Transform : TDPF

Opinion formers
Academics, Business People, Drug Treatment, Opinion writers, Media Editorials

Academics

Professor John Adams Emeritus Professor of geography, University College London
Professor Sheila Bird of the Cambridge-based Medical Research Council biostatistics unit and a former member of the NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) advisory committee
Professor Colin Blakemore Waynflete Professor of Physiology, University of Oxford,Fellow of the Royal Society; President of British Association for the Advancement of Science, Director of the Medical Research Council
Julia Buxton Senior Research Fellow, University of Bradford
Professor Maureen Cain Criminologist
Professor Noam Chomsky MIT, Linguist, Author
Professor John Davies University of Strathclyde
Professor Albert Einstein Physicist, Nobel Laureate (physics) (quote on alcohol prohibition)
Professor Stephen Fineman University of Bath
Sigmund Freud Psychoanalyst & Neurologist
Professor Milton Friedman Economist, Nobel Laureate (economics)
Professor Michael Gazzaniga Andrew W. Thompson Jr. Professor of Psychiatry (Neuroscience) at Dartmouth Medical School (USA), editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (MIT Press)
Professor John Gray London School of Economics
Dr Anthony Grayling Birkbeck College, University of London, and St Anne's College, Oxford
Professor Nick Heather Emeritus Professor of Alcohol & Other Drugs Studies
Professor Helen J Leathard St Martin's College, Lancaster
Harry Levine Professor of Sociology, University of New York
Jeff Miron Professor of Economics, Harvard University, University of Boston
Paul O’Mahony Senior Lecturer in the School of Medicine, Trinity College, Dublin
Peter Reuter Professor at the University of Maryland
Sanho Tree Fellow, Drug Policy Project, Washington DC
Lev Timofeev Analyst of Russias shadow economy

Richard Branson Founder of Virgin Group
Henry Hoare Senior partner of London Bankers Hoare & Co (Transform Patron)
Anita Roddick founder of the Body Shop (Transform Patron)
George Soros Financier
Adair Turner Chairman of the UK Pensions Commission and the UK Low Pay Commission, trustee of WWF, former director of the CBI.

Professor John Adams Emeritus Professor of geography, University College London

"Bloomsbury is an area dominated by a few large, mostly educational, institutions. It is currently mounting a vigorous resistance to the invasion of dealers and addicts. The heads of security of its institutions are liaising with each other, and the police, in an unprecedented fashion. More CCTVs are being installed, and the monitoring of them coordinated. The police are encouragingly active. But under the current state of the law, the most that we can do to deal with our problem, that has been displaced on to us from Kings Cross and St. Giles/Tottenham Court Road, is to displace it on to someone else. This strikes me as the worst sort of NIMBYism. Hence my revived interest, this time guilt-inspired, in the pernicious futility of prohibition, and my enthusiasm for the controlled-legalisation agenda being promoted by Transform."

Source: Bloomsbuury Association "Drug Prohibition is not working: The case of Bloomsbury, London" John Adams 2003
read the complete article here

Professor Sheila Bird of the Cambridge-based Medical Research Council biostatistics unit and a former member of the NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) advisory committee

"In the face of all the evidence, thorough research into the possibility of legalisation is the only intelligent thing to do.

"It costs about £300 per week to fund a heroin addiction. Users are often unemployed and turn to crime to fund their habit. To get hold of £300 they will need to steal goods initially worth two to five times that value. Legalisation would eradicate the need for users to steal.

"However, at present there are still too many unknown factors for us to make a proper informed decision but the case for serious studies, conducted at the highest level, is very strong."

Professor Colin Blakemore Fellow of the Royal Society; President, British Association for the Advancement of Science

"Persisting in our current policies will only result in more drug abuse, more empowerment of drug markets and criminals, and more disease and suffering. Too often those who call for open debate, rigorous analysis of current policies, and serious consideration of alternatives are accused of "surrendering." But the true surrender is when fear and inertia combine to shut off debate, suppress critical analysis, and dismiss all alternatives to current policies. Mr. Secretary General, we appeal to you to initiate a truly open and honest dialogue regarding the future of global drug control policies - one in which fear, prejudice and punitive prohibitions yield to common sense, science, public health and human rights"

“Globalization, free trade and neoliberalism have made the old drug model redundant and anachronistic. Adapting to modernity will require a change of revolutionary proportions. This will be fiercely resisted, but without an overhaul of founding principles, institutions and vested interests, the international community will continue to waste millions of dollars and ruin millions of lives in the pursuit of an unrealizable end.”

Legalisation, she said, would have more certain consequences like, "a massive drop in price and a movement out of drugs to a more lucrative trading opportunities by organised crime."

"It makes money so guns can be bought. I cannot think of any other way to bring the price down. The only way is to legalise it."

Source: 'Legalise Narcotics' The Trinidad Express 09.02.04
Read the full article here.

