At least Bob Ainsworth dares to speak about drugs
Nick Cohen
The Observer
Sunday 19 December 2010

Our leaders are too addicted to power to upset voters by demanding we have
a proper debate about the possible legalisation of narcotics
We live in a country where the prime minister refuses to say whether he
has ever taken drugs. As Mr Cameron once ticked a multitude of boxes on
the drug squad's offender profile - rich, single, young man working in
target-rich environment of a London TV company's PR department - I can
guess the cause of his embarrassment. The leader of the opposition,
meanwhile, has appointed as his spin doctor Tom Baldwin of the Times, who
has never responded to uncorroborated allegations in a book by the
Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft that he could well have had a fondness for
cocaine when he was a hell-raising reporter about town.

What they and many others at the top of politics may or may not have
swallowed, snorted or injected would be no concern of yours or mine, if
they allowed an intelligent argument about drugs policy.

Indeed, if they had swallowed, snorted or injected without noticeable
ill-effect, that argument ought to be easier. But honest argument is not
possible in Britain as the contemptuous and contemptible treatment of Bob
Ainsworth showed. Perhaps inspired by Ed Miliband's cry that he led a "new
generation that understands the call of change", Ainsworth called for a
change to the drugs trade. He wanted to take it out of the hands of
criminals, who do not care how dangerous their wares are as long as they
get their money, and hand it to accountable public servants. If Britain
regulated production and supply, he argued, chemists and doctors could
prescribe hard drugs.

Drug takers would escape the death and sickness adulterated drugs bring.
The public would find some escape from junkies stealing to fund their
addiction, and from crime syndicates, whose wealth makes them ever more
able to corrupt the criminal justice system.

Ainsworth was a Labour Home Office minister, responsible for drugs policy,
and for that reason alone his views were worth listening to. He had also
served in the Ministry of Defence and seen the impossibility of fighting
both a war on terror and war on drugs in Afghanistan. His realisation that
conventional wisdom was creating the monsters he was in politics to oppose
concentrated his thinking.

He told me how ashamed he became as a minister when he saw Britain, acting
at the behest of America, condemning Portugal for liberalising drugs laws,
a policy that has seen striking falls in HIV infection in the slums of
Lisbon. He pointed me to the disaster current orthodoxy has brought to
Mexico, which is in a kind of civil war between the cartels and the
government, and Jamaica, where drug-funded corruption is creating a failed
state.

He had learned lessons from the political failures he had witnessed, which
is more than I can say for his opponents. When David Cameron stood for the
Tory leader he favoured decriminalisation and allowing doctors to
prescribe heroin.

His forward-thinking did not survive contact with office. At his behest, a
succession of Conservative MPs denounced Ainsworth for advocating the
"devastation of communities", condemnations they might more justly have
directed against themselves considering the gangsterism and misery their
policies have created. I will say this for the Tories, however: at least
they stood up in public view. Labour showed that under Ed Miliband it was
reverting to the sneak attacks of Charlie Whelan and Damian McBride.

A Labour spinner - I don't know if it was Baldwin or one of his underlings
- could not confine himself/herself to saying that Miliband disagreed with
Ainsworth. Instead, the unelected and cowardly "Labour source" went for an
elected and brave Labour politician anonymously. He/she told the lobby
journalists who maintain the poison-pen culture of the aptly named
"Westminster village" that Ainsworth was an "extremely irresponsible" man.
"I don't know what he was thinking."

In that moment, the "source" crystallised a doubt about Miliband's "new
generation" that had been nagging at the back of my mind. Your ideas and
principles matter in politics, not your age. The "new generation" on both
the Labour and the Tory side is not bringing new thinking but repeating
the worst failings of the old. When confronted with a difficult social
problem, they retreat into know-nothing denial.

They display their bad faith by damning two distinct reforms and treating
them as one. Liberalisation usually means following different policies for
different illegal drugs, not punishing users for possession and
decriminalising cannabis use. In theory, you can disapprove of
liberalisation and want to keep illegal drugs illegal, while still
believing that it is better to cut off the flow of money to crime
syndicates by allowing doctors to prescribe hard drugs to addicts. This
was the policy known throughout the world as "the British system". From
the 1920s, doctors provided an alternative source of drugs to addicts, who
could not break with their dealers. With the collaboration of the medical
profession, I am sorry to say, the Home Office ended the system in the
1960s and the result is the crisis we see around us.

In Switzerland, Germany and Canada, doctors are reviving the British
system. With a minimum of fuss, Britain is too. Professor John Strang of
King's College, London, has run pilot projects, which Ainsworth set up -
"very quietly because Downing Street would have gone wild if it knew what
I was doing". The worst addicts were given heroin and their behaviour was
compared with the behaviour of a control group taking methadone, the
medical profession's preferred and often inadequate substitute.
Unsurprisingly, methadone users also bought street heroin when they were
out of the sight of doctors. Urine tests showed, however, that those given
heroin gave up on the criminals' drugs. Several told the professor that
taking drugs in a supervised clinic meant that they stopped injecting in
the groin. They were building the strength to break free from the circle
they shot up with.

Even if the coalition found the will to expand the pilots nationally, you
can guarantee that they would back off as soon as the press started
shouting that taxpayers were subsidising junkies' pleasures (although
"pleasure" is the last thing addicts find in drugs). The Home Office's
cowardice is already evident. Its latest drug policy paper devotes just
one line to the most effective anti-crime strategy it has.

People often say we have the prohibition of drugs in Britain. But illegal
drugs are not prohibited, they are everywhere. What we have is a
prohibition of political debate on what to do with them and that is the
greatest drug crime of all.
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