Anthrax outbreak: Seven reasons to get radical

The news that Professor David Nutt has founded an independent advisory group on controlled substances following his dismissal from his role at the head of the government-sanctioned Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs must come as welcome news to those who have lost loved ones to drug abuse. For the seven Scots who have recently died from contaminated heroin, however, even a sea change in government policy on drugs would come too late.

With an estimated 50,000 heroin users in Scotland, the proportion of those affected by the recent outbreak of anthrax contamination is less than 0.03 percent. A minuscule number—but nonetheless a stark reminder of the lethal dangers that users face every time they choose to inject themselves with an unregulated, untested and malignant substance.

The seven deaths over the past three weeks must serve as a dire warning to law makers that their policy on drugs is a failure.

Attitudes, strategies and policies on handling problem drug users and dealers appears to have suffered from arrested development. In the past decade the government's drug strategy has cost upwards of one billion each year, with little to show for the expense. The dealers are comfortable, and usage rates are stable, but hardly low.

The government's prolonged assault on drugs is not only draining scarce funding, but it is failing abysmally in its bid to reduce the number of drug users and relieve the pressure on health services, the police, social workers and families.

A 1998 study estimated the value of the UK drug market—amphetamines, heroin, crack cocaine, cocaine, cannabis and ecstasy—to be almost £7 billion annually; money which funds a plethora of organised crimes like human trafficking, the sex industry and gun smuggling.

The high cost of the seven lives lost to anthrax contamination—to say nothing of the scores of others killed by heroin use—should not be wasted. It has passed time for the government to consider more radical approaches to drug policy.

It is necessary to accept that the ideal of ridding the world of drugs is a utopian one, and hardly useful. With strict controls on access to and the sale of drugs, legalisation could eradicate a host of effects and after-effects of the drug trade, the cost of which to the NHS and justice system the government estimates to be £15 billion annually for Class A drugs alone.

A tightly regulated and taxed drug industry would be worth many millions rather than wasting many billions. Money currently in the hands of dealers would be far better spent in the hands of government, paying for support treatment clinics and prevention initiatives.
Such a move would make thousands of dealers redundant whilst raising the prospect of jobs for the the thousands of trained professionals currently graduating from the higher and further education systems with qualifications in pharmacology and public health.

The pressure on Britain's bursting prison system would be eased. By doing away with the current ham-fisted strategy, prisons would be eventually be cleared of the thousands of criminals on drug possession or smuggling charges, to say nothing of the numerous repeat offenders who are addicts stealing to feed their habit. Police resources could be turned towards the more useful task of policing the process, rather than the product of the drugs trade: organised crime and large-scale producers and dealers.

The odds of anything remotely close to an outright sanction of illegal substances are high. There is too much to lose; no politician is willing to lose face. There is an outdated agenda at work that if veered from even slightly can get you sacked—as Professor David Nutt found not 12 weeks ago.