“The utterly fraudulent war on drugs was undertaken at a time when everyone knew that use of every drug-even coffee-was falling among educated whites, and was staying sort of level among blacks. The police obviously find it much easier to make an arrest on the streets of a black ghetto than in a white suburb. By now, a very high percentage of incarceration is drug-related, and it mostly targets little guys, somebody who’s caught peddling dope. The big guys are largely ignored.
“Drug-related crimes, usually pretty trivial ones, are mostly what’s filling up the prisons. I haven’t seen many bankers or executives of chemical corporations in prison. People in the rich suburbs commit plenty of crimes, but they’re not going to prison at anything like the rate of the poor.”
‘The Common Good’, interviews by David Barsamian, p. 35 & 38 07.02.97

“Now when some client state complains that the US isn’t sending it enough money, they no longer say ‘we need it to stop the Russians’ - rather, ‘we need it to stop drug trafficking’. Like the Soviet threat, this enemy provides a good excuse for a US military presence where there’s rebel activity or other unrest.

“At the time the drug war was launched, deaths from tobacco were estimated at about 300,000 a year, with perhaps another 100,000 from alcohol. But these aren’t the drugs the Bush administration targeted. It went after illegal drugs, which had caused many fewer deaths-3,500 a year.
“The administration also targeted marijuana, which hadn’t caused any known deaths among some 60 million users. In fact, the crackdown exacerbated the drug problem.”
‘What Uncle Sam Really Wants’, Noam Chomsky, p. 83-84 13.01.91

A FORMER government drugs adviser has called for heroin to be legalised and says that if addicts want to kill themselves by using the drug they should be allowed to do so.

Speaking at a conference focusing on substitute prescribing, held at Stiring Royal Infirmary yesterday, Professor John Davies of Strathclyde University claimed that the criminal status of the drug fostered a "helpless junkie" culture which encouraged addicts to abdicate responsibility for their actions when they got into trouble.

Professor Davies said: "If somebody has a desire to kill themselves through drug use, provided it doesn't interfere with anybody else's liberty, I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to do so. You can kill yourself hang gliding, you can kill yourself climbing mountains."

At the conference, which was organised by the Scottish Drugs Forum, the psychology professor went on to argue that methadone, prescribed by doctors to addicts as a heroin substitute, was not always successful. Some people, he said, got "parked on methadone for long periods of time" and were "not having any fun from their drug use, and they're not getting any better". He added: "If that helps to reduce crime and so on, that's fine, but in some instances it's not doing that person any good at all."

A member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and editor of the journal Addiction Research, Professor Davies has studied drug addiction since the 1960s and was involved in the first methodone scheme introduced at Saughton Prison in Edinburgh.

Calling for drugs to be made legal, he said: "The hope would be that you would get an increase in prevalence, but a reduction in harmful, damaging drug use."

Professor Albert Einstein Nobel Laureate (physics) (quote on alcohol prohibition)

"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this."

Source: 'My First Impression of the U.S.A.', 1921
Note: this quote is in reference to alcohol prohibition in the USA during the 1920’s

“You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are a scourge that is devastating our society…Your mistake is failing to recognise that the very measures you favour are a major source of the evils you deplore. Of course the problem is demand, but it is not only demand, it is demand that must operate through repressed and illegal channels. Illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords; illegality leads to the corruption of law enforcement officials; illegality monopolises the efforts of honest law forces so that they are starved for resources to fight the simpler crimes, of robbery, theft and assault. Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalising their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike.”

Source: An Open Letter To Bill Bennett from Milton Friedman, Wall Street Journal 7 th September 1989; quoted in O’Mahony The Irish War on Drugs

"An attempt is currently being made [in America]...to deprive people of all stimulants, drugs and semi-luxuries and satisfy them, by recompense, with the fear of God. The outcome of this experiment is another thing over which we need waste no curiosity."

Milton Friedman Economist, Nobel Prize winner (economics)

"So long as large sums of money are involved - and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal - it is literally impossible to stop the traffic, or even to make a serious reduction in its scope."

"Our emphasis here is based not only on the growing seriousness of drug-related crimes, but also on the belief that relieving our police and our courts from having to fight losing battles against drugs will enable their energies and facilities to be devoted more fully to combating other forms of crime. We would thus strike a double blow: reduce crime activity directly, and at the same time increase the efficacy of law enforcement and crime prevention."

Source: "Tyranny of the Status Quo"

"Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement. Can you conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order?"

Professor Michael Gazzaniga Andrew W. Thompson Jr. Professor of Psychiatry (Neuroscience) at Dartmouth Medical School, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (MIT Press)

“If your goal were, pure and simple, to get high, you might try crack or cocaine, or some amphetamine. You wouldn't go for marijuana, which is a mild hallucinogen and tranquilizer. So, if you wanted to be up and you didn't have much time, you might go to crack. But then if it were absolutely established that there was a higher addiction rate with crack, legalization could, paradoxically, diminish its use. This is so because if cocaine were reduced to the same price as crack, the abuser, acknowledging the higher rate of addiction, might forgo the more intensive high of crack, opting for the slower high of cocaine. Crack was introduced years ago as offering an alluring new psycho active experience. But its special hold on the ghetto is the result of its price. Remember that—on another front—we know that 120-proof alcohol doesn't sell as readily as 86 proof, not by a long shot, even though the higher the proof, the faster the psychological effect that alcohol users are seeking.”

