The Guardian on Drugs

Yes, yes, I know, cheap shot and all that. The G ran a very nice couple of articles yesterday on the scope and scale of the drugs trade in the UK.

The true scale of Britain's illicit drug economy was revealed yesterday with the disclosure of an internal Home Office estimate that there are 300 major importers, 3,000 wholesalers and 70,000 street dealers involved in a trade with a turnover of between £7bn and £8bn a year.

And it's also potentially extremely profitable:

It finds there are very high mark-ups along the supply chain from production to street level, about 15,800% in the case of cocaine and 16,800% for heroin.

If you prefer your information in a graphic format try here.

I've always been pro-legalisation of drugs on purely liberal grounds. Your body, you screw it up as you wish to. But I am aware that a large percentage of my fellows don't actually think this way, that we should stop you from doing things you enjoy (the reasons run the gamut from protecting you from harm to the more Puritan stopping you from having fun) for good reasons.

But looking at those numbers above simply tells me that trying to stop people importing and distributing, taking, drugs simply doesn't work.

Given that the current methods do not work, can we all get together and try and work out what might? I don't mind too much if heroin isn't available at every pharmacy (a day's worth for an injecting addict would be about £20 or so, based on current pharmaceutical costs) across the land but surely everyone can now see that the current banning and illegality doesn't work, and is thus unsustainable?

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