Comment: This War is Unwinnable

Former Columbian Ambassador Calls For Legalization

Owen Bowcott
Wednesday July 4, 2001
The Guardian

Britain's former ambassador to Colombia, who has witnessed at close quarters the spiralling cost of the war against cocaine and been at the heart of international initiatives to counter trafficking, yesterday called for legalisation of drugs.
Sir Keith Morris, who served in Bogota from 1990-94, argues in a Guardian article that the drugs war "is unwinnable, costly and counter-productive". He urges an end to prohibition and the establishment of a controlled, legal framework in which drug sales would be taxed for the common good.
The founder chairman of the British and Colombian chamber of commerce, he maintains contacts with Latin America, where governments have for years urged the west to help their drug-distorted economies by reducing the demand for illicit drugs.
He has also been privy to senior UK government thinking. While in Bogota he hosted visits from then home secretaries Kenneth Clarke and Michael Howard, and the then prime minister John Major.
Sir Keith's comments coincide with signs of a possible softening in official policy on drugs and a flurry of debate on the issue since the election. Last Sunday, Mo Mowlam, the former cabinet office minister who visited Colombia several times as the minister heading the war against drugs, urged decriminalisation of cannabis.
"This government believes in 'what works': drugs prohibition does not work," Sir Keith, 66 and now retired, said yesterday. "I'm encouraged that the government has started to relax the regime for cannabis.
"Now the principle of prohibition has in practice been abandoned, I hope the government will start a serious examination of the best way of controlling drug use within a legal framework. It will not be easy. Hard drugs users may have to register with GPs and get their drugs on prescription.
"Some soft drugs might be sold under a regime like that used for alcohol and tobacco and, as Mo Mowlam has proposed for cannabis, they would be tested for purity and taxed.
"The revenue would go to medical research and greatly improve education and treatment. There will be costs, probably, initially at least, greater use and addiction and problems quite unforeseen. But the benefits to life, health and liberty of drug users and the life, health and property of the whole population would be immense."
Sir Keith admits advocating legalisation has been personally difficult "because it means saying to those with whom I worked and to the relatives of those who died that this was an unnecessary war".
By coincidence, the police in Brixton, south London, chose this week to announce they will simply warn those caught in possession of small quantities of cannabis. In effect, they have turned their attention to more serious crimes.
In her column in the Sunday Mirror, Ms Mowlam wrote: "From my time [of being] concerned [with] the government's drug policy I have come to the conclusion that we must decriminalise cannabis. The trade needs to be legalised so it can be sensibly regulated.
"We could then have a tested product, which would be safer; outlets where other more dangerous drugs were not also available and it could be taxed." Any income, she suggested, would pay for improved treatment of addicts.
Since Ms Mowlam retired from parliament at the election, responsibility for government drug strategies has passed from the cabinet office to the Home Office.
Arguments for legalisation have more commonly come from the libertarian wing of the Conservative party. Last year, for example, the former Tory treasury minister, Philip Oppenheim, similarly warned "criminalising drugs hands massive profits to organised crime". Drugs are dangerous, he conceded, but "legalisation looks like the lesser evil".