Europe's internal borders

This post is not by me, it is by James Panichi, an Australian journalist based in Brussels who tries - quite successfully - to understand how the Belgians are coming to terms with the cards that history has dealt them. All credit to him and "Inside  Story".

Go to
http://inside.org.au/border-control-the-complexities-of-life-along-one-of-europes-hottest-cultural-fault-lines/




Carel Edwards
15 January 2013

Epistle to the Eurosceptics

Ever since the banking crisis began to roll, politicians the world over have been caught in a dilemma: how to make the people who vote for them pay the cost of one of the most disastrous policies that they - the politicians - have embraced since the late 1970's: deregulation of financial services. The banking crisis is usually blamed on the banks. But the financial sector could never have even started out on this particular road to hell if the politicians of the great democracies hadn't embraced the sadly flawed notions of  von Mises, von Hayek, and Friedman.

The damage done will probably take a generation to clear up. When we get back on our feet again we are likely to find that some things have gone for ever, such as many public services, the social emancipation and progression that life in the middle-class used to offer, or the idea that the weak and needy in our societies are not necessarily scroungers. Moreover, the relationship between labour and employers is changing back to a harsher model reminiscent of the industrial revolution - and "labour" includes academics and skilled craftsmen as well as the lower skilled. The steady rise in the numbers of  poor in the West is also now becoming visible and is well documented.

More than 50 years after WWII, it is striking how the populations of Europe accept to pay for this mess. Yes, there is plenty of protest, but none of it is particularly organised or constructive. Many European countries with seriously unbalanced budgets are however fundamentally quite prosperous. The austerity they are inflicting on confused electorates has an old fashioned tinge of class enmity about it.

To preach austerity to the poor and frail has become a sign of political manhood in Europe. But the Northern belt of EU states have now sunk their teeth in one of their oldest bug bears: the EU budget and its civil service. And why not? Why should public servants be spared when the people as a whole are suffering? The thing is that the national public services, at least in the "sensible" Northern countries of the EU, are not really suffering at all.

Let's take the case of The Netherlands - one of the most eager cost cutters in Brussels. The Dutch state employs more than one million people for a population of some 16.5 million. 160.000 are "real" civil servants in the sense that they work for government departments.They have received salary increases of more than 10% since 2008. The EU institutions employ 33.000 people for a population of half a billion people. In other words, the EU is run by what is roughly the number of staff employed by an English County Council, or rather less than the 44.000 employed by the city of Paris. The cost of the EU administration is 8 percent of one percent of total EU GDP. The sort of money Icelandic banks used to shift in a day. Real Wages in Brussels have been dropping since 2004 by up to 20%. Contrary to what "certain media" put about, EU civil servants' pay and conditions are average for international organisations and are on a par with Nato, the UN and its many agencies, the World Bank, the IMF, the Council of Europe, etc.

Honestly though, no one today is going to shed a tear over Eurocrats having their salaries and pensions reduced, not with 20% unemployment in Spain and drastic cutbacks in health services in Britain. But that is not the point. The real point is that app. half the legislation of the member states is actually EU legislation, much of it affecting people's jobs and lives. The basic principle of the EU civil service is that you want it to be beyond the reach of national governments as well as beyond temptation to be anything other than totally scrupulous and incorruptible. That is the basis of pay and conditions of all international officials around the world, particularly if they have direct authority. There is also the question as to why it is that the richest member states of the EU - with some of the most highly paid public servants in the world - have gone on a slash and burn spree in the EU budget this year. If they succeed, the number of Swedish, Dutch, German and British nationals drafting legislation and controlling national budgets from Brussels will sink even lower than it is today.

So what's the bottom line? It is that one day your national treasury will be visited by a team of Commission auditors made up exclusively of Greeks, Romanians, and Spaniards. What's wrong with that? Am I a racist? No, but I remember the fuss about Polish plumbers some years ago. I am simply anticipating the reaction of the populist media in London, Budapest, The Hague, etc.


Carel Edwards





 

Europe, the active volcano.

Europeans who still have some sense of history are smelling a whiff of old toxic vapors.

For thousands of years, great migrations have emerged from the Eastern plains to fight their way into the crowded peninsular on the Western edge of Asia since known as Europe. As Slavs, Celts, Goths, Magyars, Longobards, Saxons, Christians and Muslims, Protestants and Catholics, clashed for generations, the outcome has often been like the shifting of tectonic plates. In Europe's history of striking ferocity  nations were born or abolished, religions exiled or established. The siege of Sarajevo in our time may have been shocking, but that is largely due to our naive belief in the end of history and the politically correct self-delusion that all races and creeds should naturally get on with each other in what is now surely an age of reason. If you think it is, go and talk to the mothers and widows in Srebrenica. That happened in 1995. You can get there in an easy day's drive from any number of EU capitals.

The Greek crisis for its part has (re)awakened a distasteful superiority complex in swathes of northern European populations, about work-shy southerners who have only themselves to blame for squandering hard-earned cash, hard-earned that is by Germans, Dutchmen, etc. Little is said in the North European popular press about the fact that much of the money the Greeks owe was lent eagerly by German  banks for instance, not least to buy German-made capital goods which the Greeks clearly couldn't afford, such as German Type 214 submarines. (Where is American surplus equipment when you need it?). Even normally respected politicians and observers in these North European countries seem to have lost the EU plot, their  moralising and hectoring rivaling the Tea Party in moronic platitudes about complex issues. Immigration - and the integration of immigrants - is such an issue. It has been shockingly mismanaged and is coming to haunt a street or school near you. Manuel Barroso, the  EU Commission's president - and hardly a firebrand -  has even spoken out against irrational soundbites by European leaders who take one decision in Brussels and say the opposite as soon as they get back home.

Xenophobic stereotyping is rife in Europe. It is an essential part for its historic addiction to suicidal wars. The EU was designed to change all that, and to a large extent it has succeeded. It all began to wobble though,  when Europe embraced economic/financial deregulation along with the rest of the West. It got worse when Europe failed before the eyes of the world to deal with the Yugoslav problem. Then it blundered into one of those "March of Folly" moments with a hasty and bungled absorption of former Communist block countries, and when it launched a common currency without a solid political or fiscal authority behind it. The poorer nations went off shopping with mummy's new Euro credit card. I would have done the same.

Bringing Romania and Bulgaria into the EU (against the advice of Commission experts, who said they weren't ready but were told to shut up) has changed the nature of Europe. These countries, and Hungary is no better, were and are nowhere near the standards of law abiding democracies (the EU has recently made that official). We have no answer in Brussels to the semi-criminal classes that run much of the Balkans, nor against the old Hungarian spectre of hard-handed authoritarianism, racism, and unbridled nationalism. And so, with the Roma, we now have political refugees from within the EU, but we are legally unable to treat them as such because they come from EU Member States, countries that have signed up to the EU Treaties, and who must therefore be deemed to be democracies.

