“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.