November 3, 2008 Britain’s drug debacle Daily Mail, 3 November 2008 The mezzo soprano Katherine Jenkins, whose glorious voice has made her the latest sensation in the classical music world with a £6million recording contract, has unexpectedly confessed to having taken drugs. She wanted people to know, she said, about the terrible downside of taking drugs such as cocaine, ecstasy and cannabis: the depression, paranoia and loss of the will to live that follow the temporary ‘high’. Despite her earlier foolishness, she is to be applauded at least for her belated honesty. But one has to wonder whether her sudden confession and warning will have the effect she desires. Surely it is rather more likely that she will merely have added to the general perception that just about every fashionable person is on drugs. The fact that they may be all too obviously in a bad way — Amy Winehouse comes to mind –does not diminish them significantly in the eyes of the vulnerable young. On the contrary, it even adds to their glamour. After all, there they still are in the public eye. Using drugs or coming off them — hey, what’s the difference, it’s all part of being rich and famous. For people like Russell Brand, Pete Doherty, Kate Moss, George Michael — even Barack Obama –a past, or even present, drug habit merely adds to their mystique. The way such role models effectively normalise drug use is perhaps the single most important factor behind its rise. The Government has hugely exacerbated this impression through its incoherent policies, which have muddled the crucial message that all drug use is an unconscionable menace to individuals and to society. The downgrading of cannabis was catastrophic because not only did many young people think as a result that cannabis was no longer illegal, but it also brought a flood of hard drugs in its wake. The price of these drugs accordingly went through the floor. The only reason cannabis use has gone down is that — appallingly — users have moved on to cocaine instead. Last week, the Government tried to hide all this with a Home Office report about drug law enforcement which was shockingly misleading. It was heavily spun to give the impression of great success in drug seizures. But the precise opposite is the case. The report bragged about the number of drug seizures by police and customs officers, which it claimed have leapt by between 15 and 73 per cent. Crucially, however, it did not provide information about the amount of drugs that has been seized. At the Centre for Policy Studies think tank, researcher Kathy Gyngell dug deep into other official figures. She discovered that far from going up, the actual quantity of Class A drugs seized last year had fallen by 30 per cent. The amount of seized cocaine was down 53 per cent from 2003, and crack cocaine by 73 per cent during that time. The fact is that Britain is simply awash with hard drugs. There is so much heroin on the streets that it is reportedly being re-exported from Britain. With such huge quantities pushing down the price to an all-time low, consumption has soared to become the highest in Europe. During the decade in which New Labour has been in power, cocaine use has doubled. Far from the progress so falsely claimed, the Government’s drug policy is an absolute shambles. The elephant in the room is the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) which was created in 2006 to take the lead against the drug cartels. The Home Office report says cryptically that SOCA seizures are not included in its findings. The reason for this mysterious coyness is that the agency has been an unmitigated disaster. Key to this is strategic confusion at the top. SOCA is supposed to reduce the amount of drugs coming into Britain. Instead, it has concentrated on catching criminals further up the supply chain. The absurdity of this was revealed when it realised that some 130 supposed master criminals on its core target list were not actually committing much crime. But while it remained fixated by the glory of arresting these individuals, it was ignoring the drugs reaching Britain’s streets — and scandalously, actually hampering the efforts of police and customs officers who were desperately trying to do the job SOCA was failing to do. It refused to provide good quality intelligence for the boats specially built to intercept drugs from yachts and other vessels. And it refused to stage follow-up operations to smash the criminal networks revealed by the Border Agency’s ‘cold find’ seizures — drugs discovered without prior intelligence — which often provide the best opportunity to disrupt the market, make arrests and lead on to targeted operations against organisers. As a result, the Border Agency has been forced to cobble together investigation efforts by local police forces which don’t have the resources or experience to deal with major traffickers. All this has demoralised police and customs officers who regard SOCA with unbridled contempt. So great is SOCA’s failure to take a strategic lead in fighting drug crime, however, it has resorted to hiding its lamentable efforts behind the record of the police and Border Agency — the reason for its mysterious absence from the Home Office report. Blame for this disaster should be laid squarely at the door of the Government. Two years of uselessness and unaccountability by a dysfunctional agency has done incalculable damage by the flooding of the UK market with drugs. Dismayingly, the greater the failure of drug policy through such incompetence at the top, the more people jump to the false conclusion that the only solution is legalisation. But legalisation would not end drug crime. Regulating drug use would merely institutionalise a black market — and enslave countless additional millions of young people to drug addiction. Yet the legalisers have their hooks deeply into the Establishment. Last month, a two day seminar was held at the House of Lords featuring a veritable Who’s Who of drug legalisers from around the world. Their agenda was to advance drug legalisation by influencing next year’s UN review of drug policy. For years, an international network of legalisers has been working to overturn the UN drug conventions which commit Britain and other countries to eradicate illegal drugs. The seminar was organised by the Beckley Foundation, which is committed to legalising drugs under the guise of ’studying consciousness and altered states’. The co-director of its drug policy programme is Mike Trace, Tony Blair’s former deputy drugs czar, who resigned from his new job at the UN after the Mail revealed he had been a self-described fifth columnist at the heart of the British Government working covertly to undermine the UN drug conventions. His co-director, Amanda Neidpath, is an advocate of the bizarre practice of ‘ trepanation’ (boring a hole in the skull) which she recommends as a protective measure against dementia. She has undergone the process herself and believes that having a hole in her head allows more oxygen to reach her brain and helps expand her consciousness. At a meeting of the World Psychedelic Forum last March, she said the Beckley Foundation’s projects included investigating the ‘possible beneficial use of micro-doses of LSD to improve cerebral circulation’. Among speakers at its Lords seminar were the neurobiologist Professor Colin Blakemore, the former Tory Cabinet minister Peter Lilley, the former Labour Home Affairs Committee chairman Chris Mullin, and the new chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, Professor David Nutt. With the Establishment so firmly in bed with such people, and such ineptitude at the heart of government drug strategy, is it any wonder that Britain has turned into the drug abuse capital of the world? |
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