The reality of our European history is that some deep cultural/religious/ethnic fault lines run through our nation states. The Balkans, Switzerland, Belgium, the Baltic States, Ireland, etc. They all have in common that they  have dominant and dominated cultures, religions, or languages within their borders. We exported the problem to Canada centuries ago, but as in the case of Switzerland, it is one of the rare countries to have found a workable and civilised solution to multilingualism. In Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, a long history of repression of minorities, the struggle against the Ottomans, and arbitrary border tracing by the great powers in the past are proving more than a match for the civilising influence of EU membership.

The botanical and medical origins of opiates are mostly European

Much of what I'm going to say is straight from an article by Mike Jay in the London Review of Books of 21 June. The book is "Opium: Reality's Dark Dream" by Thomas Dormandy (Yale, ISBN 978 0 300 175325), I recommend it to the serious student of the history of drug policy. It helps to explain how we got where we are today, or rather, why our seemingly sensible policies only seem to make things worse. Much of what I'll say next is pure plagiarism, but I hope LRB and the authors mentioned will see it as free advertising.

Opiates are thousands of years old. As a drug they haven't changed, nor has our metabolism. The difference between feeling good on it and being dead is uncomfortably small, hence the reluctance of many medical men in ages past to use it. This is supposedly why Philips II of Spain, Charles II of England, and Lois XIV were among the masses who in their time died of protracted and unnecessary agony (as millions still do in poor countries today, thanks to the moral casino known as the INCB). The agony was unnecessary because opium as a painkiller was well known at the time. But doctors always know best. A 12th century medical man noted that many visitors to Mecca were "dangerously obsessed with their craving", still a problem today if the Saudi police are to be believed. Avicenna warned about the addictive and euphoric effects, and advised to collect your fee before dosing the patient, etc.

It wasn't until the 19th century that society begins to see pain relief as a necessity rather than a luxury. The spread of TB in the middle classes helped. As Mike Jay says "Despite resistance from some medical and religious authorities who maintained that pain was a physical or spiritual necessity, the use of opium to relieve it came to seem no more than common kindness". Palliative treatment had arrived, at least in the rich world.

As production was increased to feed this market, prices dropped. Opium was often cheaper than alcohol (and did a lot less damage in a crudely industrialising world). The article gives a tantalising vignette of Britain's most notorious opium growing area, the "poppyland" of the East Anglian fens, an area I know well, and more traditionally English than that you can hardly get. "Shopkeepers on market days would line up tots of laudanum tincture on their counters for visiting farmers to drink on the spot, with...bottles and jars of pills to see them through the week". For anyone who knows this area of England the image is surreal.

Opium had been known in China for ages, but he article claims that it was introduced, at least on the scale that European colonial powers were behind it, as an additive to Dutch tobacco, hence the design of the opium pipe, offering a way of more efficient vaporisation, inhalation, and a more intense high (at a time when most Europeans were still drinking the stuff).The market-induced Chinese custom transformed the drug from a private medication into a a convivially shared intoxicant, giving it ultimately its decadent and sinister, alien image.

By 1860 morphine had been developed out of opium, vastly improving its effectiveness as an (addictive) painkiller. Just in time really: By that time the American Civil War (the biggest single war of the 19th century) had created 50.000 amputees (not to mention 620.000 dead). It had accounted for the distribution of  more than ten million doses of morphine. Morphine addiction becomes a fairly familiar phenomenon in the States and elsewhere. By 1885 the American physician J.B. Mattison is quoted in the article as claiming that a third of all New York Doctors are morphine addicts. This led to problems in the medical professions (and their families).

And here we get to today's conundrum. This is where, in the US, addiction begins to be seen as specifically "un-American", not just immoral but rendering people decadent and socially useless. The latter is important. Henri Bergeron, in "Sociologie de la Drogue" makes a similar point about the social/political issue with drug use: the effect of drugs takes the form of a withdrawal from society (unlike alcohol, normally) and removes the citizen as a social actor and tax payer, thus rendering the state irrelevant. Not something the French are keen on.

By WWI legislation was coming in in various countries, as millions of men were given morphine on the battlefields of Europe. The article mentions one of the first prosecutions under the new laws, against Harrods of London, for selling gift-wrapped packets of morphine for friends and loved ones at the front. It goes on to describe the rising tide of drug control legislation as the 20th century progresses, and the growling moral tone of some of those laws. In the US, the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 stated that addiction was not a disease but a "self-inlicted moral infirmity". Like today's multilateral system of drug control, those laws failed to address the issue with any success. Heroin makes its appearance and is sold in cough mixtures and other over-the-counter products until 1913. WWII's demobbed heroes included untold numbers of men and women with amphetamine addictions induced by liberal but official prescription by the military. By 1946 the mob begin to control the drugs market, and the rest his history.

I leave you to read the book for the more constructive and well-founded conclusions, but this is an intelligent account of how the "disease model" of addiction is very imperfect to say the least. It tends to have much more support among policymakers than in the medical profession. So much for the evidence base. We still have a long way to go.

Carel Edwards

Shared irresponsibility

Europeans have lost the taste for armed conflict. They have been there and done that.
They don't like the war on drugs much either, which is why Europe has been a relatively civilised place in terms of drug issues for some years now, favoring harm reduction and tolerance over the sort of mass incarceration that we see in the US. 
We buy this peace for ourselves at the cost of keeping firmly out of the debate that increasingly desperate Latin American countries are trying to get us involved in. Last December's Tuxtla Declaration - and the Cartagena meeting that followed - clearly called on the consumer regions to experiment with market solutions, i.e. regulate the market in order to take it out of the hands of organised (and not so organised) crime. The Europeans are deaf to these pleas, that goes for the media as well as the governments. 
It seems that we are even beginning to prefer a "Stronger European response to drugs" (see previous posts on the EU Commission's Communication).  If words could solve problems we'd be home and dry, but studies done for the Commission itself have shown that it is very hard to find any reliable data that allow us to make a causal link between public policy and drug use in the first place. That goes for demand, but the situation is even worse for supply control; law enforcement does not like to be evaluated or scrutinised, certainly not by a bunch of bureaucrats in Brussels. As a result, we haven't a clue whether (very costly)  police intervention against drug trafficking is having any effect, but in this respect we are no different from any other major block or country. 

So where does this leave the European approach to drugs? More and more European countries are probably in breach of the UN Drug conventions today, at least by the standards of the now Inquisition-like INCB. If Europeans (and quite a few other countries) have no appetite for reviewing the conventions it is partly because they are afraid to open a Pandora's box (you might end up with something worse), and partly because they have a big economic crisis on their hands. But above all, I believe that it hasn't sunk in yet in the world's major drug consumer markets that the only way to take organised crime out of the market structure is for states to produce certain types of drugs themselves and to regulate the sale of them. This won't happen tomorrow; the idea is a vote killer and distasteful to large parts of public opinion, but growing pressure from Latin American countries, where states are crumbling under the effects of our inconsistent policies, may yet turn the tide. 


On 29 May, European members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy met in Brussels with members of the European Parliament and officials of the EU Commission and Council. They were Michel Kazatchkine, Executive Director of the Global Fund for AIDS, TB, and Malaria, and Pavel Bem, architect of the Czech drug policy and former Mayor of Prague. Both are medical doctors with extensive experience in political life. They called on the EU to strengthen its comprehensive and balanced approach, and to resist the siren voices of the new "tough" approach advocated by the EU Commission. To quote Pavel Bem: in politics, simple solutions to complex problems are the road to hell.


A full report on the Brussels meeting should appear soon on the website of IDPC and the Global Commission itself.  

Unleash the dogs of criminalisation.

The history of criminalisation is one of casting first stones, scapegoating and of tribes seeking safety in convention. It is an entirely understandable and necessary social reflex, but possibly the most abused of all. Much of criminalisation is indefensible by almost any moral standard; from the spuriously sadistic retributions threatened by the great religions, via heresy to witch burning, to castration of young inmates of church-run boarding schools (recently revealed to have taken place in the Netherlands in the '50s). And then there is the one recent example of potential decriminalisation that beats them all: the Moroccan law that allows a rapist to marry his victim in order to save her honour (sic). Yet, my friends from LEAP, who have spent much of their lives at the sharp end of criminalisation, have explained to me just how little time the average law enforcement officer gets to spend on dealing with "proper" crime, like murder, rape and arson, and how much time goes into controlling kids with "substances" in their pockets, never mind harassing respectable housewives with substances. Which must be one of the reasons why the US has the largest prison population in the world: a quarter of the world's prisoners for 5% of the world's population - more than China - and a rate seven times higher than Europe.

But we Europeans like to learn from our American friends: the recent violent life and death of Mohammed Merah, in France, has prompted President (and candidate) Sarkozy to promise criminalisation of such things as visiting Jihad web sites, going to areas like eastern Afghanistan for no good reason , etc. Law enforcement officers and judges take note: when that woman from Médecins sans Frontières with the North African features (because her Algerian grandfather fought in the French army) checks into Charles de Gaulle  off a flight from Kabul, pull her out of the queue.  OK, it's election time, but we already have crazy laws, like the one making it an offence to deny the holocaust. Not that I believe denial of historical facts should be encouraged, but the holocaust is one of history's most documented and undisputed facts, and those who do deny it are usually so implausible (or mad) that they strengthen the holocaust case every time they open their mouths. I also get this queasy feelings sometimes about the 900,000 or so Germans who died in the allied bombing of their cities in WW II, most of them civilians, their memory unprotected by laws criminalising denial or even trivialisation of what happened to them.

The act of criminalisation always raises the issue of what is permissible in lawmaking when judging those who are not like yourself. "Otherness" (l'altérité" in french) is a familiar concept in sociology and anthropology. It is the mainspring of tribal and racial conflict which can lead to the sort of massacres I have mentioned. It was probably the greatest single factor in anti-semitism throughout the ages (that and owing money to Jews). It is one of the toxic by-products of immigration, not because immigrants are bad, but because today many (European) host countries  park their immigrant communities in no-hope housing with no-hope education, keeping them quiet with welfare but making it extremely difficult for them to belong, even if they do get through the social barriers. This doesn't justify shooting Jewish school kids or former soldiers, nor for that matter, cutting Theo van Gogh's throat or planting bombs on the London tube, but it should warn us that this may have to be dealt with in other ways than criminalisation. Killing people is already a crime.

THE INCB's CLOTHES

The International Narcotics Control Board has now repeatedly attacked Bolivia since it denounced the 1961 Convention, indicating its intention to re-accede with a reservation allowing for the traditional use of coca leaf. Bolivia has been acting within the normal procedures of international law and its own constitution on this matter. The squeals of protest it has met with from its European, American, and other "friends" have contained little in the way of argument other than INCB's recent contention that "the integrity of the international drug control system would be undermined".

It is interesting to see a body like the INCB overstepping the mark of its own powers under the UN treaties by playing God, with little regard for the inviolability of the national laws and cultures that are the bedrock of the UN system. “The INCB response is another clear sign that the UN drug control regime is under strain and that the cracks in the so-called ‘Vienna consensus’ are approaching a breaking point,” according to TNI’s Martin Jelsma. “It is a sign that its principal guardian, the INCB, is in distress and no longer capable of responding to challenges in a rational manner.”


Why this persistent refusal on the part of the multilateral system of drugs control to enter into a meaningful dialogue on reform of the Conventions? A South American diplomat recently put in the following terms: back in the 16th century, when the Catholic church was no longer capable of reform, it spawned the Reformation and lost its monopoly over Christianity. Without dramatising current events, the multilateral drug control system is showing its age and revealing the sclerosis of the institutions created to implement it. The tabloid tone of the INCB's latest report is a sign of this.

Last December, Presidents and other political leaders of ten Latin American countries from the so called Tuxtla Mechanism for Dialogue effectively called on the rich drug consumer markets, primarily the US and Europe, to begin with experimenting regulation models for what we still call illicit drugs. US and European media largely ignored this declaration. These countries made this call because they are being destroyed by organised crime. The UN Drug Conventions have not created this crime, but they have created a global framework in which it prospers almost by default. The struggle against such crime is turning into a slaughter house for ordinary people, particularly in Central America, with no end in sight.

If the church will not reform then let us put our faith in a reformation and support the Tuxtla appeal. As a European, I hope that Europe will not yet again be trumped by the Americans in getting us out of a hole. It may not look likely at the moment, but 16 US states have enacted laws that allow for the sale of "medical marijuana, and at least there is a lively debate going on there, whereas EU leaders are firmly looking the other way and the Brussels administration has quite lost its way. Sooner or later though, our governments will have to grasp the nettle of organising this regulated market. If there is one lesson to be learned from the tobacco and alcohol models it is that it should not be left to purely commercial interests.

Watch this space.

