Pubdate: Sat, 21 Dec 2002 Source: Guardian, The (UK) Copyright: 2002 Guardian Newspapers Limited Contact: http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/175 Author: John Grieve Note: John Grieve served as a specialist drugs squad officer and national coordinator for counter-terrorism and is now a senior research fellow at Portsmouth University SMOKE AND MIRRORS John Grieve on Contrasting Views of the Government's War on Drugs From Keith Hellawell and Philip Bean THE OUTSIDER, by Keith Hellawell, 400pp, HarperCollins, UKP18.99 DRUGS AND CRIME, by Philip Bean, 224pp, Willan Publishing, UKP16.99 In 1993 in this paper, Duncan Campbell reported what he saw as a significant event in the war on drugs. During a workshop on prevention held as part of a drugs conference run by the Association of Chief Police Officers in West Yorkshire, a group of senior drugs squad leaders concluded that what we were doing - seizing drugs, busting dealers, confiscating assets - was not working. Either, they reasoned, we had to have a real war on drugs, fought in the bedrooms of our teenage children, or we had to think the unthinkable. One possible solution was to take the profit from the dealers and the motivation from burglars and street thieves by getting the state to supply or license the supply of drugs, exactly the position that the government reached a decade later after the failed period with Chief Constable Keith Hellawell as "drugs tsar". This was, and is, hardly molecular science because, as Philip Bean points out, "during the 1960s the largest 'pusher' of drugs was the National Health Service". As leader of the prevention session, I reported its findings back to Hellawell, who was chairing the conference, in advance of the plenary, because at the time, this coming from the police would be tantamount to asking Dolly the sheep to front the next DNA conference. Hellawell smiled and said that if that was the group's finding, then it was an important part of the debate and we should consider it. In fact it would be cowardice not to. As I presented our findings from one side of the stage to a hall full of hundreds of professionals working in the field - from the drugs squad to Customs and Excise - I was aware that the chairman was stricken with a lively attack of what is known in the trade as "dock asthma": spluttering, shock, amazement, and a "what's he talking about?" expression. When I got back to my seat, the detective sitting next to me said "If Knight Rider [Hellawell] had taken any more steps backwards, John, he'd have been in the car park." Next April, the UN will reconsider the international drugs conventions for the first time in 15 years, and will review how close we are to achieving a drug-free world by 2008. These are two timely, important books that will contribute to our understanding of the debate. They are very different books by very different men, written in very different styles for very different purposes, but they are about their converging life's work and what it all meant to them, and possibly to us. Neither mentions the other by name, although they are juxtaposed in time and space - in the same three decades and within 100 miles of each other. I know them both. Hellawell has written a sad book about a difficult and meandering journey through life that sounds rewarding but clearly was not. His childhood was appalling and his career and self-improvement inspiring. He rose from being a bullied child, via mining and fast-track promotion in the police, to become the first national drugs coordinator. His courageous struggle to reform the CID, the personal abuse and the impact on his family are a case study for anyone embarking on change and are mirrored elsewhere. Early on he claims his philosophy was that "if you cannot say something positive about someone, you should keep quiet", but the irony and lack of consistency in some of the positions he adopts escapes him. I gave up counting the victims of his ire at 20. Slightly more worrying is his ability to ignore the names of leading players who have been described in detail some pages earlier, for example when writing about the Yorkshire Ripper case and its aftermath. So astounding is his account of his dealings with Sonia and Peter Sutcliffe that I had to read it twice to make sure I had really understood the context and situation in which Sonia could have "sat on the floor by my side leaning her arm on my knee". Moreover, his description of a powerful but violent and corrupt CID, immediately followed by a nostalgia for its control of the streets, is tiresomely familiar and ill thought-through. Hellawell was a police reformer, and paid the penalties for it. He is ready with his advice to politicians who are left behind, such as the far more successful Mo Mowlam, whom he accuses of being a populist without realising the value of the skill that it took to bring representatives of both sides of the sectarian divide together. He seems never to have learnt that, like the military, police officers are subject to acute political about-turns and have to deal with the personal consequences when the agenda changes. Pretending that you were not party to and never acquiesced in any changes in the drugs laws, that you have not changed your mind at least once, is not an option - not with several police officers available as witnesses. Dock asthma, even when practised on the Today programme, does not work. We are given pages of exact transcripts of dock asthma towards the end of the book. What he says wrongly about Mo ironically applies with greater force to himself: "Such a talented individual felt so insecure that she had to present herself in such a manner." He finishes his book with a familiar cry of the misused civil servant: "What an ending, after more than 40 years of dedicated service to law and order... the final act of a 'caring' government was to brand me a liar. What a reward." Hellawell is not a liar, however; he is confused, but then so are most of us. It would not just be sad, but a wasted life, if this were indeed his ending, his last word on the subject, other than soundbites and on news programmes. He has much left to offer and some conversations with Philip Bean would produce an even more important book. Bean, professor of criminology and a member of the professional conduct committee of the General Medical Council, begins his journey by dragging you steeply up into a statistical debate, but once you are above the foothills the view and his directions to points of interest on the plains below are rewarding. I have been an avid reader of Bean's work over 25 years, for he is an uncompromising analyst of the complexities, myths, ambiguities and corruptions, big and petty, that bedevil the debate. He can be a difficult companion on this journey. I can almost hear his irritated "keep up, will you", but he does know the topography and the vital landmarks, and his compare-and-contrast list of 16 models to help explain the relationship between drugs and crime is the most complete I have encountered thus far. He briskly outlines the significance of the different models of, and approaches to, substance abuse, its related social problems and policy responses to them, before finding them all inadequate alone and pulling elements from several together. After rejecting any causal relationship (as distinct from interaction) between drugs and criminality, Bean eventually identifies most closely with Paul Goldstein's psycho-pharmacological, economically compulsive and systemic (that is within the illegal market framework) account, and his book explores how different crimes and criminal behaviour can be explained using this framework. This model is not far from the one set out in the 1980s by the advisory council on the misuse of drugs, which connected the drug, the individual, the situation or setting in which the drugs are taken and the culture or community from which the situation springs. By understanding each component and how they interact we can help different communities design bespoke local solutions, based on a central policy. The Lambeth project, designed by Brian Paddick to maximise local use of scarce police resources, put this into practice. Bean is at his best describing the criminals operating in the various markets as "they take care of business" and avoid the informers and the police. For all his uncompromising academic search for truth and explanations, he is adept at finding sources himself. I was amazed to find him happily ensconced at another police conference, this one on informers, with that most difficult group of CID officers, the informant handlers, sitting at his knee. Unlike Hellawell, Bean does not try to have the last word. He concludes that there are no easy solutions and that government targets and aims have to be modest and realistic. His realism, coupled with Hellawell's drive and vision, might provide someone with a way forward. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake