coverage has been fascinating and varied. There have been a number of opinion pieces that have argued directly for licensing of brothels and the prescribing of heroin.

Mary Ann Seighart in a Times article 'Drugs: why we should medicalise, not criminalise' writes that:



"Drug addiction is a medical condition; it should not be treated as a criminal offence. The crime that results from drug addiction is a direct result of the drugs’ illegality. The organised criminal gangs, with their violence, corruption and money laundering; the street gangs, with their gun crime, stabbings and intimidation; the muggers, burglars, car thieves and shoplifters, who steal to fund their habit; the dealers who try to create new addicts; and finally, the prostitutes who put their health and lives at risk; all this crime and suffering could be wiped out if the drugs were available, free, on prescription"

Transform, get a nod when she then goes on to say that

"In European cities, where heroin is available on prescription, property crimes by drug-users have dropped by as much as a half. And think of the effect that widespread prescribing would have on turf wars, gang violence, gun crime, street dealing and prostitution. An excellent report from the Transform drug policy foundation* also points out: “The largest single profit opportunity for organised crime would evaporate, and with it the largest single source of police corruption.”

Transform estimates that the prison population would fall by between a third and a half, ending overcrowding and the need to build more jails. Billions of pounds spent enforcing prohibition and coping with its consequences would be saved. Hundreds of thousands could be treated as patients rather than criminals. The number of drug-related deaths would fall dramatically. And desperate young women could be rescued from pimps, potential rapists and murderers."

A similar pro reform piece appeared by Deborah Orr in the Independent. She focuses on sex work, but has been a long time supporter of drug law reform. The Guardian, as mentioned in the previous blog entry has run online articles on both sides of the drugs debate, with Nick Davies, whose articles on heroin were so influential back in 2001, arguing for more heroin prescribing, and John Harris, who flags up the difficulties in making crack legally available. This week the Guardian printed a well argued piece by Simon Jenkins that focuses on the political cowardice getting in the way of reform.

Inevitably there has been a reaction to this talk of 'legalisation' from other opinion writers who see it very differently.

Will Self (who is Deborah Orr's husband) argued in the Evening Standard that the 'legalise' drugs and prostituion position was over-simplistic. This seems a bit harsh given that he appears to be basing this on other columnists without reading the detailed work done by people in the public health arena, academia and drug related NGOs. But there you go, journalists can be a bit lazy and opinionated. David Aaronavitch in the Times down a similar route but becomes a self appointed expert on the basis that he has read the Home Office consultation paper 'Paying the Price'.

Melanie Phillips has also inevitably stepped up to represent the reactionary moral-indignation position with a familiar sounding tirade against the evils of pragmatic drug law reform. As ever she studiously avoids the reality of widespread dug use and dodges well known facts (some pointed out in the online comments below her article) like; cannabis use has fallen since it was reclassified or; Holland has a far lower rate of cannabis and heroin than the UK. Her initial tack is to argue, strangely it must be said, that replacing criminal markets with legally regulated ones wouldn't reduce crime or get rid of illegal markets. Secondly she argues that legality would condone and encourage use - as if somehow prohibition has reduced/eliminated it. She assumes her self-appointed moral high ground by calling for the continuation and ramping up of policies that have, for decades, done the exact opposite of what she seeks. The reformers, we are told, would 'institutionalise harm and enslave millions in a post-moral degraded universe' - yet that is exactly what the criminal justice approach she advocates has already achieved.

There is something particularly troubling about those, like Phillips, who argue there is any moral justification for increasing harm to vulnerable individuals as a way of discouraging certain behaviours in others. Not only does the past 40 years provide no evidence that this is an effective strategy, but it is profoundly unethical.

Yet Phillips, for all her dodgey stats and intellectual wrongness, does at least make a good argument and attempt to see it through. This cannot be said for the utterly vile Richard Littlejohn who appears to deliberately court controversy by being as unpleasant as possible. In a recent Daily Mail piece Spare us the 'People's Prostitute' routine... his bile takes the familiar reactionary route of blaming the victims, but doesnt stop there. He then dances on their graves:

"the deaths of these five women is no great loss. They weren't going to discover a cure for cancer or embark on missionary work in Darfur. The only kind of missionary position they undertook was in the back seat of a car."

Despite a few grains of truth in the Littlejohn piece ('they did it for drugs'), he doesn't appear sophisticated enough to actually take his spleen venting to any sort of conclusion. He doesnt call for anything, or recommend any policy response - he just says vile things about some poor murdered women, and their families, and then levers in some unrelated insults at the Prime Minister.

So where does all this opinion lead us?

The media debate, despite emerging from tragedy and despite the efforts of some Mail columnists, has overall been a valuable and suprisingly mature one. It has provided a useful platform for those advocating pragmatic regulated alternatives to the illegal markets created by various prohibitions.

It would be wrong to suggest that a particular law or policy is directly 'to blame' for the murders. Clearly the killer could have targetted women in brothels who were legally recieveing drugs on prescribtion had he chosen to. However, these events have focused attention on the way the laws on drugs and prostitution drives these markets underground and far from eradicating the problems, makes them far worse, fuelling crime and maximising riskes for the people involved - in this case putting vulnerable women directly in harms way. So whilst not directly to blame, it is unarguable that wrongheaded prohibitions can create high risk environments that make violence more likely, and the reporting of this story has made this point very clear.

