Much of the criticism has centered on the role of Secretary of Defense — ahem, War — Pete Hegseth’s decision to “double tap” the alleged traffickers: hitting survivors a second time to ensure death — after they’ve already been incapacitated. Such conduct is indeed ethically troubling, however, the current controversy elides the larger issues.

I should know. After a stint in the army, I served as a targeting analyst attached to the Joint Special Operations Command from 2011 to 2013, helping to identify Taliban targets for elimination or capture. For all the flaws of what used to be called the Global War on Terror, my comrades and I acted according to tight restrictions, guided by the laws of war. Furthermore we conducted our operations against armed combatants and under the authority of an Authorization for Use of Military Force voted on by Congress.

The current controversy misses the bigger flaw in the administration’s hemispheric operations: contrary to Vance’s arguments, the extralegal operations against trafficking don’t repudiate “permanent Washington” — but offer it succor. The military-industrial complex and the hawkish security establishment want nothing more than to see the nation embroiled in yet another long and constitutionally dubious conflict with unclear goals and the potential to topple yet another government willy-nilly.

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In the two decades after 9/11, the Bush and Obama administrations launched several wars of this kind, wasting thousands of American lives and trillions of taxpayer dollars — for what, exactly? In 2016, Trump clinched the GOP presidential nomination by condemning this enormous waste. Now, by embracing a state of never-ending war and state of emergency, a condition declared by an omnipotent executive branch, the second Trump administration has embraced essential elements of the deep state, the very machine the Trumpians were twice elected to dismantle.

Once upon a time, American conservatives were deeply committed to resisting the expansion of presidential war powers. Indeed, “Mr. Republican” himself, Sen. Robert A. Taft, commenting on the state of American pseudo-belligerency in the North Atlantic in 1941, argued that “if the President can declare or create an undeclared naval war beyond [Congress’s] power to act upon, the Constitution might just as well be abolished”.

Conservative Republicans similarly balked at President Truman’s unilateral use of military force in Korea and other trappings of the early Cold War state, arguing that the condition of permanent emergency empowered their liberal political enemies, “the war party” at the expense of constitutional norms and limited government.

They lost that political fight, and a new paradigm of an empowered presidency, tasked with securing an ever-expanding set of “national-security” interests, was born. Over the course of the Cold War and afterward, presidents from both parties upheld this new model, one that sanctioned a massive, permanent military bureaucracy. Americans became inured to a chief executive who could order US troops into combat with little to no congressional input, seeing the empowered presidency as an essential component of a modern state. The imperial presidency, as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called it, became the core political supposition of postwar America, one that survived the interregnum of Watergate and the Fall of the Berlin Wall.    

Throughout the Global War on Terror, successive presidents from both parties leaned on this legacy to justify military action in Yemen, Somalia, and Syria — wars conducted without explicit congressional authorization or clear, achievable political ends. Indeed, the open-endedness of these “forever wars” made possible by unbounded executive authority provided an essential plank for the MAGA platform, one that the Trump administration is now ripping up. The White House is instead doubling down on the original endless war, on the assumption that attempting the impossible in one’s neighborhood — winning the war on drugs — is somehow more prudent than attempting “the impossible all over the world”.

Southern Spear, as with the War on Terror and the Cold War before it, conserves another component of permanent Washington: namely, a permanent emergency based on emotionalism and obfuscation. Under the imperial presidency, America’s wars have been sold via slippery language and amorphous geographical and conceptual boundaries. Washington inched its way into both world wars based, in part, on open-ended conceptions of neutrality and shifting boundaries of the Western Hemisphere. In both Korea and Vietnam, such quagmires were deepened through incremental escalation, crises that silenced debate and left tens of thousands of American dead.

More recently, the Global War on Terror, a quixotic war against a tactic — terrorism — yielded a 20-year morass without an achievable political objective, all the while furthering the growth of the security state at home. Throughout the War on Terror, the security state sold adventurism abroad by personalizing and inflating the threat of terrorism at home, making individual Americans unduly afraid that they could be the victims of terror. In all of these wars, the real winners were the Beltway bureaucrats — Vance’s permanent Washington — who administered them, often in careers that spanned eras, thereby preventing genuine national-security reform.  

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In Latin America, the Trump administration is conserving the core interests of permanent Washington. The White House has not only preserved the imperial presidency, but expanded its powers. While Trump’s recent predecessors pushed the boundaries of existing Authorizations for the Use of Military Force, the Trump administration, through a novel interpretation of the terrorism designation, has given itself the authority to commit acts of war. The administration’s obscurantism about the strikes and its guiding strategy for them are another inherited facet of permanent Washington’s predilection for secrecy in the service of unachievable goals.

The Trump administration is employing the same narrative games used by previous administrations. The primary rhetorical vehicle, the fluctuating label of “narcoterrorism”, once applied to acts of terror in service of the drug trade, has been applied to the trade itself. Similarly, the administration and its supporters have spuriously compared overdose deaths — tragic as they are — to American combat casualties. Associating an overdose of American at home to the death of an American draftee in the rice paddies of Vietnam is an absurd conflation that strips the drug epidemic of its context. This narrative slippage is but the latest example of Washington’s shameless shifting of symbols to prep the public for another unwinnable war like the ones that defined much of my career as a soldier and intelligence professional.

Someday in the near future, the Trump era will end. Betraying its campaign pledges, the Trump administration has not served as a disruptive force for permanent Washington, the deep state, or whatever euphemism one favors for the suite of institutions and assumptions that guide American geopolitics in the postwar era. By remilitarizing the War on Drugs — to say nothing of a potential regime change in Venezuela — the White House is breathing new life into the political forces that it claimed to oppose.

Southern Spear is not a break with permanent Washington — it is its logical conclusion.

This week, Prof Nutt visited the UnHerd Club to discuss his latest research, the resistance he’s faced from the academic community and the transformative power of psychedelics. Below is an edited transcript of his conversation with Flo Read:

Florence Read: Instead of turning on parts of the brain, psychedelics can do something quite unusual, which is actually turn some parts off. Could you just explain a little bit more about that?

