PROHIBITION'S FAILED. TIME FOR A NEW DRUGS POLICY

IN JUNE 1971, US President Richard Nixon declared a "war on drugs".
Drugs won.

The policy of deploying the full might of the state against the
production, supply and consumption of illegal drugs has not worked.
Pretty much anyone in the developed world who wants to take illicit
substances can buy them. Those purchases fund a multibillion dollar
global industry that has enriched mighty criminal cartels, for whom
law enforcement agencies are mostly just a nuisance, rarely a threat.
Meanwhile, the terrible harm that drug dependency does to individuals
and societies has not been reduced. Demand and supply flourish.

"It is time to admit the obvious," writes Fernando Henrique Cardoso,
former president of Brazil, in the Observer today. "The 'war on drugs'
has failed."

Earlier this year, Mr Cardoso co-chaired the Latin American Commission
on Drugs and Democracy with former presidents of Colombia and Mexico.
They endorsed a collective shift in policy from repression of drug use
to harm reduction. Last month, Argentina's supreme court declared the
prosecution of individuals for the possession of small amounts of
drugs to be unconstitutional. Colombia's constitutional court came to
a similar conclusion in 1994.

The trend towards decriminalisation in Latin America is born of
desperation. The continent is the world's largest exporter of cocaine
and marijuana. Its economies and criminal justice systems have been
corrupted by the trade; in some areas the power of the drug gangs
rivals that of the state. Something had to change.

Something must change also in the countries that buy Latin America's
biggest export. In Britain, more than half a million people aged 16-24
took cocaine last year, according to Home Office statistics. More than
a third of all Britons aged 16-59 have taken drugs at some point in
their lives; one in 10 in the last year.

Not all of those people are a menace to society. Most of them are not
even a menace to themselves. Most who take drugs in their youth stop
later on. A generation that has grown up with normalised recreational
drug use now occupies the commanding heights of business, media and
politics. They might not take drugs themselves, but they are not
morally outraged by them.

That is a significant cultural change. The political fixation on drugs
prohibition really took hold in the west in the 1960s as much from
moral panic about a subversive counterculture as from analysis of the
harm caused by particular drugs.

Since then, the law has tried to maintain a distinction between
reputable and disreputable substances that neither users nor medical
research recognise. Scientific attempts to classify drugs in terms of
the harm they do to the body and society routinely place tobacco
and alcohol ahead of cannabis and ecstasy. The point is not that the
wrong drugs are banned, but that the law is nonsense to anyone with
real knowledge of the substances involved.

One point of general agreement is that heroin is the big problem. It
is highly addictive and those who are dependent up to 300,000 in
Britain tend to commit a lot of crime to fund their habit. But then
it is hard to tell how much of the problem is contained by prohibition
and how much caused by it.

Leaving gangsters in charge of supply ensures that addicts get a more
toxic product and get ever more ensnared in criminality.

Those arguments do not prove that the solution lies in legalisation,
or even just decriminalisation. But as Mr Cardoso argues: "Continuing
the drugs war with more of the same is ludicrous."

The entire framework of the debate must change. In Britain, we operate
with laws that start from the premise that drug use is inherently
morally wrong, and then seek ways to stop it. Instead we must start by
evaluating the harm that drug use does, and then look for the best
ways to alleviate it; and we must have the courage to follow that
logic wherever it leads.