Incredibly boring man supports ending of drug war.

In the past year and a bit or so, there’s been a real momentum challenging the establishment view on drugs –  that drugs are all bad and that a civilised society has to keep them prohibited. The head of the Royal College of Physicians, former Police chiefs and of course SSY favourite former ACMD chair David Nutt have all attacked this viewpoint and called for drugs to be either legalised or in some way regulated.

Your typical psychoactive/methamphetime drug user.

Recently another name can be added to this star run down – that of Bob Ainsworth, the former Defence Minister in the last Labour Government.  Bob’s called for drugs to be decriminalised, with different substances being legalised and other prescribed. This is the same argument SSY has made; legalise soft drugs like cannabis which cannot be reasonably considered any worse than alcohol, but put heroin on prescription so that it can be prescribed in a controlled environment to addicts and therefore remove an addictive drug from the control of dealers.

The facts are that Britain already had a system of prescribing heroin to addicts which was known as the “British method” because unlike the USA it treated drug abuse as a medical issue. This practice was wound up in the late 60′s, and since then heroin use in the UK has skyrocketed. Instead of addicts being able to get clean drugs in a controlled environment from the state, they get it from drug dealers  and fund their habit from burglary, mugging etc.

SSY welcomes Bob’s conversion, but it’s a shame he couldn’t have done anything about the UK’s unwinnable drug war when he was a Minister. Perhaps it was his experience as Minister of Defence during the ongoing war in Afghanistan that he saw how much money various warlords could make out of the heroin trade. It’s no exaggeration to say that it’s been the heroin addiction of Europe that has basically funded the entire conflict in Afghanistan, from the Soviet occupation to the NATO occupation today.

Unsurprisingly Bob has been attacked for his new stance by Ed Miliband, showing that on this issue (alongside many others) he doesn’t represent even a cosmetic change for New Labour. But the fact that ex-Ministers are now backing drug legalisation and prescription shows that our ideas can no longer be tarred as just those of loonies. Ending the drug war is an idea whose time has come.