Drugs: stop beating the dog and fix the real problem

THERE’S a funny scene in the movie 10, in which George (Dudley Moore), visiting ‘The Reverend’, is served tea by an old woman. The woman lets one go, as they say, and the reverend’s dog runs out of the room.

The reverend, played by Max Showalter, tells a puzzled Dudley: “Whenever Mrs Kissel breaks wind, we beat the dog.”

When it comes to drugs policy, British politicians are hellbent on beating every dog in sight, when they should be giving Mrs Kissel a flatulence remedy.

Last week, after a series of highprofile knife murders, the airwaves were jammed with commentators blaming the schools exclusion policy for turfing troubled youngsters on to the streets.

Labour politicians regularly seize the opportunity to beat the Government for cutting police budgets, which may be true but misses the point.

In a week or two we’ll be back to horror stories about drug dealing and the rise of “county line” gangs trafficking drugs into our rural towns and villages – and no one, apparently, will make the connection.

The West has been waging a War on Drugs since the 1970s, 50 years.

It’s estimated that this war costs at least £75 billion a year – between £2 billion and £4 billion of that in the UK.

And yet drugs use continues to soar. The illegal trade is now worth £240 billion a year to the criminals globally.

The Prohibition era in the United States proved conclusively that if you want to make criminals rich and fuel violent crime, then all you have to do is to outlaw something a lot of people want.

The only possible solution is to legalise drugs, and take control away from criminals.

Opponents of legalisation drugs are bad – and so they are.

But making them illegal hasn’t helped. Our prisons are stuffed to the brim with addicts who have

say turned to petty crime to get a fix. It is suggested that up to half of all acquisitive crime is drug-related.

Heroin and crack cocaine users may need £15,000 to £30,000 a year to fund their habits. Since stolen goods fetch about a third of their value, the addict must nick up to £90,000 worth of property a year.

Statistics appear to show that the War on Drugs has done nothing except increase the use of drugs.

Even if ending this laughable “war” and replacing it with a system of government regulation did nothing else, it would cut the price of drugs.

Now senior police officers are backing plans to create a national network of drug consumption rooms, known as “shooting galleries”, where addicts are provided with drugs such as heroin, paid for by the state.

Such drug consumption rooms in Canada, America and elsewhere in Europe have been shown to cut the number of overdose-related deaths, with no evidence of increasing levels of drug use, according to a report from the government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.

Some people claim this amounts to the state helping people to take illegal drugs.

Well, yes – but there’s a simple answer: legalise drugs. All of them – it’s no good pussy-footing around one or two softer substances.

The billions we now spend fighting drugs could be better used to deal help the addicts. And the number of people in prison would be cut in half.