Wasting the citizen's time

In English law there is a criminal offence known as "wasting police time". I wonder if this applies in other countries. It covers things like knowingly making a false report that creates apprehension for the safety of any person or property. A good thing then that the INCB and the UNODC are based in Vienna and not in  London. Except of course that the UK is one of the 144 or so signatories to the single convention. So that's all right then. The police can waste citizens' time. It is quite common in London for a young person to get stopped for a routine drug search. It happens regularly to the student son of a friend of mine, who is a member of the House of Lords. We can all feel safe knowing that young aristocrats are being kept on a short leash these days.

"Towards a stronger European response to drugs" - third and last post.

The original EU text can be found at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2011:0689:FIN:EN:PDF

In the previous two posts I have tried to demonstrate that this policy announcement by the EU Commission has more to do with political testosterone than with a sensible assessment of the past. This is certainly true for the tired old penal and prohibitionist ideas that dominate this paper. The merit of Commissioner Reding's predecessors responsible for drug policy was that they at least understood the need to submit law enforcement to some form of assessment. At the moment, we don't know how successful the world's police forces and judiciaries are in fighting drug crime. If this is what "success" looks like, heaven preserve us from failure. The development by the Commission of "key indicators" to measure drugs markets and drug supply reduction (para 2) is a welcome initiative; it was however started before Mrs Reding was appointed and has consistently met with a very unenthusiastic response from law enforcement and judiciary circles in the EU, so we are still years away from an assessment as to whether our money is being wasted or not by running after drug criminals who are usually a few steps ahead of the law and doing very well. And if one day we have these key indicators worked out and adopted across the EU, imagine the task of getting precise data on national law enforcement performance out of the 27 Home Affairs ministries across the EU.

Although we should welcome anything in this Communication that at least tries to hold up the balanced approach that used to be the Commission's hallmark on drug policy, no specific policy measures are announced beyond supporting measures to reduce health and social harms. The demand reduction part of the Communication (para 6) reflects ongoing health initiatives on HIV/AIDS and various existing funding programmes. It fails to mention that the Commission's current Drug Prevention and Information (funding)  Programme is destined to become a pure "justice" programme in 2013 and will loose its demand reduction and wider policy aspects. Mrs Reding is on record as saying that health aspects are not a Commission competence under the EU Treaty and that she leaves that up to Member States. So much for the balanced approach.

The initiative on "drugged driving" has been in the making for some years. It is a promising initiative.... in the field of road safety, not drug policy.

Para 8 - on International Cooperation - is again the usual line-up of supply reduction-related measures. There is a passage on the "comprehensive" nature of external EU policy, and on the (major) effort by the Commission in terms of providing alternative livelihoods in production and transit countries. This is of course the work of the Commission's EU External Action Service now and the Commission's Directorate General for Development. The former is in disarray and has just had a written warning from 14 EU Foreign Ministers to pull its socks up; the latter has no mandate on drugs policy but will implement policy directives on this from Brussels.

Conclusion

Evaluations made at the request of the Commission in recent years (particularly the so called Reuter/Trautmann report:  http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/doc_centre/drugs/studies/doc_drugs_studies_en.htm, a joint publication by Rand and the Trimbos Institute) clearly suggest that the punitive, law enforcement driven approach of the world's current multilateral control system has not led to a reduction in use or trafficking, and that demand rarely responds to arrests and punishment. What we do know is that harm reduction and treatment strategies reduce crime and other social problems and reduce public health problems too.

This Commission announcement seems to ignore the lessons of the past 15 years, lessons which are not crackpot ideas from extreme pro-drugs groups, but evidence-based conclusions from its own services, from most Member States, and from serious bodies financed by the European Commission itself, such as the EU's  drugs monitoring agency, the EMCDDA.

It also comes at a rather odd moment: i.e. before the Commission's own services have completed their evaluation of the EU Drugs Srategy 2004-2012, and before the Commission's Civil Society Forum on Drugs has had the time to table its recommendations for the next Drugs Strategy.

Europe has had a bad year on the world stage. It's credibility is at a low ebb while that same world is loosing the battle against illicit drugs because the system the Western countries put into place 50 years ago in the form of UN Conventions and institutions have failed. Today, they are little more than a dysfunctional, scandal-ridden irrelevance, but capable of supporting extreme levels of violence against populations in the weaker countries. Presidents from a number of Latin American states, including Mexico and Colombia, have recently signed the Tuxtla Declaration, calling on  drug consuming countries to explore "all possible options, including market alternatives", i.e. forms of legalisation or regulation. The recently retired Secretary-General of the Council of Ministers and EU High Representative for the EU's external and security policy, Xavier Solana, is a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which is calling for the same thing. The global drugs problem has reached a stage where serious and difficult policy changes are being debated. Not, it would seem, in the European Commission.

The Commission's policy statement is an embarrassment to intelligent European policy makers and people working in this field. It is also a comfort to the enemy, i.e. the criminals who makes a profit out of the huge illegal market the system provides them with. It is however also a comfort to those individuals, organisations, and countries - from dodgy bible-thumping preachers to the Kingdom of Sweden - who want to stick with the current  prohibitionist system if it kills them. The problem is, it just might, but do we want to go down with them?

Good luck

“Towards a stronger European approach to drugs Part II” – More on the EU Commission’s Communication on drug policy.

As we saw in the last post, this Communication ( http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2011:0689:FIN:EN:PDF ) quickly homes in on supply reduction and control issues. In fact, they make up the bulk of the text in a way that I had hoped we would not see in Europe again, not after more than a decade of groping our way towards an evidence-based understanding of the futility of non-smart law-enforcement approaches, and the growing – if politically incorrect – doubt about the effectiveness of a punitive control system in the first place. 

Parts two to five: drug trafficking, drug (chemical) precursors, confiscation and recovery of criminal assets, and new psychoactive substances.

The measures proposed by the Commission under these four headings all suffer from the same flaw: they admit that the illicit drugs trade has been too clever and adaptable for EU justice and law enforcement agencies to have any real effect on the flow of drugs into Europe. Some singularly ineffectual “pacts” against drug trafficking – little known beyond surreal debates in Brussels – are quoted. The fact that existing EU rules on the definition of sanctions have been largely ignored by the member states is correctly identified. Yet no conclusions are drawn from any of this other than that tougher rules in the same vein are needed.

There is no sign that the poor record of control and interdiction of drug trafficking into the EU (or into any other region for that matter) has been subjected to any objective analysis, as was called for by the Commission’s own mid-term evaluation of the current EU Drug Strategy in 2008. The good news is that the Commission, with Europol and the EMCDDA, will provide key indicators for the monitoring of drug markets, drug-related crime, and drug supply reduction. We also know that a Commission evaluation of EU drug markets, carried out by Rand/Trimbos/King’s College is still in the making. The bad news remains that it would surely have been more logical to have waited for the results of these initiatives and to have analysed first the actual performance of European law enforcement and justice systems in the drugs field before rushing into this macho legislative programme.

