Bad habits | 3 March 2012

Professor Hamid Ghodse, president of the UN’s International Narcotics Control Board, is not the first to observe that Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham have acquired ‘no-go’ areas of ‘fractured communities’ ruled by gangs. But if he were brave enough to venture just a little bit closer to the frontline of Britain’s drug problem he would realise that much of the rest of his analysis, delivered with the board’s annual report this week, is bunk. Making a case for a shift towards treatment and rehabilitation programmes, he claims that Britain offers proof that ‘it is no good to have only law enforcement, which always shows it does not succeed’.

Whatever the solution to the problem of drugs gangs, it is a gross distortion to claim that the British approach to tackling drugs is based only on law enforcement. To the oft-repeated claim by the pro-legalisation lobby that the ‘war on drugs’ has failed, the obvious question is ‘what war?’ The white flag was run up against drugs at least as early as 1997, when Tony Blair’s government moved quietly away from prohibition to a policy of harm-reduction, treating drug addiction as a health problem rather than a crime.

Britain’s cities are not wanting for drug prevention and rehabilitation programmes. On the contrary, drug addicts searching for help are in danger of being smothered with attention from therapists and counsellors. In many cases the ‘treatment’ mainly consists of the state taking over the job of supplying drugs to addicts — entirely free at the point of delivery.