Pubdate: Tue, 01 Oct 2013
Source: Daily Telegraph (UK)
Copyright: 2013 Telegraph Media Group Limited
Contact:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/114
Author: Philip Johnston

DECRIMINALISING DRUGS WOULD SOLVE NOTHING

Supply of These Narcotics Could Still Be Controlled by Criminals, and 
Legalisation Might Trigger a Rise in Drug-Taking

In the small Mexican town of Los Reyes last week, a bag containing 
the severed heads of three men was left beside a roundabout. They had 
been killed by gangsters as a warning to local people who had 
established self-defence squads to protect themselves from the brutal 
violence associated with the country's war on drugs.

Over the past three years, an estimated 60,000 people have been 
killed in Mexico. If ever there was a country that had cause to 
believe it was losing the fight, then here it is. So why haven't the 
Mexicans alighted upon the solution proposed at the weekend by Mike 
Barton, the chief constable of Durham, and decriminalised drugs?

Mr Barton said that prohibition had failed to tackle drug use and had 
merely put billions of pounds into the hands of criminals.

He compared what was happening now to the aftermath of the 1919 
Volstead Act in America, which banned alcoholic beverages and is 
widely credited with being one of the most ill-judged pieces of 
legislation of the 20th century.

It meant that the production, distribution and importation of alcohol 
were no longer the province of legitimate businesses, but were taken 
over by criminal gangs, which fought each other for market control.

Gangsters such as Al Capone grew rich on the proceeds of illicit 
trafficking, backed up by violence, extortion and bribery.

The aim of prohibition was to stop people drinking; but since they 
didn't want to, the law was widely flouted.

The police and the courts did their best to bring prosecutions, but 
juries refused to convict and in the end the ban was rarely enforced.

Within 15 years, the prohibition experiment was over and the Act was repealed.

Yet while this meant it was possible once more to go to a bar for a 
beer, one thing it did not do was to end organised crime.

The mobsters who had made fortunes out of alcohol soon diversified 
into other areas, like gambling and drugs.

It is what they do: they are criminals.

So while Mr Barton is right to say that drugs have lined the pockets 
of crime lords, he is almost certainly wrong to imply that legalising 
drugs would put them out of business.

For a start, if drugs were legal, who would control the supply? 
Unlike many who favour some form of decriminalisation, Mr Barton is 
talking not just about cannabis (which can be grown at home), but 
heroin and cocaine, which would need to be imported from overseas. 
Since the cocaine supply routes are already in the hands of the 
criminal cartels in South America, and the Taliban effectively 
controls opium production in Afghanistan (which, to be fair, it has 
stopped in the past), legalising the drugs would legitimise their activities.

Even so, should we continue to spend billions every year waging a war 
we cannot win, since people will always want to take drugs however 
censorious society might be about their activities?
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