What we see here, then, is conviction politics of the worst order. I strongly object to naming names in these discussions, but Mrs. Reding, the member of the EU Commission responsible for (civil and criminal) justice, is not a civil servant but fills a political appointment and – like all Commission members – has her own web site. Let me quote then what she said before the House of Lords Select Committee on the European Union, last November: “I am more an action person than a strategy person. If necessary, I can also propose a strategy, but that will not prevent me from taking action, because actions are what is needed”.  Are we to understand that she will not be hampered by analysis but will run up a strategy for us if we really insist?

At one point she gets surprisingly close to evidence-based policy, when she refers to the Rand/Trimbos report on global drug markets, saying that it identified “…a lack of evidence that controls can reduce total global production. The same applies to trafficking”. She doesn’t follow this up however, nor does it seem at all incompatible to her with the course the Commission, under her leadership, is now following.

When asked what she thinks about the report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy or the debate on reviewing the conventions she literally refuses to answer the question and says so. (The transcript can be found on http://www.parliament.uk/documents/lords-committees/eu-sub-com-f/EU%20DS/ucEUF28.11.11ev7.pdf )

The stricter control of trade in chemical precursors (also) used for making drugs, and the proposals for more effective criminal asset recovery should be given a chance to show what they’re worth. Crime has to be fought and the encroachment of the black economy on the "white" economy is a serious issue. In the next post we will look at the remaining parts of this Communication (demand reduction, drugged driving, and international cooperation), and we will try to draw some conclusions as to where all this leaves the European debate on drug policy.

Good luck

"Towards a stronger European response to drugs” - Reflections on the latest European Commission Communication to the European Parliament and the Council “

The title doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, and I advise all non-specialists in drug policy to wait for the movie. For the brave however, this is important in the wider context of developing civilised and effective drug policy, and if you want to check this out, the text I’m commenting can be found by Googling Com (2011)689 final or by clicking on:

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2011:0689:FIN:EN:PDF 

First of all, it should be understood that a Commission Communication is a statement of intent as to the sort of action or legislative proposals the EU Commission will put forward in the near-ish future. It has no legal value and does not have to be approved by the Council or European Parliament. It does however give an idea as to the political thinking that goes on inside the Commission on a particular subject. Wise Commissioners also use it as a sounding board to test the temperature in the other Institutions and in the Member States.

So what does the latest Communication on drugs tell us, beyond the rather bullish rhetoric that is now apparently in vogue in Brussels?

1. The youth and health arguments.

Part 1 gives an almost tabloid picture of alarm: “Illicit drugs are a major threat to health and safety…”, “Europe’s drug problem is evolving rapidly”. Drugs, it says, particularly affect young people and are “one of the most important causes of avoidable deaths among young people”. The trouble is  that this is not borne out by other EU sources.

Thus, the greatest killers in our society are heart disease and accidents. If heart disease tends to spare the young, road accidents do not. The ETSC (European Transport Safety Council), in its press release of 29 November 2011, states that the proportion of people dying on the roads aged between 15 and 30 is 69 percent higher than the corresponding figure for people of all other age groups. In 2010 alone, around 10.000 young people died in road accidents in the EU.

Eurostat, in its “Causes of deaths statistics (September 2011)” gives bar graphs of 17 of the most significant causes of mortality across the EU per 100.000 inhabitants - from heart disease to drug dependence. Drug dependence is by far the least significant cause of death.

This is not to say that drug use and health concerns are not closely linked, and there is plenty of evidence that all drugs – licit and illicit - are bad for your health and that they affect adolescents in particular in specific ways, but youth mortality is a spurious motive for calling for a “stronger European response”. It is also questionable from an evidence base point of view. The same is true for the remark made in Part 5 of the Communication (which deals with new psychoactive substances) that “5 percent of young people interviewed (for a Eurobarometer poll) have used such substances”. Can we really take the result of a telephone straw poll as a reliable indication of drug use? If so, why bother to have a European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA)?

Back in Part 1 of the Communication it is already clear that the new policy line is about “justice” (understood in terms of the application of the law rather than what might be right or wrong). Trafficking and organised crime is what this document is really about. This is actually not unreasonable, coming from a Directorate-General for Justice, but whatever happened to the “comprehensive and balanced approach” which the Commission spent years developing, together with the Member States? To be fair, demand and health-related aspects are mentioned in this Communication, if you read past four other chapters on supply reduction, but  there is little doubt that Mrs. Reding’s heart is not in the soft stuff and that she has no ambition (nor would Mr Barroso let her) to coordinate the agenda for and the thinking on an overall European Drug policy which would avoid the “unintended consequences” that are so stretching the credibility of public authorities across the world.

Let's drill down further in the next post, in which we’ll cover the trafficking and organised crime aspects and try to give some modest and constructive pointers on how to avoid the anticlimax of continued failure in EU cooperation in those areas.

Good luck, and a happy new year.

Passengers on the Titanic to be charged for deck chairs.

European leaders took a decision this morning that effectively puts an end to the European dream. Not that the EU will cease to exist, on the contrary; after decades of inching towards greater sovereignty sharing through a slow but democratic process, most Member States will now sign up to an intergovernmental Treaty outside the EU legal framework which at a stroke places national budgetary competence in the hands of people outside national governments and parliaments. It may be the realisation of a federalist dream, but this was never the outcome sought by any civilised, democratic European federalist. It's the sort of thing King George's American subjects went to war over with England.

The result will be that when governments break the draconian new budget rules on deficits - and there are many reasons for doing so from time to time other than profligacy - they will have their noses rubbed into it by having to pay fines to Brussels. It has been tried before. It was called the Stability Pact. It was invoked twice, against France and Germany, who simply dismissed it. The EU Commission didn't have the guts to call them to account, which it had the powers to do.

I have been a European official for thirty years, I am an alumnus of the College of Europe, I believe a united Europe is the only way forward  in order for our continent and way of life to survive, and I say that this decision is madness. In years to come, every cut in public services, every tax rise, will be blamed on "Europe". A generation will grow up that will learn to loathe that word and dispise the Brussels system, which is in fact a semi-government with one of the best administrations in the world, but led by one of the worst sets of mediocre politicians we have seen since the 1930s and who are clearly in over their heads. The politics of the liberal capitalist counting house await the peoples of Europe.

