ISSUES
: Drugs
Chapter 2: UK drug laws
29
Let’s end the war on drugs by making
them legal
By Ian Bell
I
t could be a pub quiz question.
What do Armenia and Argentina
have in common? The Czech
Republic and Chile? Paraguay and
Poland? The answer isn’t football.
Each has decided, in some fashion,
that if you just say no to drugs, you
say nothing useful at all.
Depending on the definitions used,
there are between 25 and 30 such
countries. Their laws, methods,
aims and ambitions vary. Some have
legalised drugs. Some have ‘re-
legalised’. A few never got around to
prohibition to begin with. Most have
experimented – for personal use, you
understand – with a gateway policy,
decriminalisation.
Last week the Republic of Ireland
decided, in effect, that what’s good
enough for Belgium, Spain, Portugal,
Estonia, The Netherlands and others
might help with its own liberation
from the half-century of failure we still
call, without irony, the war on drugs.
With a leaked report suggesting
that the UN Office on Drugs and
Crime (UNODC) is on the brink of
advocating decriminalisation, Ireland
joins a growing consensus.
Britain doesn’t want to hear about
that. Or rather, the Conservative
Government doesn’t want to hear the
accusation “soft on drugs” from its
press sponsors. Amid a fragrant haze
of hypocrisy, the line is that there will
be no change, funding cuts aside, in
UK drugs strategy. Meanwhile, police
forces the length of these islands are
improvising policies of their own.
In Ireland, serious thinking has
been going on. The result, if carried
through, will be the decriminalisation
of drugs in personal use quantities
combined with the introduction
of injection (consumption) rooms.
Narcotics will remain illegal, but in
future – or such is the hope – no-one
will be treated as a criminal because
of an addiction or a problematic
habit. The Irish are making a
fundamental distinction.
Officially, Britain remains tough,
tougher than tough, on drugs.
Unofficially, an ad hoc pragmatism
guides enforcement. A fall of close
to a third in cannabis possession
offences in England and Wales
between 2011–12 and 2014–15 has
not happened because dope has lost
its allure. With budgets cut to ribbons,
police forces have concluded they
have better things to do than harass
cannabis users.
There are worse principles a
government could apply. In a speech
at the London School of Economics
last Monday, Aodhain O’Riordain, the
Irish minister responsible for drugs
strategy, maintained that a “cultural
shift” is required. Addiction should be
regarded as a health issue, he argued,
both for the sake of individuals and for
the benefit of law enforcement. Time
and money spent hunting addicts
could be better used against a
criminal trade.
O’Riordain
advocates
de-
criminalisation, not legalisation. He
is not alone in that, though at the
LSE he failed to explain the logic.
Portugal’s experience over the
last 14 years is the Irish minister’s
inspiration, as it is for many
reluctant conscripts in the war on
drugs, but a conspicuous Iberian
success remains half an answer to
a complicated question.
With Europe’s highest HIV infection
rate among injecting drugs users,
Portugal faced an undoubted crisis at
the turn of the century. Desperate, it
decided that drug use or possession
should remain offences, but not
criminal offences. The money spent
on treatment and prevention was
doubled. The police meanwhile began
to ignore mere marijuana use. And the
HIV rate started to fall.
It has not been plain sailing since.
According to some studies, hard drug
use has increased. More people have
sought treatment, perhaps as a result,
but the number of drug-related deaths
has declined. Pressure on courts has
eased, meanwhile, and the street
price of drugs has fallen. Adolescent
use seems to be waning, but with the
police still seizing several tonnes of
cocaine each year, the effect of reform
on organised crime has been hard to
measure.
That, though, is an aspect of
decriminalisation
too
often
overlooked. On its own, without a
wider health policy or O’Riordain’s
“person-centred” strategy, it does not
‘solve’ a narcotics problem. Chiefly, it
spares individuals the brutal effects
– prison, stigma, unemployment,
existence without treatment or
medical care – that are legacies of the
unending war. But decriminalisation
alone is not enough.
It counts as a start, nevertheless,
and that is more than Britain has
managed. Last October, the Home
Office caused strife within the
coalition by publishing a report,
Drugs:
International Comparators
, that looked
at the experience of Portugal and a
dozen other countries. To the dismay
of Tories, the survey said there was
“no apparent correlation” between
tough laws and the level of drug use.
While decriminalisation would not
curb use, there were “indications
that decriminalisation can reduce the
burden on criminal justice systems”.
Who’d have thought? In the ensuing
battle, the LibDem Norman Lamb
resigned as a Home Office minister
while policy – “this government
has absolutely no intention of
decriminalising drugs” – was
reaffirmed. Faced with a problem,
Britain had not got beyond failing to
put two and two together.
Why decriminalise? For an Irish
recreational user, far less an
addict, the question is superfluous.
Nevertheless, O’Riordain, like his
peers around the world, has taken a
first step and refused the second. As
the Home Office report suggested,
decriminalisation has little effect on
