space between us. God is in that table in front of you. God is everything and everywhere and everyone. It just happens that I realised all this through acid but it could have been through anything.”’
‘Is the right honourable lady quoting prominent people in favour of drug taking?’ a shocked backbencher interrupted. ‘It is terribly dangerous to quote people like that when we are against drug taking.’
Over the course of a few years, the British Establishment had lost control of the drugs problem. Between 1964 and 1968 the number of known teenage heroin addicts in Britain had risen from forty to 785. As health professionals were forced out, criminal gangs had moved in to supply all manner of new substances to young thrill- seekers with money to burn.
The Home Secretary James Callaghan told Parliament how Britain faced a pharmaceutical revolution presenting such risks that, if the country was ‘supine in the face of them’, it would quickly lead to ‘grave dangers to the whole structure of our society’.
‘Stimulants, depressants, tranquillisers, hallucinogens have all been developed during the last ten years, and our society has not yet come to terms with the circumstances in which they should properly be used or in which they are regarded as being socially an evil,’ he explained, adding that ‘the government intends to give full support to the endeavours to get international agreement on these problems.’ It was the beginning of the global War on Drugs.
In 1971, US President Richard Nixon described drug abuse as ‘public enemy number one’, as the United Nations passed a new convention on psychotropic substances, which widened international controls to almost any mind-altering substance imaginable. The same year, the British Parliament passed the Misuse of Drugs Act, giving the Home Secretary direct authority to ban new drugs and increase the penalties associated with them. Political debate about prohibition was being closed down; the criminal justice system would be the main tool to fight drug abuse.
The War on Drugs pitted Establishment authority against defiant and disrespectful youth; the old order against the dangerous young generation. In the mid-1970s, Britain’s punk movement coincided with an outbreak of glue sniffing because, it has been suggested, teenagers wanted to use the most visibly distasteful substance they could find. Illegal drugs were part of the armoury of rebellion, so when huge quantities of cheap, smokeable heroin flooded into Britain in 1979, punks were among the first in line.
The government was slow to realise what was happening. Amid the social turbulence and industrial unrest of the early 1980s, the Home Office was a department with other matters on its mind. Underworld drug syndicates quietly exploited the weakness of communities ravaged by unemployment and dripped low-quality heroin into the veins of a generation. The gangs targeted the poorest estates in the urban conurbations of Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Bristol and parts of London. They set up highly resilient distribution networks in which thousands of jobless, marginalised young men were recruited as street salespeople, running the gauntlet of an increasingly aggressive law enforcement system in return for a bit of low-grade smack and the thin promise of fabulous wealth.
At the beginning of the 1980s there were almost no heroin users in the Merseyside borough of Wirral. Six years later there were known to be about 4,000 addicts. As users searched for cash to support their habit, the impact of the crisis began to be felt in wealthier neighbourhoods. Burglary rates soared and what had been an issue of the underclass became a middle-class and, consequently, ministerial anxiety. ‘Heroin outbreaks’, as they were described by Home Office experts, spread down the west side of the Pennine hills, bringing a wave of crime and misery to each community they touched.
The irony was probably lost on government ministers, but a significant proportion of the heroin was coming from the Golden Triangle of South East Asia where, a century earlier, Britain had made a fortune from selling illicit opiates. As though reaping the consequences of some long-forgotten Chinese curse, Britain found itself with a drugs problem it could not control. To add to the bewilderment and helplessness felt in Whitehall, it emerged that the metaphorical heroin ‘epidemic’ had a real and potentially catastrophic viral element: HIV/AIDS.
With the police and prison systems straining to cope with the explosion in crime fuelled by drugs, and a major health disaster on the cards, the British government was in pragmatic mood. While Ronald Reagan was going around his Cabinet table demanding to know what his team was ‘doing for the War on Drugs’, Margaret Thatcher was seeking practical solutions to the crisis. For all the front-of-house anti-drugs rhetoric, behind the scenes the Prime Minister gave approval for the introduction of community drug teams and needle exchanges, handing out clean equipment and health advice to heroin injectors. The philosophy was one of harm reduction rather than moral crusade; echoes of the British System could still be heard in parts of Whitehall.
