The nonsense of a 'War on Drugs': The Wire's writers get it, governments consistently - TheNewTopical.com - current events, politics, culture, ethics, economics discussion forum

Zichao · #1 (**permalink**) 03-06-11, 10:50 AM

The nonsense of a 'War on Drugs': The Wire's writers get it, governments consistently don't – Telegraph Blogs

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We run a funny story today about the US attorney general calling on David Simon and Ed Burns, the writers of HBO’s The Wire, to do another season of the hit cop show; and fair enough, it was one of the greatest things ever on television, although the fifth and last season was the weakest.

But what surprised me is how low down in the story we put Mr Simon’s response, which was scathing. He said in an email to The Times: “The Attorney-General’s kind remarks are noted and appreciated. I’ve spoken to Ed Burns and we are prepared to go to work on season six of The Wire if the Department of Justice is equally ready to reconsider and address its continuing prosecution of our misguided, destructive and dehumanising drug prohibition.

“[The US government's war on drugs is] nothing more or less than a war on our underclass, succeeding only in transforming our democracy into the jailingest nation on the planet.”

Kudos for “jailingest”, by the way. But if only it were just the US government. A couple of months ago I wrote about various British ex-politicians who had come out and said that it was time to look seriously at the laws governing the prohibition of drugs. I said: “…this is a boring merry-go-round of political cowardice. It’s always former ministers and outgoing heads of something-or-other who call for a review of drug laws, while current incumbents of the Home Office release identikit statements claiming, on the basis of no evidence, that decriminalisation somehow ’sends the wrong message’. It is a racing certainty that when this government leaves office, one or two ministers will break ranks and say that we should take a look at drug regulation, and hope that their successors in the post have bigger cojones than they did.”

So it came as no surprise when today, the BBC reported that various “former world leaders” have said that the embarrassingly misnamed War on Drugs has failed. The Global Commission on Drug Policy includes Mexico’s former President Ernesto Zedillo, Brazil’s ex-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria, the former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, the EU’s former foreign policy chief Javier Solana, and George Schultz, a former US secretary of state. Notice the profusion of “formers” and “exes” in that sentence. The only politician currently in power and with sufficient political courage to come out in favour is the Prime Minister of Greece, George Papandreou.

It came as even less of a surprise to hear that the Home Office have issued a response which is functionally identical to the last two they released on the topic. A spokesperson said: “We have no intention of liberalising our drugs laws. Drugs are illegal because they are harmful – they destroy lives and cause untold misery to families and communities. Those caught in the cycle of dependency must be supported to live drug free lives, but giving people a green light to possess drugs through decriminalisation is clearly not the answer. We are taking action through tough enforcement, both inland and abroad, alongside introducing temporary banning powers and robust treatment programmes that lead people into drug free recovery.” It’s almost indistinguishable from the last two statements they gave me.

I’ve gone on and on before about the evidence. I’ll just recap: the evidence seems to suggest that there is no link between how harsh the drug laws are and how many people take drugs. Three studies, one by the Cato Institute looking at Portugal, one by the World Health Organisation, and one in the British Medical Journal found that by every measure, intelligently applied regulation of drugs is better than prohibition. In Portugal, the Cato Institute found, which decriminalised all drugs in 2001 but kept trafficking punishable by jail, drug use dropped in the young, HIV infections among drug users fell, drug-related deaths fell, there was a decrease in trafficking, and a huge amount of money was saved by offering treatment instead of prison sentences. The World Health Organization study concluded: “Globally, drug use is not distributed evenly and is not simply related to drug policy, since countries with stringent user-level illegal drug policies did not have lower levels of use than countries with liberal ones.” A systematic review in the International Journal of Drug Policy in March of this year found that “increasing drug law enforcement is unlikely to reduce drug market violence. Instead, the existing evidence base suggests that gun violence and high homicide rates may be an inevitable consequence of drug prohibition and that disrupting drug markets can paradoxically increase violence.” They recommended that “since drug prohibition has not meaningfully reduced drug supply, alternative regulatory models will be required if drug supply and drug market violence are to be meaningfully reduced.”

I don’t think I’m cherry-picking. These are the biggest studies that have been carried out in recent years, and the evidence seems, overwhelmingly, to suggest that prohibition is not just failing to fix drug problems, it is aggravating them. Generally, in a liberal democracy, you need a reason to make things illegal, not a reason to legalise them. There is, it seems, no good reason not to take a long, hard look at our drug policy, at what really works, not what is merely politically expedient. It is a sad day when the writers of an (admittedly brilliant) TV police show have a better grasp of health and social policy than our politicians. Hopefully, if the US attorney general is that big a fan, he’ll take up their offer to get hold of season six.