What we know today as illegal drugs all have one thing in common – in different ways they all give pleasure, and that almost always means that they alter the way we feel, and hence perceive or talk about things.  For this reason they are valued by very large numbers of people throughout the world.  The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime puts the figure at between 155 and 250 million.  It is one of the many contradictions in the world of conscience altering drugs that the two most commonly used – alcohol and tobacco – are legal, but both kill many times more users than illegal drugs.  Alcohol, too, is responsible for endless violence, domestic breakdown, criminal damage and social nuisance.

Until the beginning of the twentieth century every home, no matter how humble, kept a little opium. It was one of the very few effective remedies: it is a wonderful pain-killer, it suppressed coughing and it cured diarrhoea at a time when tuberculosis was rife and water supplies often contaminated.  Opium was commonly given to children to get them to sleep.  Nevertheless its addictive properties were well recognised.  In 1912 The Hague Convention imposed obligations on the 12 signatory nations to make possession and use of opium, morphine and cocaine a criminal offence.  This may be seen as the start of the policy of prohibition which has been ruthlessly pursued by the United States ever since.  One might have thought that the experience of alcohol prohibition in the 1920s would have had an effect, but then who learns from history?

Much anti-drug legislation and policy has been inept, and even counter-productive.  When President Nixon declared ‘War on Drugs’ he closed the US-Mexican border to stop drug smuggling.  The direct consequence of that action was that the US has now imported a whole criminal industry, and cannabis has recently become the largest cash crop by value in America.  Massive spending on Federal Agencies has resulted in a doubling of the prison population, most of whom are non-violent, and human rights abuses by the new army of federal henchmen.  In 1982 President Reagan became mired in the Iran-Contra Affair, and the CIA became complicit in illegal and murky activity.  The CIA had long been involved in the fight against communism in South-East Asia, but the price of loyalty by the local tribes who fought this proxy war was involvement in the transport and protection of opium and its processing into heroin.  The ‘War on Drugs’ has been costing America at least $50 billion a year.

President Nixon’s declared intention was to make drugs so scarce that they would be beyond the reach of almost everybody’s pocket.  This was to be achieved by seizures and keeping drugs out of the country, together with foreign policy and military initiatives aimed at producer countries.  How different is the reality.  The price of drugs on our streets has fallen steadily.  Seizures, though considerable, have made no lasting impact on the availability of drugs.  Anyone who wants drugs can easily get them.  There is probably not a village in England where heroin cannot be delivered to your front door quicker than a 999 ambulance.  And the market is in the hands of criminals, who prosper obscenely.  The numbers of drug users are broadly the same from year to year, though fashions do change and are reflected in the ups and downs of the figures.  The overall picture is one of a mature market.  Not even the most optimistic of drug warriors can claim that prohibition has been other than an abject failure.

‘The drug problem’ has many heads, but it is incapable of solution in the way that many problems are.  The best we can do is to select the worst and most damaging aspects of the problem, and aim policy at attacking these.  Most people would agree that there is an indissoluble link between money and crime, and that if we could take much of the money out of drug trafficking, its appeal to criminals would wither.  If, by legalizing drugs, heroin and cocaine became mere agricultural products their price would fall greatly.  The mark-up for these drugs is at present grotesque – about 160 times , whereas coffee, produced by the same Colombian farmers, sells at a mark-up of 3 times.  Furthermore legalized drugs could be sold at a price which would inhibit shop-lifting, theft and fraud, which many addicts resort to in order to buy their black market drugs.

These arguments have been around for many years, and have commended themselves to numbers of people.  New and urgent impetus has been given to this cause in the last few years.  It is now evident that the great majority of international terrorism is funded by drug money, and a fall in the price of drugs would profoundly affect criminals’ ability or inclination to perpetrate such outrages.  The ghastly violence, murder and mayhem in Mexico and elsewhere is the consequence of criminal gangs fighting it out to get or retain their share of this unbelievably lucrative market.  This, too, would diminish, and countries would become easier to govern.

New thinking is needed.  Several countries, notably Portugal and the Czech Republic, have decriminalised drugs for personal use.  This means that it is no longer an offence to posses drugs for your own use, though dealing remains criminal.  It is a step in the right direction, but the market, and hence prices, remain in criminal hands.  Results have been encouraging but unspectacular.  If drugs were legal they could be bought and sold in a government-regulated market.  The essential point is that you cannot have a legal market in illegal goods.  Legalization is thus a necessary pre-requisite to a controlled market in which prices could be fixed, and the conditions under which the various drugs could be obtained could be laid down.  Drugs could also be taxed, and the strength and purity of drugs controlled, and packaging and labelling regulated.

Legalisation would have many consequences, some difficult to predict.  Many will fear that it would lead to an up-surge in the number of users.  It might, though Portuguese experience is reassuring in this respect.  Furthermore the more harmful use of drugs, like injecting, seems to give way to more contemplative and gentle use of poppy-head tea and other similar preparations.  It would be a mistake to under-estimate the possible difficulties, and we will have to work hard to persuade politicians and the international community that it is the way forward, but the status quo is becoming increasingly intolerable.  It could lead to a much safer world, and one which is much more pleasant to live in.