OUR DRUG WAR

Congratulations to Channel 4 for screening the most sensible film
about drugs I've ever seen.

Whether or not you believe drugs should be de-criminalised, it's
blindingly obvious that if the intention of Britain's drug policies is
to stop people using them, then they're absolutely not working.

Angus MacQueen's calm, un-hysterical film asks the question we must
all be wondering: what did the UKP1.5 billion we spent last year on
fighting drugs actually achieve?

MacQueen's stance is that the war on drugs is actually causing more
harm than the drugs themselves by criminalising entire sections of the
population, clogging our courts and filling our prisons without
actually stemming the supply of drugs one little bit.

One expert's figures show that police and customs are currently
managing to seize just one per cent of all heroin being smuggled into
Scotland.

Imagine, says MacQueen, if the police had to admit they were only able
to solve 1% of all murders.

In the first of a three part series, MacQueen speaks to a former
smuggler to discover how much it costs to pay off a customs officer,
and also discovers how banning one substance simply causes users to
switch to similar chemicals which are still legal but can be even more
dangerous.

That is what happened when the government banned GHB: users switched
instead to a chemical called GBL - easily available on the internet as
an alloy wheel cleaner.

MacQueen meets Suzanne Dyer whose son Chris died as a result of an
addiction to GBL.

Would making GBL illegal have saved his life? She thinks
not.