Johann Hari

Ann Byfield is another pointless victim in the "war against drugs". This might seem like a perverse conclusion. Wasn’t the 7-year old gunned down this week in Kensal Green by vicious dealers who were after her crack-cocaine-selling father? Isn’t her death yet
another argument for hammering away at the fight against drugs?

No. Ann was killed, clearly and plainly, by our
government’s policy of prohibition. This country has made a political choice to place the supply and distribution of some drugs – heroin, cocaine and so on – in the hands of criminal gangs rather than phramacists and businesses. Anybody with a legal trade
like, say, selling alcohol, has no need for guns,
because they have recourse to the police to protect their property rights. The suppliers of drugs do not have this choice, so they tool up to protect their trade from intruders or competitors. It really is that simple. It's why Scotland Yard say 95 percent of the guns in London are related to the drugs trade.

If the vast market for drugs in this country cannot be met in a legal way, it will inevitably be met like this, in an illegal way. All politicians know this. After years and years of ‘crack-downs’, it is stunnningly obvious to all but the most blinded ideologues that the drugs trade will never be eliminated. The choice confronting this country is not
between some people using drugs and nobody using drugs. It is between people using illegal drugs that they buy from gun-wielding criminals, or people using
legal drugs and far fewer guns floating around.

The political choice we have made comes with a price tag. You don’t see the people who pay that price in the news too often. They are junkies dying in squalid flats because they have been sold bad heroin. They are black men shot to death in poor areas. We noticed Ann only because she was unusually young; a
prohibition-related murder in itself is not unusual at all. (Milton Friedman calculated there are 10,000 surplus deaths caused by prohibition every year in the US). They are the invisible, forgotten victims of a war that has never worked.

It’s often argued that drugs legalisation is a middle class cause. Legal heroin might look very nice in Hampstead, critics sneer, but on Moss Side it looks like another catastrophe waiting to happen. In fact, it’s poor areas that feel the effects of prohibition. Ann Byfield wasn’t gunned down in Islington. Entire
council estates are not dominated by gun-toting criminal gangs in Cheshire. We already have effective decriminalisation in middle class areas: it’s not rich white men who get busted and jailed for cocaine use but the poor black men who supply them. It’s not the
rich who are getting shot (yet); it’s the poor.

Every time there is a drug-related gun crime (and they happen across this island every hour of the day), we need to remind ourselves of one thing. We choose to create the conditions in which this happens, and we
can choose to change it tomorrow if we have the sense.

Nobody will be shot in Chicago today because of a dispute about alcohol. That is because the supply and distribution of alcohol were brought back into the remit of the legal economy in the United States in the
1930s. The problems inherent to a vast illegal trade – and the network of criminal gangs that it necessarily involves – quickly disappeared. True, some of the gangs transferred to other criminal activities, like protection racketeering. Most went bust and found their way into the proper economy, sometimes as licensed alcohol sellers. We have travelled so far from that world that it would seem bizarre today to imply there was anything illicit about liquor store or even a recovering alcoholic in the White House. One day, this is how we will think about the legal suppliers and users of drugs.

If we bring drugs into the legitimate economy, we will experience the same benevolent effects that the US enjoyed after the repeal of prohibition. In one fell swoop, we could bankrupt most of the criminals in
Britain, and free up the police to deal with burglars, rapists and murderers.

We choose not to do that. Instead, we have chosen a vast increase in gun crime. There are now three million illegally-held guns in Britain, according to the Metropolitan Police, and the rate of increase is dizzying: over 150% in the last three years. The deputy commissioner of the Met, Ian Fuller, has warned that gun crime is "threatening the fabric of London",
and nearly all of it is related to the drug trade. All the other reasons why this has happened – the glamourisation of LA-style gangsta culture, for example – are trivial compared to the need that criminal gangs have to protect and extend their trade.

If we do not redress this problem soon by creating legitimate, licensed drug sellers (probably through the existing network of chemists), the whole debate about guns will shift in dangerous directions. We are
reaching a point where guns are intruding into the lives of people completely unnconnected to the drug trade. Last year, Alice Carroll, 70, was shot in the back as a gunman opened fire on another man near her home in a quiet residential cul-de-sac in Longsight, Manchester. A freak occurrence? Tell that to the mother and father gunned down in front of their seven-year-old son; to the 14-year-old shot down with an automatic machine gun; the man shot in the head during a "road rage" row; the clubbers, including several teenagers, shot as they queued on one of
London's busiest high streets last year.

