Rethink

MacAskill Wants Change

FORMER justice secretary Kenny MacAskill has called on the SNP Government to stop treating drug users as criminals.

MacAskill, who served for seven years under Alex Salmond, claimed the war on drugs had failed across the world and said that police would be better targeting criminal gangs instead of low-level users.

The Scottish Government rejected the call and Labour branded his proposals "potentially dangerous".

MacAskill, justice secretary from 2007 to 2014, said the "winds of change are blowing" across the world.

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Change in Approach to Petty Offending to Ensure Major Crimes Are the Priority

PEOPLE caught with small quantities of cannabis will face on-the-spot warnings from police rather than prosecution.

The change in enforcing drug laws is part of a major overhaul of how officers handle petty offending to free up the time of police and prosecutors.

Scottish officers will next month start issuing new "Recorded Police Warnings" to many of the tens of thousands of people a year found committing minor offences, such as carrying cannabis, urinating in the street or petty shoplifting.

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AS officers know well, it is not for the police to shape laws on drugs. There might be a ready audience for another debate over the decriminalisation of cannabis, but that is not, strictly speaking, the business of Police Scotland. Instead, the force is preparing to ask important questions of its own.

Where petty offences are concerned, those could be summarised as what, how and why? If the offence involves an individual caught in possession of a small amount of cannabis for personal consumption, what should an officer do? As things stand, the issue of "how" follows, given the high chance of a report to the Crown Office leading to no action.

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REGARDING the commentary by Howard Wooldridge, there is a middle ground between drug prohibition and blanket legalisation (The lives and trillions of dollars sacrificed on the altar of futile modern prohibition, Comment, November 15). Switzerland's heroin maintenance programme has been shown to reduce disease, death and crime by providing addicts with standardised doses in a clinical setting. Its success has inspired heroin maintenance pilot projects in Canada, Germany, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands.

Expanding prescription heroin maintenance would deprive organised crime of a core client base. This would render illegal heroin trafficking unprofitable and spare future generations addiction. Cannabis should be taxed and regulated like alcohol, only without the advertising. As long as criminals control cannabis distribution, consumers will come into contact with sellers of hard drugs. Cannabis prohibition is a gateway drug policy.

Robert Sharpe, MPA Policy analyst Common Sense for Drug Policy Washington, DC

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SINCE the official beginning of the drug war in 1971, the law-enforcement community in the United States has spent just over $1 trillion. Tens of thousands of citizens have died, sacrificed on the altar of this modern prohibition. Millions have suffered from a drug arrest, which haunts them forever - and the difference on the streets? Federal research shows drugs are cheaper, stronger and more "readily available" to America's youth.

As a street cop and detective in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, I had a ringside seat to this unfolding social disaster.

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Scotland's war on drugs amounts to a war on the poor, according one of the country's leading authorities on substance abuse.

In a new paper, Dr Iain McPhee, from the University of the West of Scotland's Centre for Alcohol and Drugs Studies, calls the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, "unjust, unfair and unworkable." McPhee was Project Leader of the National Drugs Helpline and the National AIDS Helpline, and has worked as a drugs specialist with social work and Scottish police.

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I'D LIKE to commend the Sunday Herald on raising the need to debate our current drugs legislation. It has been clear for a long time that the so-called war on drugs is simply not working. Those at the top of the supply chain go unpunished and get rich while the vulnerable are criminalised for the violence and petty crime that surrounds the use of illegal substances. It appeared from your reports that interested parties who are in the know were not asking for immediate decriminalisation. They were just asking for a debate to be opened up in Scotland about the issue of decriminalisation. As was pointed out, Scotland is a progressive country and there is nothing to fear from a discussion, surely?

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IT SEEMS that there was a comma in the wrong place in Ian Bell's excellent article. The prison industrial complex in the USA has now provided more than two million customers for companies like the Corrections Corporation of America. Over 900,000 are in jail for drug related crimes, 10 times more than stated in the article. The Scottish government's response to the new Irish policy was predictably pathetic. A Celtic mouse?

Myles Cooney Cambuslang

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TWO things puzzle me about Ian Bell's article in last weekend's Sunday Herald (How to win the war on drugs? Legalise them, Comment, November 8). Firstly, his point that Portugal's decriminalisation has resulted in the decrease in the price of street drugs. Isn't an increase in the price of addictive substances (booze, fags) meant to reduce demand?

Then: "So legalise the lot." Okay, let's. Watch for a massive price war between the major supermarkets. Buy one get one free?

Sadly, there is no answer and no-one should pretend they have it; too much to lose when, inevitably, things turn out differently from the visionary's dream.

Hugh Burns Edinburgh

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Six years ago the Government's chief drugs adviser, David Nutt, alerted us to a frightening addiction called "equasy".

Equasy, as Nutt described it, was a pursuit that released adrenaline and pleasurable endorphins into the brain. It was also extremely dangerous, often fatal. Nutt reckoned that around one in every 350 usages of equasy resulted in acute physical harm. Worse still, this was an addiction that had in its grip tens of thousands of people across Britain, including small children.

