WAR ON DRUGS: BRINGS OUT PEACE PIPE

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

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

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

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

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