The Government has not emerged with any credit whatsoever, in particular regarding its shelving some of pragmatic recommendations made by a long and detailed Home Office consulation on prostitution that reported in 2004. The Observer front page headline concerned the fact that No 10 'blocked move to legalise prostitution' because of fears about the media reaction to such moves. Quite revealing, and one suspects, not disimilar to No.10s reaction the the drugs report produced by No.10's own Strategy Unit in 2003 (which they tried not to publish).

There is something going on here with this debate that suggest progress to me. The concept being promoted by the Government and the likes of Melanie Phillips is that drugs and sex work are morally unacceptable and on that basis alone their prohibitions are justified. On the other hand there appears to be a growing public and media awareness that policy needs to be pragmatic, accepting of reality, and be based on evidence of effectiveness rather than just moral indignation. The latter position appears to have come out on top this time round, and just for once, the Government are being portrayed as irresponsible for not legalising something.


Paying the Price - Home Office consultation document
Paying the price - final report

Guardian Comments On Prohibition

This pithy comment from the Guardian divides the prohibitionist camp into the ignorant and the political.
Whereas this second comment from the Guardian says the legalisation argument flounders on the extremity of dangers imposed on society by crack.

Australian Justice Minister Seeks to Ban Language

This story highlights the control freakery of those in power in Australia. Prior to a crisis meeting on ice, the justice minister, Chris Ellison, has called for the use of the terms "party drugs" and "recreational drugs" to be outlawed. So it's no surprise that he is against injecting rooms despite the fact that these have proved to be effective in reducing crime and rates of addiction as has been amply demonstrated in the Canton of Zurich.

End Drugs Prohibition and Sign Our Petition

This petition goes directly to Downing Street, so please sign up and make our case for ending prohibition heard!

At last! polonium 210 in cigarettes hits the news

I have been researching this story for a number of years – that cigarettes contain radioactive polonium and lead – but never made any progress getting it into the news. A few times I have contacted science correspondents and never received a reply. I guess it just seemed like too much of a wacko-conspiracy theory, a bit like exploding cigars and Fidel Castro.

And then… the Litvinenko murder happens and polonium appears in the news as a major story, for the first (and probably last) time ever. And now the story I have been twittering on about to my generally disbelieving colleagues for years hits the news - at long last.

So what’s it all about?

Basically there has been various research done over the past 30 years or so to show that there is radioactive polonium-210 and lead-210 present in cigarettes. This fact whilst little known, is well acknowledged in the scientific community and beyond dispute.

There is a lot of debate about the possible health impacts of this radioactive content but it is clear that it does enter the lungs in smoke and there is a reasonable case made by a number of authors that this is the direct cause of some, possibly even most, smoking related lung cancer. It is important to note that there is considerable controversy about the extent of the carcinogenic effect of the radioactive content of the cigarettes as this exchange of letters in New England Journal of Medicine from 1982 clearly demonstrates.

Various estimates put the level of radiation absorbed by a pack-and-a-half a day smoker at the equivalent of 300 (Maryland Department of Health & Mental Hygiene) to 800 (The Office of Radiation, Chemical & Biological Safety at Michigan State University) chest X-rays every year – other reports suggest it is much higher, some up to 22,000.

High profile figures have got involved in this debate over the years: The US Surgeon General C Everett Koop stated publicly in 1990 that tobacco radiation is probably responsible for 90% of tobacco-related cancer.

Researchers have induced cancer in animal test subjects that inhaled polonium 210, (Yuille, CL; Berke, HL; Hull, T. 'Lung cancer following Pb210 inhalation in rats.' Radiation Res, 1967. 31:760-774) but were unable to cause cancer through the inhalation of any of the non-radioactive chemical carcinogens found in tobacco.

Some researchers suggest that the radioactive particles are relatively low risk if the exposure is averaged out over the entire exposed surface – but that with inhaled smoke the particles are concentrated in localised regions, the bronchial epithelium (points where the lung airways divide) exposing small numbers of cells to comparatively high levels of radiation – magnifying the carcinogenic effect.

It is clear that the radioactive polonium and lead is present in cigarettes, is being consumed, and a risk – potentially a very serious one - does exist. Marmorstein, J. ('Lung cancer: is the increasing incidence due to radioactive polonium in cigarettes?' South Medical Journal, February 1986. 79(2):145-50), notes that In 1930 the lung cancer death rate for white US males was 3.8 per 100,000 people. By 1956 the rate had increased almost tenfold, to 31 per 100,000.13 Between 1938 and 1960, the level of polonium 210 in American tobacco tripled, commensurate with the increased use of chemical fertilizers. Whilst this is not an established causal link, given the terrifying extent of the death rates, It is amazing that this issue hasn’t received more attention.

It now gets more interesting conspiracy fans.

The key source of the radioactive content in tobacco is thought to be phosphate fertilisers. The radioactivity is concentrated in the plant, particularly the tiny sticky hairs on tobacco leaves, as the water is drawn from the soil and evaporates. The radioactivity is also present in lots of farmed foods but it is when the tobacco leaves are smoked and inhaled that the particular lung cancer risk emerges.