“This gets to the issue of actual availability. Drugs are everywhere, simply everywhere. In terms of availability, drugs might just as well be legal as illegal. Now it has been argued that legalization will create a different social climate, a more permissive, more indulgent climate. It is certainly conceivable, primarily for that reason, that there would be greater initial use—the result of curiosity. But the central point is that human beings in all cultures tend to seek out means of altering their mental state, and that although some will shop around and lose the powers of self-discipline, most will settle down to a base rate of use, and a much smaller rate of abuse, and those rates are pretty much what we have in the United States right now.

Asked:
“What would be your prediction, as a scientist, of what the advent of [drugs sold legally and without prescription to adults in a kind of] Federal Drugstore, combined with a program of intensified education, would accomplish in the next ten years?”

Gazzaniga Replies:
“Drug-consumption rates will bounce around, related as they are to environmental factors, fads, and a host of other factors. Drug-abuse rates will not change much, if at all. Yet many of the negative social consequences of keeping drugs illegal will be neutralized. The health costs of drug abuse will always be with us. We should try to focus on those problems with more serious neurobiologic and neurobehavioral research and help where we can to reduce the percentage that fall victim. I am an experimental scientist, and like most people can see that the present system doesn't work. We need to try another approach. If, for whatever reason, legalization doesn't improve the situation, it would take five minutes to reverse it.

“Whatever the inherent dangers of any drug, an extra level of risk is added when users have no reliable knowledge of the quality of the drug they are consuming. Decriminalisation - a policy of not prosecuting the end-users of drugs while continuing to target their sources - would not solve this problem.

Turning a blind eye on users - as is being done in regard to cannabis in Brixton in an experimental scheme which makes long-established police practice in south London official - leaves production and distribution in the hands of criminals.

Only legalising the most widely used drugs, subjecting them to strict quality assessment and making them available through controlled outlets, will allow people to make intelligent choices.

The most odious tyrannies are those that seek to impose unreal values on society. Drugs policy has become such a tyranny. The hard truth is that millions of people want the freedom to use drugs, and no policy of prohibition is going to stop them.

Isn't it time government accepted this fact, and allowed them to use drugs more safely and at less risk to others?”

Dr Anthony Grayling - Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford

"Drugs should be legalised - their prohibition is an intolerable intrusion into private behaviour "

"One measure of a good society is whether its individual members have the autonomy to do as they choose in respects that principally concern only them. The debate about heroin, cocaine and marijuana touches precisely on this. In my submission, a society in which such substances are legal and available is a good society not because drugs are in themselves good, but because the autonomy of those who wish to use them is respected. For other and broader reasons, many of them practical, such a society will be a better one."

Source: 'Why a high society is a free society' 19/05/2002 the Observer
Read the article here

Nick Heather on the alcohol field and the relative irrationality of the drugs field. Well vocalised and concise video piece 3 minutes long.

"3.1 Freedom of people to make informed choices about risky behaviours, together with protection (through legal prohibition if necessary) for children, is a principle that currently applies to alcohol and tobacco products, to driving of motorised vehicles and to other risky recreational pursuits. This same principle should apply to drugs policy. Decriminalisation of personal usage of drugs would engender a culture of openness about drug habits and, thereby, enable understanding and compassionate caring for those whose usage is problematic for the individual, their friends and family or society at large. This would greatly facilitate the supportive contributions that could be made by the voluntary sector, including Christian organisations that are currently deterred by the notion of engagement with illegal activity.

3.2 A necessary concomitant of such a policy would be the provision of pure, standardised products (with appropriate health warnings) through regulated/licensed outlets. The pricing of these could include a "health care" element based on the estimated cost of health and social care provision required for those who suffer because of that drug; price could thereby reflect relative risks and favour use of least risky drugs."

“harm reduction is not inherently an enemy of drug prohibition. However, in the course of pursing the reduction of harm, harm reduction necessarily seeks to reduce the criminalized and punitive character of U.S.-style drug prohibition.”

Source: Levine ‘The secret of world-wide drug prohibition’ quoted in O’Mahony The Irish War on Drugs p27

Jeffery A Miron Professor of Economics, University of Boston, Harvard University

“The existing evidence suggests the social costs of drug prohibition are vastly greater than its benefits.”