In reality, the Greek problem has nothing to do with it, but it is has now become the justification to yank the entire European polity to the right. What was a European-minded Germany is creating a German Europe. France without the UK is too weak to stand up to this and has chosen the winning side for now. The irony is that what is making this possible is the pressure of the markets. The same markets that Germany considers itself to be immune to. Atavistic German phobia about inflation is stronger than economic analysis.

The Germans are spectacularly missing the point: this is a banking crisis, not a fiscal or budget crisis. Moderate inflation - something we have lived with on and off for decades - is essential for stimulating growth at the moment. A more active role on the part of the European Central Bank can mean the difference between private bankruptcy or survival for millions of Europeans in the years to come. This new German Europe will turn people not just against the whole idea of Europe but will awaken ancestral fears. Germany may now have postponed its return into the mainstream of popular European belief that she is a safe neighbour  for another couple of generations. It may also have set off yet another resurgence of nationalistic feelings in this part of the world.

Oh What A Lovely War

"Fortunate are those who give their lives in a just war", so wrote the French poet Charles Péguy before he died at the battle of the Marne in 1914. I wonder if a mayor of a Mexican town whose head is dumped at his office door  can be said to have died in a just war. Mexico may be an extreme case - and its problems are caused by many things beside drugs - but it seems to confirm the notion that first banning drugs and then fighting the criminals who swarm to pick up the money is a dead end in more ways than one.


It reminds me of another memorable statement from Europe's troubled past: "Long live death", Spanish Falangist general José Millan Astray called out at the University of Salamanca, on 12 October 1936. He followed it up with the wish "May intelligence die". He was addressing an academic assembly, and clearly had the very process of scientific analysis itself in mind.


Today we do things differently (we believe), yet people keep dying in "just wars" (Afghanistan, the War on Drugs, society's war against organised crime, etc). At a recent military funeral in Paris of the latest batch of French casualties from Afghanistan, President Sarkosy said pointedly "your sacrifice has not been in vain". Reasonable consolation from a Head of State, but chillingly unconvincing.


General Astray's wish for the death of intelligence was less crazy than it sounds. Politicians have always been more comfortable with what "feels" right  than what is right. The war on drugs, or even the global drug control system, is an essentially emotional reaction to the almost Freudian squeamishness of Western societies to accept habits that alter your state of mind. In Western tradition this has only ever been allowed on any scale when it was properly monitored by the church and served a higher purpose. It is no surprise then that christian missionaries played a major part in the 1909 Shanghai Conference (chaired by the American bishop to the Philippines), which is widely seen as the start of the global control system.




General Astray's Freudian simplicity about doing away with intelligence has long dominated drug policy world-wide. The European Commission doesn't seem to be immune either. Its latest "Communication" (Towards a stronger European response to drugs - http://ec.europa.eu/justice/newsroom/anti-drugs/opinion/111027_en.htm) promises to do things that society clearly needs, like fighting drugs crime and coming to grips with the growth of legal highs on the internet. But why does the response have to be "stronger"? And why does it have to take the form of repressive control when we are drowning in evidence (intelligence) that it hasn't worked for decades? Should it not concentrate on a "more effective" or even "more intelligent" response?


An example: anybody can buy the legal high "Energy 2" over the internet for a few Euros/Dollars. It will be delivered by the postman. It was recently analysed by a forensic lab in Belgium. They found that the batch they had ordered contained caffeine and nothing else, about the equivalent of five cups of coffee per tablet. The envelope it came in said three tablets in one go was a safe dose. That's 15 cups of coffee! Now that's definitely not good for you, so maybe someone should do something. But if the internet can host snuff movies, child pornography, and lessons in bomb making, drafting EU legislation on caffeine, which is just one of a thousand substances used in legal highs, is clearly not going to make a great difference , except possibly to coffee drinkers. Doing something about internet trading might be more effective.


The first thing to be done then is to save the intelligent approach on drugs that the EU has been following for the last 15 years, and to tone down the present calls for repression and control of what is a social habit indulged in by some 100 million Europeans, mostly without problems. (Most of the problems are caused by drug criminals and a small percentage of problem users). The second thing is to follow the evidence-based approach that the EU has done much to encourage in recent years, and to commission an independent study of the true  impact of prohibition and enforcement on consumption and on the illicit drugs trade in Europe. This has never been done in any meaningful sense because countries won't (and often can't) provide the figures of what it is all costing. Such a study would nevertheless clearly have to include an analysis of the cost of implementing current policies, and could be a follow-up to the Reuter-Trautmann report on the global control system made for the EU Commission in 2008.


In the mean time, the internal squabbling of the EU Commission should be dealt with (there are now two Commissioners dealing with drug policy) and the calls of the Commission's Public Health and external affairs people to maintain the balanced approach on drugs should be heeded. It is that approach that has kept "intelligence" on drugs alive in Europe. It is the only way forward out of a dilemma that has more to do with the voice of our darkest past than the voice of reason.


Organisations like LEAP (Law Enforcement Against prohibition) and the Global Commission on Drug Policy have understood this. Politicians should listen to them.

Did history really start on 9/11?

The word in White House at the time was that it did, and it goes some way towards explaining why the lessons of history were so spectacularly ignored in the years that followed.

The point is made in a thoughtful book "Cultures of War: Pearl Harbour/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq" by John Dower of MIT. It throws an interesting light on the selective amnesia in the US regarding the way the intelligence services didn't see 9/11 coming any more than they did Pearl Harbour. The shock and awe that was subsequently unleashed on Japan and later on Afghanistan (and Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11) was designed to persuade the enemy with incomprehensible levels of violence that resistance was futile. But was it really necessary to nuke two Japanese cities? And did we actually have to give in to Stalin's pressure and wipe Dresden off the map, with its large population of refugee women and children? Dower calls it a revolution in moral consciousness at the time, i.e. the end justifies the means.

I believe that levels of violence used in war - in so far as they exceed the "civilised" needs of combat - reveal a lot about the fear and outrage felt by the side that is inflicting it. 9/11 was the first serious "bombing" of an American city. Until then, the Americans had done the bombing. The "American innocence outraged" was an opportunity too good to be missed by the born-again Bush administration: it launched a war against "evil".God was now on its side. The rest we know. The fact that it is all ending in tears is a depressing testimony to US foreign policy and the faith-based politics that drive it. Unfortunately this is neither the end nor the beginning.

The war on terror has militarised the national reflexes of the world's most powerful state to the point where its friends are feeling uncomfortable. A 'theology of national security' has a firm grip on the system of government. The Patriot Act has made Americans subject to interference in their private lives that would not be tolerated in most European countries. Where is this war going to stop? What is its objective? When will we know whether it has been won or lost? The answer is of course 'never'. Society has simply changed. Civil rights have been rolled back. And the line between political dissent and unpatriotic behaviour is getting blurred.