Once ordinary people begin to fear unexpected gun crime like this – a moment getting closer every day – they begin to believe that they need guns to protect
themselves, and a terrible spiral is created. This is the case in the United States, where ordinary people get guns for self-defence and a whole panapoly of social problems are unleashed: their arguments are far
more likely to descend into shooting, terrible
accidents happen when children discover their parents’ guns, criminals get even bigger guns than everybody else… anybody who has ever watched ER could continue this list in several different ways.

The arguments for ‘gun freedom’ from the US are just as tediously predictable. Already we are beginning to hear these Charlton Heston-style arguments on the fringes of the British right: Richard Littlejohn and Peter Hitchens have recently argued in defence of the
‘right’ for decent, law-abiding folk to have guns for self-protection, and it won’t be long before some Tory MPs get in on the act. The Tony Martin case prefigured how the guns debate will evolve in Britain if gun
crime continues to rise at the current rate.

Drugs legalisation – the only real way to slash gun crime - seems a very distant prospect at the moment. Danny Kushlick of Transform, the most prominent and eloquent drugs legalisation charity in Britain, says,
"We need to prepare the ground so that in ten to fifteen years legalisation seems like common sense. It’s obviously not going to happen in the next few years."

He is undeniably right – David Blunkett blanched at even the pathetically limited moves on cannabis that the government unveiled last week. Yet by the time we
get around to legalising, we will might have developed a gun culture that is so entrenched – with ordinary people demanding that they have the right to own guns
too, and with all criminals tooled up rather than just drug dealers - that we can never reverse it.

Today is our fifth anniversary, and all the classic
anniversary questions are rattling through my mind. Is
it really five years since I walked from my local
branch of Boots, squeezing her tightly in my hand,
knowing that my life was about to be changed
completely? Is it really five years since first I felt
her on my tongue? Is it really five years since she
made me able to walk steadily and think clearly and
live again? Is it really five years since I started
taking Seroxat?

You may have heard of my beloved. She is part of the
SSRI (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors) family
of anti-depressants - Prozac is her somewhat more
famous big sister - and she is a bit of a slag, since
over 100 million people worldwide also have her in
their bloodstream.

What better anniversary gift could we have than Robbie
Williams's acknowledgement that Seroxat is beautiful?
Speaking on Sarah Cox's radio show last week, he
revealed that SSRIs have pulled him back from
depression. "I took too much ecstasy, to tell you the
truth," he said. "When you take E, your brain releases
an awful amount of serotonin the chemical in the brain
that broadly correlates with happiness and it makes
you go, Great.' Use it all up and your brain's got
nothing to bathe in." SSRIs have restored his
serotonin to normal levels (or as normal as it gets
for a billionaire rock-god).

This problem is going to be one of the biggest health
challenges facing developed economies over the next
few decades. The first ecstasy generation (hundreds of
thousands of them) are now sagging into middle age,
and there is a small mountain of research indicating
that heavy ecstasy use can, in the long term, cause
depression. This is, very soon, going to be a country
with a massive constituency of the anti-depressed. I
doubt that my own ecstasy use was a factor in my
depression, since I can remember being seriously
depressed long before I ever saw a tab of ecstasy; but
Britain has, we must admit, already waded pretty far
into a sea of artificially induced serotonin. Last
year, the NHS issued 20 million prescriptions for
SSRIs.

Please, please don't take this column as a trite
Reefer Madness-style warning against ecstasy. It
cannot be repeated enough that most ecstasy users will
be perfectly safe and have some terrific,
life-enhancing experiences. Alcohol claims more
victims than a vicious invading army, with its liver
diseases, its car wrecks and its violence; by
comparison, ecstasy is a stray bomb. If the limited
dangers of ecstasy enthuse you for its ongoing
prohibition, then I look forward to your campaign to
criminalise alcohol.

The problems caused by extreme ecstasy use (and the
widespread problem of depression caused by other,
unknown factors) can, thankfully, be largely rectified
by SSRIs. But there is at the moment an irresponsible
scare campaign - orchestrated by sections of the media
that should know better - that is stigmatising SSRIs.

A tiny number of suicides have been tenuously linked
to anti-depressants, and on the basis of these
unproven accusations, an entire demonising bandwagon
has been put on the road.

It is never mentioned that for every one of these
supposedly linked suicides, there are hundreds of
thousands of people such as Robbie and myself who have
been saved. Journalists rarely understand what they
are dealing with when they write about this subject.
It takes very little to scare depressives away from
anti-depressants, because it is far easier to wallow
in the howling pain you know than to venture into the
frightening anti-depressed world that you have
retreated from. One scare-mongering article is often
all it takes to keep you in a darkened room.

