Transform News - March 2009    Briefings    Support    Donate    Media Blog
" The right policy, therefore, is to legalize drugs while using regulation and taxation to dampen irresponsible behavior related to drug use, such as driving under the influence. This makes more sense than prohibition because it avoids creation of a black market. This approach also allows those who believe they benefit from drug use to do so, as long as they do not harm others "
-- Jeffrey Miron Senior lecturer in Economics, Harvard University
Contents

Transform News

Transform publishes latest report comparing the cost-effectiveness of the prohibition and regulation of drugs
Other media appearances
Transform in Lords and Commons debates
Transform Mini Blog
Google Alerts
Upcoming events
International News

UNGASS - what happened in Vienna?
Jeffrey Miron calls for drugs to be legal in order to reduce violence
Evaluation of Portugal's decriminalisation experiment
Shoveling water: War on drugs, war on people
UK News

Lords urge UN to look at alternative policies to control drug trade
MP calls for Impact Assessment at Prime Ministers Question Time
Donate
 

Transform News

Transform publishes latest report comparing the cost-effectiveness of the prohibition and regulation of drugs

Transform published its latest report last week, comparing the costs and benefits of the current policy of drug prohibition, with those of a proposed model for the legal regulation of drugs. The report demonstrates (using Home Office figures) that a move to legally regulated drug supply would deliver substantial benefits to the Treasury and wider community. The report has attracted significant media attention as described below:

Summary:

'The benefits of... [legalisation/regulation] - such as taxation, quality control and a reduction in the pressures on the criminal justice system - are far outweighed by the costs and for this reason, it is one that this Government will not pursue either domestically or internationally."

Home Office Briefing, 2008
Despite the billions spent each year on proactive and reactive drug law enforcement, the punitive prohibitionist approach has consistently delivered the opposite of its stated goals. The Government's own data clearly demonstrates drug supply and availability increasing; use of drugs that cause the most harm increasing; health harms increasing; massive levels of crime created at all scales leading to a crisis in the criminal justice system; and illicit drug profits enriching criminals, fuelling conflict and destabilising producer and transit countries from Mexico to Afghanistan. This is an expensive policy that, in the words of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, has also created a raft of negative 'unintended consequences'.

The UK Government specifically claims the benefits of any move away from prohibition towards legal regulation of drug markets would be outweighed by the costs. No such cost-benefit analysis, or even a proper Impact Assessment of existing enforcement policy and legislation has ever been carried out here or anywhere else in the world. Yet there are clear Government guidelines that an Impact Assessment should be triggered by amongst other things, a policy going out to public consultation or when 'unintended consequences' are identified, both of which have happened with drug policy in recent years.

Alternative approaches - involving established regulatory models of controlling drug production, supply and use - have not been considered or costed. The limited cost effectiveness analysis of current policy that has been undertaken has frequently been suppressed. In terms of scrutinizing major public policy and spending initiatives, current drug policy is unique in this regard.

The generalisations being used to defend continuation of an expensive and systematically failing policy of drugs prohibition, and close down a mature and rational exploration of alternative approaches, are demonstrably based on un-evidenced assumptions.

This paper is an attempt to begin to redress these failings by comparing the costs and benefits of the current policy of drug prohibition, with those of a proposed model for the legal regulation of drugs in the UK. We also identify areas of further research, and steps to ensure future drugs policy is genuinely based on evidence of what works.

This initial analysis demonstrates that a move to legally regulated drug supply would deliver substantial benefits to the Treasury and wider community, even in the highly unlikely event of a substantial increase in use.

Media Coverage:

BBC radio 4: The Today Programme:

Transform's Steve Rolles Drug policy "not cost-effective". Ironically the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith was sitting next to Steve, being interviewed prior to the piece on our Cost Benefit Analysis report. Perfectly happy to talk about her recent expenses scandal in gratuitous detail, she was not minded to debate the cost-effectiveness of UK drug policy with Steve. Funny, I thought that was part of her job...Yet again the Home Office has failed to put up anyone to debate the contents of our report, (despite the fact that they were given early sight of it.)
BBC Mark Easton's Blog:Could we save billions by legalising drugs?

Guardian news: Legalisation of drugs could save UK £14bn, says study

Guardian Comment piece by Danny Kushlick: Immunised from scrutiny

Telegraph:Illegal drugs cost the country £16bn a year, says charity Transform

Financial Times:Call to review drugs legalisation

Mirror:Legalise drugs to halve crime

Metro:Halve drug deaths by making heroin and cocaine legal (Plus theMetro Poll)

The Herald: Call for heroin and cocaine to be legalised in bid to halve deaths

ePolitix:Legalising heroin and cocaine could save £10 bn

BMJ medical ethics blog:Drug Policy Transformed

The Register:Legalising drugs would save UK plc a packet. Common sense doomed by Guardian/Daily mail axis

Politics.co.uk:the cost of drug wars: £16 billion

Hungarian news portal:no translation available

not all the print coverage was positive / straight reportage:

South Wales Evening Post:legalising drugs would lead to chaos

Daily Mail:Peter Hitchens: Eliot Ness couldn't stop booze, but he would win today's war on drugs ("Another parcel of garbage from the pro-drug lobby" !).