David Nutt: Obviously, Timothy Leary was wrong, these drugs don’t turn on the brain, they actually turn off the brain. Imaging work has shown that there’s a circuit in the brain called the “default mode network”, which controls how you think. Our research showed that network was being switched off.

You’ve probably heard of Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception. That book was written after a mescaline trip, but the phrase “the doors of perception” is taken from William Blake. And Blake said that: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” He was referring to people who aren’t artists, who see things in a very restricted way. Huxley used that quote, but he realised that what mescaline had done was open his mind, and then worked out that something must be closing his mind. What’s closing his mind? He said: the brain.

The brain is an instrument for focusing the mind. Psychedelics switch off the parts of the brain that control your mind. There was a group at Yale doing work in depression. They showed that the default mode network — the part of the brain that was turned off by psychedelics — is overactive in depression. If you scan the brains of depressed people, a greater amount of their brain is engaged in this internal, reflective, self-referential thinking. We thought: “Let’s see if we can turn it off in depressed people, and will they be non-depressed?” And lo and behold, they were.

We gave a single dose of psilocybin to people who had failed on other treatments. (They’d all failed on two antidepressants — somebody had failed on more than 10; they’d all failed on CBT.) They all got better. It’s the strongest effective treatment for resistant depression there’s ever been. Some of them are still well now, 10 years later. For the majority, the depression has crept back, and that tells us something else about the nature of how deeply embedded depressive thinking can be. But the fact that you could switch off the depression circuit, and lift people’s mood — that was a discovery.

FR: Among that cohort of treatment-resistant depressives, was there a common thread between them, in terms of their experience on the psilocybin? Or is it quite individualised?

DN: The content of a psychedelic trip is completely unpredictable. After that first trial, we set up a second trial, where we wanted to see if we could prolong the antidepressant effect of psilocybin by giving two trips, three weeks apart. And there was absolutely no relationship between the first trip and the second trip. Some people had a terrifying trip the first time, then a good one, and vice-versa.

What we try to do in therapy is get people to use the experience to deal with the thinking that is underpinning their depression. We asked them to try to engage with problems, to go back to issues in their childhood that might be relevant to their depression. Most of them don’t want to do that. One of the theories of depression — one of the theories about why your mind is so preoccupied in depression — is that you’re trying to resist re-engaging with those traumas. But we encouraged them to do that. It’s challenging, it’s difficult, they find it distressing — but they often get fundamental insights.

One of our patients on the first trial said: “I saw my father abusing me and I realised that was why I was depressed.” He realised: “I was blaming myself for the abuse. And in the trip, I was able to say to him, ‘That’s it.’” He got closure. He came out of the trip and he’s been well ever since. So people’s trips often focus on an individual trauma in their lives which they struggled to deal with. They have that in common.

FR: So given this level of success, why are these drugs not available for depressives in the UK?

DN: There are so many hurdles. Where to begin? The first is really weird. That initial study that we did was actually funded by the Medical Research Council. They put out a call for new treatments for depression and we got the grant. Getting the grant was the easiest bit. It took three iterations of the Ethics Committee to get permission to do this study. The ethics committee said: “It’s too dangerous; you can’t give depressed people psychedelics.” Why not? “Well, they might die.” That’s pretty unlikely — no one’s ever died on psilocybin before — but why do you think depressed people might die? “Well, they’re depressed.”

The third time we were going to this committee, I realised if we didn’t agree to do what they said, we would never get the study done. So in the end, they said: “You cannot do a controlled trial; you can do a safety study. Give 12 people it, see how they go. If none of them are dead in six months then you can come back and do a controlled trial.” So we said yes — in fact, the original trial was to see if people survived, which they all did. And the secondary outcome was whether their mood had changed. They could have got worse. They all got better.

So it took us a year to pass ethics. It took us another year to get hold of the medicine — the drug — because there’s only one place in the world that could make it. Then we had to get import licences and export licences. It took 30 months to get hold of the drug, and two more months to get permission from the Home Office to actually use it. That’s 32 months out of a 36-month grant — all because these drugs have been vilified for the last 50 years. The bureaucracy is so intense.

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FR: Is this a bureaucracy problem or is it a moral failing?

DN: It’s more than moral; it’s political. The reason psychedelics were banned in 1967 in the US and in 1970 in the UK was simply because psychedelics were allowing people to think differently about how they wanted to run international relations. The war in Vietnam was being protested. There’s this amazing photograph I have, of someone holding a placard that says: “Drop acid, not bombs.” They couldn’t ban the anti-war protests so they banned the drugs instead, thinking that would dissipate the protests. Of course it didn’t, and eventually, the protesters won.

The Vietnam War ended but by that time, the drugs had been banned. And one of the worst things about drug laws is that it’s almost impossible to remedy them. For example, in America, two-thirds of states have medicalised cannabis, and half of states have recreational cannabis, but it’s still illegal under the federal law. In fact, there’s only two countries in the world that have actually pulled cannabis out of the UN conventions, and that’s Canada and Uruguay. Every other country in the world, even America, still complies with the UN regulations, which still say that cannabis is an illegal drug. And no country has pulled psychedelics out of the UN conventions.

So everything we do, we do in the face of this enormous barrier. They’ve created this myth that these are very dangerous. Almost everything you’ve heard about psychedelics has actually been a deliberate misrepresentation to perpetuate this political decision that people shouldn’t use them.

FR: Would the power dynamic between a doctor and a patient change if this kind of drug became legalised?

DN: The medical profession isn’t really that progressive. And I can say that: I’m a doctor. I have become more and more disappointed by the inability of medicine — particularly in fields like psychiatry — to move with the times. I personally think that psychedelics will re-energise psychiatry. A lot of psychiatrists are very disillusioned. We haven’t had any real innovation in psychiatric medicine or psychiatric psychotherapy for 50 years.

FR: One thing under threat at the moment is the idea of holistic health — the idea that your mind and body have some sort of co-dependent relationship.

DN: We are quite top-down, paternalistic and autocratic in healthcare. There is very little scope to do anything that we’re not told to do from above — and, of course, that’s why I was sacked. Because even if you challenge — even if you just raise an intellectual question about the policy — they don’t like it.

