TOM POPE

Drugs in the UK: It’s Time to Legalise Them All

WITH roughly 12,000 people in UK prisons for drug related offences, costing the UK taxpayer over £½ billion every year, drugs are undeniably the cause of many problems within the UK from a health, crime, and economic standpoint. Furthermore, with nearly 4,400 drug poisoning deaths registered in England and Wales in 2019 – the highest since records began– nobody can claim that the issue is going away.

The drugs trade is one of the most lucrative worldwide and is estimated by the National Crime Agency to be worth nearly £11 billion in the UK alone. The drugs market is huge, and the prices increase significantly from farm to street owing to the many different middlemen. People who smuggle drugs over borders take the largest cut and that is before the drug is adulterated with additives. The purity of amphetamine on the streets has been found to be as low as 5%, which means that of the £13 per gram of amphetamine that the consumer is paying, a mere 65 pence represents the actual product that they are ingesting. The rest can be a mixture of anything from washing powder to concrete powder. The fact that drugs are not adulterated to a uniform extent is extremely dangerous; one night a consumer could take a full strength pill and not feel many effects, while on another night the same individual could take an identical amount and end up in hospital with an overdose.

I spoke to Peter Bleksley, a former undercover detective who has dedicated over a decade of his life to “putting hundreds of people in prison for thousands of years” and achieving “the biggest landslide seizure of heroin ever in the UK”. Yet when he asks himself whether there are fewer guns and drugs on the street now as a result of his work, he comments, “the answer of course, is a resounding no”. In 1971, following US President Nixon’s characterisation of illicit drugs as ‘Public Enemy Number 1’, Bleksley entered New Scotland Yard thinking he was “on the side of the angels”. The media had coined the phrase ‘the war on drugs’ and yet, in hindsight, Bleksley realised that “we could never win this war – it will never, ever be won”. Hence, he concurs with me and many others that it is time for a rethink: “Why would we leave an industry worth billions to criminals?”

In 2001, Portugal became the flagship nation of drug legalisation after decriminalisation measures were brought in to tackle its widespread heroin crisis. Switzerland followed suit in 2012 for a similar reason. Following this, multiple US states started to permit the sale of cannabis. Drug legalisation is gradually becoming normalised, yet countries are understandably reluctant to lead the way. The vision that Peter Bleksley and so many others share is of “drug stores, on every high street, open 24 hours a day”.

How on earth could drug reform on this scale be achieved? How would drugs be made any safer for consumers? What would drag people away from their current dealers? The end result must be able to beat organised crime