Other broadcast coverage/interviews included:

Radio:

BBC Five Live drive-time
BBC radio Wales
BBC radio London
BBC Radio 4: 'More or Less'
Talk Sport radio
LBC radio
Liverpool city talk radio
TV

South Africa Broadcasting corporation TV news
BBC news channel
Channel five - The Wright Stuff (discussion of report not featuring Transform staff)
Other media appearances

Steve Rolles has also taken part in a number of high profile TV appearances including a debate on drug legalisation/ regulation with Anne Widdecombe MP on David Frost's Al Jazeera show; 'Frost over the World' (which is broadcast to some 140 million households internationally - mostly in the middle East) and an appearance on the BBC's Newsnight Scotland. Steve also took part in The Real Deal with George Galloway. More analysis on the appearances can be read on our blog here.

Transform in Lords and Commons debates

Lord Thomas of Gresford quoted Transform in a debate in the House of Lords on the 'Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001,' which took place in January 2009.

"Mr Danny Kushlick, of the drugs policy think tank Transform, said that nobody would be put off smoking cannabis by the decision to reclassify it. He makes the valid point that if cannabis can be dangerous to a few people but 2 million regularly smoke it, we should have a regulated and supervised market for it, rather than putting its distribution in the hands of criminals."

The full debate can be viewed here.

Transform is also quoted in the House of Commons debate on the 11 th March (also looking at the issue of cannabis reclassification). The debate can be read here.

Transform Mini Blog

In the right sidebar of the Transform blog you will notice that the blog has spawned a new 'miniblog'.

The idea of the miniblog is to allow the Transform team to post interesting links, with a very brief comment and description, when they don't really need a more detailed post on the main blog or when we just don't have the time to write one. It provides a snap shot of the river of information flowing into our computers each day: news reports, writing on reform, drug war lunacy, archived material we have stumbled into, other peoples blogs, images and videos, and other weird and wonderful cyber-detritus that washes up in our inboxes or otherwise catches our eye. It will be updated as often or rarely as often as interesting material appears - at the moment it is buzzing as the trickle of pro reform comment analysis has turned into a torrent.- change is in the air.....

The miniblog is a feed of the 10 most recent posts from our del.icio.us bookmarking page and you can view all previous bookmarks on its own page here. You can subscribe to the miniblog RSS feed by clicking here

Unfortunately you can't post responses to the miniblogs (unlike the main blog posts) but if it raises questions or issues do let us know, and if there are links you think we should include please flag them up by sending us an email from here.

Google Alerts

If you want to stay up to date with all the latest drug policy development, we'd like to recommend 'google alerts' as a way of insuring that all the best stories are filtered and delivered to your inbox. You can sign up for google alerts here. We have found that the google alerts "war on drugs" and "legalisation drugs" are two of the most useful.

Upcoming Events

Steve will be attending the International Harm Reduction Associations 20 th International conference in Bangkok Thailand. He will be speaking at a major session organised by Transform entitled 'Can harm reduction end the war on drugs?' details and discussion here. This the first time a major session at this conference has been given over to the reform movement for a critical discussion of the drug war and policy alternatives.

Danny is taking part in a debate on whether heroin should be available by prescription at Cambridge Union on April 23 rd.  The full speaker line-up is as follows:

Proposition:

Kate McKenzie (drug campaigner as featured in 'Mum, Heroin and Me')
Francis Wilkinson (former Chief Constable)
Danny Kushlick (head of policy and communications at Transform)

Opposition:

Kathy Gyngell (drugs policy adviser to the Conservatives, Fellow of Centre for Policy Studies)
Richard Lau (world champion debater, Director of Debating, Cambridge Union)
Neil McKeganey (Director, Centre for Drug Misuse).

International News

UNGASS - what happened in Vienna?

"Every state that signs up to the Political Declaration at this Commission recommits the UN to complicity in fighting a catastrophic war on drugs. It is a tragic irony that the UN, so often renowned for peacekeeping, is being used to fight a war that brings untold misery to some of the most marginalised people on earth. 8000 deaths in Mexico in recent years, the destabilisation of Colombia and Afghanistan, continued corruption and instability in the Caribbean and West Africa are testament to the catastrophic impact of a drug control system based upon global prohibition."

Danny Kushlick - Transform Drug Policy Foundation



The recent UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) meeting in Vienna had particular significance marking the end of the 10-year UN drugs strategy agreed at the 1998 General Assembly Special Session, and the culmination of a nominal year long evaluation and review process resulting in a new political declaration to guide the next ten years of international drug policy. For campaigners hoping that the failures of the last ten years might lead to reforms, specifically that harm reduction (HR) would become a more explicit corner stone of CND policy, the meeting ended in disappointment with a small nexus of hard-line countries (including the US, Japan, Russia, Italy and Sweden) vetoing any mention of HR in the declaration. Whilst 26 countries (including the UK) registered a formal objection to this absence, the 'consensus at any cost' process meant that all parties ultimately agreed the final text, largely unchanged from the 1998 declaration.