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you that I’m quite a fan of Huxley. But my favourite book is not Brave New World or Doors of Perception. It’s actually Island, his last book. It is a roadmap to a society where you use psychology — you use dance, you use movement, you use exercise — and you use psychedelics to maximise quality of life. That’s what we should be doing. I was on the Good Read programme about six years ago, and Island was my Good Read. And two weeks later, I was in Parliament, at a group on drugs and drug addiction, and I was viciously attacked by a drug service provider for daring to talk on the radio about the use of illegal drugs to help people have a better life. That exemplifies our silos of thinking, which have become entrenched over decades. I don’t even think psychedelics could open their minds. 

FR: When people are having these transcendent experiences on psychedelics, are they finding something that we have all lost? Barely 3% of the country goes to church anymore; we’ve lost so much of our connection to the spiritual. Do you think they are recovering some of that?

DN: Yes, I have no doubt. Psychedelics increase connectedness — with the self, with other people and with nature. There’s a very interesting relationship between psychedelics and religion, because pretty much all religions emerged from groups of people using psychedelics. Hinduism came from a combination of mushrooms and Ephedra. South American beliefs came from ayahuasca and DMT and also from mushrooms. There’s a wonderful study going on in the States using psilocybin on priests who’ve lost their faith, and it’s working — it’s working for some faiths: I don’t think it’s quite as good for Islam as it is for Christianity — but there are priests coming out saying they have begun to find their faith again.

And of course, there was this remarkable experiment called the Marsh Chapel Experiment at Harvard in the Sixties. They took trainee priests on Good Friday — when they’re going to be in chapel praying and contemplating for the whole day — and they split them and gave 10 of them psilocybin in the same doses. And of the 10 given psilocybin, eight of them have this powerful mystical experience where they saw God.

So that does help make sense of the way in which religion or religious beliefs can be facilitated by changing the way your mind works. Of course, historically, people have done that in very different ways. In the old days, you used to starve yourself for days and nights, or kneel and pray for hours and hours, to get those kinds of mystical changes. And they would have been produced by alterations in biochemistry — due to stress — which are not necessarily very different from those that psychedelics produce. But psychedelics are just easier and probably more effective.

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FR: If these drugs did become widely available, how would we preserve this connection to spiritual well-being?

DN: There’s a really interesting experiment going on in the US now. Oregon has made magic mushrooms effectively a legal medicine. But more than that, they are authorising wellness centres, all around the state, to provide mushroom therapy, or mushrooms as part of wellbeing therapy. Now, that’s an amazing decision. It’s the first time anywhere in America that there’s kind of socialised medicine — using what it is now, and will be even when the therapy centres are open, an illegal drug. The purpose is to improve wellbeing in communities, and I think it’s going to work. 

FR: You’re a good advocate for psychedelics, but have you faced judgement from your academic peers? Do you find that you are in any way isolated in that community?

DN: About five years ago, I gave a talk to the Royal College of Psychiatrists and about psychedelics as the future of psychiatry. And after the talk, the room divided into three separate groups. There were about seven or eight men in the room older than me, who said: “Fantastic. I was there in the Sixties, we were using it. It was working fine. Thank goodness you’re bringing it back.” And the majority of the room were people from 35 to 60 who said: “This is rubbish. There’s no RCTs. They’re dangerous drugs.” And then there were about 50 trainees who said: “Fantastic — at last. Psychiatry has got something to offer me!” So credibility is very age-related.

Academically, I’ve been generally pleasantly surprised by the positivity. I think there are a lot of academics out there who realise that this is the way forward. They just don’t have the courage to stand up and do it because they don’t want to be vilified, they don’t want the Daily Mail writing about them. But they are on-side. There’s very little criticism within the scientific community about what we’re doing, because it’s good science. It’s published in the top journals. It’s very hard to argue with that.

FR: Let’s take some questions from the audience.

You spoke about shutting down the “default mode network” as a one-off event. Have you found that there’s a need to link therapy, psychotherapy, and a deep understanding of people’s trauma with the psychedelic experience, versus treating it like a neuroscientific event?

DN: What I find amazing is that both are true and that’s why it’s unusual. In fact, it’s kind of unique in psychiatry — to be able to do a brain imaging of someone who’s had a treatment, and see why it’s worked. What we see in people who’ve been depressed, who’ve had a psychedelic trip, is their brains are more flexible. And that accords extremely well with the cognitive experience of actually being able to think differently and not be locked into negative thought loops.

But I absolutely agree with you that the experience itself is what people want to talk about — and the value of that, in terms of helping them change their lives and move forward is, for the patient, absolutely central. Critics say: “Prove to me that what the patient thinks matters.” In fact, there are people who’ve said to me: “I’m not going to believe that psychedelics work until you give it to people under anesthetic, because it could all be placebo.” It’s surreal, because we don’t do any other kind of therapy under anaesthesia. People want to talk about why the experience is valuable to them. They want to get other people to engage with it. 

FR: Placebo is a concept that’s totally vilified in the mainstream scientific arena. Do you think that there’s room for a good placebo effect?

DN: Half of everything any doctor does to you is placebo. It’s you wanting to get better. If you don’t want to get better, you won’t get better. If you want to get better, you can get better, and psychedelics allow you to get better — whether that’s a placebo, or whether it’s a drug effect. I think it’s a drug effect, but proving it’s a drug effect is kind of pointless, and probably impossible, and I’m not going to bother.

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I was a government minister in the Department of Health in 2018, when we rescheduled THC for therapeutic use. And probably the most important thing was having a cause célèbre. There was Billy Caldwell, and a number of children with horrendous, untreatable epilepsy — suffering dozens of fits a day — who were treated by these medicines. And the compassionate power, forced on people in positions of power, was irresistible. That is actually what led to change. So applying that to psychedelics — who will be the cause célèbre?

DN: Australia decided in February that, from the first of July, psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, and MDMA for treatment-resistant PTSD, will be approved medicines. And that was driven by an example: a woman who was actually a friend of the Prime Minister’s husband became severely depressed, begged for psychedelic therapy, couldn’t get it, and killed himself. And she made videos and she campaigned and she became the cause célèbre because of her dead husband.

We haven’t got that patient in Britain. But the sad thing is, we do have a lot of veterans who are medicating themselves. Some of them have been part of our studies. We’ve been working with them for eight years. They have been campaigning for this law change. And it’s not happening. These veterans are going to South America to get treatment — many of them can’t afford it; we’ve got senior members of the military arguing for this. But it’s falling on deaf ears. And I don’t know what the problem is. It may be because it’s not a child. The other thing about Billy Caldwell is that he was dying in St. Thomas’s, which is just across the river from politics. Parliamentarians could not avoid the fact that he could be dead within a few hours. So they had to do something. We don’t have quite the same immediacy.

I feel that cannabis has got stuck. It’s got stuck at this stage where unlicenced cannabis medicines are massively on the rise, but the NHS is not prescribing the licenced medicine. And it’s very hard to change. Even if tomorrow, the Home Office looked to reschedule psilocybin, we’ll end up in a similar place — where psilocybin therapy is only accessible privately because the NHS won’t endorse it. What’s your view on how we push past that?

DN: You’re quite right: for four and a half years cannabis has been a medicine, and there have been four prescriptions on the NHS. That’s almost as big of a scandal as having made it illegal in the first place in 1971. The NHS is not flexible and the mistake made was to insist that cannabis could only be prescribed by a specialist. And most specialists are old white men like me who spent their lives working on treatments which aren’t cannabis, and they don’t want to have to get out of their rut and learn about cannabis. The people that need to prescribe medical cannabis are the GPs and they’re not allowed to.

The other problem with the NHS is their budgets are controlled by pharmacists.You’d think pharmacists would be interested in pharmacology, but actually they’re not — they’re interested in money, and they’re really resistant to bringing in new treatments. So even with patients where it’s incontrovertible — the consultant says: “Medical cannabis has helped this person, please can we prescribe on the NHS” — the pharmacist says: “No because NICE hasn’t approved it.” And that’s why I left the NHS. That’s why now my work with ketamine is outside the NHS. Because it’s the only way we can actually use a psychedelic drug on patients. The same will be true with psilocybin or MDMA when they become available.

What we’re doing in the clinics that I’m working with — the awakened clinics here — is collecting data. At some point in the not-too-distant future, we will be able to go to the NHS and say: “100 patients with depression treated with ketamine therapy. Make NICE approve it.” We’re all campaigning to get NICE to accept that this real-world data for ketamine could be used — in the same way that real-world data for cannabis was collected.

I work at the Centre for Social Justice and we work with around 800 small grassroots charities, many of which are working in the addiction sector. And I have yet to meet a single one of those organisations that thinks legalisation is the answer. In fact, they actually think the opposite. We recently held a roundtable with a load of drug dealers, and we asked them what they thought about legalisation, and they said they were absolutely desperate for it, because it was going to significantly increase the number of people who will be buying drugs. And their response to that, they said, would be to undercut the legal drugs by making them cheaper, and then they can make them stronger or weaker, depending on what the clients want. And I wondered what you thought of that?

DN: Free markets are a problem, aren’t they? So my argument would be that we should decriminalise personal possession of all drugs. Criminalising people who use drugs is both immoral and ineffective. It would be economically sensible to have regulated markets for all drugs which are less harmful to the user than alcohol. Because reducing the use of alcohol would have a net beneficial effect on society. We’re beginning to see that now, in countries or states where medical cannabis has become legal: people are drinking less, and also using less opiates.

In our medical cannabis initiative — the Drug Science 2021 initiative, which you can access online — we had 3,500 people on medical cannabis, over 1000 of them for chronic pain. And they almost halve their use of opiates without even being asked to stop opiate painkillers. They’re just stopping because medical cannabis is better for pain.

In terms of treatment providers, the reason cannabis is a problem in Britain is because we tried to get rid of cannabis, in the same way that heroin is a problem in America because they tried to get rid of heroin. They tried to stop people using relatively mild forms of cannabis and what did the market do? The market just shifted to make stronger forms of cannabis. When we tried to clamp down on cannabis in prisons, what happened? We started making spice, and spice kills people; cannabis doesn’t. So our hostility to cannabis has driven the problem for cannabis. When we tried to stop the use of opium in 1910 by Chinese people in the East End of London, what happened? They stopped smoking opium; they started injecting morphine.

Almost every drug we’ve tried to control through prohibition has resulted in the use of stronger, more toxic alternatives, and lead to greater problems with addiction. I was in a huge conference in Orlando, speaking to 2,500 addiction service providers, last year. I started talking about using psychedelics to treat addiction and they were horrified. But it’s their business. The addiction business is a big business. A lot of people get their employment out of it, but they need addicts to keep the business going. And if we can get rid of addicts, they will be out of business, so they don’t want change either.

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When the default mode network is switched off, how does it come back? And if it comes back, how does it not cause the depression again?

DN: It comes back different, it comes back more flexible, it comes back less entrenched. Now why that is? We don’t know. One analogy is, if you keep thinking something, it’s like a cartwheel going along in a muddy field. It digs deeper and deeper and deeper. But then if you have a rainstorm or a flood, you can wash the ruts away and you can start again. But how that actually translates into neurochemical changes, or neurological changes in neurons, is still a mystery, and it is actually to my mind the big target at present. I would really like to understand how we get rid of it. Some people use the analogy of a snow field: once you’ve skied for a long time, you get stuck in a rut. Then the snow comes and you can see normally again. But eventually, for many people who’ve been chronically depressed, particularly from childhood, there’s a pressure to rut again. And what is that? I don’t know. And that’s one of the areas I’m really trying to get my head around intellectually, because then we might be able to design some experiments to test it.

FR: This comes back to this idea of neuroplasticity, which you have when you’re young and then you lose as you get older — do you think people have a fear of the general public becoming more neuroplastic?

DN: Yes and no. No one minds people with Alzheimer’s getting more neuroplastic. But young people thinking differently — that frightens society, or the establishment. But neuroplasticity — this is an ancient concept. Every time you do anything, you’ve grown a few synapses in your brain, you’ve consolidated some synapses, you’ve made them more efficient. Now, that process is very powerfully stimulated by psychedelics. It’s also stimulated by ketamine and MDMA. And from the insights you get during a trip, people often see things very differently, come up with new solutions to old problems. But they can consolidate those new solutions by neuroplasticity. 

The US Department of Defence has invested something like $27 million in trying to develop drugs which will produce plasticity, without being psychedelic, because they’re terrified of psychedelics. If you’re a vet in America, and you use an illegal drug to get better, you lose your pension, and you lose your access to healthcare. So rather than change the law, they’re trying to find drugs which will actually heal the brain through plasticity. I don’t know if that’s going to work. I think it might be useful. It might augment psychotherapy. But I think it’s going to be something you take every day. I don’t think you’re going to have a single dose of a neuroplastic agent and suddenly you’re going to wake up the next morning feeling un-depressed. But the research is going on, and we’ll find out.

What is monkey dust?

DN: Monkey dust is a new cathinone. Here’s a story. Just before the 2010 election, along comes mephedrone (“meow meow” or MCAT), a relatively weak cathinone that’s legal. It becomes very popular. But an election’s coming up, and Gordon Brown doesn’t want to be seen as soft on drugs. So mephedrone gets banned. And then, after a couple of years, we start to look at the data. And what we saw with mephedrone between 2008 and 2010 was as use went up, cocaine deaths fell, amphetamine deaths fell. Why? Because people were switching from an illegal, dangerous, harmful drug, to a legal, less harmful drug. So there were two or three deaths from mephedrone, and it reduced cocaine deaths by about 50%. It’s the biggest impact on cocaine death ever.

When mephedrone is illegal, and the dose and supply runs out, people switch back to cocaine because it’s a better drug. If everything’s illegal, why not use a better drug. Cocaine deaths have now gone up and up and they’ve now reached an all-time high. So for those two years, we saw that the drug market does have a lot of rationality. People want a drug that is fun but less harmful than the ones they’re using. So having banned mephedrone people said: “Mephedrone is pretty weedy. Why don’t we make a stronger mephedrone which we can sell in smaller amounts?” That’s monkey dust. Monkey dust is to mephedrone what fentanyl is to heroin. It’s just the product of having banned mephedrone.

Are there any studies on microdosing?

DN: Yes there are and we’ve done the best one. It’s very difficult to do because the problem with microdosing is: it’s illegal. And when we set up a microdosing study at Imperial, six years ago, we wanted to give a microdose — one microgram of LSD — to people twice a week for six weeks and see what happened. And the ethics committee said yes, but every single microdose had to be given in hospital, and they had to stay in hospital for 12 hours. We’ve never done the study because we couldn’t afford to do it.

So we did a citizen science study. We basically worked out a way of getting people to randomise their own microdoses, and that study was published last year. It shows that microdosing works — if you think you’re microdosing. So if you’re taking placebo, and you think it’s a microdose, it works. That’s the best study we have so far. It’s what you want it to be, in a way. So at present, we don’t know if microdosing works, but it doesn’t seem to harm you.

With antidepressants, you don’t know what it’s doing, but you feel better after it’s built up. With psilocybin, we can see the effect on the brain scan: it’s essentially an experience that changes the person. Are there any other drugs that are like that? 

DN: It’s like surgery. It’s like a cure. Are there any other drugs like that? I suppose with some anti-cancer drugs, you might get a relatively rapid cure. But not in terms of mental health. But the idea of a sudden cure is not novel in psychiatry. When I was on the Isle of Skye 30 years ago, there was a wonderful tale there about how they used to treat depression. They used to take depressed people to the blacksmith and put their head down on the anvil and the blacksmith would take out his massive hammer and bring it down right next to their head, but not hit them. And they would get better. That seems implausible, but it’s not completely implausible, because that is a massive stress.

Pavarotti suffered from depression. And he was talking about how he overcame his depression, and he was on a plane that crashed. He said: “That near-death experience lifted my depression.” And in fact quite a lot of people who have near-death experiences say not only that their depression goes, but that they feel more spiritual. Interestingly, the brain scans of people who have near-death experiences and those after psychedelics are very similar. So the final answer to your question is that it is a psychological experience, but fundamentally it’s a biological experience, changing your psyche, and that’s why it’s so powerful. Huxley was right: your brain controls your mind. If your brain gets it wrong, as it sometimes does, change your brain. Then your mind can be free.

The atrocity brought national attention to a brutal gang war that had, until then, been raging only in the outer reaches of the city. The subsequent need to escape the spotlight focused the minds of gang leaders on their core business model — which is, quite simply, making billions of dollars from the drug trade. Since the infamous airport attack, Australia’s powerful bikie gangs have turned their considerable brawn into brains, evolving into sophisticated transnational criminal organisations that are reshaping global drug networks.

Police say that there are 38 outlaw motorcycle gangs operating in Australia, with around 4,600 patched members and hundreds, or even thousands, of hopefuls waiting in the wings. Culturally, the reach of this relatively small group is great. Bikies have strong connections to Sydney’s nightclub scene, and rugby league and AFL players are frequently chastised for socialising with them. A Home and Away starlet was sprung on a bender with a bikie in 2009 — losing her billionaire media heir boyfriend in the fallout — and last year, a sitting Victorian Senator was forced to step down as deputy leader of her party after it was revealed that she had dated a former Rebels leader while she was on the Joint Law Enforcement Committee.

Bikies have long sat at the top of domestic drug distribution networks, and they’ve no shortage of customers. Australians are notorious fiends for anything in powdered form, buying it at several times the going rate in the United Kingdom or United States. A gram of cocaine retails for around £75 in London, but you’ll pay at least £175 in Sydney. The bikies make an estimated £1.7 billion per year from dealing, a figure that represents a third of the total Australian drug trade — and is rising.

But bikies are increasingly turning their attention to the really lucrative business of importing. This shift became evident in 2021, when Mark Buddle, exiled leader of the biggest and most brutal gang, the Comanchero, sent a message to other leading Sydney criminals stating that he was setting up a Mafia-style “commission”, to control who was importing gear via taxation and price-fixing. The cost of meth had dropped from $250,000 to $80,000 per kilogram in a month, his message lamented, “because there is NO STRUCTURE, no rules, no reasoning and to be honest there’s NO SENSE”.

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Strengthening vast global supply chains and creating new ones, the bikies are collaborating with bona fide mafia organisations like the ‘Ndrangheta and Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel. A network of these gangs are working together, having set up outposts in south-east Asia, to be at the forefront of the methamphetamine trade. Indeed, a 2019 United Nations report found that, while established players from China, Hong Kong and Thailand remain central to methamphetamine and heroin manufacturing, outlaw motorcycle gangs from Australia and New Zealand had recently “sought to gain a foothold in the region”. Heightened law enforcement attention in Australia was seen as a driving factor.

The domestic crackdown on the gangs was partly caused by the public outcry following the Airport brawl. Before then, bikie elites were often derided in Australian popular culture as Instagram-obsessed “Nike bikies” — roided-up gym junkies who don’t even ride Harleys. (One leader was known as the “Bathrobe Bikie”, because he had a tendency to pose in Versace loungewear.) But if leaders are more cosmopolitan, their gangs are comprised largely of young men from Sydney’s severely disadvantaged western suburbs, who do the dirty work. The city has seen a spate of high-profile bikie attacks in the last few years, including a bitter drug distribution feud between two bikie-linked clans, the Alameddines and the Hamzys. Scores of shootings which almost wiped out the latter family entirely, and the bloodshed was met with wide condemnation — from talkback radio callers demanding swift action, to then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd denouncing the brawl as “absolutely unacceptable”. The police promised to step up.

The Alameddines and Hamzys are fairly low-ranking clans, but infighting has plagued the big boys, too. In 2018, a former Comanchero boss, Mahmoud “Mick” Hawi — who was charged with the manslaughter of Anthony Zervas — was murdered by a friend with financial motives. (The accused man was subsequently acquitted and then murdered himself last year.) A report last year from Deakin University challenges the narrative that what drives the gangs is endless patch-on-patch warfare; they are, rather, looking for new ways to do business. “OMCGs have changed in the past 10 to 15 years,” author Professor David Bright said. “Before this, they were very much about the brotherhood and that antisocial bikie lifestyle, but now they’re inviting young members to join simply because they have a criminal history the club finds useful.” The study also found that young men looking to get into bikie gangs aren’t motivated less by being their brothers’ keeper and more by the cash that can be made.

The focus on money-making, as well as the police crackdown, has seen an exodus of senior bikie leaders, who want both to escape the law and oversee offshore operations. Estimates suggest that a third of senior leaders live outside of Australia — in places such as Dubai, Cyprus, Thailand and Turkey — although this trend has been dented in recent months by the extraditions of key figures. Mark Buddle, exiled leader of the Comanchero — and considered the most wanted man in the country — was dragged home late last year with a series of security measures worthy of a war criminal.

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Bikies don’t elicit a lot of sympathy, but there’s clear evidence that they’re being over-policed. Data from the two states that provided it shows that the failed prosecution rate for members of OMCGs (outlaw motorcycle gangs) was up to four times higher than the general population. States routinely try to enact anti-association laws, which included bans on operating clubhouses and working in tattoo parlours, and jail time for consorting in public in groups larger than three. These laws are often struck down by the courts.

But it’s the “501 law” that has had the profoundest effect. Brought into effect in 2015, it gives the Immigration Minister the power to deport people born in another country if they’ve spent 12 or more months in jail. Freedom of movement laws between Australia and New Zealand, and the opportunities present in former’s organised crime scene, mean that ambitious young Kiwis travel over the Tasman to ply their trade in Sydney. The 501 law has seen many of them sent back to New Zealand. The irony of Australia effectively creating a modern penal colony isn’t lost on the Kiwis, who have been critical of the practice. New Zealand is decidedly anxious about importing Australian problems to its shores, and with good reason: the Comanchero turned the challenge presented by the 501 law into an opportunity, by opening a New Zealand chapter. It is estimated that Kiwi gang membership in total has doubled to over 8,000 since 2016. Indeed, the nation has had to do some deporting of its own, to the Pacific Islands.

Inevitably, the oceanic drug highway has blossomed as a result. Small island nations, such as Fiji and Tonga — which are in many ways beholden to the two regional leaders — have become fundamental hubs in the trade between the Americas and Australia. Bikie gangs have established chapters in many of them, often thanks to members who have been deported. A report last year by the Lowy Institute found that, in the Pacific Islands, “drug trafficking has evolved significantly with the rise of local actors in transnational criminal networks”. It blamed the deportation policies of Australia, New Zealand and the United States for “exacerbating crime and addiction within Pacific nations”.

Last month, two prominent news stories underlined the extent that the drug trade is now very much a regional issue. A record-breaking 3.2-tonne haul of cocaine, valued at £260 million, was discovered floating in bales in international waters north-east of New Zealand. Greg Williams, director of New Zealand’s National Organised Crime Group, claimed that it had to be bound for Australia — because Aussies would only take 12 months to get through the drugs, while the same amount would take Kiwis 30 years. Then there was the curious case of a group of men found clinging to an ice box off the southern coast of Western Australia. The men claimed that their boat had capsized fishing, but in the following days, both it and 365kg of cocaine had washed up on nearby beaches.

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Traffickers are now specialising in these kinds of drug dumps in the poorly-policed international waters in the Pacific, where floating bundles of cocaine are left at particular coordinates to be collected by another waiting vessel. Police don’t patrol these waters to catch these drops, so unless they have inside information, it’s a relatively successful practice. We know that these kind of bold drug importations are now favoured by Australian bikies thanks to an-FBI led international operation where leaders such as Mark Buddle had their conversations monitored by a police-operated encrypted app called ANOM.

