Thursday, 2 June 2011

Celebrities write to David Cameron urging decriminalisation of drug possession, but should drugs be legalised? - mirror.co.uk

Judi Dench (Pic:AP)

Judi Dench (Pic:AP)

A HOST of celebrities and three ex-chief constables have signed an open letter urging the PM to ­decriminalise drug possession.

Dame Judi Dench, Julie Christie, Kathy Burke, Sting and Sir Richard Branson are joined by ex-drugs minister Bob Ainsworth in asking David Cameron to look again at the current legislation to mark this week’s 40th anniversary of the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act.

With the three former chief constables Paul Whitehouse, Francis Wilkinson and Tom Lloyd, they claim all the legislation has done is lead to a growth in the illegal drug trade. “This policy is costly for taxpayers and damaging for communities,” they said.

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“Criminalising people who use drugs leads to greater social exclusion and stigmatisation making it much more difficult for them to gain employment and to play a productive role in society.

But the Home Office insists it has “no intention” of liberalising drug laws. A spokesman said: “Drugs are illegal because they are harmful – they destroy lives and cause untold misery.”

Today we look at both sides of the drugs debate..

Ann Widdecombe is against decriminalisation

There are two ways of ­decriminalising drugs. One is to decriminalise just soft drugs, the other is all drugs.

If you decriminalise soft drugs but not hard drugs, all the profits for the drug barons will be in the hard drugs and those drugs will therefore be pushed to an even greater extent.

Secondly, for a percentage of people who start off on soft drugs, it is a gateway into hard drugs.

If you decriminalised cannabis, more people would try it because it would be lawful and there would be no reason why they would not.

Therefore, on the basis of the same percentage, far more people would then go on to hard drugs.

In other words, 10% of 1,000 is greater than 10% of 100, so more people would go through the gateway on to hard drugs.

If these drugs were lawful, it would be very difficult for teachers and parents to say: “This is a bad idea, don’t start it, don’t try it,” because the retort would be: “Well, it wouldn’t be legal if it was that harmful.”

So you would get far greater usage. Indeed, there was a study by the University of Amsterdam following the relaxing of the drug laws there, which ­actually showed that as soft drug use went up so did hard drug use.

Then, of course, there is the effect of cannabis use on mental health and there is now a great deal of evidence of cannabis psychosis.

Cannabis can actually adversely affect mental health, it can cause psychosis, and it can accentuate conditions that already exist. That is now pretty well documented, so there would be that impact as well.

All that is if you decriminalise just the soft drugs. If the state should make legal the use of heroin, people would be able to have their first experience of what is a killer drug simply by walking into a shop and buying it off the shelf.

Is that really what you want? I don’t think it is. So no, don’t do it.

Look at the problems we have with the legal drugs, with alcohol and cigarettes, for example. I think there’s no doubt at all that if we knew at the time what we know now, there would have been a lot more ­argument against making either of those legal. Now, the fact that they are legal doesn’t mean that they haven’t caused a huge amount of suffering.

Alcohol causes crime, it causes mental illness, and it causes family break-ups if abused. Yes, I (like many others) drink, but ­nevertheless alcohol is now a huge social evil and we know it.

Cigarettes are not a social evil but they are an enormous medical evil and we know it.

Why introduce a third?

You have no criminals in alcohol and you’ve got a little bit of ­bootlegging with cigarettes, but it’s not the biggest problem on earth.

The problem is in the actual substances themselves.

If you make drugs legal, you may not have the criminals but you have still got the big social and health problems.

And the criminals will find some other shocking substance to sell.Former chief constable Tom Lloyd says drugs should be decriminalised

I JOINED the police to help people and catch criminals.

Yet I found myself dealing with people for drug possession who needed help, not locking up.

So many of those caught up in drugs have been ­physically, mentally or sexually abused as children.

Prosecuting them does more harm than good.

The Misuse of Drugs Act was a well-intentioned but flawed attempt to control drug use.

We couldn’t be more out of control now – drugs are probably available in every secondary school.

The disaster predicted by those so resistant to change is already with us and the current system has to take a lot of the responsibility.

Drug abuse is a health not ­criminal justice issue.

And police need to focus on ­criminals, the people who do real damage to society.

As Tim Hollis, from the ­Association of Chief Police Officers, said this week, police resources are not best focused on drug possession.

With police budgets being heavily cut, the money we waste arresting users could be much better used.

It is not fair that so many of those caught up in the criminal justice system for drug possession are young, black or poor.

This unfairness gets in the way of policing in some of our most ­troubled communities.

It makes the police’s job harder, wasting even more resources. The step of decriminalising drug use would undo so much of this harm.

It would allow the police to focus on serious criminals who we really need them to catch. It is not true that drug use will necessarily go up at all. When cannabis was ­downgraded to class C, its use continued to fall.

In Portugal, where they ­decriminalised drug possession 10 years ago, fewer young people take drugs and more people are seeking treatment.

Drug deaths and HIV transmission have fallen.

This is what really matters – reducing harm.

Remember that decriminalising possession isn’t legalising drug dealing.

This change would give the police a much better chance of pursuing those who prey on others.

Drug use is so much better tackled by education and access to treatment and support.

When I was chief constable, we tried to tackle prolific offending by heroin users with health and social services using treatment and support.

Crime dropped. It was tough love that convinced an initially sceptical, seasoned older detective that it was “the best way to prevent crime he had ever come across”.

Ultimately this is what matters. Improving the quality of life by cutting crime and the harm ­associated with drugs.

We can only do this through ­practical, pragmatic, evidence-based steps like the decriminalisation of drug possession.

We all want to reduce addiction, death, disease and crime.

The clear lesson from 40 years of failure is that we must change and change now.

What do you think? Add your comments below...

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