DON'T FOLLOW US INTO A DISASTROUS WAR ON DRUGS

The UK Government Could Revert Cannabis to a Class B Drug, but
Harsher Penalties Will Only Feed the Black Market, Writes Ethan Nadlemann

Young people laugh at the adult world when we talk about the war on
drugs. People pretend we need prohibition on cannabis to protect the
young. But it's precisely young people who have always had the
greatest access to cannabis. If people in their fifties and sixties
want cannabis, they ask their children.

The British government says it is time to consider whether cannabis
should revert to a class B drug. That would be an incredibly stupid
thing to do. We should be moving in the direction of the
decriminalisation and regulation of cannabis.

What would be the consequences of increasing penalties by making
cannabis a class B drug? It would not reduce its availability, nor
would it make cannabis any more or less potent than it is today. All
it would result in is more young people getting criminal records.
This would simply intensify the hypocrisy of the government's war on
drugs and is one area where Tony Blair is foolishly following in the
footsteps of a disastrous US policy.

The bottom line is that there is a way to take cannabis out of the
black market - that is to tax it, control it and regulate it. The
government pretends that prohibition represents the ultimate form of
regulation when in fact prohibition represents the abdication of
regulation. That essentially leaves drugs in the hands of criminals.

If people are concerned about the potency of substances, all the
better to regulate them. During the alcohol prohibition years, the
United States had very little low-potency beer around. Most of it was
alcohol that was 70 or 80 or 90 per cent hard liquor.

Why? Because Al Capone wanted to stock those trucks with 80 per cent
booze, not 80 per cent water. When you regulate something legally,
its potency and its dangers go down. When you drive a drug
underground and criminalize it, it is much more likely to be
transformed into a more potent substance.

There has barely been a single drug-free society in the history of
human civilization. All around the world people have found, planted
and discovered substances to alter one's state of consciousness.
That's a near-universal truth. To have policy that devotes resources
to forcing abstinence is going against human nature, against the
forces of supply and demand.

You might ask why the drug prohibition policy is crumbling despite
vast subsidies. That's like asking why socialist dictators have
crumbled. You had a system that ultimately did not stand for human
rights, did not recognize the power of supply and demand, and tried
to suppress global commodities markets rather than regulate them.

Tonight in the US we will have almost 500,000 people behind bars for
violating a drug law. That's not counting the people who steal to
support their habit and all the drug dealers who get involved in
violence. We in the US lock up more people for drug law violations
than the whole of western Europe for everything, and you have 100
million more people than we do.

That's why it's foolish for the British government to be following in
the footsteps of the United States.

This high incarceration rate is absolutely integral to the American
drug policy. Last year we arrested more than 1.5 million people on
drugs charges -760,000 for marijuana offences and of those, 89 per
cent were for possession alone. We arrested 600,000 people simply for
carrying a small amount of cannabis.

In the US that means you may lose your government loans for access to
university, it means you may lose access to food stamps or housing.
We think nothing of giving millions of people a criminal record.
Trying to follow in the footsteps of the old apartheid South Africa
on race policy.

My philosophy on drugs is harm reduction. That must seek to reduce
the negative consequences of drug use such as deaths, disease,
overdoses and accidents, and reduce the negative consequences of
prohibitionist policies - ie crime, violence, corruption, black
markets, and environmental damage to developing countries.

The question is, what is that policy in respect of each drug? In
respect of cannabis, the optimal policy is going to be one that taxes
it, controls it and regulates it.

I don't understand why Scotland is being such a laggard in respect of
heroin. People agree that using heroin is a bad thing. But thousands
of people in this country are using it, so the question has to be
asked - what do we do?

You can start by getting rid of the waiting lists for methadone and
help people to go drug free if that's what they want. But after that
you will still be stuck with thousands of people using heroin.

The Drug Policy Alliance is seen as a liberal and progressive
organization, but in fact many of our best allies are on the right.
One of the good things this Bush administration did was commission
some outside reports to look at the effectiveness of the government
programmes in a wide range if areas.

The report found that not one of the federal drugs war programmes
were being effective. Not a single one.

We're running the largest federal budget in the country's history and
keep getting hit by one disaster after another, including oil price
shocks. Yet we're spending $20 billion (UKP 11.3 billion) a year on
the war on drugs.

People - both liberals and conservatives - are beginning to say that
we need a different approach. There's growing opposition around the
world to the prohibitionist policy. Even in the Far East, which is
traditionally always in favour of very harsh prohibition, governments
are having to go for harm reduction because of the HIV problem.

This isn't going to happen quickly. But I see myself in the first
generation of a long-term political struggle that will succeed after
successive generations have taken leadership.