WHY CAN'T YOU BUY HEROIN AT BOOTS?

Picture this: beside the electric toothbrushes at your local chemist, you
can pick up complete kits of syringes, needles, cotton balls, lighters,
rubber tying-off cords and cute stainless-steel spoons - all vacuum-sealed
in plastic. Just as you can request some high-strength cortisone cream to
treat that pesky eczema on your shin, you can ask your GP for heroin. Thus
you can hand the pharmacist an NHS prescription for a two-week supply of
commercial opiates (let's say Merck's version is called Scagodrine),
inviting nary a raised eyebrow. As with all NHS prescriptions, your
co-payment will only amount to about UKP6.50. You can walk out of the
chemist with your Boots Home Works Kit and Scagodrine (bagged into single
dosages whose potency is printed on the box), and wave to the bobby on the
corner. He'll wave back.

Are you, in your mind's eye, scampering down to your nearest surgery for
that prescription, and racing off to Boots? Perhaps you're thinking,
"Blimey, all this time I haven't been an intravenous drug addict because
heroin is against the law! If I wouldn't get arrested, I'd spend every day
in an apathetic swoon, alienate my friends and lose my job!"

Most of us aren't heroin addicts because we don't want to be heroin
addicts. Or coke heads or meth freaks. The people who do want to be junkies
are junkies. Were hard drugs decriminalised, it's dubious that consumption
would appreciably rise.

Which is why Lib Dem MP Chris Davies's calling for the legalisation and
regulation of hard drugs last week really shouldn't qualify as "brave". Nor
should Lord Birt's now partially leaked 2003 report on UK drug policy
qualify as "controversial". The report's assertions make common sense: for
drug cartels, government seizures are merely a modest line-item in their
budgets; the "maximum" - meaning, farcically optimistic - estimate of drug
seizures runs to 25% of total supply. Confiscation only serves to drive up
the street price of hard drugs and so benefits their purveyors. Therefore,
even more effective narcotics enforcement would simply push users into
stealing yet more DVD players to fund costlier habits.

Alas, common sense is in short supply on this matter. The west's
prohibition approach to drugs is as entrenched as it is idiotic. Davies and
Birt are pissing in the wind. So, by the way, am I. But I've nothing else
to do this afternoon, so let's fritter away my time.

It would be nice if everyone were happy and good. If everyone were a
productive member of society, reliably rising to greet the morning,
bursting into song and eager for the day ahead. If we all took such joy in
the miracle of sheer being that it would never enter our heads to try to
fuzzy up a single blade of grass.

But government can't manifest this healthy look-life-square-in-the-eye by
fiat. Frankly, most of us need to take the edge off once in a while - or
put it on. Get a buzz from a cup of coffee or a few drags of a fag. Put our
feet up with a glass of cabernet or sink into the sofa with a cognac before
bed. Plenty of folks in my boomer generation still suck on the odd spliff
in the privacy of their living rooms, and the sky doesn't fall when they do.

If most of us tinker with our consciousness on occasion, a subsection of
our fellows finds raw reality not just hard to take, but unbearable.
Whether to induce exhilaration or oblivion, the compounds are out there to
do the job, and these people, by hook or by crook, are going to get their
mitts on those drugs.

There may be a set percentage of the population determined to throw their
lives away. Calling drug abuse a "victimless crime" may be a misnomer, for
you can victimise yourself. Be that as it may, we've plenty of evidence by
now that it costs a society far more to try to stop people from
"self-medicating" than to let them. It's hard enough to protect people from
each other; it's impossible to protect people from themselves.

Davies was dead sound in calling for an end to drug prohibition in the name
of mere "harm reduction". There's no good answer here. But the costs of
this puritanical thou-shalt-not are gobsmacking. We've delivered whole
countries such as Afghanistan largely into the hands of crooks.
Internationally, we've created a massive shadow economy out of the reach of
the law. On the US-Mexico border, murderous battles between rival drug
gangs are getting so out of hand that this month Arizona and New Mexico
declared states of emergencies. In the UK alone, crimes committed by heroin
and cocaine addicts to feed their habits come to UKP16bn a year.

We can take Vioxx off the market, but the appetite for pain relievers of
the dodgy variety is not going to go away, no matter how many scary adverts
run on television. So deal with it. Regulate drugs, tax them, monitor them,
just like alcohol. You'd take preying on that appetite away from elements
that have grown so powerful that they constitute rival governments. You'd
have far few drug-related deaths, because the product would be pure, its
potency established. You'd clear prisons of people guilty of nothing more
than wanting to feel different, and you'd free up the police force to go
after people who actually want to hurt somebody else. You'd take the
cultural shine off drugs altogether, depriving them of their furtive cachet.

Isolated European experiments with more liberal drug policies have poorly
tested the premise that prescription beats proscription. When a single
country such as the Netherlands loosens its narcotics laws while its
neighbours continue to pursue punitive ones, naturally the country becomes
a magnet for wasters, and there goes the neighbourhood. A Europe-wide
rethink would spread the wasters around.

Yet as for working out the details of a legal distribution scheme that
would effectively result in "harm reduction", why bother? Davies was
wasting his breath, Birt his paper - as I am wasting yours. I cannot
imagine a rational, pragmatic approach to drugs in the western world
evolving in my lifetime. Davies's proposal was sane, it was welcome; it was
also self-destructive. Fellow Lib Dems rushed to clarify that he was not
promoting party policy. And these are Lib Dems! Can you envisage an
American presidential candidate going out on a limb to advocate that the US
decriminalises heroin? That's right, with pigs flying merrily overhead, and
hell freezing below.