Pubdate: Mon, 04 Jul 2005
Source: Mirror, The (UK)
Copyright: 2005 The Mirror
Contact:  http://www.mirror.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1161
Author: Rosa Prince, Political Correspondent

NO 10: WE'RE LOSING WAR ON DRUGS

Dealers in Control, Say Experts

THE Government was secretly warned two years ago that the police were
losing the war on drugs, it emerged yesterday.

According to leaked papers, Cabinet ministers were told dealers had
won the battle for control of the streets with the police proving
unable to disrupt supplies.

The report by the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit - overseen by policy
tsar Lord Birt - said measures to cut the amount of illegal drugs
entering the UK since the early 1990s had little impact on supply.

Seizure rates were running at less than 20 per cent, far lower than
the 60 to 80 per cent the experts said was necessary to put major
suppliers out of business.

The damning report revealed there had been no "sustainable disruption"
to the drug market.

The trade's big players saw government intervention as a "cost of
business" that posed no real threat to the industry's viability.
Cocaine and heroin have halved in price over the last decade in real
terms, although the report's authors said police action had slowed the
rate of decrease slightly.

The study revealed there exists an "inexhaustible" supply of drug
traffickers, who are "innovative and technologically
sophisticated".

The international drug war led by the US simply forced production to
be moved from one country to another.

Researchers found that cracking down on drug users through the courts
had little effect and Lord Birt had recommended forcing them into
treatment programmes.

The full report provided a powerful argument for legalising drugs in
order to bring them under government control, cutting crime and at the
same time undermining illegal suppliers.

The cost of crime by heroin and crack users was put at UKP16billion and
30,000 drug users were committing 21 million criminal offences a year.

Parts of the report were forced to be made public last week by Freedom
of Information requests while the rest was suppressed - however that
hidden half has now been leaked.

Former Customs officer David Raynes, who now works with the National
Drugs Prevention Alliance, said that rather than tackling the supply
end, government should focus on reducing demand for drugs.

He added: "Drugs enforcement doesn't solve the problem. The real
problem with drugs use is preventing young people using drugs.

"What has happened is we teach kids about drugs but we don't teach
them to resist peer pressure to use drugs."

A spokeswoman for No 10 said: "This paper was written two years ago
and a lot has happened since then.

"You need to see this paper for what it was - blue skies thinking. The
intention was to provoke debate." 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake