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."
Nah, he's not that psychotic. He just wouldn't care and would approve if someone else killed his daughter. Sheesh, give the man some credit.....
Half that money is spent on enforcement, drug interdiction, overseas drug eradication programs, and local border control. The other half is spent on anti-drug advertising, drug education, and drug treatment programs.
Success is measured in a number of different areas -- interdiction is only one. Personally, I measure success by the percentage of the population that uses drugs. AND, I allow for the possibility that, under our form of government, we may only be able to reduce this number to a certain percentage and no further -- we may already be at that point.
Except that this has been tried in police states where they can kill just about anyone they like, and it has never worked. Part of the problem is that humans rarely make judgments of risk that are remotely reasonable, rational, or correct, a fundamental characteristic of our cognitive architecture. A solution predicated on humans routinely making good judgments and evaluating risk even vaguely correctly is ipso facto useless.
They should copy our system and confiscate all the drug lord's earthly possessions.
They must be a social mess to let drugs get that much out of control.
So you'd consider a situation where half of the adult population smokes a joint a week, but doesn't drink or use any other recreational drugs to be a substantially worse situation than we have now?
that was the end result of a drug crackdown in Thailand a few years ago. It just turned into a bloody street war with lots of dead crooks, cops and innocent bystanders.
That POV seems to cast considerable doubt on the ideas of democracy and self-government.
You're saying this would happen if we legalized marijuana? Where do you get a scenario like this?
You're as bad as Zon with your hypotheticals: Geez, robertpaulsen, if everyone quit doing hard drugs and alcohol and only smoked one joint a week in the privacy of their home, what's wrong with that? Why are you against that, robertpaulsen?
First, make the claim that would happen. Second, support that claim. Then I'll comment.
I never thought I would see a performance of The Oresteia on Free Republic.
I'm just trying to get a handle on what appears to be a grossly oversimplified standard of "success". Are we really talking about the percentage of the population that uses drugs, or the percentage of the population that complies with the regulations about which ones?
The simple argument is that we are spending billions of dollars on it every year and getting no results for the investment. The money would be better spent in a fashion that actually does generate a measurable improvement for society.
It is similar to the argument against the bloated education budgets in the US. Public education used to be cheap in the US, good results with relatively little expenditure. The teacher's unions promised even better results if only we spent more money. Fast forward many decades and we spend vastly more per student with the same or worse results despite spending more per student than the rest of the industrialized world on education. That investment in public education was a waste -- vastly more expensive, no measurable improvement.
The problem is the government never has to justify its expenses in terms of return on investment. If we spend money, we should expect to get something for it. If we increase spending, we should expect to get more of what we were already getting. Any program that does not meet these expectations should be dismantled immediately, the money reallocated to other programs at worst or returned to the taxpayer at best. The War on Drugs is unambiguously one of these programs -- lots of money creatively spent and no real positive results.
In typical government fashion, they completely ignore the systems theory that governs this type of regulation and try to brute force their way through problems that can really only be solved by shifting the equilibrium of the system such that it settles into a more satisfactory state under its own weight, but that takes more brains than a typical bureaucrat can frequently muster.
Looks like Scotland is years ahead of America in the ability to see that the drug "war" can't be won. It can be lost though, year after year. Time to stop beating our head against the wall and find a different strategy.
LOL!
Did I confuse you? Did you think I was talking about alcohol use or prescription drug use?
You came along and said "The numbers range from 70% to over 80% depending on which source you want to believe". Where did you get that percentage?
"The War On Drugs is a total failure"
Measured how? What do you mean, total failure?
Not really, but it depends on what you mean by the above terms. In short, there are a number of stable self-regulating systems that generate relatively optimal outcomes even if individuals in such a system routinely make poor judgments or make frequent irrational (or marginally rational) decisions. Provably so. Free markets (in the classical economic sense) are an example of a stable system well-suited for marginally rational actors. Democracy is in fact unstable as a general point of theory, but the initial state has a large impact on how fast it decays.
The problem, of course, is that humans rarely have the education or the penchant for designing durable social constructs in the first place that are not enforced by biology. Short term gain often trumps long term benefit if they think they can setup the rules to their personal benefit when given the opportunity to do such things.
So you're saying that if we ended this War on Drugs and stopped spending these billions, drug use would not increase? We're getting NO results today?
Four posts from you and you have not been able to explain how a person home alone smoking marijuana harms another person or their property, because it doesn't.
When Lt Jack Cole of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition ( LEAP) gives presentations at colleges he asks the audience, "How many of you don't do drugs because they're against the law?", seldom does even one person raise their hand.
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