. . . And why I believe failing police must NOT surrender

THERE’S no reason to be shocked by police officers who want to give up on fighting drugs by concentrating on dealers alone. They’ve been wasting their time doing this futile thing for 40 years. They’ve failed utterly. Who can blame them if they’re sick of it?

But that doesn’t mean that surrendering to the drug legalisation lobby is the right response. All this macho undercover stuff misses the point completely.

Why are the dealers evil in the first place? If they were selling soap, who would care? The things that make them wicked are their products, which ruin the lives of those who buy them, and the lives of their families. Drugs do their damage when people buy and then use them.

Yet for decades the courts have been treating the major crime of drug possession as unimportant. And the police have got the message and seldom even bother to arrest anyone for it. Why plunge into the ghastly paperwork of an arrest when the result will be a discharge or a tiny fine?

Some forces openly say they cannot be bothered to act against possession. Others undermine the law by permitting the open ‘testing’ of illegal drugs for ‘quality’ at festivals. In April this year a BBC Freedom of Information request showed that arrests for cannabis possession in England and Wales had dropped by 46 per cent – almost half – since 2010.

This weakness comes from the very top, despite frequent

noisy claims by politicians to be ‘tough’. The Tory Lord Chancellor Lord Hailsham told magistrates in October 1973 to stop sending people to prison for cannabis possession.

This approach has been going on by stealth since the Wootton Report recommended it in 1969. As long ago as February 1994, John O’Connor, former head of the Scotland Yard Flying Squad, said: ‘Cannabis is a decriminalised drug.’

Nor is it just cannabis. In July 2008, the Tetra Pak heir Hans Kristian Rausing and his wife Eva were arrested and charged with cocaine and heroin possession after Mrs Rausing tried to take the drugs into the US Embassy in London. Two weeks later, all charges were dropped.

It was claimed at the time that the pair had been given privileged treatment, but there is no evidence that this is so. Figures obtained by Nicola Blackwood MP showed that fewer than one in ten Class ‘A’ drug users are imprisoned for possession.

Real toughness does not involve hanging out with violent gangsters. It involves resisting the huge media and political power of the drugs lobby and punishing the people who really drive the global drug trade – the selfish, law-breaking users who supply the money. This policy once worked well here, and still works well in Japan and South Korea, where possession is prosecuted and firmly punished and drug abuse is far lower than in Britain. What a pity that the subtle, oily spokesmen of the drugs legalisation lobby have now succeeded in demoralising the police.

Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens is author of the book The War We Never Fought, The British Establishment’s Surrender To Drugs.