Buk-buk-bukaaaw: Coalition still chicken over drug laws
Her Majesty's Government, yesterday. (Photo: Richard Watt)
The Government: a bunch of chickens. I want to make this absolutely explicit: this Government is chicken. Buk-buk-bukaaaw chicken; yellow-bellied, lily-livered, chicken. Scaredy-cats. But not just this Government; the last one too. Absolute cowards. Fraidy little weaklings.
I say this because the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), the official Government advisory board, has called for an end to criminal prosecution for people found carrying drugs – any drugs. It's not actually the first time they've said this: last year, they made a similar cry. For some reason it hasn't got a great deal of media attention: The Times (£) has run a story on page 12; no other paper seems to have mentioned it at all.
The ACMD suggests that it is possible to be more "creative" in the legal approach to drug users: "For people found to be in possession of drugs (any) for personal use (and involved in no other criminal offences), they should not be processed through the criminal justice system but instead be diverted into drug education/awareness courses (as can happen now with speeding motor car offenders) with concomitant assessment for treatment needs (if the person consents), or possibly other, more creative civil punishments (eg loss of driving licence or passport)." If the person has also committed another crime, of course, "the usual test and treatment procedures would occur." It says, and it would know, that such approaches "may be more effective in reducing repeat offending" and would reduce costs to the criminal justice system.
So, with a sense of weary inevitability, I asked the Home Office what they had to say about it. And it was the same thing they had to say when I wrote about it in June; the same thing they had to say when a cross-party group of peers recommended the same thing in March; the same thing they had to say last September when Portugal's decriminalisation move was announced a "resounding success". For those of you who haven't read it a million times before, a spokesman said:
We have no intention of liberalising our drugs laws. Drugs are illegal because they are harmful – they destroy lives and cause untold misery to families and communities. Those caught in the cycle of dependency must be supported to live drug-free lives, but giving people a green light to possess drugs through decriminalisation is clearly not the answer. We are taking action through tough enforcement, both inland and abroad, alongside introducing temporary banning powers and robust treatment programmes that lead people into drug free recovery.
I've gone on and on before, at length, about the arguments and evidence for a rethinking of the drug laws: that there is no evidence that prohibition lowers drug use; that there is evidence that prohibition increases drug harm and drug crime. In Portugal, there has even been a small drop in drug use among young people since decriminalisation. I know all this; the ACMD knows all this. The Government is chicken, because presumably it knows this too – knows it could save lives, and even better save money – but it won't do the right thing, even though it is staring them in the face, because it can't face the political fight.
Buk-buk-bukaaaaw. Chicken.
Tuesday 21 February 2012
Buk-buk-bukaaaw: Coalition still chicken over drug laws – Telegraph Blogs
