Pubdate: Fri, 09 Mar 2007 Source: Daily Telegraph (UK) Copyright: 2007 Telegraph Group Limited Contact: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/114 Note: See The RSA Commission on Illegal Drugs, Communities and Public Policy website http://www.rsadrugscommission.org and the 335 page report as a .pdf file at http://www.rsa.org.uk/acrobat/rsa_drugs_report.pdf Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/opinion.htm (Opinion) DRUGS ARE, AND SHOULD BE TREATED AS, A MENACE For the past three decades or so, drug use and the criminality it spawns have posed the greatest threat to our social fabric. Any contribution to the debate on how to combat this menace is welcome. A specialist committee set up by the Royal Society of Arts has spent two years examining the problem and its report, Drugs - Facing Facts, is nothing if not thorough. It explores ways of reducing the supply of drugs, discouraging demand and treating addicts, while formulating new mechanisms for the delivery of drug policy. Along the way, it has useful things to say about education, treatment and rehabilitation. Yet the overall tone of the report is naive, and dangerously so. While the committee is under no illusion that drugs are bad, it strikes a note of fashionable tolerance that suggests it does not want to combat this scourge, but accommodate it. "The use of illegal drugs is by no means always harmful any more than alcohol use is always harmful," it asserts, as if an ecstasy tablet or cannabis joint are as benign as a glass or two of Chilean red. In fact, there is a profound difference. The use of soft drugs all too often leads to the use of harder drugs and addiction. Even more sanguine is its contention that "a majority of people who use drugs are able to use them without harming themselves or others". Really? What a complacent, middle-class take on recreational drug use is encapsulated in that sentence. In the real world, the victims of drugs are predominantly poor people on sink estates preyed on by ruthless drug dealers. Their need to fuel their drug-taking habit accounts for about 70 per cent of criminal activity in this country. "Without harming themselves or others"? We don't think so. As part of its light touch approach, the committee wants drugs to be classified alongside alcohol and tobacco, rather than in a category of their own. Such a move would simply blur the boundary between illegal drugs and the two legal drugs; it would only be a matter of time before the boundary vanished altogether. The report also bemoans the fact that drug policy is seen primarily as a criminal justice issue, rather than one of health. It wants to redress the balance by giving the Department of Local Government and Communities the lead role, rather than the Home Office. That is simply throwing in the towel. The report's most galling assertion is that current drugs policy is driven by "moral panic". Not so. It is driven by the desperation of people whose streets are not safe from the depredations of thugs hooked on illegal drugs looking for money for their next fix. That demands not greater tolerance, but the vigorous policing of unambiguous anti-drug laws. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake