Prohibition: Stop screeching.

Those with an interest will have noticed an odd observation, the fact that former drugs ministers, who are now safely out of the limelight, have a habit of condemning the prohibition policy they once so staunchly advocated. The latest is Bob Ainsworth, who of course has been barracked from all sides, but that doesn't mean he's wrong.

I've already written about the case for prohibition, which is all to rarely never given a fair hearing simply because of the screeching from the likes of the weekly edition of Mein Kampf (known by its publication name of the Daily Mail) about people being too 'soft' on drugs, and how it's likely that one day an immigrant with a knife who is high on smack will give you cancer. That really would be their dream headline. But in actuality it's not about being hard or soft, its about being smart or stubborn and stupid.

The idea that banned drugs are safely away from kids on the streets is ridiculous, it's insultingly easy to get drugs on the street, illegal or not. The only difference illegality brings is that in order to get the drugs gangs become involved. This jacks up prices (leading to a rise in crime to fund habits), knocks down purity to make bigger profits (leading to much greater health risks) and means millions around the world are caught up in the crossfire from turf wars.

I've already done detailed posts on the case for prohibition, as has the far more qualified Johann Hari, but that's not the point of this post. You don't have to think drugs should be legalised to agree that we at least need the debate, so that both sides can make their case.

As soon as Ainsworth came out and simply asked for a debate on the issue of drug legalisation we had one Tory say he was not just wrong, but 'dangerous', and Labour's John Mann criticise him for wanting nothing but an 'intellectual debate'. We're in a sorry state of affairs when wanting an 'intellectual debate' is something to be criticised.

I understand why party leaders would want to keep well away from his views, admittedly they don't resonate with the majority of the public, but surely much of that could just be down to the fact that we're never allowed a real debate on the issue. Disagree with him by all means, but don't start with the hyperbole in order to shut him up, we need more people like Bob Ainsworth with a backbone around or we'd never discuss anything controversial.

When I talked about prison reform, and why prison manifestly does not work for many people, I mentioned at the end how, surprisingly, the last person to cut prison numbers significantly was not a namby-pamby liberal at all, but Winston Churchill. And so it gives me a little hope that, when safely out of the limelight, another MP from the backbenches asked the then Labour government to discuss with the UN the possibility of legalisation and regulation of drugs. He added, "I ask the Government not to return to retribution and war on drugs. That has been tried, and we all know that it does not work."

The young hotshots name was David Cameron, whose personal views clearly differed from the political viewpoint he's now forced to espouse as Prime Minister. Let's hope he has the kind of steel we haven't seen from him or his deputy as yet and whether he decides to let the country have a genuine debate on the subject.

In the War on Drugs, Reason is Treason.

Last night, Professor David Nutt (the previous Chair of the drug advisory council to the government who was sacked for a paper he wrote) held a lecture at the University of Manchester on the science (or rather lack of it) in current drug policy. Much of this post is based on that talk.

I've wrote posts on this subject before, but now that I've heard the arguments come from an infinitely more knowledgeable person on the subject I thought I'd reiterate with a few new points. The basic message is that our current views and laws on drugs are completely out of touch with the scientific reality. The Misuse of Drugs Act is being abused and its original purpose to take the politics out of drug policy is being swept aside in order to score cheap points.

First of all, I'll start with what made him famous in the first place, his being sacked as the Chair of the Advisory Council On the Misuse of Drugs by Alan Johnson, the then Home Secretary. It may have come to the attention of readers that I'm something of a Labour man, I don't hide it all that well, but this is one of those occasions when I was appalled by what we did in government. Our drugs policy, and that of the opposition, was completely out of kilter. In trying to cosy up to the tabloid rags (i.e. Daily Mail, Sun etc.) Johnson decided to put his boot in where it was not wanted or indeed appropriate.

Nutt's crime? To publish a scientific paper, stating the facts about the relative harms of drugs. Because what he said embarrassed the government he was shown the door, hardly the kind of treatment you would expect to give to someone who is supposed to work independently of the government in order to give sound unbiased advise.

I have a feeling the government weren't too happy even before this paper was released, what with his previous findings on the relative harms of Ecstacy and horse riding (for which he coined the term Equasy). It didn't suit the tough rhetoric of the government that in fact Ecstacy was less harmful than horse riding and so they distanced themselves. Nutt had evidence, but the politicians had an image to protect.

So, here's some of the facts the government would rather Nutt wouldn't let the public know about, because they'd rather keep us all in this hysterical Daily Mail style bubble which keeps us all frothing at the mouths about the dangers of drugs over a pint in the pub. (And failing to see the irony) These are all findings from previous studies and Nutt's new independent body, which did a much more detailed analysis of both the harm to users and to society of a range of drugs.

• The most harmful drug overall was Alcohol, mainly due to its exaggerated damaging effects on society. Because so many of us drink, we fail to see the massive damage that this drug does.
• Tobacco comes in 6th place, ahead of Cannabis, Amphetamines and Ketamine.
• The most dangerous drugs to the individual user are Heroin, Crack and Crystal Meth, the most dangerous to others are Alcohol, Heroin and Crack, in that order.
• Horse riding is more dangerous than taking Ecstacy, with acute harm occurring once every 10,000 times a person takes Ecstacy, but once in only 350 times someone goes horse riding.

For these scientific facts, backed up by evidence and peer reviewed studies, he has been hung out to dry. Politicians seem to think they know better than the people whose job it is to study and research these things every day of their lives. What one person 'believes' to be true is not equivalent to the opinion of a man with over 30 years research experience. People may say that they 'know' better, and that these claims can't be true, but you only have to walk through an insane asylum to see that faith proves nothing.

It really was an excellent talk he gave, and it really does beg the question why we continue with such a clearly broken system for classifying drug use. We are criminalising people for their sickness and for their attempts to reduce their perceived suffering, what kind of system is that?

The Misuse of Drugs Act was set up to take the political point scoring out of drug policy, and make sure it was evidence based. What we have now makes a mockery of that original purpose. It's high time we got more evidence at the heart of policy making and had a grown up debate about drug use without people screaming their invalid opinions and distorting the debate.

To win the 'War on Drugs', we have to legalise them.

(This is a guest post written for Are You Reading?, check it out)

For this first post I've been asked to do, I settled on writing about something which I think both our respective parties are getting wrong, as is the country as a whole. Drugs.

One of the most annoying things to me is the way the prohibition of drugs is somehow lauded as a moral stand and the banisher of evil. It does the opposite, prohibition didn't work with alcohol, and it's certainly not working with drugs today. But bring this up, and somehow you've 'gone soft' and the whole country would turn into drug-crazed maniacs if you had your way. It's ridiculous.

Politics demands you're 'hard' on drugs. The evidence says that being hard on them is stupid and counter-productive.

Our idea of drugs is warped, and completely against what science tells us the truth is. We gleefully retell stories from when we were so drunk we ended up sleeping in a dog shelter but take a less harmful drug than alcohol and you could end up in jail. But my problem with drugs isn't that people don't understand the relative harms, it's that by banning them we're making the situation many, many times worse.

Did prohibition work in America in the 1920's with alcohol? Why do we think that banning other drugs will have a better outcome than it did back then? Prohibition these days has exactly the same problems as it did back then, only magnified because of being international.

We should be blunt, you can ban things all you want, the fact is people are going to be able to get hold of drugs. If I hadn't already realised that before now, a year at university certainly has made me. If someone like me who really has no interest in taking drugs knows how I could easily go about getting them, what does that say about who's winning the 'War on Drugs'?

I don't doubt that the people who defend this 'war' have their hearts in the right place, but when faced with the bare facts it really is hard to defend.

Drug gangs scar the face of communities right around the world, with ordinary people getting caught in the crossfire of turf wars. There is such an immense profit to be made that dealers can simply pay off anyone who might get in the way. The only thing they fear is legalisation, because then they'd be out of business. When something's legal, you have no need for shady gangs to get it for you illegally. In America it's been known for dealers to bribe politicians to appear excessively keen on prohibition precisely so that it wouldn't be legalised and they could stay in a job.

Then you have the issue with the quality. Contrary to what you might read in the Daily Mail, you are not going to die the second you take your first puff of a drug, so long as it's pure. And that's the key point. Drug's are much, much more dangerous when bought on the street than they should be because of all the extra shit that's mixed in with them to increase the quantities. With no legalisation, you have no regulation, and without regulation you have drugs which are far more deadly than they might otherwise be. Is a dealer really going to be overly concerned about your health?

I always worried that legalising drugs would lead to an explosion in drug use, but that's just not backed up by any real facts. Portugal decriminalised personal possession of all drugs in 2001 and there was no impact whatsoever on usage, in fact, there was a small decrease in usage amongst the young.

Imagine we could replicate that, but go further. People taking drugs wouldn't be criminals, but addicts who can ask for help. And being able to ask for help earlier would mean they were far easier, and cheaper, to treat. Drugs would be regulated, they would be kept pure and safe, with nothing dangerous mixed in, so many lives could be saved. And armed drug gangs would be out of a job. Nowhere would be left to peddle their imported goods and the turf wars that blight the streets would be over in one fell swoop.

