Posted on 06/18/2006 9:22:25 AM PDT by SittinYonder
SCOTLAND'S drugs tsar has sparked a furious row by openly declaring that the war on drugs is "long lost".
Tom Wood, a former deputy chief constable, is the first senior law enforcement figure publicly to admit drug traffickers will never be defeated.
Wood said no nation could ever eradicate illegal drugs and added that it was time for enforcement to lose its number one priority and be placed behind education and deterrence.
But his remarks have been condemned by Graeme Pearson, director of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA), who said he "strongly disagreed" with Wood.
The row has erupted as concern mounts about the apparent inability of police, Customs and other agencies to stem the flow of illegal drugs. It was reported yesterday that an eight-year-old Scottish school pupil had received treatment for drug addiction.
And despite decades of drug enforcement costing millions of pounds, Scotland has one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with an estimated 50,000 addicts. At least half a million Scots are believed to have smoked cannabis and 200,000 are believed to have taken cocaine.
Wood holds the influential post of chairman of the Scottish Association of Alcohol and Drug Action Teams, a body which advises the Executive on future policy. The fact that Wood and Pearson are at loggerheads over the war on drugs is severely embarrassing for ministers.
Wood said: "I spent much of my police career fighting the drugs war and there was no one keener than me to fight it. But latterly I have become more and more convinced that it was never a war we could win.
"We can never as a nation be drug-free. No nation can, so we must accept that. So the message has to be more sophisticated than 'just say no' because that simple message doesn't work.
"For young people who have already said 'yes', who live in families and communities where everybody says 'yes', we have to recognise that the battle is long lost."
He added: "Throughout the last three decades, enforcement has been given top priority, followed by treatment and rehabilitation, with education and deterrence a distant third.
"In order to make a difference in the long term, education and deterrence have to go to the top of the pile. We have to have the courage and commitment to admit that we have not tackled the problem successfully in the past. We have to win the arguments and persuade young people that drugs are best avoided."
Wood said he "took his hat off" to the SCDEA and added that it was essential to carry on targeting dealers. He stressed he was not advocating the decriminalisation or legalisation of any drugs.
"It's about our priorities and our thinking," said Wood. "Clearly, at some stage, there could be resource implications, but the first thing we have to do is realise we can't win any battles by continuing to put enforcement first."
But Pearson, director of the SCDEA, said he "fundamentally disagreed" that the war on drugs was lost.
"I strongly disagree when he says that the war on drugs in Scotland is lost. The Scottish Executive Drug Action Plan acknowledged that tackling drug misuse is a complex problem, demanding many responses. It is explicit within the strategy that to effectively tackle drug misuse, the various pillars of the plan cannot operate in isolation."
Alistair Ramsay, former director of Scotland Against Drugs, said: "We must never lose sight of the fact that enforcement of drug law is a very powerful prevention for many people and, if anything, drug law should be made more robust.
"The current fixation with treatment and rehabilitation on behalf of the Executive has really got to stop."
And Scottish Conservative justice spokeswoman Margaret Mitchell said: "I accept Wood's sincerity, but this is a very dangerous message to go out. I would never say that we have lost the war on drugs. Things are dire, but we should never throw up the white flag."
But Wood's view was backed by David Liddell, director of the Scottish Drugs Forum, who said: "We have never used the term 'drugs war' and it's right to move away from that sort of approach. For every £1 spent on treatment, £9-£18 is saved, including in criminal justice. The balance has been skewed towards more punitive aspects."
And John Arthur, manager of the drugs advice organisation Crew 2000, said: "I think Tom Wood is right. This is something our organisation has been arguing for for a long time and it is good to see this is now coming into the mainstream."
Among the ideas now backed by Wood is less reliance on giving methadone as a substitute to heroin addicts.
He says other substitutes should be considered, as well as the possibility of prescribing heroin itself or abstinence programmes.
One new method being examined by experts is neuro-electric therapy, which sends electrical pulses through the brain. One addict with a five-year habit, Barry Philips, 24, from Kilmarnock, said the treatment enabled him to come off heroin in only five days.
Wood said: "We need to look at the other options. Other substitutes are used in other countries. They even prescribe heroin in Switzerland and there is a pilot in Germany, with pilots also mooted in England and, more recently, Scotland. We need to have a fully informed debate."
A Scottish Executive spokesman said: "We have a very clear policy on drugs, which is to balance the need to tackle supply and challenge demand. They have to go hand in hand and we make no apology for that."
No.
We cannot maintain and continue the current state of affairs. The costs in terms of tax dollars and the eroding of our individual liberties are exorbitant.
Are you questioning my committment?
To properly evaluate Mr. Pearson's statement, we must ask if Mr. Pearson would have a problem making his house payment, car payment, buying groceries and paying bills if the Scottish war on drugs vanished. 
But you believe someone else should do it for you?
I believe you said something about piling up bodies = winning the War on Drugs.
However, no it seems you are not willing to do the dirty work of piling up the bodies of drug users.
If the same ingenuity was applied to food production as cannabis production, we could feed a trillion.
Mrs VS
No, the "war" IS an expression of one of society's worst sicknesses - namely, the utopian desire to "improve" humanity.
To H*ll with it.
Would you impose a death penalty for adultry and divorce?
Some would say those crimes of life do far more damage then anyone ever taking a hit of pot.
I'd pile up bodies of terrorists. Seems SittinYonder knows somewhere deep down that the WoD is a fraud.
My belief is that if we are going to have a war against illegal drugs, then we should also have a war against "legal" or prescribed drugs.
My ex-wife's quack doctor has her on an anti-depressant called Cymbalta. I believe that it has made her nuts. She will call me up one week saying she wants to get back together, then the next week she hates me again. And she forgets things and makes up crazy stories, which she did not do before she was put on this so-called anti-depressant. In a fallen world, everyone is going to depressed at some point in time, but instead of just accepting that and dealing with it we have instead bought into the lie that we need medication and therefore have made drug companies and doctors rich.
Exactly. That's why lying and divorce and greed aren't illegal.
But somehow the drug war lives on. Even though probition didn't work somehow we are under the impression that eventually the drug war will.
You can't make people make the right choices for themselves.
You have to let people be self destructive.
I'm proposing what I believe is the only solution for winning the WOD. I'm not interested in executing people myself.
I also don't execute murderers.
They have also stopped drug executions because there would have to be so many, there would be a civil war.
After the massive earthquake in Bam, the UN and American relief agencies had to buy and distribute heroin to keep the 10,000+ junkies from dying of withdrawal, creating more casualties than the earthquake.
Penalties and punishment won't ever work by themselves. The main result of prohibition has been the enriching and empowering of the drug cartels.
The greatest fear of all drug users is getting caught. Until you can over-counter that with a more powerful alternative not to use, drug users will not quit.
Ask any drug addict how big their habit is and they will tell you that it solely depends on how much money they have.
That's the reality folks.
You don't declare war on your own people, families and friends.
Secure the borders, provide realistic and effective treatment, completely decriminalize marijuana, stop the farming of poppies and cocaine in foreigh countries anyway we have to. We have to get Congress to pull it's head out of where the sun don't shine, on this problem.
We don't have a national war on adultry and divorce. If we did, I suspect it would move along very much like the WOD does. And then I suppose that I would probably weigh the costs of that WoAaD and come to a similar conclusion.
Of course, that's a strawman, isn't it? The topic of discussion is the WOD, not the WoAaD.
Very little at the state and especially Federal level these days is as simple as "right and wrong".
And very few, if any, politicians operate on pure principle, unless we are talking about financial principle, these days.
Hate being such a "wet blanket" on a holiday.
But em are the facts as I see them.
Of course I have been becoming more and more cynical with age. Perhaps that is it and we really do have a "righteous society representing our Republic".
I think everyone above the age of 18 (who wants to do drugs) should be supplied with any / all free drugs that they can shove down their gullet.
The "drug problem" would be over in about 6 months. It's the easiest cheapest solution.
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