Source: Miron, J and Zwiebel, J (1995) ‘The economic case against drug prohibition’ Journal of Economic Perspectives 9, 4 at 175-192; quoted in O’Mahony The Irish War on Drugs p25

Paul O'Mahony Senior Lecturer in the School of Medicine, Trinity College, Dublin

“Global abolition is a worthy, if very demanding and difficult, ambition, which offers many significant benefits…It is impossible to overstate the crucial importance of eliminating criminal involvement in the drugs trade. Wresting the drugs trade from criminal hands is at once a major benefit, which only total abolition can deliver, and an absolutely necessary condition for truly successful abolition. Other considerable benefits, such as a comprehensive system of quality control of drugs, the ending of the detrimental effects of the ‘war on drugs’ on human rights and criminal justice and the redirection of resources from law enforcement to harm reduction, entirely depend on eliminating criminal control over drugs.”

"The most harm comes from policies rather than from drugs, enforcement of drug policies has caused lots of unintended harm."

Source: EUBusiness.com, 'EU sees failure of global anti-drug policies after 10 years'

Sanho Tree Fellow, Drug Policy Project, Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC

"Trying to find a sustainable solution to manage the drug problem without discussing the consequences of prohibition is like taking one's car to the machanic for repair but not allowing the hood to be opened. The time has come to take a look under the hood of our unwinnable drug war"

"We cannot hope to win a war on drugs when our policies see to it that only the most efficient drug operations survive. Indeed, these survivors are richly rewaded because we have constricted just enough supply to increase prices and profits while 'thinning out the herd' by eliminating their competition for them."

"Prohibiting a market does not mean destroying it. Prohibiting means placing a prohibited but dynamically developing market under the total control of criminal corporations. Moreover, prohibiting a market means enriching the criminal world with hundreds of billion dollars by giving criminals a wide access to public goods which will be routed by addicts into the drug traders pockets.. Prohibiting a market means giving the criminal corporations opportunities and resources for exerting a guiding and controlling influence over whole societies and nations. This is the worst of the negative external effects of the drug market. International public opinion has yet to grasp the challenge to the world civilisation posed by it."

Richard Branson Founder of the 'Virgin Group'

"I'd like to see the government back a programme of research into the medical properties of cannabis and I do not object to its responsible use as a recreational relaxant."

Source: Independent on Sunday, 28th September 1997.

Henry Hoare Senior partner of London Bankers Hoare & Co (Transform Patron)

"Prohibition in America in the 1920s was a disaster and the present "War on Drugs" simply is not working. Radical new thinking is required"

“The seeds of the current policy’s destruction are perfectly obvious in its terminology. In a war, there can only be winners and losers. While the Government’s main weapon is short-sighted legislation, the losers are humanism and common sense. We’ve got to replace fear with foresight and Transform has that vision.“

“I would establish a strictly controlled distribution network through which I would make most drugs, excluding the most dangerous ones like crack, legally available. Initially, I would keep prices low enough to destroy the drug trade. Once that objective was attained I would keep raising the prices, very much like the excise duty on cigarettes, but I would make an exception for registered addicts in order to discourage crime. I would use a portion of the income for prevention and treatment. And I would foster social opprobrium of drug use."

Source: Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995.

Adair Turner Chairman of the UK Pensions Commission and the UK Low Pay Commission, trustee of WWF, former director of the CBI.

"And if we want to help sustainable economic development in the drug-ridden states such as Colombia and Afghanistan, we should almost certainly liberalise drugs use in our societies, combating abuse via education, not prohibition, rather than launching unwinnable 'wars on drugs' which simply criminalise whole societies."

"So you come into the field and immediately this is what you see. This is one’s induction. This is a profound Normalising experience. Society never reserves this opprobrium for those who have problems with legal drugs. Nope. It stores it up for our clients. Every time. And that process of Marginalisation and discrimination, of rejection, of hatred is a result of the prejudices and practices that attach to Prohibitionism.

Welcome to Lifeline
Welcome to the drugs field
Welcome to harm reduction
Welcome to prejudice and discrimination
Welcome to the desert of global prohibition

Bruce Anderson, the Independent

“The gains from legalisation would be overwhelming, especially as regards the crime statistics. Moreover, there is no coherent philosophical basis for keeping drugs illegal.
…my ultimate argument is not libertarianism, but defeatism. That may strike some as ignoble, and I am not particularly proud of it. But I would maintain that when we are loosing a war which is not worth fighting, defeatism is the only rational response.”

Source: This article first appeared in the Independent, and was subsequently published in the Daily Mail. December 30, 2003

“The dealer who sells you the dope (still an illegal act) is also the criminal who'll sell you cocaine or heroin. And the criminals are only interested in one thing: money. The safety and well-being of the user matters not one bit: harder drugs mean bigger profits. This connection will only be broken when the sale and the possession of cannabis is fully legalised.”

" As an economist with a strong commitment to personal liberty and responsibility, my preference would be to see all illegal drugs legalised."

"So legalise, regulate, tax, educate and rehabilitate. Stop a losing war, get the government off our backs, beat the Taliban and deal a blow to al-Qaeda in the process."