This was apparently known to major tobacco companies as far back as 1974, and by 1980 a means to remove the radioactive content was also known – by using ammonium phosphate as a fertilizer, instead of calcium phosphate. This idea is rejected on the basis of expense. This is clearly revealed in the two publically available leaked ‘smoking gun’ memos (reproduced below from the www.tobaccofreedom.com website) from Philip Morris in 1980.

The key quotes are:

"210- Pb and 210 -Po are present in tobacco and smoke."

..."For alpha particles from Po-210 to be the cause of lung cancers in unlikely due to the amount of radioactivity of a particular energy necessary of induction. Evidence to date, however, does not allow one to state this is an impossibility."

“The recommendation of using ammonium phosphate instead of calcium phosphate is probably a valid but expensive point”






So what can we conclude from all this?

Well, obviously tobacco companies primary concern is not public health, they are motivated purely by profits. If there is a model for irresponsible corporations – they are it. No surprise there. They denied tobacco was linked to lung cancer despite overwhelming evidence for years.

More worryingly perhaps is that Government’s in the UK, the US and everywhere else have failed to act on this – either by commissioning the appropriate research or by banning the use of the offending fertilisers. Ultimately it is the governments responsibility to monitoir these issues. They have had 20 years since this has been in the public domain and done nothing. Only now when some unrelated Russian political murder brings this obscure substance into the public eye are we beginning to get a hint of a debate and the potential for change. Lets be under no illusions, this saga is a grotesque failing of our public health infrastructure and a total scandal and disgrace for all governments concerned.

On a broader front serious issues are raised about tobacco control generally and why it has historically been so lax. Things are now improving – with long overdue controls on advertising and smoking in public spaces - and the public health impacts of smoking beginning to fall from their post war high. This is the result of more effective public health education and better legal regulation – something that should obviously underpin effective policy on all drugs. Cigarette tobacco can still have up to 15% non tobacco content and there are 400 or so permitted additives, most of them pretty obnoxious looking (the list is available from the Tobacco Manufacturers Association). Tobacco products should have ingredients listings the same as any other product we put in our bodies:

THIS PRODUCT CONTAINS RADIOACTIVE POLONIUM AND LEAD

Similar lessons need to be applied to alcohol control, still far too unregulated, particularly regards marketing and packaging, contributing to the rapid current rise in alcohol related ill health. Why no health warnings on alcohol products? why no ingredients listings? why do we so rarely see alcohol content in units on alcohol products?

Organic tobacco is fairly widely available which apparently doesn’t use the offending fertilisers. Its not good for you but may be marginally less bad. Alternatively, you could go all Swedish and use ‘snus’ or ‘bandits’ – tobacco which you hold in you mouth rather than smoke. It can give you mouth cancer but is generally far less risky (they have half our level of smoked tobacco in Sweden and half the level of lung cancer).

It is incumbent on the Government to regulate dangerous drugs properly. This must include basic harm reduction measures such as making sure tobacco full of radioactive carcinogens isnt being consumed by millions of people on a daily basis.

LATEST: 12.12.06

In a rather depressing development, apparently a government TV ad that highlights the fact that cigarettes contain polonium-210 has been pulled because of...wait for it...sensitivities to the Litvinenko family. How totally ridiculous. Just as we are about to be told something that has been known for decades, they decide to pull the ad for the most absurd of reasons.

Surely the sensitivities of the tens of 1000s of who have lost relatives to lung cancer, or may do in the future, are more important. Im quite sure Litvinenko would not want this ad being pulled as part of his legacy, and nor would his family. The Litvinenko story is an opportunity to broadcast this story and achieve something positive, not squirrel it away.


(mock cigarette packet photo from www.adbusters.org)

Losing Hearts and Minds in the War in Afghanistan

Despite widespread popular distrust of the use of herbicides in Afghanistan ("Afghans are deeply opposed to spraying poppies"), John Walters, the director of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy is pressing the Afghan government to use the ground-sprayed herbicide, Roundup, on the illegal poppy crops. No mention is made in this article of any recompense or alternative crops which the Afghans might grow as profitably as opium nor of the inflammatory effect that wiping out people's livelihoods tends to create. Perhaps this will come later.

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition Talks in Scotland

The Scottish Herald here describes the campaigning by Jack Cole, spokesperson for the American based organisation Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) in Scotland. Cole was invited by the chairman of the Strathclyde Police Federation who has noted that an ever increasing number of his members are calling for a root and branch reform of existing drug policy. This has elicited a restrained and even at times encouraging response from Tom Wood, the chair of the Scottish Association of Alcohol and Drug Action Teams. He very tentatively praised the police for their "courage" in inviting someone with such "radical" thoughts. However in the language of officialese "courage" often actually means foolhardiness. It's therefore hard to to reach a firm conclusion as to the real official response to Jack Cole's campaign. Nevertheless it's encouraging that LEAP are on the campaign trail in the UK.

Drug policy debating bonanza in the Times

The Times has embraced the recent flurry of drug policy stories with more enthusiasm than any of its broadsheet rivals. The ‘paper of record’ ran a pretty decent leader on the prohibition / legalisation debate, highly critical of the obvious failings of prohibition (it doesn’t work, it causes crime etc) and at least reasonably sympathetic to the ‘legalisation lobby’.