Indeed, the role of bikie gangs in the drug trade is set to become a key election issue in New Zealand later this year. The conservative National Party has been emphasising the importance of law and order — pointing out that the new Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins, was police minister during the early and enormous explosion in gang recruitment. Back in Australia, the state of New South Wales, of which Sydney is the capital, goes to the polls in March — and bikies are a big issue. Premier Dominic Perrottet has announced that he’ll be adding a further 30 police to the force’s Raptor Squad, which tackles outlaw motorcycle gangs, a move supported by the Labor opposition. Yet in spite of the law and order frenzy on both sides of the Tasman, there’s an issue that nobody wants to face: there would be no illicit drug trade to control if it wasn’t for the global war on drugs, now into its second century of failure.

Oceania is a fascinating case in the way the global drug trade is changing. Traditional gang hallmarks like loyalty to the badge and firm local control are, like so many other things in this world, giving way to bean counters. Organised crime from all over the world is coming together to maximise profits, and becoming more ruthless in pursuit of them. After all, getting caught means a long jail sentence whether it’s 20kg or two tonnes — so why not go all in?

Ye Gon was making his fortune, say US and Mexican prosecutors, by importing the flu medicine pseudoephedrine from Chinese labs and selling it to Mexican gangsters who cooked it into crystal meth to traffic to the United States. A fan of high-stakes poker, Ye Gon was then jetting to Las Vegas, where he lost $125 million at tables (a casino was later ordered to hand over much of this to the US government) and bought a million-dollar home for a casino hostess. After a lengthy legal battle, Ye Gon was extradited back here to Mexico, where he sits in a high-security prison on drugs, organised crime, money laundering, and weapons charges.

At the time, when I covered the story, Ye Gon appeared to be a passing novelty. Importing chemicals from China contrasted with the cocaine and heroin trade I was investigating, in which you can go to the mountains and witness the peasant farmers harvest coca leaves and opium poppies. It’s apparent now, though, that Ye Gon was a pioneer, and that Mexican cartels have followed his lead to reshape their entire industry — with perilous consequences for Americans.

Since that record bust, Mexican traffickers have gradually shifted the core of their business from plant-based drugs to synthetic drugs — those created using man-made chemicals. These include meth and illegally-made fentanyl as well as others, such as ketamine. Synthetic drugs are cheaper to produce and more lethal, with fentanyl many times more powerful than heroin. To churn out these synthetics, cartels followed Ye Gon’s lead to forge an unholy alliance with shady elements of the Asian chemical industry.

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The scales gradually tilted until 2018, when US agents on the border seized more crystal meth than cocaine (both considered “uppers” and party drugs), and 2021, when they also seized more fentanyl than heroin (both considered “downers”). The trend has accelerated in 2022, with US agents nabbing 14,000 pounds of fentanyl, which was seven times the amount of heroin, and 175,000 pounds of meth, two-and-a-half times the amount of cocaine.

Marijuana was once a big cash crop for Mexican traffickers, but border seizures have plummeted since 2012, when US states began legalising recreational weed. Further south, Colombia is still producing enormous amounts of cocaine, but much is now going to the booming European market. Meanwhile, the biggest shipments to, and profits from, the United States are in synthetics. This paradigm shift has transformed the logistics of Mexican drug trafficking.

Traditionally, drug trafficking relied on plantations of poppies and coca leaves, which are vulnerable to aerial crop spraying. Today, the mass production of synthetic drugs involves two behemoths of globalisation: supply chains of cargo ships, and the pharmaceutical industry. Pacific cities such as Manzanillo, Mexico’s biggest container port, have become bloody trafficking hubs. Pill mills can be anywhere, from quiet Mexican suburbs to right on the border itself.

The cartel shift to synthetics coincides closely with the soaring rise in US drug deaths. Back in 2007, about 27,000 Americans lost their lives in overdoses. By 2021, the number had quadrupled to 107,000 deaths. The majority, 71,000, involved fentanyl or other synthetic opioids. The second highest, 32,000, involved “psychostimulants” including meth. Traffickers are also mixing fentanyl into cocaine and heroin, causing more deaths with those. The rise in overdoses is especially sharp over the last five years, just as busts of fentanyl on the border have soared.

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But beyond the stats is the human pain. Most of the victims are in the prime of their lives and some are teenagers. Millions of parents, siblings, children, and friends bear the loss.

There are various forces behind the US overdose epidemic. Pharmaceutical giants dished out too many legal opioids that fuelled addiction, as courts continue to hear. Shutting down industries in the Rust Belt drove workers to despair, and the pandemic and lockdown were terrible for mental health. But it is hard to deny that changes in the supply of illegal drugs — from cocaine and heroin to synthetic meth and fentanyl — are a major factor behind the ballooning death toll.

Like everything in American life, the overdose epidemic gets dragged into partisan politics. Republicans have sought to take a hard line, lobbying the White House to classify fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction and Mexican cartels as terrorist groups. In their midterm attack ads, Republican candidates tied fentanyl deaths to illegal immigration. Democrats, meanwhile, have pushed hardest for “harm reduction” programmes, especially in deep-blue cities like San Francisco. But the level of open drug abuse there has drawn fire from both Republicans and moderate Democrats.

After covering the human catastrophe of narco violence here in Mexico for two decades, I have mixed feelings about the latest political row. I have long been a critic of the War on Drugs, which has failed to stop the drug trade while creating a huge black market for ultraviolent cartels. When US states began legalising marijuana, I celebrated it, thinking that the cartels and drug violence could slowly become a thing of the past.

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But the rise of synthetics and the sheer level of overdose deaths have rattled my thinking. It is evident that Mexican traffickers, who work with corrupt officials here, are indeed pumping ever more perilous drugs northward. When cartels mainly moved cocaine and cannabis there was an argument, at least, that they were providing Americans with products they demanded. But with the perilous fentanyl, which some people take unwittingly, there is validity to the claim they are flooding poison over the border. The question remains, however, as to what can be done about it.

In Manzanillo, I sit and watch the vast container ships come into the bay from across the globe and line up to unload their cargo. Last year, the port handled more than 3 million TEU’s (20-foot container units) — a vast amount of cargo for synthetics and their precursors to be hidden in. In a restaurant in the port, I meet up with the owner of a freight company who brings goods in from China. Working in the port for decades, he says smuggling has always been rife but has evolved over time. Today, Mexico’s two most powerful mafias, the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel, operate there and are always looking for shippers to move their products. “This is the gateway to China and all of Asia,” he says. “They have to be here to get access to chemicals.”