If there is a positive side to all this it is reflected in the increased presence of the NGO community in the UN drug agency deliberations. The level of civil society engagement was unprecedented, particularly amongst the various formal and informal coalitions advocating for pragmatic reform; making clear calls evidence based policy making and better evaluation, and a shift away from the failings of a punitive enforcement paradigm towards proven public health and harm-reduction led interventions. Where positive pressure for reform did emerge it was invariably led by NGO engagement with their national delegations and interventions in the various international policy for a, providing both the template and inspiration for future action and offering hope that the wider drug field can have a say in developments that impact on us all.

Full details about the events can be found on the CND blog

Some highlights from the meeting include:

Evo Morales ate a coca leaf in front of delegates at the UN summit
Germany criticises new UN action plan and calls for inclusion of 'harm reduction' language in the consensus statement
Transform has written a number of blog posts looking at the proceedings, which can be read here,here, and here.

IDPC has written a number of briefings critiquing the 'consensus' statement and Costa's speech which are also well worth a read.

The European Commission also released a report to coincide with the meeting, which concluded that there was no evidence to show that the global drug problem had been reduced during the period 1998-2007.

Jeffrey Miron calls for drugs to be legal in order to reduce violence

Jeffrey Miron, senior lecturer at Harvard University, wrote an excellent article for CNN, in which he explicitly calls for the legalisation of all drugs to reduce violence, its well worth a read.

He also endorsed our latest report stating:

"I applaud Transform for breaking new ground with this report, explicitly comparing the costs and benefits of two alternative drug policy regimes - prohibition and legal regulation. This will catch the UK Government between a rock and a hard place: accept this report's findings - that prohibition is a disastrous policy choice - or carry out their own research, which, if done properly, will serve to confirm that Transform's findings are right on the money."

Evaluation of Portugal's decriminalisation experiment

"Evaluating the policy strictly from an empirical perspective, decriminalization has been an unquestionable success, leading to improvements in virtually every relevant category and enabling Portugal to manage drug-related problems (and drug usage rates) far better than most Western nations that continue to treat adult drug consumption as a criminal offence."

Glen Greenwald

A number of articles have been published this month evaluating the success of the Portuguese experiment of decriminalizing all drugs, which has been in effect since 2001. A report from the Cato institute (a Washington, D.C, libertarian-leaning think tank) concluded that the number of deaths from street drug overdoses had dropped from 400 to 290 annually and the number of new HIV cases, caused by using dirty needles plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006.

Interestingly even Walter Kemp, in an article in the Scientific American, a spokesperson for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, says decriminalization in Portugal "appears to be working" an interesting admission to say the least.

The full report released recently by the Cato Institute can be read here


Shoveling water: War on drugs, war on people

Please take a few minutes to watch this excellent short film produced by Witness for Peace, that considers the human and environmental costs of the disastrous ongoing efforts to eradicate coca production in Colombia using aerial fumigation. The film features occasional Transform blogger Sanho Tree, a drug policy analyst from the Washington based Institute for Policy Studies.

UK News

Lords urge UN to look at alternative policies to control drug trade

"What is now needed is an admission that most existing policies have failed and an open debate on what alternative policies should be adopted for the future...To this end we suggest that the UN should now establish an intergovernmental panel charged with the task of examining all possible alternative policies for the control of the drugs trade."

This month a cross-party group of 26 peers including David Puttnam and Molly Meacher signed a letter in the Guardian calling for the UN to establish an intergovernmental panel with the task of examining alternatives to current drug policy. They urged the UN to look at the experiences of other countries, such as Portugal, The Netherlands and Switzerland, who have experimented with a range of alternative policies.

More on the story, including a list of signatories can be found here.

MP calls for Impact Assessment at Prime Ministers Question Time

At Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday March 25 th Lembit Opik MP requested a meeting with the PM to propose a full impact assessment of current drug policy.

His full question was:

"A new European Commission report on drugs shows that despite prohibition the illegal drugs trade has thrived, creating what the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, describes as a "staggering" criminal market, destabilising health policies and entire countries.

"As such, will the Leader of the House please convey my request to meet the Prime Minister to propose a comprehensive impact assessment of current drugs policy, to help us tackle this crisis in an evidence-based way?"

In response, Harriet Harman MP, Leader of the House, answering on behalf of the Prime Minister who was attending the G20 conference, said:

"I will pass on his request to the Prime Minister who I'm sure will agree that we need to make sure that every bit of support is available to those who are addicted to drugs and we need to crack down hard on dealers."

Transform is in full support of Lembit, as we've been long calling for the UK and UN to carry out their own Cost Benefit Analysis's.

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