But let's get back to history. This is not the first time the US has declared a war on something that can only end in the triumph of good over evil and is therefore unlikely ever to be brought to a close. Richard Nixon is widely credited with starting the War on Drugs in 1971, legitimising military and foreign intervention in the fight against drugs. In actual fact, the US crusade - and this time the term is used in its specifically christian meaning - goes back to the end of the 19th century. It was then that America joined the European powers in the great colonial adventure. The difference was that superior American christian morality - superior also to that of the Europeans that is - had to be seen and felt to assist the US in fulfilling its Manifest Destiny in the Pacific. That was when domestic anti-opium laws were extended to the newly acquired Philippines. This made the Philippines possibly the first experiment in global drug control measures which were to ultimately result in the system we have today.

Then as now, Christian morality, the national interest, and a biblical faith in might being right makes drug issues as difficult to debate in the US as terrorism. In both cases the response has been catastrophic, for the US and for the other countries involved.

The times they are a changing?

Those countries that have open debates about their drug policies around the world are coming to similar conclusions: that repression has not led to the drug-free world we were hoping for, that it has in fact made things a lot worse. They are also finding that law enforcement can no longer afford to go after drug users and small retailers because budget cuts are affecting the police and the judiciary too. According to a recent report by the UK Drug Policy Commission, more than half the forces in the UK will scale down their "traditional" drug work and look to concentrating on the higher levels of the drug trade and on asset forfeiture (i.e. taking away the BMWs from drug dealers).

Similar developments are happening all over Europe. It is hard to imagine Greek policemen - many of whom are now on 800 Euro monthly salaries - from being either committed to or equipped for intercepting the flow of drugs that comes through from Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania. Most of it is on its way to North Western Europe anyway.

Belgian Police (sitting in the middle of the West European hub for illicit drug distribution to the region) are struggling with internal political problems and an outdated training system. The Dutch Parliament has recently held an expert hearing which advised strongly against some of the present government's flirting with more authoritarian approaches.

Drug policy is not, it turns out, about "solving" the drugs problem, but about reducing the damage that drugs do to people and the crime that prohibition creates. It is about preserving our law-based societies based on the rights of the individual from the growing fashion of making intractable societal problems into "security" issues. The unexpected ally in this effort is the rate at which security budgets are going to suffer in the coming years. It will force governments to follow more effective and evidence-based policies as they will dig deeper into citizens' pockets to service the sovereign debts we now have.

As the indignati or idignados camp in Madrid, London, New York and elsewhere, politicians are also well advised not to go too far in reading the riot act to electorates which are beginning to call into question the relevance of the current political system to their individual lives.

Global Commission on Drugs, don't let this fade away (Posted in June, moved from my old blog).

As the dust settles on the "coming out" of the former world leaders who make up the Commission (www.globalcommissionondrugs.org/Commission) it is interesting to feel the pulse of some of the world's media in relation to the idea that the drugs war has not just been lost but has made things worse, as well as the proposal that a sensible debate on regulation of drugs like cannabis is the best way forward.

If the idea has been overwhelmingly welcomed by civil society and professionals in the drugs and drug policy field, it has predictably been rejected by most governments, like the US, Russia, and other nations that have essentialy military/ideological approaches to mass sociological problems like drugs.The UK and other governments had their rejection ready but there was good coverage in most of the media in Europe. 
Some of the official reactions are almost comical. Apart from the old favourite about "sending the wrong message" there ist the World Federation against Drugs. Have a look at their website. Its headlines are an emotional rant aimed at discrediting individuals ("Russian Drugs Tsar Viktor Ivanov accused Koffi Annan of lobbying on behalf of drug traffickers"). The Russian Federal anti drugs service is a notoriously corrupt and ineffectual body, while Russia itself has a huge drugs problem that it is failing to deal with. The site goes on to name the "legalisers" and "harm producers" behind the report, which looks like a Who'sWho for evidence-based policies; surely an unintended consequence. 

Mr Ivanov was also active at Deauville, where the G8 recently looked at this (Why the G8?). He stated that we should be aware that this is "a public relations campaign in favour of drugs linked to the huge revenues they generate". He also called for a Russo-European agency to eliminate drugs in ..... Afghanistan. The French government has a way of pretending to go along with this type of initiative because it gives them international visibility but it rarely leads to much (who knows what results the 2010 Hortefeux Pact against Drugs in West Africa produced?). François Hollande on the other hand, potential socialist candidate for the presidential elections, calls for a commission at European level to look at treatment and decriminalisation of cannabis. Let's see if he remembers if he wins. And let's hope that the European Commission is listening and will anticipate the need to support such an initiative and channel it away from ideologically induced platitudes in order to obtain EU consensus. 

Freek Polak of ENCOD gave a particularly clear and helpful interview on Dutch radio. That is now more important than it used to be as the Dutch are becoming wobbly on drug policy and are in denial about the reasons why home-grown organised crime has got into the home-grown cannabis trade, but that is another subject.. 

Ruth Dreifuss, former President of Switzerland - and member of the Global Commission - is on record as saying "I have high expectation of European action on this. Europe must put public health at the centre of the drugs problem." 

As the old joke goes in Brussels: maybe the EU should apply for membership of the Swiss Confederation. 

Counting the cost of bad politics (published earlier on opiumwars blog)

The Netherlands have been a byword for tolerant and realistic drug policies for years. It took some courage to do that because it provokes some pretty rough criticism from its partners in Europe and around the world.

The Dutch system effectively suspends its own drug law (drugs remain technically illiegal) and tolerates both drug use and the sale of cannabis in a regulated way through the "coffeeshops". These are regulated, legal (and taxed). Their supply is not. When the system started decades ago the "back door" was supplied by green-fingered "hippy" types and other amateurs. Now that cannabis has become a mainstream consumer product in much of the world - although production remains illegale - organised crime has stepped in.

It is a good illustration of the point I made in my post of 4 April (Power sharing with the Mafia). There is no easy option for weak politicians: all-out prohibition doesn't work (anywhere in the world) nor does the half-hearted tolerance policy of the Dutch (and, incidentally, quite a few other European countries).

As demand for cannabis grew in Holland - boosted by drugs tourism from neighboring countries - the volume of the  cannabis trade overtook heroin and cocaine somewhere around 1995 and is still expanding. The police has responded by creating special teams, sentencing is now tougher, but the profits to be made are totally irrisistable and the business plan of a serious canabis producer includes prison as a calculated risk and lethal violence as an essential management technique. Take a look at the fundamentals: a 1000-plant cannabis plantation with grow lights and automatic irrigation yields up to five harvests a year worth 700.000 EURO. The electricity and water are free because they are illegally tapped from the public networks.