Of course, SSRIs are not perfect, and there are
side-effects. Like many users, I have put on a hideous
amount of weight since I started taking Seroxat
(although I guess my diet of Big Macs and KFC buckets
might be a factor). I get hot flushes once or twice a
week, where I sweat rather unpleasantly for about 20
minutes or so. But this is a pathetically small price
for the freedom to live a normal life.

Many people do have problems coming off the drug, but
since I never intend to come off (and I think any
depressive who tries is crazy), why should that bother
me? Dependency in itself is not a problem. I am
dependent on food and water and oxygen and the
maintenance of the social fabric around me. Diabetics
are dependent on insulin, and I don't hear anybody
lecturing them to wean themselves off.

Nor do SSRIs turn people into zombies, or make them
incapable of thought; these are stereotypes left over
from the old, terrible antidepressants such as
lithium. I feel things just as keenly as I ever did;
the difference is that Seroxat prevents one dark
feeling - of emptiness and self-loathing - from
overwhelming all the other, more subtle and
interesting feelings.

I often wonder why the impact of SSRIs is not more
widely appreciated. One of the great, lingering curses
of the human condition - depression - is now, in all
but a small number of cases, treatable. This is a
breakthrough - I mean this seriously - as substantial
as a cure for cancer. Robbie Williams could easily
have gone the way of Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf;
there are whole stadiums full of people walking our
streets who would have cut their wrists or drowned
themselves without SSRIs.

The new generation of anti-depressants has even
created a wholly new human condition: I think of it as
"anti-depression". Those of us taking SSRIs are not
depressed, but we are not quite like normal,
undepressed people either. We are anti-depressed, and
we should be proud of it. Most people - the
undepressed - live by default; they live because death
hasn't come along yet. But if you have flirted with
suicide but then discovered life through Seroxat, you
emerge with a purpose and an impatience that the
never-depressed often lack. The anti-depressed are
very often driven people, aware of the presence of
utter misery and death and the knowledge that without
a packet of chemicals, it would all flood back. Death
is an almost tangible presence to us; we hurry.

There is even a theory, explained by Oliver James in
his book Britain on the Couch, that SSRIs are a
helpful prop for people in advanced capitalist
societies. Market economies require people to be able
to deal with failure without becoming depressed. You
should be able to launch a company, fail, launch
another company, fail and keep on going until
eventually you crack the market before the market
cracks you up. We may even be developing a form of
Seroxat capitalism - if human beings cannot change
harsh market processes to make them liveable (through
shorter working hours, say, or reduced levels of
stress) then we will have to alter our own brains
chemically.

I think there is something in that: of my friends from
university, it is the SSRI users who have had, if you
like, an unfair head-start. The anti-depressed are
racing ahead of my undepressed friends. So, yes, there
will be many drawbacks to tomorrow's Britain as it
copes with its ecstasy hangover; but it will, I
suspect, have some unexpected advantages, too.

July 4, 2003, Friday

SECTION: COMMENT; Pg. 15

LENGTH: 911 words

HEADLINE: MR DUNCAN SMITH SEARCHES FOR REHABILITATION

BYLINE: JOHANN HARI

BODY:
The Conservative Party has invented a startling new
concept. It is called - say it slowly -
re-hab-il-ita-tion. Yes, the party of Margaret
"legalising cannabis would be like legalising murder"
Thatcher has finally seen that drug addiction is an
illness, not evidence of demonic possession. Perhaps
they have looked to their hero, George Bush, who is a
recovered drug user (his poison was alcohol, although
he dabbled with cocaine) and has risen to the toughest
and most responsible job in the world.

Whatever their motives, the Tories now admit that
banging up heroin users in prisons where they can get
even more heroin, and have nothing better to do,
should not be the Government's first resort. They
propose to create 20,000 new rehab places for
hard-drug users (we currently have 3,000 places to
serve 500,000), and to offer rehab as an alternative
to prison.

It would be wrong to carp. It is genuinely surprising
- and impressive - to go to the Tory party website,
see an image of a filled syringe and realise that it
is not followed by some hysterical Reefer
Madness-style propaganda. Oliver Letwin, the shadow
Home Secretray, is plainly sincere, and this is a
commendable attempt to look at an area of public
policy that has too long been a bog of stale cliches
and outdated thinking.

Moaning about the initial cost - around pounds 400m -
is misplaced. Rehab is good policy because it saves
money in the long term: recovered addicts do not clog
up the police, the courts, the prisons ... the
statistic most commonly used by anti-prohibition
campaigners in the US is that each dollar spent on
rehab saves seven further in the criminal justice
system. It is a bracing condemnation of the Home
Office under David Blunkett that the Tory policy on
drugs is now far more progressive than Labour's.

But before we get carried away, there are some
important points to bear in mind. IDS, in his speech
yesterday, croakily listed the places in Britain worst
afflicted by drug addiction: Chapeltown, Hackney,
Gallowgate, Moss Side, Easterhouse. Notice anything?
They are also the poorest parts of our country. There
is a direct and obvious link: take a kid, raise her in
misery, deny her access to any social opportunities,
bore her senseless, and just wait for the heroin to
look appealing.

No drugs strategy can be credible without a parallel
and vigorous anti- poverty strategy. But the Tories -
who, when in government, both catalysed and denied the
existence of these slums - have no credible plans to
tackle poverty at all. The Blair government's
under-rated anti-poverty strategies are having a real
effect: the minimum wage, the New Deal, the working
families tax credit and massive benefits increases for
working families have transformed the council estate
my sister lives on, and plenty of others across the
country. Yet the Tories declare that they want to
reverse almost all of these policies: a recipe for
creating far more junkies.

Even more importantly, all the available research
shows that only around 5 per cent of addicts want to
quit at any given time. If you hang out with junkies,
alcoholics or cigarette smokers, they don't sit there
longing for the day they're "clean": they enjoy their
intoxication and seek some more.

It is incredibly important that rehab is available for
those who want it, and a scandal that it isn't there
at the moment; but even with the best rehab facilities
in the world, we would still have to live alongside
the 95 per cent of addicts who don't want it. They
will still burgle, beg and mug to get their fix,
unless we do one of two things.

First, we can legalise hard drugs, massively bringing
down their price because they would no longer have to
pass through 15 different handlers between Colombia
and the streets of London, each taking their own cut.
A reduced price means far less theft. Second, we can
return to the British policy of the early 1960s and
prescribe heroin.

At the moment, only around 500 extremely problematic
users are given their heroin by the state. (David
Blunkett, to be fair, has recently increased this
number, albeit very slightly.) Mass heroin
prescription would slice great chunks of crime out of
the worst estates in Britain: users who now steal out
of desperation, because addiction is ravaging their
bodies, would no longer have a motive.

The ideal drugs policy would be a mix of both these
strategies, with a dash of terrific rehab, paid for by
taxing the profits of the drugs market that, because
of prohibition, currently go to criminal gangs. To
people like Ann Widdecombe and David Blunkett who say
that this would lead to a "drugs culture" and masses
of people using drugs, all I can say is: where are you
living? We already have a drugs culture, and it ain't
going away. No country on earth has been able to stamp
out drug use that is so widespread and popular. No
drugs is no option.

Yet IDS was still clinging yesterday to the silly
language of "winning the battle against drugs". This
is risible. The real choice is between safe, legal
drugs twinned with low crime, or dangerous, illegal
drugs and the resulting crime epidemics. Rehab
matters, and if the Tories are serious about providing
20,000 places for addicts, then 20,000 lives will be
transformed. But this is only one - comparatively
small - dimension to drugs policy. Now, if the
Conservative Party had the nerve to say that, I'd be
impressed.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

May 2, 2003, Friday

SECTION: COMMENT; Pg. 21

LENGTH: 1207 words

HEADLINE: DANNIELLA WESTBROOK IS LUCKIER THAN SHE
KNOWS

BYLINE: JOHANN HARI

BODY:
Here's a great idea for a TV show: let's take a
fragile recovering coke addict who's just had her
septum restored (it was eroded away by the constant
coke use, you see). And let's dump her in the middle
of an Australian jungle with a horde of weird egotists
and a pair of unnaturally cheerful Geordie midgets,
bombard her with insects and rats, and watch her go
mad! Sounds cruel? It's nothing compared with the way
we treat most drug addicts in this country under our
current failing system of drug prohibition.

Danniella Westbrook is currently enduring a week on
I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!, watched by 10
million of us. (She seems only marginally less
miserable than in her former life on EastEnders, where
her character, as I recall, seemed to run away to
Spain on an abnormally high number of ocassions.) But
the blunt truth is that if she had not been lucky
enough to have the wealth to pay for private rehab,
she would probably be reduced to the state of most
female Class A drug addicts in Britain: selling her
body on the streets in a desperate bid to feed her
addiction for the next week, day, hour.

In a country with a population of 58 million people
and between 250,000 and 500,000 problematic Class A
drug-users, we have 3,000 rehab places available on
the NHS each year. That is not a misprint. 3,000
places - which works out as one rehab place per 83 to
166 addicts. I cannot find a single expert on our
current drugs policies who believes that Danniella
would have ended up in one of these extremely limited
slots. This is because she was not involved in theft,
most of our treatment places are designed for opiate
users (despite the advice of the World Health
Organisation), and she has two young kids (places that
can accommodate women with children are even more hard
to find).

Without an EastEnders-enhanced bank account and a
millionaire husband, Danniella would have been left to
the vagaries of underfunded detox programmes "in the
community". As she tried to stop, she would still have
been surrounded by her coke-using friends and
temptation at every turn; the chances of succeeding in
weaning herself off would have been slim.

The repercussions of this policy are massive. Tiggey
May, a senior researcher at South Bank University,
studies British prostitutes. She explains: "A huge
number of the women I meet on the streets want to go
into rehab, but they know that finding a place is
extremely difficult. The proportion of addicts who are
women is increasing, but mother and baby units haven't
been created at anything like the same rate, and most
women don't have somebody they can just leave their
children with... A majority of the women working on
the streets are crack addicts, but they don't get the
support to change their lives that they badly need."

And it's not just the women themselves, the countless
lost Danniellas whom nobody watches on prime-time TV
and nobody notices, who suffer: it's you and me. A
Home Office-commissioned study last year found that
the economic and social cost of Class A drug use add
to an amazing pounds 10.1-17.4bn a year - and 88 per
cent of that spending goes on crime. Half of all
property crimes, according to Home Office Minister Bob
Ainsworth, are caused by addicts. Every second theft,
then, is a consequence of the failure of the
government to invest in rehab: remember that next time
you come home to see your door broken open and your
valuables gone.

If ever there was an example of where "tough on crime,
tough on the causes of crime" could be put into
practice, this is it. The long-term savings - for
police and court time and government money - involved
in providing rehab are massive, and the political
capital waiting to be seized in a country terrified of
crime is vast. If the Government needs an easy source
of revenue for funding this massive crime reduction
programme - one of the few methods which has been
shown time and again to work - they could legalise and
tax the vast and unstoppable drugs trade that already
exists in this country. Drug-dealing happens every
second of the day, and only the most blinkered
authoritarians now think that it can be stomped out
through "crackdowns". It is only a misplaced fear of
public opinion that stops the Blair government - which
does not consist of fools - from admitting this.

They know perfectly well that the country that has
most vigorously tried this kind of drugs repression,
the US, has ended up with the biggest drug problem of
all developed nations.

Meanwhile, the country that abandoned this policy
soonest and opted instead for funding rehab and harm
reduction, the Netherlands, is seeing its junkies age
without a large younger generation to replace them.

(It is worth bearing in mind that the US drug war is
now being fought by a President who has himself
tacitly admitted that he has used cocaine, a crime for
which he is happy to send others to jail for 20
years.)

There is a myth that those of us who campaign for
drugs legalisation would happily see the whole country
descend into an opium-induced trance. The defenders of
prohibition conjure up a post-legalisation dystopia:
one year after drugs are legalised, they imagine,
heroin-injecting housewives will lie in a blissed-out
sleep in Britain's gutters next to shaking,
cocaine-hungry bank managers. The whole of Britain
would become an omnibus edition of I'm A Celebrity...

This is absurd. I defend the right of individuals to
use drugs recreationally and in moderation, and this
is possible with both cocaine and heroin. (The British
Government backs this in one sphere at least: US
pilots and soldiers fighting alongside "our boys" in
Iraq have been given amphetamines to sharpen their
concentration. Why soldiers and not, say,
journalists?) But crucially, just as I support and
occasionally enjoy limited drug use, we legalisers
also see reducing the number of addicts as absolutely
central to our agenda.

There is no contradiction here: it is far easier to
fight addiction when drugs are in the open, carefully
regulated and sold in pharmacies (thus bankrupting all
drug-pushing). Most important, under legalisation -
which will happen in a European country in the next
few decades, I am sure - we will have huge sums of
money that would go not into the bank accounts of
criminals (as it does today) but into a flowering of
well-funded rehab projects across the country. Drugs
legalisation and reducing the number of drug addicts
are not opposing goals: they are as firmly linked as
Siamese twins.

It is the supporters of the current system who are not
serious about fighting drug addiction. They prefer to
cling to the discredited myth that the supply of drugs
can be stamped out by plugging every port and
coastline on this island, and that we can carry on
spending a pittance on rehabilitation.

So if you think Danniella seems to be cracking up out
there in the Australian rain forest, spare a thought
for all the other women with drug problems who lack
her advantages in life. It is the prohibitionists -
who refuse to tax the drug trade and spend the money
this would raise on rehab - who are inflicting this
living nightmare upon them.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

Copyright 2003 Newspaper Publishing PLC
The Independent (London)

February 27, 2003, Thursday

SECTION: COMMENT; Pg. 19

LENGTH: 909 words

HEADLINE: THIS FANTASY WORLD OF DRUG PROHIBITION

BYLINE: JOHANN HARI

BODY:
The United Nations International Narcotic Control
Board (INCB) has attacked one of the few progressive
drugs reforms introduced by any British government
since the disastrous tide of prohibition began to roll
across the world in the 1960s. The downgrading of
cannabis - a drug which more than half of all British
citizens under the age of 30 have tried - from Class B
to Class C, earmarked for this Easter, was the barest
minimum that could be done in a country where even The
Daily Telegraph, Peter Lilley and The Economist
support legalisation. Yet the INCB has condemned it as
a move made by a government "intimidated by a vocal
minority that wants to legalise illicit drug use".
This "vocal minority" includes, according to a 2001
ICM poll, more than half of all British people when it
comes to cannabis.

The INCB is among the world's most hardline exponents
of drug prohibition. Whenever a country moves in the
direction of greater tolerance and reducing harm, the
INCB is there to beat it with a big stick. Despite its
disingenuous attempt yesterday to claim to speak on
behalf of African nations, it is effectively a puppet
of the United States, a nation whose drugs record
speaks for itself. The latest US Department of Health
found last year that despite endless "crackdowns" over
two decades, 87 million Americans have used illegal
drugs, and nearly a million regularly use the most
hardcore of all, crack cocaine.

The intellectual poverty of the prohibitionists is so
obvious that it no longer merits serious discussion.
They are not interested in evidence from the real
world; they are simply blinkered ideologues. Yet the
INCB still tries to enforce the catastrophic US model
across the globe. Any nation that tries to liberalise
even mildly finds itself, as Britain has, under
intense US/UN pressure.

Through the INCB, they oppose even the most basic
harm-reduction tactics, such as injecting rooms where
heroin addicts can inject under supervision in case
they overdose; needle exchanges (to avoid HIV
infection); heroin prescription (proven to reduce
property crimes, because addicts no longer need to
steal to fund their habit); and ecstasy testing in
clubs, combined with education about the drug (which
could save the lives of the few people who do die
using ecstasy).

As Danny Kushlick, director of the increasingly
influential Transform Drugs Policy Institute,
explains: "There is now a serious tension emerging
between the US approach to drugs - which is being
aggressively forced on the world - and the European
harm-reduction philosophy which is gradually emerging.
Portugal has effectively decriminalised personal
possession of all drugs; and in Spain and Italy,
personal possession is now only a civil offence."

At the moment, the European approach remains - just -
within the boundaries of the international
drug-control treaties, regulated by the UN, that were
set up in successive waves in 1961, 1971 and 1988.
Even these changes are achieved mostly by exploiting
clauses about medical necessity. For example, needle
exchanges, which test the ultra-prohibitionist spirit
of the treaties, are justified by the Dutch with
reference to the clauses about individual health. But
no European country can move towards full legalisation
of production and supply while remaining within the
treaties' constraints. Sooner or later, there will be
a blatant challenge to the treaties by a European
country that wants to travel this path, although
massive diplomatic pressure will be exerted to rein it
back.

The US-imposed constraints on South America are even
greater. In Colombia, 40 per cent of the national
economy is based on the international trade in drugs.
The distorting effect on the entire country is
immeasurable, with billions sloshing around in illegal
funds, corrupting both politics and the administration
of law. This is exacerbated by a US policy of mass-
spraying, with noxious herbicides, of fields suspected
to be used for cocaine-related crops. Tens of
thousands of acres of land belonging to
poverty-stricken small farmers have been destroyed,
the environmental damage is devastating, and yet the
policy is so ineffective that since it began the
cocaine yield from Colombia has trebled.

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.

The INCB approach, in contrast, is a guarantee of
poverty in South America and mass property crime in
Britain. The Government has unflinchingly taken the
condemnation of this unaccountable body for even its
very moderate change. This should embolden it to
confront the prohibitionists again and move faster
towards the European model that will - one day soon -
replace the current anarchy and criminality of the
drugs world with regulation, legality and sanity.

The British Isles are awash with chemicals. From the council estates to the landed estates, from the granny having a cup of cannabis tea for her arthritis to the stockbrokers snorting Charlie in the toilets at Springfellow’s, from Richard Bacon to Jack Straw’s son, we are a nation of drug-users.

There are still people who hold out against legalising ecstasy, cocaine and heroin, despite great wodges of academic studies showing that this would prevent the killing of yet another Leah Betts. But there is a growing consensus in Britain that cannabis at least should be decriminalised.

Let’s be honest – if the British laws on cannabis were enforced, half of the population of this country would have to be banged up. Recent surveys have found that over 60% of people under 25 smoke the weed, and 35% have at least one spliff a week. Set against this reality, the “war on drugs” is a stupid joke. It would be as sensible to declare war on bikes, hamburgers or pet budgies.

It is, of course, possible that something could be extremely widespread but still be wrong and worth cracking down on. Anti-semitism was very common in Weimar Germany; rape remains very common in many developing societies; and homophobia is prevalent across the globe. We don’t respond by saying that just because it happens a lot, the government shouldn’t do anything about it. So it is worth asking: is there anything actually wrong with smoking cannabis?

Well, we all know a few people who light up a spliff the minute they wake up and are stoned pretty much throughout the day. I had a friend – I haven’t seen him in a while now – who used to be pretty sharp, energetic and funny, who took to smoking so much dope that he just became an apathetic, anaesthetised blob. But it’s not like the evil weed came from nowhere and took over his mind. He was depressed, he wasn’t getting anywhere with the opposite sex or in his work, and only once all this caused him to sink did he turn his flat into an immense ashtray littered with stubbed-out spliffs. (I once found three under his pillow when I was so horrified by the mess in his flat that I decided spontaneously to tidy up. Grim.) If it’s hadn’t been for spliffs, I am certain he would have found another drug. Alcohol would have been even worse: at least the cannabis never made him aggressive or obnoxious. So the existence of people addicted to cannabis isn’t an argument for criminalising it. Addictive personalities will find something to be addicted to no matter how many chemicals you ban.

But, yes, we should also admit that there are other draw-backs to cannabis. It can shag your shirt-term memory, as I learned after a few too many spliffs just before one of my GCSE exams. (I forgot the name ‘John Steinbeck’ – which was pretty dumb given that he wrote the set test I was being examined on.) It can, in a tiny number of cases, precipitate schizophrenia if it runs in your family and happens to be latent in your personality. And it’s pretty carcinogenic too – it’s more like to bring on cancer than smoking a tobacco cigarette. It was, after all, excessive cannabis use that killed Bob Marley in his forties. Oh, and the munchies can make you put on serious weight. I’ll never quite forget one night last year when a friend and I managed to eat three entire KFC buckets (the large family-sized mothers) after smoking a little too much.

Once we’ve admitted all these drawbacks, though, we can also celebrate the huge positive factors of cannabis. Unlike this country’s favourite drug, alcohol, cannabis makes you warm and lovely. Have you ever seen a fight break out at a party where everyone was toking? Have you ever woken up and realised that you had majorly insulted somebody because you were stoned? Amsterdam’s cannabis café culture causes far lower levels of street violence than the pub culture of Britain’s cities.

Cannabis is the ultimate relaxant. My ex-boyfriend used to tell me that the only time my neck muscles were ever truly relaxed was after a few spliffs. (He failed to make the connection between that fact and his rather poor sexual technique, but, hey, that’s another story…) It makes us more tactile, more friendly and more open.

Also, it works wonders for people with arthritis and diseases like multiple sclerosis. Britain is one of the few remaining countries in the West which is cruel enough to criminalise cannabis use for medical purposes – although the government has now at least commissioned a report to investigate the issue.

So, given all this, how can anybody support the on-going ban on cannabis? Partly, the arguments are based on ignorance. Jack Straw, who until last year was in charge of enforcing Britain’s drugs laws as Home Secretary, was so naïve that when he was President of the National Union of Students in the seventies (he was the leader of Britain’s students, for god’s sake), he was handed a spliff in a public meeting as a joke and he didn’t know what it was. His one time Tory equivalent, the notoriously freakish Anne Widdecombe, was even worse. She seriously proposed in 2000 that anybody found with cannabis should be marched to a cash point and immediately fined. When even the police themselves reacted by pissing themselves laughing and pointing out that the plan was completely unworkable, the Virgin Anne was forced to backtrack.