For some, this shift in approach amounted to capitulation, but illegal drugs had become so intermeshed with mainstream youth culture in Britain that policy was aimed at damage limitation. The Home Office ostensibly led on government drugs strategy, but the initiative increasingly rested with the Department of Health, creating departmental tensions that mirrored the old arguments over whether illicit drug use should be regarded as sin or sickness.
For hundreds of thousands of British teenagers it was neither. Popping pills or smoking dope was a bit of fun and just part of growing up. Towards the end of the 1980s, a new designer drug started appearing in clubs. Within five years, shocked ministers were told that a million and a half ecstasy tablets were being consumed every weekend. Three million people had used cannabis in the previous twelve months. In 1996, parliamentary advisors reported that almost half of Britain’s 16- to 24-year-olds had tried drugs and a fifth were regular users. The prisons system was overwhelmed as the courts dealt with 8,000 drug offenders each month, while drug-related crime accounted for much of the rest of its workload. Coroners were recording more than a hundred drug-related deaths each month. Police were seizing record amounts of narcotics but reporting that global supply to the UK was still going up.
When Tony Blair arrived in Downing Street he swiftly appointed a ‘drugs tsar’, the former police chief Keith Hellawell, to try and bring some order to the chaos. But what the government called its vision for the future was fuzzy and contradictory. The rhetoric was punitive but the huge cost to the criminal justice system demanded a more pragmatic response. It was bound to end in tears.
Towards the end of 2001, a parliamentary committee of MPs from across the political spectrum began investigating whether the government’s drugs strategy was working. By May the following year it had made up its mind. ‘If there is any single lesson from the experience of the last thirty years, it is that policies based wholly or mainly on enforcement are destined to fail,’ it unanimously concluded. ‘It remains an unhappy fact that the best efforts of police and Customs have had little, if any, impact on the availability of illegal drugs.’
Among those who put their name to the document was the future Prime Minister David Cameron. He supported a recommendation that Britain should initiate a discussion at the United Nations on ‘alternative ways — including the possibility of legalisation and regulation — to tackle the global drugs dilemma’. Shortly afterwards, the Home Secretary David Blunkett signalled that he didn’t want police in England and Wales to continue arresting people for possession of small amounts of cannabis by ordering that it be reclassified as a less dangerous drug. He said he wanted an ‘adult and mature debate’ and a focus on the ‘drugs that kill’. Mr Hellawell, whose prohibitionist instincts had seen him increasingly sidelined, resigned, asking: ‘How on earth can you justify messages which appear to soften the approach?’
In June 2003, senior Cabinet ministers arrived in Downing Street for a presentation on the drugs situation from government advisors. The lights were dimmed as a series of slides were displayed. It was a sobering event. The annual cost to Britain from illegal drugs, they were told, stood at ?24 billion, a figure equivalent to the entire spending budget for the country’s armed forces.
So were they winning the War on Drugs? ‘The drugs supply market is highly sophisticated,’ ministers were advised, ‘and attempts to intervene have not resulted in sustainable disruption to the market at any level.’ From a sea of graphs and tables, the horrible truth emerged. ‘The drugs supply business is large, highly flexible and very adaptable; over time the industry has seen consumption grow and prices reduce,’ the advisors warned. ‘Even if supply-side interventions were more effective, it is not clear that the impact on the harms caused by serious drug users would be reduced.’
The Generals in Iraq might have been claiming victory over Saddam, but the campaign against illegal drugs was going very badly indeed. British ministers attempted to hush up the gloomy news, but governments across the world were getting similar reports and responding. The Portuguese decreed that the purchase, possession and use of any previously illegal drug would no longer be considered a criminal offence. The Russians made possession for personal use a civil matter. The Spanish moved drugs policy from criminal justice to health.
