Everyone knows the war on drugs has failed. So why doesn’t the public want change?

Yet another call has been made for an end to the so-called ‘war on drugs’, this time from former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan.

Like so many politicians who recognise the absurdity of the state’s unwinnable crusade against narcotics, the former UN chief appears to have seen the pointlessness of it all soon after leaving office.

It was 40 years ago that US President Richard Nixon signed the ‘war on drugs’ into law. Drugs were ‘public enemy number one,’ said Nixon, and action was necessary because addiction to narcotics had ‘assumed the dimensions of a national emergency’.

Four decades on and the global clampdown on drugs continues unabated. From London to Bogota to Kabul, the same disastrous policies are being repeated with the same destructive consequences. As a Global Commission on Drug Policy report released in June 2010 argued, the global war on drugs has resulted in ‘devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world’.

The US government spent over $15bn dollars in 2010 on the war on drugs, at a rate of around $500 per second. The human consequences are even more troubling. Around 90 per cent of all cocaine consumed in the US comes via Mexico – a place where, between 2006 and 2012, over 47,000 people were killed in President Philip Calderon’s violent battle with the drug cartels.

In his 2008 book Flat Earth News, Nick Davies cited a confidential Downing Street report leaked to the press in 2005, which claimed black market drug users were responsible for up to 85 per cent of shoplifting, between 70 and 80 per cent of burglaries and 54 per cent of robberies.

Inflated street prices mean a junkie must perpetually steal to fund his habit. In one of the many unintended consequences of prohibition, whenever the forces of law bring in a drugs haul the likelihood is they are inadvertently creating a shortage on the streets that will inflate prices further – together with local crime levels.

Many of the health problems associated with drug use too are also a result of their prohibition. Britain’s 300,000 heroin users suffer severe health problems such as septicaemia, hepatitis, ruptured veins and the risk of overdosing. Rarely acknowledged, however, is the fact that almost all of the harmful effects of heroin are caused not by the drug itself, but by toxic contaminants added by unregulated and unscrupulous street-sellers. The respected Merck Health Journal is clear about the effect prohibition has on drug content and quality:

‘Long-term effects of the opioids themselves are minimal; even decades of methadone use appear to be well tolerated physiologically … many long-term users who inject opioids have adverse effects from contaminants (eg talc) and adulterants (eg non-prescription stimulant drugs); cardiac, pulmonary, and hepatic damage from infections such as HIV infection and hepatitis B or C, which are spread by needle-sharing and non-sterile injection techniques.’

The hardline approach to drug use has also had a negligible impact on the number of drug users worldwide. A 2006 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime put the total number of drug users in the world at 200 million, equivalent to about five per cent of the global population aged 15-64. Looking at the rates of hard drug use over time, the report said that ‘in … north America [and] western Europe, abuse levels remained constant for opiates [and] in Europe cocaine use continues to expand.’

Opponents of legalisation are fond of evoking the possibility of increased drug use as a consequence of the legal availability of hard drugs. The likelihood of this happening, however, must be set against a backdrop of worsening drug conflict in the developing world and the unregulated and potentially lethal substances being peddled on British streets.

Politicians appear to know that the war on drugs has failed. Almost everyone who has had to deal with the consequences of prohibition calls for some sort of evidence-based ‘rethink’ when they leave office and are no longer in a position to be slapped down by superiors.

So what’s the problem, then?

In the UK, a change in counterproductive drug policy does not appear forthcoming because the electorate have yet to be convinced of the alternatives. Apart from backing the decriminalisation of cannabis, the public are firmly against the decriminalisation of hard drugs, let alone their legalisation. Public recognition of the failure of current policy hasn’t, in other words, translated into a groundswell of opinion calling for change.

It is, after all, overwhelmingly the poor who die through drug abuse; and unless the middle classes start suffering the effects of prohibition in a similar way, it is hard to see from where any demand for change is going to emerge.

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James Bloodworth is editor of Left Foot Forward and writes a weekly column for Progress. He tweets @J_Bloodworth

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Photo: Jordan Dawe