What does this lead to? An unprecedented growth in organised violent crime in a country that has a firmly non-violent tradition. Drive-by shootings, public assassinations in bars and people's homes. Although much of this is gang warfare, the degree of intimidation of private citizens who are "pursuaded" to make a room, garage or cellar available to the growers is such that they rarely go to the police to complain. One mayor of a Dutch town is in hiding under police protection. Dutch police claim they destroy 6000 plantations a year or 2,5 million plants (one plant produces app. 40 grams). And yet, cannabis production is not thought to have decreased significantly.The market however is becoming more violent every year.

The problem has now spread over the border into Belgium, which has a weaker police system than Holland and less experience with the drugs trade. Belgian police recently claimed that more tha, 90% of plantations discovered were linked to Dutch organised crime. A Belgian criminologist, Prof. Decorte, describes the (Dutch) police tactics as "hit and run" raids on plantations, but which do no significant harm to the organisations behind the trade itself. Going for the top criminals would take resources that are simply not available and are likely to remain so for years to come. Meanwhile, others are moving into the business. Turkish, Bulgarian and Moroccan networks are increasingly active, to say nothing of the Vietnamese, already dominating the Canadian market and expanding rapidly in the UK.

How long will it take for our feeble and election-hungry politicians to take their eyes off the economy and to recognise that the bells are tolling for traditional prohibition of drugs and for the UN Conventions on drugs, at least in their present form. If they persist in "fighting" rather than regulating and reducing the side effects, we should expect a gradual slide into a form of society in which organised crime plays a major part in mainstream politics and in ordinary people's lives. Try to explain that to your children.

No drug policy please, we're politicians.

In a recent book by John Dower called "Cultures of war" there are some useful pointers to what makes the war on drugs such a dead-end and self-defeating exercise.

What makes Iraq and Afghanistan different from the (successful) turnarounds of Japan and Germany after 1945 is the fact that the occupation and subsequent régime change had been prepared years in advance by people who understood the situation on the ground and believed in the power of the state to bring about that change. Many mistakes were made but it basically worked.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, as in the war on drugs, we see the sort of  thinking that is making the institutions (and  bank accounts) of the world sag under the weight of the fact-free polices of the Victorian poor house: you shall suffer for your own good (budget cuts if you're lucky, shock and awe if you're not, prison if you're caught in possession again), and the future is nobody's business for God shall provide. And while we wait for that we shall build prisons and apply the Patriot Act.

The war on drugs - in which I include the less spectacular excesses of European politicians and judiciaries - is like the great wars of the 20th century in that it pushes civilised nations into a frenzied suspension of values.  Generations that grew up after the war were never taught to question the slaughter of civilians on an industrial scale, at least not of German or Japanese vivilians. The last upsurge of independent thought that Western societies have known were the events of 1968. They died down and were smothered in the materialism of the market economy that eventually overcame all other ideologies.

And so it goes with drug policies. Independent, critical analysis is a rare thing either among politicians or the media, although both claim the contrary. The political ineptitude and bureaucratic sloth that increasingly surrounds us in Europe and the US is a formidable obstacle to the development of drug policies for tomorrow.

There are rays of hope though. The Global Commission on Drug Policies is one. It is made up of leading ex-politicians who still have credit, but not for ever. They have addressed their report to the UN earlier this year, calling for a change of direction. We are still waiting for a similar approach to be made to the EU.

 

The March of Folly Revisited

In 1981, the American historian Barbara Tuchman wrote in The March of Folly:"Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other activity...Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and elightened self-interest suggests? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function?" 

The question is as relevant today as it was then, or during the gaffes of the civilisations that she described, from Troy to Vietnam.

One issue to which her question applies directly is the global narcotics control system. A construct which reflects mainly American prejudice about alien customs and fear of losing social control, and which was embedded into the UN system of drug conventions between 1961 and 1988. The Financial Times yesterday joined the growing chorus of serious media with a one-page spread on the situation in Latin America. Conditions in Central America are particularly dire, as drug trafficking to the US market that goes through the region has produced unprecedented and widespread violence (El Salvador is quoted as having 71 murders per 100,000, or nearly 12 times the level of the US, 35 times more than in Europe). The legalisation debate, the article claims, "is bogged down by legitimate fears about the risk of increased addiction rates". Why are these fears legitimate? In the 1950's, anti- communist paranoia was rife. It was used "legitimately" by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to create a toxic mix of fear and xenophobia  about an international drugs conspiracy to undermine the free world. The rest is history: by 1961 the world (i.e. the West) had painted itself into a legal corner by adopting the first UN convention on illicit drugs. By 1971 Richard Nixon had called for the War on Drugs, and today we have the world's fastest growing illegal commodities market ever.

So, what about those "legitimate" fears? Just how scared do we have to be of addiction? Not half as scared as we should be of violence and the growing bonds between the legal and black economies as billions in drug money are seeping into our daily lives. Does your town or city have no-go areas? Mine does, and the fact that drugs are illicit gives the local tough guys their "respect" and their currency.  Regulating drugs would not turn these people into honest citizens, but it would take a form of crime out of circulation that is so easy I'm almost tempted myself. It would also free up a lot of cash for prevention and treatment that is now being spent on rather unsuccessful law enforcement. Prof Kleinman from UCLA may claim that the former is "cost-effective but not very effective", at least it is not a ruinous and murderous joke like much of the law enforcement efforts over the last decades.

The fear is not "legitimate". It is understandable, which is entirely different. It is understandable because self-serving politicians have played on it for so long - assisted by sensational media - that the mere suggestion of doing this differently provokes outbursts of righteous anger, particularly from "people with children", who somehow have the moral high ground in this debate. What about children with parents in prison, usually poor, serving inhumanely long sentences for posession or small scale retail trafficking? What about children living in prison, as they do in some Latin American countries? What if your adolescent child gets a taste of tough drug laws, looses his place at school, his bright future suddenly cancelled? 

The fear can be addressed and the options for regulating the drugs market explained. However distatsteful the idea is to most of us, regulating drugs is being discussed by many serious people in civil society, universities, and unexpected places like the House of Lords. A lot of work has been done on it, the complexity and risks of the idea are fairly well known. What is lacking is a political class that does more than follow its most rabid electorates in stead of showing a statesman-like way out of the present mess.

Let me end with Barbara Tuchman again. To qualify as political folly, she wrote, the policy must have been recognised as counter-productive in its own time, and, secondly, an alternative policy must have been available. 

Good night and good luck.