Drugs policy: Brown fiddles while…

Not long after I moved to Hackney, I witnessed an armed robbery. From a range of about three feet, the fact that the robber was a crackhead was as obvious as the hammer and kitchen knife he was waving about.

A few years later, my partner and baby daughter were abducted outside my house. The guy, later convicted of kidnap and assault, was no Moriarty: he was in custody by nightfall. He was a known local crackhead.

Last month, a 27-year-old bloke had his phone stolen at knifepoint at 6pm in the next street to mine. A couple of days later Jamie Simpson, 33, was murdered for the day’s takings in my local Matalan. It would hardly be surprising if either or both attacks were drug-related.

Local crack addict Keith Beckles was recently jailed for eight years for attacking a Polish immigrant (not for the first time). Who knows how many people die in the drugs import business. And so on.

Now, one can imagine that if we were to hand the supply-chain for curtains, or orange squash, or embossed stationery, over to criminal gangs, trouble would follow. I’m no fan of state regulation, as a rule, but I’m finding it difficult to think of a market more suited to government oversight than narcotics. So there’s police shortages? How many booze dealers publicans are in prison? How many drug dealers was that again? To support continued prohibition isn’t to take a fine moral stand on the best way for young people to live their lives; it’s washing your hands, cowardice, nothing more. And closed minds solve nothing.

Ignoring a policy review from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs that the Home Office themselves requested is just the latest evidence-free missile fired in an unwinnable War on Drugs. Of course, I no longer feel ‘betrayed’ when Brown makes policy based on what will sound best in tomorrow’s Mail. Tory press officer Iain Dale asks why left-wing writers don’t hang on Brown’s every word. It’s simple: the left’s future will be built without him; he’s as irrelevant as this classification ‘debate’. He isn’t on the left; he isn’t even Mr Bean: he’s Nero. And he’ll go the same way.

It’s okay for the suburban seethers to tut and moan; to dismiss legalisation as a (pejoratively) ‘liberal’ concern. New Labour aren’t ever far behind with a new initiative (or deception) to hoover up a few of those votes; and the hypocritical Blue Blair is a match for them in that department. But the fact is: prohibition has failed, local policing can’t cope, and never will. Never mind those appeals to liberty that Tories don’t seem quite so keen on anymore.

And, in case Brown hasn’t noticed, it isn’t marginal Middle England that has to live with the fallout. While the political class collectively fiddle, those of us inhabiting inner city Britain get to swallow the consequences. Every day. Thanks for that.

First posted at Liberal Conspiracy.