Frances Cairncross, the Independent

"A policy of legalisation might sound outrageous, but it would ultimately cause less social harm than the present ban"

Source: 'Why we should legalise all drugs' the Independent - 31/07/2001

“If politicians believe that drugs are dangerous, they should wrest control back from the criminals. Regulated companies would surely be no more distasteful than the tobacco giants. We could then let the technocrats argue about health warnings, advertising and age limits. We could even buy shares, cash in. After all, that’s human nature — and the war on drugs can never be won precisely because it is a war on human nature.“

Source: ‘Drugs Inc has easily won the war on our streets’ The Times Online – 24/02/2004

James Delingpole, the Daily Telegraph

“To legalise drugs would be to strike a blow for personal freedom against the ever-growing powers of the nanny state; it would reduce public spending on the apparatus of drugs enforcement ( police, customs, prisons, the judiciary ), while simultaneously boosting public revenues ( via drugs taxation ); it would deprive major criminals of their main source of income, while lessening the need of minor ones to mug, rob or burgle to fund their habits; it would reduce the health risks involved in taking drugs ( fewer contaminants in the supply; no HIV-infected needles ); and it would mark a responsible acknowledgement of a truth so frequently dodged by politicians: that drugs are here to stay and that the war against them is unwinnable.

You may argue that drugs are an abhorrence in a civilised society; that they are physically dangerous, socially destructive and morally indefensible. But you don't need remotely to approve of drugs to support their legalisation. You merely have to recognise that the issue is not whether we should choose between a world of drugs or no drugs - that isn't an option - but whether we should make the best of an inescapable problem or exacerbate it”

Source: James Delingpole ‘Drugs are here to stay – so make them legal’ the Daily Telegraph 04.09.

“ In most people's minds perhaps, the front line troops in the fight against drugs are police on our streets. The political rhetoric focuses on the need for robust enforcement - zero tolerance and tough sanctions for dealers and users. But what if it doesn't actually work? What if it actually makes the situation worse? Well, those are questions posed by [the] report from the independent think tank the UK Drugs Policy Commission. Despite hundreds of millions of pounds spent each year on UK drug enforcement activity, the commissioners argue there is "remarkably little evidence of its effectiveness".”

“[The UK Drugs Policy Commission] report calls for rigorous assessment of the effectiveness of enforcement, but it seems unlikely that any government would want to question whether getting tough with drug abusers on our streets actually works”

"It is clear that drugs policy would be infinitely better conducted if governments actually had some influence on the business. Legalisation would enable them to tax the drugs, ensure quality control, cut out the most dangerous strains, help genuine addicts, try to prevent the sale to minors, de-glamorise the habit and, above all, deny the gangs and the terrorists their financial lifeblood. But, as so often, politicians find it safer to go in for posturing than useful action."

"The farmers make a lot more from coca than pineapples or bananas but their profits are miniscule compared to those earned along the winding smuggler's route that finally ends in Europe or the US.

Despite billions of dollars in aid, the US and Colombia are losing the battle to cut the supply. Perhaps it's time to look again at the demand and ponder options like legalisation.

But that, you might say, is a far trickier story because it's about our addiction and not about their economies".

Johan Hari, Columnist for the Independent

“The idea that the drugs market can be stamped out is a fantasy. A kilo of cocaine is worth pounds 1,000 in Colombia, but, because of the massive inflationary effects of prohibition, it is worth pounds 30,000 by the time it reaches the streets of London. Wherever there is a 3,000 per cent profit margin, people will be prepared to take extraordinary risks. This market will not die.

Legalising the supply and distribution networks of drugs, however, would put the huge sums of money generated by this industry into the hands of legitimate businesses and - most importantly – through taxation into the hands of governments that urgently need more money for the provision of basic health and education.”

"My own position is perfectly clear: I don't know what the answer is.

It may be that to make certain drugs available in a controlled fashion would spike the guns of the dealers who prey on the most vulnerable. It might even reduce the allure of illicit drugs. Or it might be that we would offer yet
another addiction to those whose only vices at the moment are alcohol and tobacco.

What I do know, as does every other citizen of this country from the prime minister down, is that the present approach is not working. Every single parent I have ever spoken to on the subject is terrified of the shady figure
lurking in the shadows of the school playground. What I also know is that it must be right to have a sensible debate on the subject and wrong to be scared off by the threat of a newspaper campaign."

"As so often in a democracy, the explanation lies not so much in the rights and wrongs of the issue itself but in the fear ambitious politicians may harbour of the consequences for themselves if they take a risky move. In
this case the risk lies not with what seems to be an increasingly open-minded public, but with the press. They are only too aware of the danger that some papers will whip up a hysterical reaction."

