Ineffective measures?
The UKDPC report found that in 2005-06, there were an estimated three quarters of a million cocaine users in Britain and the average price per gram was about £70, which has since dropped to £54 per gram. The recent drop in price and increase in usage is a surprise considering the government launched a crackdown on cocaine use last year, which the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) claimed resulted in ten tonnes of the class A drug being seized in the run-up to Christmas. Perhaps the increase in usage isn’t such a surprise when one considers that the crackdown is the reason the price per gram has dropped. Due to the increasing difficulty in bringing the drug into the country, career cocaine dealers have opted to import less cocaine but to mix what they do import with other chemicals, such as talcum powder, baby milk powder and local anaesthetic. One third of what is now being sold as cocaine at street level is actually only 5% cocaine. As the drug market is completely unregulated (due to the criminalisation of the substances), ‘cutting’ drugs with lookalike substances is relatively common. For example, heroin is usually cut with sleeping aids, plaster and brick dust and the street purity can range from 20 to 90%. The UKDPC report also found that, while heroin seizures had risen by 30%, death by drug misuse in England and Wales had risen by 25% – and in Scotland by 150%. Decriminalisation of such drugs would allow users to test the purity of their drugs at government or private health facilities without fear of prosecution.

Decriminalisation works
After the fall of Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal in 1974, the Portuguese drug scene began to grow steadily until it exploded out of control in the mid-1980s. By 1999, unable to resolve the increasing problem of (predominantly) heroin addicts and the burden they put upon the criminal justice system, the Portuguese government invited a committee of experts to propose policy recommendations. One main recommendation was to decriminalise the personal use and possession of all drugs. In 2001, the Portuguese government followed this and most other advice and decriminalised drug use, meaning that, while drugs are still illegal, their consumption is not a criminal offence so users cannot be sent to jail, although dealing is still heavily punished. The argument for this centred around the idea that the government cannot stop people from using drugs, but what they can do is limit the harm caused and work with drug users to help tackle any problems they may have. To do this, the Commission for Drug Dissuasion was set up. The Commission acts in the same way as the criminal courts, but is chaired by a social worker, a judge and a medical expert, who assess each drug user, then decide what course of action would be best for them, from social work to rehabilitation. The main difference between the Commission and the criminal courts is that those before the Commission are treated as having a health issue rather than as criminals and thus are more co-operative with the system. The Portuguese police commissioner, Paulo Flor, applauds the policy, saying it gives them far more time looking for ‘the big fish’. Consumption of most drugs in Portugal has stabilised while consumption of others has fallen; there has been a decrease in drug-related deaths and the number of people in rehab has significantly increased.

Tabloid agenda
Latin America has begun to follow the Portuguese decriminalisation model – with Argentina and Mexico having decriminalised drug use and Brazil and Ecuador preparing to follow suit. Is it not time then that Britain also abandons the War on Drugs started by Richard Nixon in the 1960s and accepts that prohibition-enforced abstinence causes more harm than good, creating a niche in the British black market worth £7 billion? The only British political party to seriously consider the results of Portuguese drug policy is the Liberal Democrats, as I found when speaking to local LibDem candidate Guy Voizey: ‘Liberal Democrat policy is to end the use of imprisonment for possession of own use of illegal drugs of any class. Treatment and rehabilitation facilities should be made more widely available … Drugs policy in this country is driven by the tabloid agenda. Tabloids (and our political opponents) consider our policy of decriminalisation to be reckless by trying to suggest decriminalisation means something similar to handing out cannabis to school kids at break time. Until there’s a more mature approach, it will be difficult getting change.’ Change can only come about through mature discussion, and that can only be achieved by bringing the issue of drugs out of the taboo and into sensible dialogue. UKDPC is an independent registered charity that: provides authoritative and objective analysis of UK drug policies, furthers understanding of the evidence base and its implications for drug policies, and encourages policy makers to adopt evidence-based drug policies.

John Moreland is in the second year of a Law LLB