The leader, however, cautions that:

“It is tempting to hope that legalisation might cut out much of this violence and crime, by removing most of the profit margin from the drugs barons. However, while the legalisation lobby makes a persuasive case, there is a lack of clarity about how exactly its ideas would work in practice. If harm reduction is the aim, can one be sure that harm reduction would really be achieved? Reducing prices might remove incentives for criminals to supply the market. But would it not also result in an increase in addicts, because drugs would be even more easily available more cheaply? Would the act of legalising in itself send a powerful signal that Parliament is condoning drug taking? And might regulated companies acting above-board not be even more effective at marketing these substances than the drugs barons have been, with their access to more conventional methods of advertising? And if half of all beds for drug treatment are empty, as we report today, is the Government really doing all it can to treat addicts successfully?”


Most of these concerns are perfectly reasonable – and if these are the only obstacles to real reforms then the future is indeed looking bright. Transform are working hard with our colleagues in the UK and around the world to show how legal regulation of drug markets can ‘work in practice’, including how drug production and supply, specifically marketing can be appropriately controlled – far more effectively than with the completely deregulated criminal markets we have today. A detailed report on exactly this is due for pulication in 2007. To read discussion on the impact of policy changes on prevalence (beyond prohibitions transparent failure to reduce it), and the idea of using criminal law enforcement as a way of 'sending out messages', take a look at Transform’s report ‘After the war on drugs – Options for control’ which has a chapter addressing these very concerns. The leader’s final point about treatment beds is a bit randomly tacked on the end and has nothing to do with the legal status of drugs.

In an attempt at balance perhaps, the Times has also run a piece from a prohibitionist advocate, Patrick West, who is very against prescribing heroin to addicts - he want them locked up: it is unambiguously titled ‘The best treatment for heroin addicts? Arrest them’ . It’s a pretty sorry attempt at a counter-argument, more of a reactionary rant really, full of factual howlers and ill thought out arguments. He kicks off with saying Brian Paddick called for cannabis 'legalisation' in Brixton – Er, no he didn’t, he called for a shift in enforcement resources to more dangerous drugs, and non arrest for minor cannabis possession offences - which has now become national policy and cannabis use has fallen.

He then goes for the nonsensical old chestnut that:

Those who seek to legalise narcotics cry “the war on drugs has been lost”. One might as well also argue that “the war on murder has been lost” or that “the war on rape, theft, fraud, larceny and pyromania has been lost”. Like drug abuse, these are malaises that will always be with us, and no sane person believes they will ever be totally abolished.

You begin to think you’re listening to someone from Nixon’s 1970's ‘war on drugs’ when he starts talking about ‘narcotics’, and then out comes the old ‘why not legalise murder’ argument just to confirm it for you. The response to this simplistic and shortsighted argument is that murder is a so-called ‘crime’ in the classical sense because it harms others, whereas consenting adult drug use clearly is not.

Deftly avoiding such tricky distinctions we then hear West’s solution to the problem: “the most caring and the practical thing to do would be to prosecute and imprison users — to stop their habit.”

Brilliant.

Not content with advocating what we have already been doing, with disastrous consequences, for over 40 years, he is apparently completely ignorant of the fact that there are more drugs inside prison walls than there are outside. This is of course mainly because ‘caring’ and ‘practical’ views like his have led to prisons overflowing with drug addicts and drug dealers.

We are then confidently informed that: “Contrary to the media myth perpetuated by movies such as Trainspotting, the typical heroin addict is as likely to be a sensitive, fragile, middle-class graduate as an aggressive, working-class misfit from the roughest of council estates,” which is just incorrect. There are indeed heroin users form all social strata, but all the research, undisputed by anyone I’ve encountered before (see for example the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs report – ‘Drugs and the Environment’) shows very clearly that problematic use is most concentrated in socially deprived communities.

His obvious confusion about addiction then takes a further nosedive into the ridiculous with the comment that: ‘Most people develop a life-debilitating heroin problem because they know that the arm of the law won’t seize them if they do.‘ which makes so little sense and is so far from reality that it hardly warrants a response. For the record the recent Science and Technology Committee inquiry was unable to find any evidence at all that the classification system was any kind of deterrence (in particular to problematic use of Class A drugs) and when challenged, the Government was unable to produce any resarch– not a single piece – to show any different.

The final section of his piece reveals that he has relatives that have died from heroin overdoses – a tragedy that has apparently prevented him from viewing the issue with any sort of rational objectivity. He slams advocates of pragmatic responses as ‘cold and callous’ (worse still: sociology students) before concluding with ‘the best way to prevent people illegally taking heroin is to prosecute those who do.’ Well Patrick, we’ve been doing exactly that since 1971, during which time the prisons have filled up with heroin addicts (the UK has Europe’s highest prison population), heroin use has risen from around 15,000 problem users, to around 300,000 (we have the highest level of drug use in Europe) and heroin users are dying in large numbers (we have the highest level of drug deaths in Europe), not to mention committing over half of all UK property crime. More of the same? Maybe, just maybe we should think about trying something different.

Now OK, perhaps I’m biased, but there was another opinion piece in the Sunday Times by Simon Jenkins, that argued the complete opposite to the West piece – it was titled ‘The really tough way to control drugs is to license them’. Ill leave you to decide for yourselves, but were I coming to this issue afresh and read both articles I suspect I would find the Jenkin’s take on this issue substantially more persuasive.

This is a live debate and reformers are winning it hands down.