Source: 'Our politicians don't dare debate the law on drugs' The Sunday Times - 21/11/1999

Simon Jenkins, The Times and Evening Standard

“Nobody, be they tough or tender, is going to stop Londoners using drugs. All that can be reduced is the harm that they caused. This harm lies in drug adulteration and the escalation of drug use. It lies in crime and the outlawing of otherwise ordinary citizens. Such harm can be reduced only when drugs outlets are regulated and licensed and London’s ubiquitous informal drugs trade eased out of business.

Legalising the supply chain is not rocket science. It is studied and practiced across Europe. Until it happens, problems of addicts cannot be traced and treated, as they were before 1971. Until this happens the social menace of crack houses and street robbery cannot be contained.

The mere thought of licensing drug outlets reduces some Londoners to panic. The same panic at various times greeted the legalisation of gin, prostitution, homosexuality and off-course betting. The thought of a “gambling shop” on every corner appalled my parents’ generation. But panic is not the issue. It is the present drug scene that should induce panic.

There are just two options. We grit our teeth and bring this whole free market under some sort of control, as other countries are now struggling to do. Or we shrug and accept London’s anarchic reputation as the drugs capital of Europe.

The latter has been the Labour Government’s position for six years. It stinks”

“Although most "facts" about drugs tend to be prejudice thinly veiled in anecdote, two generalisations seem robust. Britain has the toughest drugs laws of any major Western country, yet it has the highest consumption of drugs and the worst addiction rate. Only a fool would say that these generalisations are unconnected.”

Source: ‘Labour has lost the plot on drugs’ the Evening Standard – 15/01/04

“Legalisation would rid the streets of the pushers of soft drugs, and it would leave the police free to pursue the dealers in heroin and crack. It is not at all clear that legalising soft drugs would encourage people to move on to hard drugs. Only one per cent of dope-smokers try class A drugs; and if you could buy cannabis legally, you would not come into contact with the nasty characters who push heroin. That is the case for legalisation and is good, as far as it goes.”

Source: ‘Blow me: it’s another crackpot Blunkett plan’ The Daily Telegraph – 11/07/2002

"The global war against drugs is in contradiction to the war against violent crime at home and the war against terrorism internationally. Legalising, or at least decriminalising, drugs would, not on its own, end terrorism or gang violence — and it is no substitute for long-term measures to promote development abroad or improve education at home. But a ceasefire in the war against drugs would at least give peace a chance — not only in Afghanistan, but also in the streets of Britain."

"legalisation would almost immediately wipe out the profits of the drug cartels at home and abroad. Thus the Irish criminals running their drug empires by remote control from southern Spain or the narco-terrorists such as Farc would be unable to hike artificially the price of narcotics which would be subject solely to the laws of supply and demand.

In the meantime, as prohibition reigns, more addicts both inside and outside the Republic's prison system are doomed to die because of political opportunism and cowardice."

Source: "Zero intelligence - Muddled thinking over drug use in prisons will help the criminals" the Observer 21.08.05
Read the complete article here

Suzanne Moore the Mail on Sunday

Audience question: “Should the drug laws be relaxed as suggested by the Police Foundation?”
Suzanne Moore: “Yes they should. The mood is changing. I sometimes think politicians have such a distorted view of reality they must be on some kind of drug anyway. This is a government of people in their 40s and 50s. Cannabis has been around a long time, they must have taken it.”

"How illegal should ecstasy be? Extremely illegal? Quite illegal? A bit illegal? The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs says it should be Quite Illegal. The Government is poised to ignore the recommendation of its own group of specialists, and insist that it should remain Extremely Illegal. Any debate on whether the drug should be illegal at all is quite out of bounds.

The chairman of the Advisory Council, Professor David Nutt, did make a modest attempt to launch a debate of that kind, by suggesting in the Journal of Psychopharmacology that in terms of the number of deaths and serious injuries it causes, taking ecstasy is considerably less dangerous than riding a horse.

He was, surely, making a simple point about the risks that private citizens take with their own well-being, and attempting to create a bit of space in which a discussion about danger and freedom could be had. That, apparently, is not allowed.

Professor Nutt has been given a good scolding for his temerity by no less than the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, who says she is very disappointed in him. She has apologised to the families of ecstasy victims for the comparison. Professor Nutt has been obliged to say sorry to them as well.

Isn't that a bit weird? If apologies are in order – which they are not – shouldn't the families of both clubbers and equestrians be addressed? If anything, shouldn't it be the families of equestrians alone? Their children died doing something they had every right to do, something that they enjoyed. The families of ecstasy victims are bereaved because their relatives broke the law in order to do something that they enjoyed.

If anything, Smith should be apologising because her precious laws don't protect ecstasy users. Her laws simply ensure that there is no reasonably safe supplier to buy ecstasy from, and no reasonably safe environment in which to take it. Why she feels so strongly that retaining ecstasy's class A status, instead of downgrading it to class B, will have any impact on that fact, is anybody's guess."

