editorial comment Sanity and doing the right things are no longer part of Tony Blair's thinking. He admires Georges Bush. Strange that a fake labor should be so close to a fake conservative. Then again, as Orwell showed us, the powers-that-be can always change the meaning of words. We have now been winning the war on drugs for 30 years......

Stories of the latest war on gun crime appeared last week flanked by advertisements for a film called Mr & Mrs Smith. A glamorous couple were depicted with handguns as sexually explicit fashion items. Gun laws are like gun movies. They are erotic politics. Home Office ministers go wobbly at the knees just thinking of them.

Another crime bill is heading towards the statute book to keep the public in mind of Tony Blair’s tough-on-crime pledge. Believe it or not, between 1925 and 1980 there were four criminal justice statutes, fewer than one per decade. Blair has passed 27 crime statutes in just seven years. This is obsessional. According to the civil rights group Liberty he has created 750 new criminal offences.

The bill is intended to rectify last year’s failure to get tough enough on imitation gun crime, knife crime and drink crime. It will declare alcohol disorder zones where binge drinkers will be banned and publicans fined, apparently at will, to pay for “drink-related problems”. There will be an extension of antisocial behaviour orders, Asbos.

On Thursday Louise Casey of the Home Office’s “Asbo unit” warned anyone objecting to this extension of police power not to complain. Civil libertarians, she implied, must not put judicial process — such tedious matters as trials, courts and evidence — against the majestic will of her boss, Charles Clarke. Asbos were “a byword for action”. I could hear Robert Mugabe cheering.

Blair’s “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” has entered the lexicon as a classic of political vacuity. Don’t scratch, it says, or you will find goose feathers inside the brain. But that was in opposition. In government Blair has to choose but his choices are always “just-in-time”. Like a medieval monarch, he finds his default mode is war, whether on Iraq, poverty, Aids, drugs or guns. To the complexities of diplomacy or crime he offers a simple three-letter word. Blair has duly imprisoned more Britons (not least women) than anyone, Labour or Tory, including Michael Howard.

Hardly a week goes by without Britain’s civil rights record being under attack at home or abroad. Not since Philip of Spain told Mary to go easy on Protestant martyrs has Britain taken lessons from a Spaniard on liberty. Yet last week Alvaro Gil-Robles, Europe’s human rights commissioner, commented scathingly on Blair’s anti-terrorism control orders and Asbos and his use of torture evidence in trials.

The British government, he said, seemed to treat human rights as no more than a “formal commitment and, at worst, as a cumbersome obstruction”.

This authoritarian tendency has come from a Labour party which once called itself liberal. It is the party which, in the lifetimes of the present cabinet, abolished hanging, legalised homosexuality, ended theatre censorship, allowed abortion and liberalised divorce. Ministers such as Jack Straw and Patricia Hewitt wrote pamphlets in favour of civil liberty. It is inconceivable that the present cabinet, terrorised by the tabloids, would abolish capital punishment today.

Surely it is time for Blair to honour the second part of his pledge and get tough on the causes of crime. He knows perfectly well what they are: alcohol abuse and drug abuse. Nothing else, not terrorism, rape, fraud, paedophilia or domestic violence, is in the same league. Both arise from what experts call consensual crime. They are undertaken not to cause harm but from a desire for personal enjoyment. They so dominate the criminal justice system that hardly a month passes without a minister taking more power to control them.

The majority of violent crimes and 80% of nocturnal hospital admissions are drink-related. We tolerate this as laddish (or lass-ish) because most of us feel we know what it is. The government indulges it by reducing the cost of drink, largely as brewers and distillers pay a fortune in revenue. Ministers are even making drink more accessible by relaxing licensing laws.

Drugs are a different matter. They rule the underground economy more than gambling and prostitution did before they were legalised.

The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, introduced to combat a minor heroin nuisance, presides over an industry with a bigger turnover than the grocery trade. It fuels the mass of urban crime and is spreading deep into the countryside. As in any big business, drug supply involves organisations, tycoons, import/export, retail distribution and promotion. This requires a complex structure of policing and taxation, all of it violent.

The risk premium on drug distribution once made narcotics expensive. In the past decade government policies have let prices fall so steeply that drugs cost less than their equivalents in alcohol.

Since Britain took “responsibility” for Afghanistan’s opium output after the 2001 war, the inflow of heroin has increased tenfold. It is absurd any longer to pretend that cannabis, cocaine and heroin are products susceptible to elimination by the criminal law. They are narcotics of widespread choice. The only question is who should police their supply. By leaving it to criminals the government sponsors crime.

Last week’s figures on cannabis show that use has stabilised at roughly 3.3m customers, including a quarter of all young people. The recent busting of 47 “cannabis farms” offered a glimpse of a mature industry operating largely free of restraint. Declassification of cannabis and a cut in arrests has had no impact on use, if only because the market acknowledges no regulation. Britain is Europe’s leading consumer of all forms of narcotics, including new high-strength cannabis. Its most intensive institutional user is the Home Office’s own prisons. If Clarke cannot control the habit among prisoners, how can he expect parents or teachers to do better? As for imprisoning West Indian “mules”, he should see the film, Maria Full of Grace. There is no humanity in incarcerating, often for 10 years, these pathetic victims of a trade he refuses to control. His cruelty is truly Dickensian.

The cause of drink-related crime is cheap alcohol, plentiful outlets and lack of social control. But we can regulate and tax the sale of drink. The supply of drugs is left to gangs, guns, blackmail and violence. Distribution is through school playgrounds, pub toilets and hawkers on street corners. The drug market is unpoliced, except by an armed mafia. It is untaxed, except by protection money.

Anyone who doubts the scale of this market should read Graeme McLagan’s chilling new book Guns and Gangs. There is no point in passing laws against guns. They are the essential policing tool of Britain’s most lucrative retail trade.

Before the last election Blair taunted his party to “dare to be radical”. He should dare it himself. Drugs are the principal cause of crime in Britain. After serving on two drug inquiries, I have no doubt that all drugs are harmful in some degree and excessive drug use is dangerous. But there is no serious social constraint on drug use by the young. Instead drugs are marketed with fearsome peer pressure.

The only sensible policy is somehow to seize control of supply. This does not mean today’s ridiculous macho “seizures”. They are for media consumption, usually the result of tip-offs from drug barons eager to remove competition. They are the barons’ friend.

One day a British government will have the courage to do to drugs what its forebears did to drink, gambling and commercial sex. These were accepted as a fact of life and, despite fierce lobbying, brought within the pale of the law.

Nor is there any sense in “legalising” drugs if supply is left to criminals. Heroin should plainly be nationalised as in Britain pre-1971 and increasingly elsewhere in Europe. Other drugs should be, like alcohol in Sweden, distributed through state outlets. As with betting shops or American bars after prohibition, flourishing markets must be decriminalised. The 1971 Act has failed in its primary objective, to stamp out consumption. It must change its approach. Anything else is turning a blind eye. Anything else is soft on drugs, soft on crime and soft on the chief cause of crime.

Yet the Home Office does nothing. It sacked its last drugs czar and delegated control to the police. Meanwhile there is no better indicator of the health of this industry than gun use. In the past year gun crime rose 10%. This is far worse than any terrorism. And this year’s response is to ban plastic weapons. It is like emptying the sea with a sieve.

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