Everyone is talking about heroin and cocaine again

It’s been a busy old week for drugs stories. First Howard Roberts, the deputy chief constable of Nottinghamshire, starts a media firestorm with his comments in favour of heroin prescribing, and then a report from the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction starts another one, when it reports that the UK has Europe’s highest cocaine consumption.

No bad thing – both these stories have fuelled important and in many ways positive debate, firstly about heroin prescribing and secondly about the striking failure of UK drug policy regards cocaine. Neither actually ‘news’ as such but we can’t complain, even if some of the coverage doesn’t reflect particularly well on some of the media outlets.

Heroin prescribing is nothing new, and nor is senior police calling for it. Former Chief Constable Francis Wilkinson wrote a book about it and got almost identical headlines more than five years ago, whilst North Wale’s serving Chief Constable Richard Brunstrom has been saying the same thing, and getting the same headlines for years. There are plenty of others. The more annoying thing about this weeks reporting is that, in the quest for a juicy headline, it has suggested that heroin somehow needs to be legalised or that prescribing it is a new idea. Obviously heroin has been a legal licensed medicine since it was invented over a century ago, has been prescribed to addicts as far back as the first world war, and still is.

And its not even as if the Government needs that much persuading – David Blunkett announced an expansion of the existing heroin prescribing service back in 2002, and the Government authorised a number of pilot Swiss-style prescribing drop in centers ages ago, which have been operating over the last few years. The Times tried to make this non news into a scoop under the headline ‘Hardened addicts given free heroin in secret NHS trial’ – when clearly it was neither secret nor a new idea. They also note in a facts section at the end titled ‘ the price of addiction’:

£15,000 a year needed to fund an addiction
£45,000 The cost of the crimes committed each year by a heroin addict

This 45K figure was very naughty: rich heroin users don’t have to commit any crime to support their habits, and nor do those on prescriptions.

For some decent information on Heroin prescribing there was a useful review of the evidence from around the world produced recently by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and there is a good essay by Dr Ben Goldacre from 1998 that has recently re-emerged online that’s well worth a look.

As for the cocaine story, this was just a rehash of the ‘loads of people taking cocaine shock’ news that journalists, with quite amazing regularity, wheel out each year when the annual reports are published by the British Crime Survey and EMCDDA that just confirm what they said last year. In the intervening months we can usually rely on sporadic ‘loads of people taking cocaine shock’ stories hung on either a ‘celeb/model takes cocaine shock’ exposé, or the investigative journalist (with nothing better to do) favorite ‘cocaine traces found in bar/ school/ parliament/ convent /*insert unlikely place* toilets’. Broadsheet journalists in particular love the ‘cocaine shock’ stories because it gives them a chance to sneak some celebrity tat into their news pages, basically offering a free ticket to hurtle down market and appeal to Heat readers - The Independent on Sunday’s non-news cover story last Sunday being a case in point.

Still, at least the media arent talking about cannabis for a change, and these stories do give critics of the UK Drug Strategy – that in 1998 pledged to reduce the use and availability of Class A drugs by 50% by 2008 – a great opportunity to point out that it is doing the exact opposite of what it was supposed to (ie cocaine is cheaper, more available and loads of people are using it) despite the billions of pounds still being thrown at it. Assuming Gordon Brown is the next PM – you have to hope he’s paying attention.

The one reason I will miss Milton Firedman

A nice opinion piece in today's Independent from Johann Hari - a long time advoicate of drug law reform andsupporter of Transform (you can read his archive of drug articles here)

Normally we would just post a link but since he rang up to check a few facts in the piece, I hope he wont mind us posting the complete article. For the record Transform doesnt have a view on Milton's political position beyond the drugs issue, but he did once send us a very nice letter offering his support.

The one reason I will miss Milton Friedman
Johann Hari, The Independent, 23 Nov 2006
He offered the most devastating slap-downs of the “war on drugs” ever written

Even in death, the right misses the point. Milton Friedman – the Messiah of Monetarism, saviour of small-state conservatism – is about to be buried, but his mourners have conspicuously failed to laud his one great argument.


In the past week, his conservative obituarists have concentrated on the slew of issues he got wrong, lathering praise on his demonstrably false belief that a limp, slashed-back state delivers greater social mobility and a broader middle class than a mixed social democratic economy. Just compare Sweden to Texas to test that one – or look at the collapse in Latin American growth since Friedmanomics forced out Keynesianism. Yet on one issue, Friedman applied the forensic brilliance of his brain to a deserving purpose. Over forty years, he offered the most devastating slap-downs of the “war on drugs” ever written.


Friedman was a child when alcohol was criminalised in America. The Prohibitionist crusade to banish the “demon rum” and dry out the United States lasted until he was in his twenties. The lessons lasted his lifetime. He saw that even when you use force – the police and army – to try to physically prevent people from using a popular intoxicant, you don’t actually reduce its use very much. “I wasn't very old and was not much of a drinker but there was no difficulty in finding speakeasies,” he explained. The most generous estimate is that alcohol consumption fell by a fifth initially, and then rose to pre-prohibition levels as people discovered surreptitious channels for a mouthful of moonshine.