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/deborah-orr/deborah-orr-the-crazy-world-of-categorising-drugs-1607187.html

“Our MP’s role in the national debate on drugs policy has been a disgrace. For 40 years they have said nothing, heard nothing, noticed nothing, acknowledged nothing, understood nothing, done nothing. Those who have departed from the heard have been trampled by the heard. Something stale in the air at Westminster has stupefied not only dissent but even inquiry.”

"If government-controlled drugs were cheaply available, might it not cut through this hideous vicious circle?

Users wouldn't need to fund their habit by making our lives hell. Dealers, meanwhile, would find nobody to buy their overpriced, adulterated wares.

We could spend every penny saved from enforcement and imprisonment and drug-related crime on treatment, prevention and educating people not to take the stupid things in the first place.

“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.

“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.

“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”.

Source: 'Why can't you buy heroin at Boots?' the Guardian - 23.08.05
Read the complete article here.

"The illegal drug industry worldwide now appears completely out of control. Despite the best efforts of her majesty’s forces in Afghanistan, the business even out of that country continues to rise. Is it time to think again about commercialising illegal drugs? Would the consequences be any worse than those of our present policies?"

Source: http://blogs.channel4.com/snowblog/2009/02/18/spice-template-for-a-shiny-happy-world/

“The real social danger comes from their [drugs] prohibition which gives them to criminals and forces addicts to turn to crime to pay for them.”

Source: ‘As long as drugs are illegal the problem won’t go away’ the Guardian - 04/12/02

“If anything acts as a gateway to dangerous drugs, it is the illegal status of pot. This illegality also has a distorting effect on the picture that most people have of drug-takers. They encounter only the casualties, the equivalent of alcoholics: those who smoke cannabis in moderation and lead unwrecked lives are reluctant to advertise the fact because the law has criminalised them."

“I am now coming round to the view that narcotics are not so very different from alcohol, and that they should be treated in the same way by the law. People do terrible things under the influence of alcohol - and there must be a great many more alcoholics than drug addicts in Britain. But very few suggest that alcohol should be banned.

Most adults can drink without getting into fights or smashing up cars. Some cannot, and those are the ones who should be severely punished by the law - just as anybody who harms others while under the influence of drugs deserves to be penalised.

It is right that the sale of alcohol is regulated, and that children are protected from it. But the consumption of alcohol has been a part of civilised life since man first invented wine. Decriminalisation would be the first step towards civilising drug-taking. Perhaps the Victorians had it about right when they saw drug-taking as a vice, but accepted it as a human weakness as long as it did nobody but the drug-taker any harm. I am increasingly convinced that Lady Runciman has got it all wrong.”

Source: Tom Utley, ‘It doesn’t make sense to jail drug dealers’, the Daily Telegraph 29.03.00

“Small chinks are opening in the wall of stupidity that surrounds drug policy. In the US, a few brave souls are challenging the "war on drugs" - a euphemism for a war upon its citizens. The Netherlands and Switzerland are experimenting with decriminalisation. And, last week, a report from a select committee of the House of Commons even opened a few holes in British government policy. It is regrettably timid but still a small step in the right direction.”

“There are three broad responses to the failures of this "war"[on drugs]: moralistic, libertarian and utilitarian.

Moralists believe that the right response to failure is to try harder. In the US, federal government spending on anti-drug programmes rose from Dollars 900m in 1979 to Dollars 18bn ( Pounds 12.3bn ) in 1999. For moralists, the taking of drugs is downright wicked. William J. Bennett, America's first drugs tsar, argued that users of drugs were "slaves" of their vice. These slaves must be forced to be free - by being incarcerated, if necessary.

This Orwellian policy is stupid and immoral - stupid, because it does not work, and wicked, because the harm done by users to themselves is modest compared to the harm done by the state to users. As authors of an excellent book from the Washington-based Cato Institute argue, in attempting to stop people doing what they want, the state is forced to act in ever more intrusive, coercive and, in the US, simply unconstitutional ways”

”The UK is at last moving out of the US-led camp of hysterical moralists. Now it can start to think seriously. Sensible policies would provide treatment and hope for the drug-dependent, not punishment; they would deprive gangsters of their income, not try to push prices higher; they would provide honest information to potential users, not offer lies; they would reduce threats to public safety, not increase incentives for crime; and they would limit the spread of disease, not promote it.”

“When The Daily Telegraph in March last year called on the Government to experiment with the legalisation of cannabis as a means of challenging the rhetorical fatuities of the "War on Drugs", we knew we were moving against the controlling instincts of New Labour. We had to accept, too, that some conservatives would oppose our position, believing - quite wrongly, as it happens - that we somehow thought rolling a joint was a good idea. “

”Underpinning our Free Country campaign has been the presumption that individuals should be allowed to do what they want unless Parliament can show an overwhelming need to impose laws to control us. Mr Blunkett is to be congratulated on venturing into this debate on drugs and the law, territory many of his colleagues have found too inhospitable to enter. But now he should show he has confidence in his assessment that cannabis is not an unacceptably dangerous substance, and have the courage to take the next logical step forward by legalising the drug for an experimental period."

