Immunised from scrutiny
Legalising drugs is less harmful and costly than prohibition - as the
Home Office's own data shows

Danny Kushlick

The Guardian (UK)
Tuesday, 7 April 2009

Today Transform publishes a cost-benefit analysis comparing the policy
of drugs prohibition with a model for the legal regulation of drugs,
something the government failed to do before our drug laws were enacted
and has studiously avoided doing since - even going so far as to claim
that it is impossible.

Our report shows that, based on the Home Office's own analysis, the UK
is wasting around £4bn every year on a drug war that achieves the
opposite of its stated aims while simultaneously maximising harm
associated with drug use - and creating £9bn in crime costs. As the
report notes: "Current approaches ignore the basic finding that the
policy of prohibition itself is the direct source of much of what is
perceived as 'the drug problem' - specifically, the vast majority of ...
drug-related crime - rather than drug use per se."

Will this revelation rock the government to its core and bring about a
mature and rational exploration of more effective policy alternatives?
No, because the government-sponsored war on drugs is yet another
"inconvenient truth" to be spun and marginalised. As Bob Ainsworth MP so
candidly put it, when asked at a press conference in 2003 (he was then
the government's drug spokesperson) if he would support an audit of
prohibition spending: "Why would we do that unless we were going to
legalise drugs?"

Yet that same year the prime minister's Strategy Unit produced a report
that showed precisely what our latest publication does: that the
enforcement of prohibition causes most of the harm associated with the
production, supply and use of cocaine and heroin.

The executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio
Costa, has identified the creation of a huge criminal market, policy
displacement (from public health to enforcement), and "the balloon
effect" where enforcement in one area simply shifts the problem
somewhere else.

So, what is a government to do when a policy creates more harm than
good? During our research, we revisited the government guidelines for
what triggers an impact assessment of policy, a process similar to a
cost-benefit analysis, obliging government departments to model how a
policy change will impact in the real world. It also requires the
assessor to show what would happen if the government did nothing or
applied alternative policies.

According to the government's own guidelines, the trigger for carrying
out an impact assessment of drug policy has been pulled at least twice -
once when the Strategy Unit recognised significant unintended
consequences of current policy, and when the latest drug strategy went
out for public consultation. Yet no assessment was done.

Transform is also aware of at least two substantial recent pieces of
government analysis looking at value for money on drug policy that have
not been made public, despite Freedom of Information Act requests. Given
the wide concern, the government should urgently publish the analysis it
has done, commission a full independent cost-benefit analysis of drug
enforcement spending, and launch an impact assessment of the drug
strategy and the Misuse of Drugs Act. And while they are at it, face
reality and maturely engage in the debate around the legalisation and
regulation of drugs.

We can only hope that this latest reality check highlighting the
terrible costs of 'sending out the right message', and will expose
significant wasteful expenditure to meaningful public scrutiny and
debate. Failure to do this would maintain the culture of immunising
counterproductive wars from scrutiny that stretches back through history.

• Danny Kushlick works for the drugs reform charity Transform
www.tdpf.org.uk

-------

For the full report (53 pp, pdf):
A Comparison of the Cost-effectiveness of the Prohibition and Regulation
of Drugs
http://www.tdpf.org.uk/TransformCBApaper.pdf

--
Drugs & Democracy
Transnational Institute (TNI)
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Tel +31-20-6626608 | Fax +31-20-6757176
http://www.tni.org/drugs/
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