The row in Britain over the sacking of Professor David Nutt, until last week the head of the head of the government’s Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) shows little sign of abating: two members of the Committee have quit in Nutt’s support, and there’s talk of a mass resignation when the Committee meets on Monday. The reason for all the hoo-hah: Nutt’s public argument in a lecture (and a subsequent article) that the government had overstated the dangers of cannabis (as well as other drugs, like LSD or ecstasy), and that an evidence-based approach that prioritised harm reduction would see tobacco and alcohol as higher priorities.  As he argued in his article,

I think we have to accept young people like to experiment, and what we should be doing is to protect them from harm at this stage of their lives. We therefore have to provide more accurate and credible information. We have to tell them the truth, so that they use us as their preferred source of information. If you think that scaring kids will stop them using, you’re probably wrong.

This was anathema as far as Alan Johnson was concerned, who promptly sacked Nutt on Friday last week, arguing that

Professor Nutt chose, without prior notification to my department, to initiate a debate on drugs policy in the national media … accusing my predecessor or distorting and devaluing scientific research. As a result, I have lost confidence in Professor Nutt’s ability to be my principal adviser on drugs.

More or less the entire UK scientific community is now up in arms about Nutt’s sacking: thus for example Lord Krebs, former head of the Food Standards Agency:

I thought it was an appalling decision and totally inappropriate … it will send shockwaves through the scientific community and make it more difficult for the government to recruit the best people to help with scientific advice to underpin public policy … not one person … has been other than horrified about it and feeling that this called into question the whole validity of the government’s approach to independent scientific advice.

While I don’t disagree with Krebs (and see also this interesting critique of government policy by a former Home Office civil servant), there is one dimension to all this that is inescapably political rather than scientific: the need to provide Alan Johnson with some kind of face-saving exit strategy that also safeguards the place of science in the policymaking process – and, ideally, nudges the UK towards an approach to drugs control that is at least slightly more sane.

Right now, after all, we have a situation in which the Serious Organised Crime Agency trumpets that its work has “sent cocaine prices soaring” – but the actual effect is that dealers’ profit margins are increasing, while the product they sell becomes less pure and more dangerous; in which Portugal’s strategy of decriminalising all drus has proved “a resounding success” according to a recent independent study – but other European governments don’t want to know; and above all, in which countries like Mexico, Guinea-Bissau and Afghanistan carry the can for OECD governments’ refusal to face facts, and slide ever closer to becoming hollowed-out or outright failed states. 

So how to start to reorient drugs policy – given that, as Alan Johnson has just demonstrated so clearly, politicians manifestly feel unwilling or unable to persuade the public of the need for a more rational and effective approach?

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Don’t get too excited about Portugal.  The Wire creator David Simon is less than sanguine about prospects for change in the US:

..despite his avowed admiration for Obama, Simon believes the new regime will do nothing to solve the US’s drugs problems. “I do not believe that we have the stomach for serious change,” he said. “The war on drugs is as disastrous as any government policy has been over the past 50 years, but I do not believe Obama and his people will use their political capital to end it … If a policy failed this unequivocally in any other part of US life you would cashier the generals. But the drug problem oppresses the poor. If rich kids were wandering the streets stealing car radios we would not be so complacent. But it is easier to brutalise the poor and discard them. We are not a manufacturing economy any more and we don’t need our least educated people, so we marginalise them. The cynicism of Reagan and Thatcher still applies.”

The Serious Organised Crime Agency has been trumpeting to the BBC that the international cocaine market is “in retreat” after a year of successful operations around the world:

It says its undercover work has helped send wholesale prices soaring. Prices per kilo have risen from £39,000 in 2008 to over £45,000 (50,000 euros), but street prices have remained stable.

What this means in practice:

Data collected by the Forensic Science Service reveals how drug gangs are using increasing amounts of chemicals – so-called cutting agents – to dilute cocaine powder sold on the streets of Britain. They include the cancer-causing drug phenacetin, cockroach insecticide and pet worming powder.

Analysts at Drugscope say the shortage of supply has not seen a fall in street prices although purity levels have dropped.  “At the moment price is relatively stable for cocaine,” says Drugscope director Martin Barnes.  “What is happening is that dealers are maximising their profits by selling a product that is potentially more harmful and much less pure and a lot of people buying it probably don’t realise that’s what’s going on.”

Brilliant.  A triumph.  Well done SOCA; well done indeed.

(For what a non-asinine approach to drug control would look like, click here.)

Something I didn’t know: Portugal has way more liberal drug laws than the Netherlands.  In fact, it’s the first European country to have abolished all criminal penalties for personal possession of all drugs: marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, the lot. That was over five years ago.  Now, there’s been a major study of what happened.  Guess what?

…in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

“Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success,” says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. “It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.”

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal’s drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.

All of which makes you wonder: given that Mexico’s drug war – which is responsible for many, many, many more deaths than swine flu – stems largely from the Prohibition policies in the US, what’s the US waiting for?

I gave a talk to senior civil servants at the Home Office last week, as part of Demos’s Leadership Masterclass on International Challenges and Counter-Terrorism. My talk was on West Africa, and particularly on how looming demographic changes there are likely to increase instability in a region that is already the world’s poorest and one of its most volatile. I argue that, at least in the long-term, Western security policy-makers would do well to keep an eye on the region. For an edited version of the talk, see after the jump.

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A few weeks back I interviewed John Robb, the military futurist and author of ‘Brave New War.’  We discussed the irruption of Latin American drug gangs into West Africa. Robb sees this as symptomatic of a broader push by “global guerrillas” – armed transnational criminal organisations – to take advantage of weaknesses in the global system:

We have a global market system that is subverting the nation state, so gaps where local control is lost are going to spring up all over the place, even in relatively developed states. There will be lapses where non-state groups like global guerrillas take control. If they’ve found a hole in West Africa, there are no barriers to their expansion.

Although they are drawn to “hollow states” like Guinea-Bissau, however, contrary to dire warnings of instability from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime the South Americans are unlikely to want to shake up the status quo too much. According to John Robb:

They don’t want warfare in West Africa – they want the maximum level of corruption and to be left alone, with bureaucratic apparatus geared towards helping them to do business. Almost across the board you’ll see that non-state groups are not trying to take over the national government. They don’t want that burden – it raises the profile, puts you on the international radar screen and leads to economic blockades. If there’s a nominal government in place they’ll keep the infrastructure up – they’re parasites off the infrastructure.

I asked Robb how Africa might deal with the problem, which got him talking about resilient communities: (more…)