Winning the war on drugs by calling it off

In the last 15 years, the United States government has spent over $300 billion attempting to eliminate drug abuse. The result is that on the streets of every US city, narcotics are cheaper, stronger, purer and more widely available than at any time.

The number of drug-users, which had been in decline since the late 1970s, started to rise again in the early 1990s. Americans are consuming 60 per cent of the world's supply of illegal drugs and are spending about $60 billion a year for the privilege.

And all of that money is going into the pockets of people who are, almost by definition, violent, vicious, corrupt and contemptible. Has any social policy in the history of government ever failed so grotesquely? Yet, this week, Bill Clinton requested Congress to allocate another $17 billion this year to the "war on drugs".

This week, too, the United Nations General Assembly held a special summit on illegal drugs. On Monday, to coincide with the start of the summit, 600 prominent individuals from around the world, among them the EU Commissioner Emma Bonino, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner Oscar Arias, the former US Secretary of State George Schultz and the former UN secretary-general Javier Perez de Cuellar, published an open letter to Kofi Annan.

It pointed out that "decades of failed drug war policies" had merely "empowered organised criminals, corrupted governments at all levels, eroded internal security, stimulated violence, and distorted both economic markets and moral values . . . Human rights are violated, environmental assaults perpetrated and prisons inundated with hundreds of thousands of drug-law violators."

But the impact of this passionate statement by experienced and responsible people seems to have been negligible. The war on drugs is to go on.

The war will continue, not because those who fight it have anything to show for a massive expenditure of scarce resources, but because, at one level, it seems perfectly rational. The abuse of narcotics is a scourge. The people who profit from it are scum. So why shouldn't governments throw everything they have at them?

Napalm the coca fields of Peru. Lock up the dealers and the users. Use every weapon to uproot this evil.

But rationality requires us to ask a simple question: does repression work? No - resoundingly. As both the biggest drug market and the heaviest hitter in the war on drugs, the US has been the ideal laboratory for these policies. And all empirical evidence suggests the experiment has created a monster. The side-effects of the cure are actually worse than the disease.

The first and most obvious effect of the war on drugs is that it has made drug-dealing immensely lucrative. The market price of heroin, cocaine and other drugs is vastly higher than it would be if those substances were legal. And that, in turn, has the paradoxical effect of making illegal drugs much more widely available.

THE sheer amount of money to be made from the sale of cocaine or heroin provides an irresistible incentive for the development of a sophisticated multinational drug-distribution business. Law enforcement makes the dealers good at their job. Weak, inefficient or squeamish dealers are pushed out.

The result is the kind of bizarre situation revealed in a study of high school students carried out by the Centre for Substance Abuse Research at the University of Maryland. Asked what drug was most difficult for them to obtain, the students said alcohol. This is surreal but perfectly logical. The sale of alcohol is regulated. The sale of heroin, cocaine, ecstasy and other illegal drugs isn't.

The main effect of the drug war in the US has been the criminalisation of huge sections of the black population. Crack cocaine is the most spectacular example. It's a fair bet that most people, if asked, would tell you crack is consumed mostly in the black ghettos. In fact, the most detailed study, by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, suggests that of the half-million crack users in the US, half are white, 14 per cent Hispanic and 36 per cent black.

The reason people assume crack is a black problem, though, is that white users and dealers are almost never prosecuted. Ninety per cent of crack defendants in federal courts are black. In 1992, the huge cities of Chicago, Miami, Denver, Dallas and Boston produced not a single federal prosecution of a white person on crack dealing charges.

This pattern is repeated for all categories of drug abuse, so that, even though most drug addicts are white, over 90 per cent of drug-trafficking prosecutions are against blacks.

The reasons are obvious. As Charles Ramsay, head of the narcotics division of the Chicago police, has explained: "There's as much cocaine in the Sears Tower or in the Stock Exchange as there is in the black community. But those deals are harder to catch. Those deals are done in office buildings, in somebody's home, and there's not the violence associated with it that there is in the black community. But the guy standing on the corner, he's almost got a sign on his back. These guys are just arrestable."

The result is social disaster: 1.3 million drug arrests a year, almost two million Americans in prison, and a mind-boggling one in four black men either behind bars or under supervision.

FOR much of Latin America, the war on drugs has been even more catastrophic. George Bush spent $2 billion attacking the coca fields of the Andean regions. The result was that 200,000 coca farmers moved into the rain forest, cut down the trees, and resumed growing. Drug-refining and distribution bases spread to Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela. By the end of the Bush administration, cocaine output in the Andes had increased by 15 per cent. Meanwhile, throughout Latin America, institutions have been corrupted by drug money.

All this is going to continue as long as there are large profits in the drug trade. Instead of pretending that one more push will eliminate drugs, it is time to accept that the abuse of narcotics is a fact of contemporary life. From that acceptance it follows that the aim of social policy must be to minimise the harm drug abuse does to society and to individuals.

We know good education programmes and good treatment programmes work. We know strict regulation is much more effective at keeping drugs like alcohol and tobacco away from children than the anarchic market in illegal drugs has ever been, and the common argument that more people would use drugs if they were widely available ignores the reality that they are widely available and the vast majority of us choose not to use them.

We know, above all, that what we're doing now is, by any objective standards, a failure so disastrous that no change could make things worse.

Fintan O'Toole is temporarily based in New York