But while prohibition didn’t succeed in the fantasies of its fans that it would “end alcoholism”, it did succeed gloriously in one respect. It handed a massive, popular industry to armed criminal gangs, who succeeded to ramp up the murder rate up by 78 percent and make a mockery of the rule of law. “We had this spectacle of Al Capone, of the hijackings, of the gang wars...” Friedman wrote. “Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse - for both the addict and the rest of us.”


Friedman saw – way ahead of almost any other commentator – how prohibiting cannabis, cocaine and heroin would spawn a thousand Capones. He warned, “Al Capone epitomizes our earlier attempt at Prohibition; the Crips and Bloods epitomize this one.” The old Chicago gangster famously gunned down six of his alcohol-hawking competitors on the St Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929. But in the age of drug prohibition, there are equivalent dealer shoot-outs every minute of the day in South Central Los Angeles – and Hackney, and Bogata, and Kabul. People without recourse to the law will protect their property with hard ammunition. Late in his life, Friedman calculated that 10,000 people were dying every year in the US alone as a direct result of these killings, equivalent to more than three September 11ths. Most were bystanders caught in the cross-fire.


And by globalising this Puritan war on drugs, the US government has globalised this gangsterism. Friedman warned that the war on drugs has “undermined the very foundations of Colombian society” and “condemned hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Colombians to violent death.” I have just returned from Mexico, which is rapidly Colombianizing, with whole areas controlled by dealers who bribe or out-gun the police force and terrorize the local population. The same thing is happening on a huge scale in Afghanistan. “By what right do we destroy other people’s countries just because we cannot enforce our own laws?” Friedman asked.


But armed gangsters are not the only species of crime generated by prohibition. In his careful, methodical style, Friedman proved that criminalising drugs causes an explosion in muggings and burglary, making us all victims of this war at some time in our lives. How? A kilo of heroin passes through six different dealers in the supply chain before it reaches the veins of a Londoner. Each link in the chain demands a fat fee for risking jail. This means heroin costs 3000 percent more than it would in a legal, risk-free market – and a heroin addict must steal 3000 percent more to buy it. 3000 percent more grannies mugged, 3000 percent more homes burgled.


That’s why so many police officers are now coming out in favour of unpicking hardline prohibition and prescribing heroin to addicts, with Howard Roberts, the deputy chief constable of Nottinghamshire, joining the queue yesterday. They know from the experience in Switzerland – an ultra-conservative country that now nonetheless prescribes heroin – that it a silver bullet (or syringe?), bringing crime rates crashing down.


This does not mean Friedman was in favour of drugs. One of the biggest problem with the legalization brand is that it is still contaminated by the legacy of idiots like Timothy O’Leary, who though drugs use was an active good, an act of liberation. (Go visit a heroin addict in rehab and tell them how liberated they are). By contrast, Friedman thought (rightly) that heavy drug use – whether it was alcoholism, cannabis-addiction or junkiedom – was a human disaster. He once told Bill Bennett, Bush Snr’s drugs tsar, “You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are a scourge that is devastating our society. Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favour are a major source of the evils you deplore.”


Friedman proved, for example, that prohibition changes the way people use drugs, making many people use stronger, more dangerous variants than they would in a legal market. During alcohol prohibition, moonshine eclipsed beer; during drug prohibition, crack is eclipsing coke. He called his rule explaining this curious historical fact “the Iron Law of Prohibition”: the harder the police crack down on a substance, the more concentrated the substance will become.


Why? If you run a bootleg bar in Prohibition-era Chicago and you are going to make a gallon of alcoholic drink, you could make a gallon of beer, which one person can drink and constitutes one sale – or you can make a gallon of pucheen, which is so strong it takes thirty people to drink it and constitutes thirty sales. Prohibition encourages you produce and provide the stronger, more harmful drink. If you are a drug dealer in Hackney, you can use the kilo of cocaine you own to sell to casual coke users who will snort it and come back a month later – or you can microwave it into crack, which is far more addictive, and you will have your customer coming back for more in a few hours. Prohibition encourages you to produce and provide the more harmful drug.


For Friedman, the solution was stark: take drugs back from criminals and hand them to doctors, pharmacists, and off-licenses. Legalize. Chronic drug use will be a problem whatever we do, but adding a vast layer of criminality, making the drugs more toxic, and squandering £20bn on enforcing prohibition that could be spent on prescription and rehab, only exacerbates the problem. “Drugs are a tragedy for addicts,” he said. “But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike.”


Some people imagine that after drug prohibition ends, drug use will become rampant, with Chigwell housewives shooting up next to the chintzy ironing board. No historical analogy is perfect, but with one of his extraordinary dense statistical analyses, Friedman showed that the fears at the end of alcohol prohibition – that everyone would be glugging gin the moment they could freely buy it – proved to be false. In fact, alcohol use went back to pre-Prohibition levels, and has been falling since, with a brief spike in the Second World War. He also showed that the vast majority of criminals who had bartered in alcohol did not simply move into another form of crime, but went legit when the temptations of such a profitable criminal market disappeared.


Today, an end to drug prohibition seems like a distant fantasy. But in 1924, even as vociferous a wet as Clarence Darrow was in despair, writing that it would require “a political revolution” to legalize alcohol in the US. Within a decade, it was done. We are approaching a tipping-point in the drugs debate, when failure becomes undeniable. As we wait, I can still hear Milton Friedman in one of his last interviews: “In the meantime, should we allow the killing to go on in the ghettos? 10,000 additional murders a year? In the meantime, should we continue to destroy Colombia and Afghanistan?”


POSTSCRIPT: You can send comments on this article for publication in the Indie to letters -at- independent.co.uk or j.hari -at - independent.co.uk

Does ANYONE know about clause 2 of the Drugs Act being axed?

The New Statesman's Human Rights Q&A column by their legal expert Sadakat Kadri (a barrister from Doughty Chambers) comments this week on a question put to him about cannabis law enforcement:

"Every now and then, I start to panic that the police are about to smash my door down. It’s weird, since they never have, but if they did, hypothetically, and happened to find some cannabis, what would it mean? The drug laws always seem to be changing. It’s doing my head in."

Kadri's response is sensible stuff, but unfortunately he has missed a recent update on Clause 2 (concerning possession/intent to supply thresholds) of the recent Drugs Act 2005, leading to a mistake in his answer. He states that:

"The Drugs Act 2005 stipulates that if someone is caught with more than a certain amount of cannabis, juries must find him or her guilty of intending to supply it - a crime punishable by 14 years imprisonment. The threshold remains undecided, but John Reid is reportedly thinking of setting it at five grams. Clearer heads may yet prevail, but a fifth of an ounce will otherwise become conclusive proof of dealing. Your fears, though somewhat delusionary, therefore have a basis in reality, and it would be prudent to minimise the weight of cannabis in your possession at any given time."

Whilst the advice about minimising the amount you are in possession of makes sense, this has always been the case and isn’t affected by the Drugs Act 2005 since the situation regarding the thresholds (Clause 2 of the Act) has actually changed again recently when the clause was quietly shelved back on the 13^th of October.

The Drugs Act 2005 does contain the thresholds clause, but as Khalid points out, the quantities that would move a possession offence to an intent to supply offence, controversially, weren’t specified at the time of its passing into law). There was an external consultation convened on these thresholds in March 2006, nearly a year AFTER the law was passed. In response to the consultation pretty much everyone asked said that the idea of thresholds was stupid in theory, and unenforceable in practice.

To anyone cunning enough to have scrutinised the Drugs Bill 2005 BEFORE it became law this was no surprise. Even though there was – outrageously - no official consultation on the clause before it became law, many experts had none the less advised that it was a very bad idea. Among those ignored were:

Drugscope (representing over 900 member organisations in the drugs field) and Turning Point (the UK 's leading treatment agency):

“We oppose Clause 2, Proof of intention to supply a controlled drug, and call for it to be removed.”

“In our view this is an unnecessary complication of the law and takes away court discretion.”

Release, the UK’s leading drug law advisory service, produced a similarly detailed briefing making many of the same points:

“We are fundamentally opposed to this provision which we consider to be unnecessary and unworkable”

The Law Society also provided a further detailed critique concluding:

“The presumption will therefore have little legitimate effect, but may allow miscarriages of justice to occur”

Transform also submitted its own detailed briefing produced for the Government consideration and parliamentary scrutiny of the Drugs Bill in early 2005, providing yet another detailed critique of clause 2.

Anyway, the consultation paper has now been published, and it’s a pretty good document as it goes, albeit arriving the wrong side of the law being enacted. The upshot of its analysis, lurking at the end of the report is a short statement to the effect that the clause is not being commenced because everyone said it was daft. So the thresholds will not be implemented after all.

The Government’s non-commencement this clause was met by almost total media silence, the only coverage I came across was a brief mention in the Guardian on the day it was published. This silence was largely due to some rather clever spin on the Government’s part (blogged on briefly here), which managed to distract attention away from the issue with an announcement about Methamphetamine being reclassified as Class A. So effective were the Governments efforts for this story to not be reported (because it makes them look like the policy was ill thought out and passed with undue haste – which it was) that not even the New Statesman’s ‘legal expert’ had heard about it, and if a top lawyer didn’t know what the law was, what hope is there for anyone else?

This media silence was in striking contrast to the huge kerfuffle that broke out when the proposed thresholds were initially announced, with tabloid headlines screaming about it being legal to carry 2000 spliffs worth of cannabis, ten wraps of cocaine, and so on.

There’s various lessons to be learnt from this sorry saga:

1. That consultations on law changes are best undertaken BEFORE the law changes take place (You’ll excuse the gratuitous use of capitals again, but what seems so obvious to most, apparently isn’t so obvious in the Home Office). For the record Transform’s briefing on the flawed process by which this clause came to be enacted is here . Lessons have clearly not been learnt from the almost identical farrago with reforms to section 8 of the Misuse of Drugs Act a couple of years back.
   
   
2. Policy and Law changes should not only be consulted on properly (as per the Government’s own guidelines on such changes), but they should also be subject to a proper Regulatory Impact Assessment (as per the Government’s own RIA guidelines), which this clause also mysteriously managed to avoid. Moreover, policy and law changes should pass into the law following proper Parliamentary scrutiny and debate, not as the result of party horse trading on Bills in the ‘wash-up week’ before a General Election, as was the case here.
   
   
3. That the Government can’t be trusted to bring peoples attention to changes in policy that might put them in a bad light, but can be relied upon to trumpet ill-thought out knee-jerk policy changes on drugs if the tabloids are likely to report it as being ‘tough on drugs’ (note: it doesn’t matter if the law change actually ever occurs as long as the headlines are secured – see also: random drug testing and sniffer dogs in schools).
   
   
4. That the media can’t be trusted to check through long nerdy Government documents and report on complex policy issues in an intelligent way, (even following up on stuff they have already run as headline news), especially when there are much sexier stories about scary sounding drugs like methamphetamine .
   
   
5. And finally, given all of the above, it is down to you folks in the drugs field, boring enough to have read this far, to hold the Government and media to account when they are completely incompetent, or otherwise fail in their responsibilities, which is unfortunately quite often.

Australian Liberals call for drug crackdown

Australian newspaper The Age reports in an article titled ‘Liberals take hard line on ‘soft’ drugs’. (November 20, 2006) that:

Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu said a Liberal government would take a tough line on drugs and seek to change the culture surrounding "recreational drugs", which he described as the scourge of our society.

"The message to the community is: we are not going to tolerate it any more. Drugs are dangerous, dabbling in drugs is dangerous, and young people need to get the message," he said. "We are not going to cope if we continue to simply put around the message that it's OK to dabble or it's OK to use recreational drugs — there is no such thing."

Along with these comments he calls for the old fall back of many a drug-warrior trying to sound tough; minimum sentences for drugs dealers - which have failed in every respect in the US except boosting prison numbers to unprecedented levels. He also calls for the banning of ‘large cigarette papers’ and bongs, a frankly laughable suggestion about as likely to stop cannabis consumption as banning pint glasses is to stop people drinking beer. Just picture 1000s of Aussie cannabis users looking at their stash and small cigarette papers in bafflement and despair. A prize-winningly idiotic addition to the prohibitionist armoury, already overflowing with them.

But enough of that silliness, there’s a couple of more important points worth making about his quote above. Firstly, whilst tough talk of ‘putting out messages’ will have a familiar ring to UK audiences, being exactly the sort of thing we would expect to hear from the John Reid or David Davis, we would probably not expect to hear such knee-jerk drug war clichés from the Liberal Democrats, who have historically been a bit more sophisticated on such issues. So it is curious to hear this sort of old-school populist gubbins about getting ‘tough’ on ‘scourges’ from a nominally liberal party, particularly one that has as it’s first belief:

“The inalienable rights and freedoms of all peoples; and we work towards a lean government that minimises interference in our daily lives”

Secondly, it’s always interesting to contrast self-proclaimed anti-drug crusader's attitudes to ‘drugs’ and to alcohol (also of course, a drug). I have no idea about Ballieu’s position on alcohol, although he no doubt has a sup from time to time
Politicians in Australia aren’t apparently shy of posing for the cameras with a glass or their favourite recreational drug, nor for that matter are UK politicians, even quite well known ones:

what message does this send out to the kids?

Yet in the UK with its rapidly growing problems of binge drinking liver cirrhosis amongst young people and Australia with its high profile problems of ‘grog’ amongst many deprived aboriginal communities, alcohol could much more appropriately be called a ‘scourge’. The contrast between public proclamations on legal and illegal drugs appears to be more to do with how the different political rhetoric received by the public and media rather than the fact one drug is somehow OK whilst others are thoroughly wicked and awful. This alarming lack of consistency is all about politics and nothing to do with evidence based public health policy making. See http://www.tdpf.org.uk/Policy_General_Whythisbutnotthis.htm

You have to hope that Mr Baillieu’s intention that “$4 million would be spent teaching students about the dangers of cannabis, ecstasy and amphetamines” is matched by a commitment to spending on students favourite drug – alcohol, which causes levels of harm that eclipse all illegal drugs combined. He might also want to include some info on the dangers of prohibition, and how a criminal record for consuming certain drugs could seriously damage the future career prospect of Australia’s brightest hopes.

Piperazines - what to do with an emerging 'legal high'?

The piperazines are a 'family' of drugs with similar chemical structures. Some amongst this group of drugs are used medically (including famously, Viagra) and others, (currently unlicensed as medicines and also not covered by the Misuse of Drugs Act) are in an as-yet unclassified legal wilderness and have found a market on the (annoyingly named) 'legal high' recreational drugs scene for their stimulant effect, similar to amphetamines or ecstasy, although of lower potency.



The emergence of such drugs has only recently grazed the media with some reporting in the Guardian and a recent edition of the New Scientist as well as some coverage in the dance music scene media.

Transform has produced a detailed briefing on these drugs, considering what the options might be for dealing with them without resorting to a heavy handed crackdown. Specifically this briefing looks at the experience in New Zealand where the drugs have been widely used for a number of years (without, reportedly, any significant public health harms) and where the government have opted to license the drug for sale under a new Class D classification - amended to to their existing ABC system similar to the UK's. The new 'Class D' acknowledges risk but puts in place a series of licensing criteria (age controls, packaging, dosage etc).

Whilst piperazines themselves are not a particular concern, this represents a very real step forward in drug policy thinking for the future - offering one of the worlds first new licensing systems for recreational drugs (not currently covered by the UN conventions). The UK's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs will be considering this drug and the Class D concept in the near future and there exists a real possibility for a new and pragamatic 'third way' option to emerge in the UK, operating between absolute prohibition and the essentially unregulated 'legal highs' industry. It wouldn't be the answer to the problems of prohibition but would certainly be a step in the right direction and usefully help demonstrate how other drugs might be more effectively regulated in the future.