ONE of the Western Cape's top police officers has called for a review of South Africa's war on drugs.

And the SA National Council on Alcohol and Drug Dependence (Sanca) and the Central Drug Authority (CDA) agreed with the province's deputy police commissioner, Jeremy Vearey, that a strict regime of law enforcement and demand reduction had been ineffective in fighting the use of illegal drugs.

In a status update posted recently on Facebook, Vearey used the example of a Liverpool psychiatrist, John Marks, who while consulting for Britain's National Health Service in the early 1980s, gave crack cocaine and heroin to his drug-addicted patients to prevent them from "robbing and mugging to fund their habit".

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