Drugs: The 40-year failure

The Guardian
Tuesday 3 November 2009

Editorial

Drugs: The 40-year failure

Comparing the dangers of ecstasy and equestrianism was provocative, as indeed was Professor David Nutt's more recent suggestion, which led to his sacking last week, that "politicised" drugs classifications concealed the reality that alcohol does more harm than LSD. To that extent - and to that extent only - the home secretary, Alan Johnson, had a point in suggesting that the top drugs adviser whom he dismissed on Friday had strained the limits of his scientific remit, and was effectively campaigning.

Instead of instantly demanding Prof Nutt's scalp, Mr Johnson should have paused to reflect on why this distinguished academic had been moved to stir up such trouble. With further resignations on Sunday, from the drugs advisory council's senior chemist and its leading pharmaceuticals representative, and with additional resignations a possibility, the home secretary attempted in the Commons yesterday to conceal the stark reality that the problems here are about more than one man. But behind the scenes a review of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs is already under way. News that this has a wide remit suggests that other questions are being asked. While a systematic response to the crumbling of the ACMD is absolutely in order, a probe into what is right and what is wrong with the body itself is entirely upside down. The council evaluates the evidence as it always has. The reason respected experts are fleeing has nothing to do with the ACMD's own work. Instead, it is because its most important findings are being routinely ignored in the course of a war on drugs, where reason has long ceased to have any force.

Speakeasies, moonshine and gangsterism live on in folkloric infamy, even though the disastrous American experiment in prohibition only lasted for 13 short years. It has been three times as long since the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act instigated its own unwinnable war. In the late 1960s there were 2,000 registered drug addicts, together with a perhaps similar number who lived their life below the radar. Four decades on there are 360,000 problem drug users. Addicts scramble to spike their veins with dangerously adulterated substances that sell at inflated prices, while modern-day Al Capones clear up. As well as accompanying an explosion in damaging narcotic use, strict prohibition has gone hand in hand with an equally remarkable increase in recreational dabbling, making criminals of a huge minority of young people along the way. Half the government, as well as the Conservative leader and three US presidents in a row, have used drugs in their own youth, and yet punitive laws continue to threaten others who do the same with prison. The three-year sentence that a teenager can receive for providing friends with a few ecstasy tablets snuffs out his future far more surely than any drug, and does so at great expense to the taxpayer.

The overall story has long been one of fear-mongering and rank hypocrisy, but the debasement of the ACMD is a comparatively recent twist. The home secretary suggested yesterday that - if Professor Nutt is put to one side - the general pattern has been for it to inform government policy. Actually, while it retains influence on the minutiae, on the big questions it has now been thrice ignored in short order - over cannabis and ecstasy it argued for lesser penalties than ministers wanted, as it would also have done in the case of magic mushrooms if the government had bothered to ask. Meanwhile the Conservatives' chief complaint yesterday was to ask why the committee had not been nobbled more quickly. David Cameron presides over a party which wants to step up the doomed draconianism, scuppering important attempts to medicalise the treatment of addicts. The politicians from the main parties are thus united in continuing to talk rot. It is hardly surprising that the experts feel a need to make themselves heard - and do so in rather blunt terms.


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Drugs & Democracy Programme
Transnational Institute (TNI)
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