|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||||||
|
The Daily Express: Friday February 6, 2004 Is this the moment to legalise heroin? Danny Kushlick and John Stalker debate the possibility of legal heroin sales. Yes - Danny Kushlick You are twice as likely to be burgled or robbed because of the enforcement of our drug laws. The Government’s own figures show that the war on drugs creates up to fifteen billion pounds worth of crime costs each year. You are paying for the Government to pursue a policy that costs you more money as a result of the policy it is implementing. The war on drugs has been lost. Our policy of criminalising drug production, supply and possession has failed to achieve any of the goals it originally set out to. Production is increasing, drugs are more available and cheaper than ever before and more people are using drugs. Paradoxically, the war on drugs has served to fill the coffers of international organised criminals, fund terror groups, destabilise most of Latin America, Afghanistan and the Caribbean, degenerate inner cities throughout the world and push the price of heroin and cocaine to levels that double both the level of property crime and the size of the prison population. I once asked Tony Blair whether he thought that prohibition created more crime than it solved. His answer: “I’m terrified for my kids”. Interesting answer Tony, to a different question. I wonder how concerned he is for other people’s kids who come into contact with heroin and crack in their communities or for those kids who have died as a result of using adulterated or highly pure heroin. I wonder how concerned he is for the children of drug using prostitutes forced to sell their bodies to strangers for a hit. All this misery arises from a misguided attempt to eradicate drugs from the world by criminalising them. The attempt failed a long time ago but still we persist in supporting a global regime of prohibition. Prohibition failed to eradicate alcohol in the US in the early part of the last century and in fact served to create the US Mafia. Drug prohibition is doing exactly the same now. It is the prohibition itself that creates so much misery. Let’s end it and replace it with a system that is effective, just and humane. We have four alternatives to prohibition: unlicensed sales, licensed sales, pharmacy sales and prescription. All of these options offer significant opportunities to control and regulate the supply of drugs. No prohibition of any commodity has ever been successful in the long term. Even plutonium isn’t prohibited, it is regulated. So let’s at least discuss the alternatives to the policy of prohibition that has failed us all so badly. Let’s challenge those politicians and commentators who continue to support the drugs war to supply any evidence of an impending victory. Is your community winning? And if it is, at whose expense? Let us admit defeat and explore peaceful alternatives to a war that is killing our children and undermining the credibility of the entire criminal justice system. Danny Kushlick, Director of Transform Drug Policy Foundation No - John Stalker What have the good people of North Wales done to deserve a Chief constable like Richard Brunstrom? Until now, his place in the headlines has been confined to his obsession with speed cameras and a spat with a retired bank manager who complained about traffic enforcement laws. His latest pronouncement sets a new benchmark for crassness. He also hastens the day when small police fiefdoms such as his disappear altogether. Much more of this nonsense and chief constables will soon be appointed not from the police but from the ranks of private industry. Certainly, the chief executive of Consolidated Widgets plc would have more grasp on the real world. For two years he has been banging his personal drum for the legalisation of all illegal and addictive drugs, including heroin and cocaine. He wants them taxed, like booze and cigarettes, seeming to forget that the latter are smuggled on a gigantic scale to avoid duty. At a national police conference in 2002 he was hissed from the podium. No other chief constable publicly agrees with him, and most place Class A drugs enforcement at the top of their priorities. But Mr Brunstrom is unmoved. In his view, heroin is “not very, very, very dangerous”. He believed that, because the drugs war is not being won, we should give in. It is a defeatist policing philosophy, all too common in respect of other areas of crime, and Mr Brunstrom seems to be taking it a huge step further. Why, we will soon ask, do we need a police force at all? Richard Brunstrom BSc (Hons), MSc, is a good example of a modern breed of chief constable. Media-wise and articulate, their opinions are shaped less on the mean streets than in the warm embrace of esoteric debate. Trusted policing values of common sense and practicality are pushed away, often held in low regard by some of this new policing brotherhood. He no doubt sees himself as a visionary, voicing a radical view. But the only opinions that matter are of those who, every day, see the splintered lives of those who believed that heroin was “not very, very, very dangerous.” Heroin kills. So does crack cocaine. Mr Brunstrom’s lofty arguments have no relevance on Britain’s sink estates where life demands fewer, not more, drugs. His simplistic message reduces the regulation of dangerous drugs to a mere revenue problem rather than a life or death matter. His ideas would legitimise death and involve the state in the killing, for gain, of its own citizens. Former “drugs tsar” Keith Hellawell believes Mr Brunstrom to be wrong. I would go further: I regard him as dangerously out of touch with reality. For all our sakes, my advice would be for him to stay with speed cameras John Stalker, writer and broadcaster, was formally Greater Manchester Deputy Chief Constable and drugs squad head. |
||
 |
||
|
||
|