Prohibition has not merely failed to cut the supply of illicit drugs: it has actively spread drug use. The easiest way for new users to fund their habit is to sell drugs and consume the profit; so they go out and find new users to sell to; so it is that when one child in the classroom starts using, others soon join in; one user in the street and neighbours soon follow. Black-market drug use spreads geometrically. The Health Education Authority in 1995 found that 70% of people aged between 11 and 35 had been offered drugs at some time. Pushers push. When Britain began to impose prohibition of heroin, in 1968, there were fewer then 500 heroin addicts in Britain - a few jazz musicians, some poets, some Soho Chinese. Now, the Home Office says there may be as many as 500,000. This is pyramid selling at its most brilliantly effective.
In private, the Home Office's best defence is that it is so short of reliable intelligence on drugs that nobody can finally prove that the war is lost: we simply don't know how much heroin or cocaine is imported, or how many people are using it.
Keith Hellawell argued that the 30 years since the Misuse of Drugs Act do not really count, because, until he took over, British governments did not have a real strategy. He told us he was supporting new international tactics (which he could not divulge) and was now seeing figures (which he could not give us) to suggest finally they were going to succeed. This recalls earlier declarations that "We have turned the corner on drug addiction" (President Nixon, 1973), or "Heroin availability continues to shrink" (DEA, 1978). In the meantime, world heroin production has tripled in the past decade, cocaine production has doubled and, in the foreign secretary's Blackburn constituency, police say drug use in the Asian community has soared by 300% in four years.
But the underlying point is even more worrying: once you understand that the real danger comes from the black market and not from the drug, you can see that even if, with some magic formula, the generals started to cut the supply of these drugs, the result would be disastrous. The price of heroin, for example, would start to rise and, since there is no evidence at all that heroin addicts cut their consumption to fit their wallets, they would have to commit more crime to fund their habits. And if the dealers also responded like good entrepreneurs, they would try to keep their prices down by adding even more pollutants to the heroin, thus increasing the health risks to users.