Equasy was horse-riding. Nutt's point was that, objectively speaking, riding a horse is a far more dangerous hobby than taking little MDMA pills, or ecstasy, in nightclubs. While he calculated that 1 in 350 horseriding episodes resulted in harm, that was only the case with 1 in 10,000 episodes of ecstasy use. And yet ecstasy was a Class A banned drug and the object of great waves of concern from the media and politicians, while horse-riding was not.

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Amid a fragrant haze of hypocrisy, the line is that there will be no change, funding cuts aside, in UK drugs strategy. Meanwhile, police forces the length of these islands are improvising policies of their own

IT could be a pub quiz question. What do Armenia and Argentina have in common? The Czech Republic and Chile? Paraguay and Poland? The answer isn't football. Each has decided, in some fashion, that if you just say no to drugs, you say nothing useful at all. Depending on the definitions used, there are between 25 and 30 such countries. Their laws, methods, aims and ambitions vary. Some have legalised drugs. Some have "re-legalised". A few never got around to prohibition to begin with. Most have experimented - for personal use, you understand - - with a gateway policy, decriminalisation.

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There can be no doubt that the daft war on drugs is devastating many of the world's poorest countries, from Africa to Latin America. But this has been ignored by major charities that claim to campaign for international development, presumably for fear of upsetting their donors. Now one has broken ranks, with the release of an important report from Christian Aid condemning what it calls "a blind spot in development thinking".

Christian Aid deserves credit for taking a stand, one which has caused internal palpitations. The report itself highlights the hypocrisy of successive British governments that have poured money into aid yet supported the prohibition ripping apart poor communities. One day they will see that sanctimonious talk of saving the world is not a solution to complex problems.

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ALL debate is good. So, we welcome calls today for an informed discussion in this country around drugs. We know the absurdly titled 'war on drugs' has failed miserably - criminalising ordinary men, women and children for recreational use of drugs such as cannabis. We also know that Scotland sees itself as a progressive, intelligent country.

Progressive, intelligent countries are not afraid to debate difficult issues. This is not about campaigning for decriminalisation. This is about Scotland debating how best to deal with a very real drug problem and making an informed choice about how to proceed.

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SCOTLAND must start the debate on decriminalising drugs, campaigners, MSPs and former government advisers have said.

The call follows an announcement by the Irish government that it plans a "radical culture shift" which will see possession of drugs decriminalised in ordered to focus on offering helping to addicts and users rather than punishing them with criminal convictions and prison.

As the call came, the Scottish Government also told the Sunday Herald that it was reaffirming its wish for Holyrood to take responsibility over drug laws, which are currently reserved to Westminster.

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Marijuana Legalisation Will Help Poor 'Supply' Nations

An absurd status quo has held sway in Mexico, ever since the United States began to legalise marijuana, for medical, and, more recently, recreational use. The nation - encouraged by Washington - has some of the strictest drug laws in Latin America. But the vast majority of the marijuana it produces ends up in the US. So Mexican law enforcement officials - complying with the demands of their American counterparts - have been expending massive resources on preventing the growth and trafficking of a drug that is often, by the time it ends up being smoked within US borders, entirely legal.

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The UN wants its members to decriminalise drugs, and Sir Richard Branson thinks that is just great. Well, it is not quite like that; as so often, the story is more nuanced than the headline. The paper Sir Richard leaked, which urges "decriminalising drug use and possession for personal consumption", was drawn up for a conference in Kuala Lumpur on harm reduction by Dr Monica Beg, an official at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Vienna. It has since been withdrawn and, as you can gather from the outcry, it is certainly a "third-rail issue" you touch it at your peril.

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'We Should Treat Drug Use As a Health Issue'

A United Nations body plans to urge governments around the world to decriminalise possession of drugs for personal use, tycoon Richard Branson said last night.

The Virgin entrepreneur said that in an as-yet unreleased statement circulated to the BBC, himself and others, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) called for decriminalisation of drug use and possession for personal consumption for all drugs.

He added in an article on his blog: "This is a refreshing shift that could go a long way to finally end the needless criminalisation of millions of drug users around the world.

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The entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson has been involved in a clash with the United Nations over his claim that the organisation was poised to endorse a global policy of decriminalising drugs.

Branson, a member of the Global Commission on Drugs Policy, claimed on his personal blog on the Virgin website yesterday that the UN's Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which has been a bastion of the "war on drugs", was poised to publish a statement endorsing the decriminalisation of the personal possession and use of drugs.

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'Decriminalise the Possession and Use of All Substances'

United Nations officials have called for the possession and use of all drugs to be decriminalised by governments, in a private report hailed as a "turning-point in drug policy reform".

But the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) immediately distanced itself from the controversial conclusions, which were leaked by the Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson, and insisted they did not represent the UN's official position.

The briefing paper argues that criminalising drug use increases death rates among addicts and has led to the jailing of millions of people for non-violent offences.

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Legalising cannabis would raise taxes worth hundreds of millions of pounds and produce large savings for the criminal justice system, a private analysis for the Treasury has concluded.

It judged that regulating cannabis, which was used by more than two million people in the UK last year, could generate "notable tax revenue" and "lead to overall savings to public services".

The Treasury study, seen by The Independent, was commissioned by the former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg ahead of the general election to help formulate Liberal Democrat drugs policy if the party remained in office.

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