The current Tory Shadow Home Secretary, Oliver Letwin, admits he has smoked cannabis – but only because somebody “put it into my pipe as a joke when I was at Oxford, and I didn’t know what it was. I was jolly cross!” When the argument for legalizing cannabis was recently put to the increasingly deranged Margaret Thatcher, she barked back, “Legalising cannabis would be like legalising murder! Murder!” Onlookers stood open-mouthed and wondered how she had escaped the men in white coats.

With weirdos like these in charge of our policies, it is unsurprising that our drugs laws are trapped in the nineteenth century. There are, admittedly, some sane people within our political class. The Liberal Democrats have pledged that if that they would set up a Royal Commission on drugs to investigate the whole question of legalisation. The incomparably wonderful Mo Mowlam saw how our drugs laws worked on the inside when she was in charge of the cabinet office (which sets drugs policies) until the last general election. Now she is out of office, Mo admits that she thinks our whole drugs edifice is entirely unworkable. She now campaigns for the legalisation of all drugs, arguing that this would reduce harm to kids and bring the whole affair out of the hands of criminal drugs gangs and into the legitimate (and taxed) economy. Mo argued for decriminalising cannabis as a first step when she was still in the government, but she was over-ruled by the ultra-conservative Jack Straw.

Of course, some of the opponents of legalising cannabis are not just ignorant like Straw. Many of them deliberately and knowingly twist the truth because they are prejudiced against cannabis-smokers, who they see as clichéd hippies in sandals. The poisonous newspaper the Daily Mail is the worst offender on this front. If you believed what you read in the Mail, you would think that one spliff will turn you into a drooling schizophrenic tramp, or that it would inevitably set you on a short ‘slippery slope’ to junkiedom. They fixate on every bit of bad news about cannabis (indeed, they often just make it up), and fail entirely to account for the fact that Britain’s millions upon millions of cannabis users somehow manage to keep themselves out of the gutter.

The journalists at the Daily Mail have revealed exactly what kind of people they are with their reaction to the Brian Paddick affair. Paddick is a hero for our time, and proof that with jack straw gone as Home Secretary, we can begin to make progress on reforming our drugs laws. Paddick is the senior police officer in charge of the London borough of Lambeth, and he made a tactical decision last year not to waste huge amounts of police time on arresting, booking and imprisoning people found in possession of cannabis. Instead, he said, they should simply confiscate any dope they find and spend the bulk of their time on chasing up real criminals – like, say, thieves and murderers. The policy has been a glowing success – street crime is down, arrests of real criminals are up, and anyone who wants to smoke dope gets on with their lives without being unnecessarily hassled.

The Mail and its allies on the far right couldn’t attack Paddick for his policies, which are overwhelmingly popular with the residents of Lambeth. So they decided to hit him below the belt. Paddick, you see, is gay. Indeed, he is Britain’s most senior gay police officer, who has risen through the (often prejudiced) ranks of the Met because of his phenomenal intelligence and skill. The tabloids began to mock him for this. That fat homophobe Richard Littlejohn, writing in the Sun, called him “the Camp Commander”, and headed an article with “Get Your Trousers on, Paddick.” He made the kind of puerile and vicious innuendos that young gay kids have to put up with in playgrounds across Britain every day.

And then, as the abuse heightened by the day, the Daily Mail managed to dig up one of Paddick’s ex-boyfriends. They waved tens of thousands of pounds under his greedy little nose and, surprise surprise, the boyfriend began to “remember” that Paddick had smoked “hundreds” of spliffs with him, along with other lurid tales. Because of this, Paddick has been suspended from his duties. The brilliant journalist David Aaronovich had compared the case to the Dreyfus affair, when French society persecuted a leading figure because he was a Jew. Make no mistake: the attacks on Paddick and his cannabis policy are gay-bashing in print, and it stinks. We can all learn a lesson from this: remember that every time you buy the Daily Mail, you are supporting rank homophobes. A gay man who buys the Mail is like a black man who buys the Ku Klux Klan weekly.

Although they could get Paddick, his policy remains untouchable. The cannabis experiment continues in Lambeth and it increasingly looks like it will be rolled out across the rest of the UK too. It’s not a perfect policy. It stops short of decriminalisation, never mind legalisation, and innocent dope smokers will still have their cannabis taken from them (often by police who will only go home and smoke it themselves). But it is a massive step forward from the absurd and unwinnable “war on drugs.”