We could have that, if only politicians would look at the facts, and not what the scaremongers would have you believe. When the last governments drugs advisor, David Nutt, said it was more dangerous to ride a horse than it was to take Ecstasy, he was simply stating scientific fact. Yet what did he get for looking at the evidence? He was sacked. Not one party in parliament complained, and that's a sad illustration of how little debate we have right now.

Talking about legalising drugs is taboo for senior people. It's a dangerous taboo, and one we need to break.

War on Drugs?

I wanted to make the follow up to the 100th post about something interesting so I was pleased Channel 4 gave me some material in their documentary about the War on Drugs. I wrote quite a while back about this briefly after the sacking of David Nutt which I'm afraid was one of the very low points of the last government although our political class is so unmoving on this issue that I fear there weren't many in parliament who opposed his sacking.

Obviously, the documentary only gave one view which was a little annoying but from everything else I've seen I broadly agree with what it was saying, the so called 'War on Drugs' is a massive failure and far from doing good its actually fuelling a vicious circle of criminalisation and underground drug rings.

It's really bizarre just how little discussion the whole area of drugs is given by anyone in power. They talk about it, but they rarely listen to anything that doesn't confirm what they want to believe. The war on drugs isn't being won, estimates put the amount of drugs seized at 1% of the total consumed, that's pitiful. The police are working themselves into the ground and all they can seize is 1%. But I don't blame the police, I blame the people who expect so much and refuse to shift their opinion.

This is a ranking from 2006 of the relative harm of each drug, its pretty surprising reading, especially if you compare where smoking and alcohol comes in the list:

Now compare that to how our current system ranks them, alcohol and cigarettes are freely available whilst LSD and ecstacy are considered to be much worse.

So what do we get for confiscating 1% of drugs, many of which are less harmful than alcohol? We get massive criminal activity, violent crime and whole areas of people cast into the revolving door of a prison system. It's truly ludicrous.

People who now me will know I'm possibly one of the least likely to get involved in drugs, so the fact that despite this I could very happily get my hands on a whole range of different drugs very easily if I so wanted shows you the scale of the problem we have at the moment.

But don't we have a scientific body which advices the government on drugs policy? Indeed, and a fat lot of good they are. To say they aren't independent would be the understatement of the year. The last time the body had a chair who decided to defy the government and speak based on scientific fact (imagine that!) he was sacked, all in an attempt to appease those strange bunch of readers the Daily Mail attracts, who think locking anyone up for less than 10 years for not eating their veg is akin to going soft on crime.

I'm not asking for full legalisation (although I think some legalisation is being cried out for) but I'm simply asking for people to be able to debate it properly without others immediately whining that they've gone 'soft'. It is truly appalling that no-one at the top has the balls to stand up and say let's look at the evidence rather than carry on with this shambolic playing to the media.

We can't help addicts by criminalising them, and we don't solve the problem by making the dealers very wealthy men.

Ridiculous Drug Policies

Something else from the world of BBC News that I thought was interesting:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8601315.stm
It looks like the advisory council is fast becoming a joke which has no scientific reasoning for its existence, its just there to play to the whim of politicians looking for a way to appear tough on drugs for the sake of the morning papers. The latest being the farcical way Mephedrone was dealt with.
Seven members have resigned since the resignation of the previous chair and all have said there was too much interference from government in what should be a purely scientific and public health forum. Why do people always assume that you can solve a drug problem by banning it? It hasn't worked for decades and it won't start working now.
I don't think every single drug should be legalised, but I do think that every drug should be looked at individually not just at its effects when taken, but also at how banning the drug is likely to affect behaviours. When you ban one drug you open two doors, firstly, you hand control of it over to criminal groups who have no problem cutting it with cheap, toxic ingredients and secondly, you leave a gap in the market for a new, potentially more harmful drug to take its place.
Why should people who have no relevant qualifications in pharmacology or public health be in charge of the law of any drug? The general public blows any issue to do with drugs massively out of proportion, and still fails to solve the problem. For weeks people in favour of banning have been harping on about it being implicated in four deaths. The key word being 'implicated'. It wasn't even found to be the sole cause of death in these people. Yes it might have affected people and it may be dangerous, but we should investigate whether that's true without letting emotions rule decision-making. The governments desire to always 'act tough' on drugs is costing more lives than it is helping.
And what is the alternative that the Tories offer us? Well they just think Professor Nutt should have been sacked earlier and that the government doesn't have enough control over the council. So there position is we'll get it as wrong as Labour but do it more often and quicker. This is another one of those times when the Lib Dems seem to be the only party with any sense. They want the council to be independent and only be interested in the scientific basis for drug policy, surely that should be obvious to everyone? In the meantime, criminals are getting more and more money from banned drugs whilst making them more dangerous at the same time. Surely, being able to regulate a drug which is legal would be a more sensible approach for so many substances which are illegal right now?