Re-examining UK drug culture

Terence Dudley

The war on drugs has failed society. Time and time again politicians have repeated the ‘zero tolerance’ slogans, and to what end? The result has been steady rises in drug use, crime and health costs (which the Department of Health put at fifteen billion per year). The only winners, it seems, are the drug dealers; the United Nations has put the value of the global illegal drugs trade at well over three hundred billion USD.

The problems of the Britain’s drugs policies are evident for anyone to see, and yet those running the country are blind to the correlation between criminalisation and the growth of the dilemma. At home, drug dealers make vast profits on substances which cost next to nothing by exploiting our youth. Worldwide, the fact that these drug profits are used to fund terrorist networks throughout the world is undisputed and well documented. Furthermore, young people are becoming rapidly associated with criminal circles and are becoming criminalised at an early age.

Parallels can be drawn unequivocally with the prohibition of alcohol in 1920s America. The outlawing of alcohol provided criminals with a means of profit whilst escalating prices resulted in street crime and violence. Alcohol is itself a drug which is potentially very dangerous, and yet today, society manages the negative effects by promoting its misuse and helping, rather than criminalising, its victims. The same can be done for drugs; the extremes in retribution and prohibition have been tested and have failed – we must learn to find a new way forward. Substance misuse should be treated as a medical matter, not a criminal one.

Decriminalising drugs would have obvious immediate advantages. Aside from diminishing the black market, the policy would greatly reduce petty street crime and remove the burden of overcrowding in prisons. Drug use would also be far less dangerous; supplies could easily be monitored as being reliable and clean. Perhaps most significantly, however, the revenue from drug use would be transferred from funding criminal activity to being used for positive purposes of rehabilitation and health care, as is currently the case with alcohol and cigarette duties.
Admittedly, many of these arguments were once cast aside as being precarious and radical. Legalisation, it has been argued, will lead to nothing more than chaos and vast increases in drug use. However, the evidence suggests otherwise. Within Europe, the advantages of Portugal’s drugs policy are becoming increasingly hard to ignore. Since 2001, the government in Portugal officially abolished all criminality relating to possession of drugs, and replaced jail with the offer of rehabilitation and therapy. The results in 2009 show something of a revelation; Portugal now has the lowest rate of marijuana in Europe and its figure of 10 per cent rates very favourably with America’s 39 per cent. Deaths as a result of heroin have been halved, HIV infections from drug users have fallen by 17 per cent and the number of those entering into treatment for drug use has doubled since its de-criminalisation. In other words, these statistics mean that drug dealers on street corners, youth association with criminal circles and massive strains on health and prison systems are becoming things of the past.

So, where does the UK fit into this? The 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act has been the centre piece of our unwinnable battle, but still our populist leaders will not dare touch anything as radical as decriminalisation. Gordon Brown and Alan Johnson are currently fighting to re-classify cannabis as class B (much to the dismay of his own researchers), whilst Cameron’s top 10 ideals for Britain include a doubling of magistrates’ sentencing powers; all of which would suggest that ‘zero tolerance’ is still on the cards.

Sadly, whilst countries with innovative leadership such as Portugal and Switzerland have reaped the benefits of de-criminalisation, we are left with a battle between two political parties, neither of which has learnt the lessons that history offers them and both of whom are content with criminalising our young generation.