"The two leading parties play games with drugs. They don't actually care about deaths"

Students for Sensible Drug Policy hold annual conference

By Felicity Inkpen and Joey Severn

From intravenous heroin abuse in squats and alleyways to snorting cocaine in the highest apartments in London’s financial district, there is no doubting the voracious appetite this country has for  illegal drugs.

Every year, millions of Britons use ecstasy, cocaine, cannabis and everything in between, and for drug dealers, this means huge profit. This prompts the question of whether the policy of criminalisation, which so many in this country believe sacrosanct, is of any practical benefit.
    In his talk at the Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) conference last week, Professor David Nutt, the former government drugs advisor who was sacked by Home Secretary Alan Johnson for speaking out against government policies, said: “Gordon Brown’s view is formed in some other universe”.
    In giving an originally innocuous-seeming lecture about the tensions between politics and science in drug policy - which eventually brought to an  end his tenure as chair of the Advisory Council of the Misuse of Drugs - Prof. Nutt not only attracted the chagrin of policymakers, but also forced the debate about the government’s attitude towards drugs back into the arena of public debate.
    Once the preserve of libertarian philosophers and high-minded stoners, arguments for the decriminalisation of drugs have been gaining favour in political circles for some time.
    Steve Rolles, Director of Research at the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, thinks that this is down to the failure of the current approach taken by legislators:
    “The war on drugs is not effective. It’s not delivered upon its stated goals. It was started with the aim of creating a drug-free society and yet every year since it began drug production has risen, drugs have become more available, more people have used them and drug-related harms overall have increased. So it’s consistently delivered the exact opposite of its stated goals.
    “Worse than that, it’s created a

raft of secondary problems associated with the huge criminal market in dangerous drugs controlled by violent criminal entrepreneurs who are entirely profit-motivated. They have no concern for public health or the public good. Their only concern is profit.”
    And it’s this criminal underworld, whose lifeblood is the money of drug users and which is the source of much wider social harms such as gun crime and robbery, which is one of the nagative side-effects of prohibition.
    Rolles added: “They’re entirely unregulated and that effects far more than just drug users. Of course it affects drug users because their supply is intrinsically more dangerous and the products are more risky but it effects wider society in terms of crime on all scales.
    “The bigger picture is war - I mean an actual war, not a rhetorical war - in countries like Afghanistan and Colombia, so it has catastrophic impacts across the world”.
    Prof. Nutt sees the problem as lying in the government’s ignorance of actual scientific harms to do with drugs. He himself was chair of the body which released a harm ranking of drugs, both illegal and legal, which placed alcohol and tobacco above cannabis and ecstasy. But just how does one pin down an assessment of relative harm?         “Well that particular harm ranking was based on a scale I devised ten years ago,” said Nutt.         “It disassociated the harms of drugs into nine separate parameters, some of which relate to the harm that the drug does to the person, and some of which relate to the harm which the drug does to society, and then a third dimension which is the addictiveness of the drug. We got a whole body of experts to score each drug on those nine parameters and then we summed them up and we came up with this ranking.”
    But the Home Office didn’t agree with this analysis, and were quick to disregard Nutt’s findings and force him from his position. Alan Johnson, in a letter to Prof. Nutt, accused him of, “lobbying for a change in governemnt policy”.
    The professor thinks this stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue: “The level of the intellectual understanding of science by politicians is abysmal.”
    And the reluctance of politicians to engage in an open public debate about drugs policy can in no way help the development of the argument. Steve Rolles thinks this is just part of political careerism:
    “Prohibition has very much been framed as a response to a threat, not just to our health but to our children, our borders, the very moral fabric of society and drugs are often cast as a kind of invading army. And once you’ve committed yourself to that it’s a very absolutist, binary, good-versus-evil position and it’s incredibly difficult to step away from because any move away from it is seen as retreat, surrender or weakness”
    But an open forum of alternative approaches seems to be on the agenda in the near future, whether politicians like it or not.
    A recent document from Transform, After the War on Drugs: A Blueprint for Regulation, considers options whereby currently illegal drugs could be sold in controlled ways, much like alcohol and tobacco are now, allowing the tax revenues that they generate- as well as the savings made in scaling back policing of the drug ‘problem’- to help pay for, amongst other things, education about the harms of drugs and tackling the associated health issues.
    “Drugs are here. They’re not going away. Prohibition has not got rid of drugs. We have a choice- the market for drugs can either be controlled by gangsters or by governments and we’re advocating the latter position”.
    Prof. Nutt is less forthcoming as to how he would like to see a post-prohibition Britain look, but he is in no doubt that the current system doesn’t work:
    ‘The first thing would be to wipe the slate clean and have a full systematic review of the drug laws so that we have a new Misuse of Drugs Act where there might be six or seven classes, who knows.
    “I would have a deep review of the Dutch model and in particular the possibility of having cannabis available in some sort of regulated way with coffee shops.”
    Mr. Rolles knows the challenge that faces groups like his own isn’t a small one, but seems confident that the tide will turn in favour of drug legalisation.
    “I hope the new blueprint book will provide an opposition for the debate to move forward because one of the problems has been that when people talk about decriminalisation no one really knows what you’re talking about and a lot of myths and misunderstandings fill that void so we hope that this book will provide a clear vision of what the alternatives are that people can get behind and debate around”
       Of the current model of criminalisation, Rolles thinks: “No policy that’s so transparently a failure can last forever, and so it will fall at some point and be replaced.
    “The question is when that will happen, and we’re just trying to bring that day nearer”.

James Legge
Photography: Joey Severn

For more info on the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, visit:
http://www.tdpf.org.uk/