"Sooner or later Tony Blair will have to reconsider his absolute refusal to consider changes to the drugs laws"

“Some argue that, with the battle against drug-linked gun crime cost millions of pounds and many lives…the only solution is to legalise all drugs.
That argument is yet to be resolved. Indeed as Bruce Anderson argues in a highly provocative and personal opinion piece on this page, we are long way from even having an informed debate on this most explosive of issues.”

Source: the Daily Mail, editorial – 30/12/2003. This appeared alongside an opinion piece by Bruce Anderson, which can be read here.

“Never have so many dangerous drugs been siezed by police and Customs. But never have so many drugs been taken nor has so much crime been caused by them. However much is done to stop the threat, the drugs industry – and it is an industry – is several jumps ahead. It is obvious that something new needs to be tried.”

"This is a government committed to 'evidence-based policy'. Its favourite question is 'what works?' But policy on drugs is not following this dictum and most of it is being made in ignorance. There is much we don't know. It is thought that drug crime is costing up to £20 billion a year, that drug-related crime accounts for 50 per cent of all offences and that possibly 80 per cent of prisoners are heroin or cocaine users.

A first step must be a full audit of drug crime to find out the true cost to the nation. Ministers should signal that they are ready to radically rethink drugs policy, including examining seriously the case for further decriminalisation on a drug-by-drug basis. It is self-defeating to make criminals out of addicts, even in the emotive cases of heroin and cocaine.

A hard-headed commitment to 'what works' would win public trust and respect. Those who wish to pursue a futile war on drugs in the face of clear failure are the ones taking the soft option."

Source: 'We have lost the war on drugs.' the Guardian, editorial - 13/07/2003
Read the article here

“The role of government should be to prevent the most chaotic drug users from harming others – by robbing or by driving while drugged, for instance – and to regulate drug markets to ensure minimum quality and safe distribution. The first task is hard if law enforcers are preoccupied with stopping all drug use; the second, impossible as long as drugs are illegal."

Source: The Economist, editorial. From Issue entitled: ‘Time to legalise all drugs’ – 28/06/01

“To legalise will not be easy. Drug-taking entails risks, and societies are increasingly risk-averse. But the role of government should be to prevent the most chaotic drug-users from harming others – by robbing or by driving while drugged, for instance – and to regulate grug markets to ensure minimum quality and safe distribution. The first task is hard if law enforcers are preoccupied with stopping all drug use; the second, impossible as long as drugs are illegal. A legal market is the best guarantee that drug-taking will be no more dangerous thank drinking alcohol or smoking tobacco. And, just as countries rightly tolerate those two vices, so they should tolerate those who sell and take drugs.”

Source: 28th July 2001, 360, 8232; quoted in O’Mahony The Irish War on Drugs p25-6

"With nearly one in five Britons aged 20 to 24 now using cannabis regularly, it's clear that the current law is useless as a deterrent and serves only to criminalise otherwise law-abiding people while eating up vast amounts of police time."

Source: Marijuana Special Report 'If Britain can wise up, so can the rest of the world' New Scientist, editorial - 03/10/2002

“Leaving politics aside, where is the harm in decriminalising cannabis? There is none to the health of the consumers, and the criminal fraternity who depend for their succour on prohibition would hate it. But decriminalisation of possession does not go far enough in our view. That has to be accompanied by controls on source, distribution, and advertising, much as happens with tobacco. A system, in fact, remarkably close to the existing one in Dutch coffee shops.

Cannabis has become a political football, and one that governments continually duck. Like footballs, however, it bounces back. Sooner or later politicians will have to stop running scared and address the evidence: cannabis per se is not a hazard to society but driving it further underground may well be."

Source: Editorial, the Lancet Volume 346, Number 8985, November 11, 1995, p. 1241

"The government's drugs policy is not working, and nor is any other government's. Governments have declared a war on drugs. Politicians love to declare wars: on terrorism, crime, litter, teenage pregnancy, street begging, hooliganism--just about anything generally agreed to be bad. Wars allow politicians to inflate their importance and to strike dramatic, decisive poses; dissenters may be dismissed from public debate as traitors who undermine the war effort or even as enemy agents. But these wars are rarely won. The war on drugs has been a Waterloo for almost every government on the planet. The victims, as always, are not the politicians themselves but the poor."

"The argument for legalisation of drugs is not about their safety but about the best ways of controlling their dangers. The wars against them have failed utterly. Drugs are more widely available and more widely used than ever. The various classifications should determine not a hierarchy of criminal penalties but different forms of supply: prescription only, say, or wide availability on specifically licensed premises. The argument should be about degrees of regulation, not about degrees of criminality. The penalties should be reserved for antisocial behaviour -driving cars or beating people up under the influence of drugs - not for the use of the drugs themselves. The restrictions should be on sales to children, not to consentin g adults. The deterrents that we emphasise should be health risks, not spells in our already overcrowded prisons."