Revealed: how drugs war failed The Guardian’s main story today refers to a report that shows the war on drugs is failing. The government is refusing to publish it.
The profit margins for major traffickers of heroin into Britain are so high they outstrip luxury goods companies such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci, according to a study that Downing Street is refusing to publish under freedom of information legislation.
Only the first half of the strategy unit study led by the former director general of the BBC, Lord Birt, was released last Friday. The other half was withheld but has been leaked to the Guardian.
The Report says we need to be seizing 60-80% of the incoming drugs in order to have any meaningful impact on the drugs flow into this country. We’re actually managing to seize only 20%
Who’s surprised? The demand for drugs is evidently undiminished. Drug-related crime is endemic in this country and yet these people spend little, if any, time in prison. Incarceration plus drugs rehabilitation might work. But we don’t know because we incarcerate so few.
The government was selective in which parts of the report it withheld from the rest of us:
The government yesterday defended its decision not to publish the half of the report that delivers a scathing verdict on efforts to disrupt the drugs supply chain.
The Liberal Democrats’ home affairs spokesman, Mark Oaten, called on the information commissioner to order full disclosure. “What this report shows and what the government is too paranoid to admit is that the ‘war on drugs’ is a disaster. We need an evidence-led debate about the way forward but if they withhold the evidence we can’t have the debate.”
The report does indeed tell us that the government’s war on drugs is a bit of a flop:
The suppressed pages say that the drugs supply market into Britain is sophisticated and attempts to intervene have not resulted in sustainable disruption to the market at any level. “Government interventions against the drug business are a cost of business, rather than a substantive threat to the industry’s viability,” it concludes.
Danny Kushlik of the Transform drugs policy foundation was equally scathing about the government’s timing when it came to releasing such a critical report:
“The fact that part of the report was released late on Friday night, right before Live 8 and the G8 meeting, shows how intent the government is on ‘burying bad news’. Fortunately, they won’t get away with it.”
In a letter to the chancellor, the chairman of Make Poverty History, Richard Bennett, expressed “dismay and serious concern” at the way Britain was presenting proposals for debt cancellation.
“What is being discussed is emphatically not 100% debt cancellation for the world’s poorest countries, but government spokespeople continue to state or imply that it is.”
The government reject this accusation. However, it appears that
A meeting of finance ministers from the G7 countries - the G8 excluding Russia - agreed last month to write off the debts of up to 28 states, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the African Development Bank.
Campaign groups said, however, that the deal did not include debts owed to the private sector and, in the case of four Latin American countries, did not include debts to the Inter-American Bank.
“A small minority of the world’s poorest countries will have significant debt cancellation if this deal is agreed,” the Make Poverty History group’s Richard Bennett said.
“This is a step forward, as we have publicly acknowledged, but does not even come close to ending the debt crisis.”
So we still have debt in Africa, we still have lousy government in Africa and we still have protectionist policies in the EU and the US which make trading difficult - or impossible - for African farmers. What worries me is that the G8 - driven by Blair’s need to leave a ‘legacy’ - could find itself settling for ‘look-good’ pronouncements and short-term victories in a bid to appear effective. In the meantime, one wonders if anything will actually improve for Africa’s starving.
From The Times:
Last night, as Mr Duncan was being questioned about the triple murder on May 15 of the girl’s mother, Brenda Groene, 40, her brother Slade, 13, and her mother’s boyfriend, Mark McKenzie, police were studying the blog for clues to a killing and kidnapping case that has repulsed America.
One of the last dramatic blog entries came on May 11, five days before the bodies were found at the family’s rural property. It was headed “The Demons Have Taken Over”.
Some of his writings seem especially desperate:
On April 24, he wrote: “If you are reading this, and you believe in God, please pray for God to help me defeat my demons.” In another entry, he wrote: “I’m afraid, very afraid. If they (my demons) win then a lot of people will be badly hurt, and they’ve had their way before, so I know what they can do.” The last entry, on May 13, two days before the murders, said: “My mother is crying right now, because her son is in trouble again.
His blog is called The Fifth Nail. I’ve had a look and it has become a bit of a circus with hundreds of joke comments added to his final post. It’s here if you’re interested - although for how long I don’t know.
The group, currently on a critically acclaimed comeback tour with former Free singer Paul Rodgers taking on vocal duties, have overtaken the Beatles and Elvis Presley as the artists who have spent the longest time on the British album charts.
According to the compilers of the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles and Albums, Queen have spent 1,322 weeks on the chart, compared with the Beatles’ 1,293 weeks.
The band’s first number 1 hit album was ‘A Night at the Opera’ which came out in 1974. Queen’s lead singer, Freddie Mercury, died of an AIDS related illness in 1991, aged 45.