Opioids or precursors can be hidden under a false bill of lading and disguised as a legitimate chemical, he explains. Customs inspectors have to bust open a container and run a test, and while they are doing that, other loads can get through. It can also be hard to keep up with all the different substances. The International Narcotics Control Board lists hundreds of precursors for synthetic drugs, and they are likely scratching the surface. Scientific papers say there are more than 1,400 variants of fentanyl, and that “every year new fentanyl analog compounds, or fentanyls, appear”.

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Smugglers also have another technique, the shipper explains, which they call “remoras” or suckerfish, in which they bring in the contraband alongside legitimate cargo. Before the ship gets into port, the contraband is thrown over the side and taken ashore in small boats. It would, therefore, be difficult to stop the chemicals even if Mexican officials were all honest — which they are not. The shipper explains that intermediaries take bribes and deal with customs so that containers can pass straight through. “I can’t see this changing,” he said. “Only a dictatorship or invasion would stop this.”

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, claims to fight corruption, and over the last two years he has put elite marine military units in charge of the ports to clamp down on trafficking. “It is translating to more security, less contraband, more decommissions of drugs, above all fentanyl and chemical drugs,” AMLO said in November visiting Manzanillo. “It used to be silver or lead,” he went on, referring to the silver of a bribe or the lead of a bullet. “Now this has changed.”

However, the quantity of drugs being seized on the US border signal that fentanyl and meth are still coming through Mexico in vast quantities. Furthermore, AMLO’s position on cartels and crime is muddled. On the one hand, he has boosted the power of the military, created a new National Guard, and kept soldiers on the streets. On the other hand, he has talked of the need to avoid fighting cartels, and to have “hugs not bullets”.

AMLO’s call for peace is understandable considering the carnage in Mexico. Since President Felipe Calderón launched a military crackdown on cartels in 2006, there have been firefights reminiscent of civil wars, more than 300,000 murders, mass graves, and thousands of disappearances. But in practice, “hugs not bullets” has meant allowing some gangsters to act with impunity. In 2019, after soldiers arrested Ovidio Guzmán, the son of kingpin “El Chapo”, on an indictment for trafficking drugs including crystal meth, hundreds of gunmen took to the streets of the city of Culiacán. In response, AMLO ordered Guzmán’s release. By bowing to cartel intimidation, AMLO has raised the spectre of a country that is militarised but where powerful gangsters still flout the law.

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Washington has also put pressure on China to stop the chemicals at the source. In 2019, China classified all variants of fentanyl as controlled substances, fulfilling a promise to President Donald J. Trump. However, a US congressional advisory group concluded that Chinese chemists were getting round the ban. “Chinese traffickers are using various strategies to circumvent new regulations, including focusing on chemical precursors, relocating some manufacturing to India, rerouting precursor shipments through third countries, and leveraging marketing schemes to avoid detection,” says the report from 2021 by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

But given China denies its responsibility for the drug epidemic, what can be done about it? If Beijing really clamped down, it could probably reduce the supply in the short term. But there are other countries where precursors could be made. Moreover, as former DEA agent Leo Silva tells me, the cartels are looking to take their drug production to the next step. “These guys are now recruiting chemistry professors from universities so they can actually produce fentanyl in labs,” he says. “Their goal is to create the precursors in Mexico so they can also stop getting the precursors from China and dealing with them… So they can produce more, and keep more profits.”

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The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, for instance, wondered whether “people with guns” should even be responding to mental health calls. Pilot projects were launched all over the country to replace police with civilian response teams for 911 calls involving mental health, drugs and homelessness. Congresswoman Katie Porter introduced a bill to pay states and cities to set up more such units, while her colleague Cori Bush introduced a bill that does much the same. In many cities, “decriminalisation”, long a rallying cry for progressive critics of policing, became standard operating procedure.

The activists are right that police cannot be the “solution” to mental illness and drug abuse, which overlap in about 50% of cases. But the programmes developed to replace law enforcement have had mixed results. That’s because in many of America’s progressive enclaves, the problem isn’t that it’s the police who are responding to these emergencies. It’s that there is little the police can legally do once they get there.

Lejon Butler is a tall, lean, black man who lives in Rodeo, a bedroom community in the North Bay Area. As a kid in the East Bay in the Eighties, he recalls going to school and being taught to “Just Say No” to drugs, then coming home and smelling the familiar chemical odour of freebased cocaine wafting through the air.

Lejon’s mother, Martin, who is now deceased, and his stepfather, Craig, were drug addicts. But Craig was such a high-functioning addict that he was able to conceal his use from his family for years. He ran a successful landscaping business while getting high every day, even trading services with one of his clients for Oxycontin. But a few years ago, he overdosed. After that, dementia set in.

By now Craig was living in Richmond, a working-class residential city in the East Bay. A few months before Lejon’s mother passed away, Craig had started to become violent towards her. When she died, in April 2021, he fell into a deep depression. He became aggressive and unpredictable. He threatened to kill his grandson with a samurai sword. He put a dagger to his own stomach and threatened to gut himself. On January 5 this year, he started a fire in his kitchen and then refused to leave the house, acting like nothing had happened. His family called 911.

The responding officer was Brian Lande, who, as part of the county’s Mental Health Evaluation Team, specialises in handling these sorts of calls. Officer Lande had spoken to Craig only a few days earlier. He makes a point of checking in on people with mental illness and addiction issues when they’re not in crisis. That way he’s able to get to know them as they really are, and not just when they’re sick.

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When Lande arrived at Craig’s house, Lejon, his wife, and his niece Dnaya were already outside. Lande intended to put a psychiatric hold on Craig, which would allow a hospital to keep him for up to 72 hours. He also recommended that Dnaya fill out an application for a restraining order, which might help persuade the hospital to keep him there instead of just releasing him within a few hours.

The family had been through this drill many times before. Craig fell neatly through a gap in the system. He had dementia, but that didn’t count as a “mental illness” for the purposes of institutionalisation. He threatened his relatives’ lives, but he rarely actually attacked them, so the criminal justice system wasn’t inclined to take him seriously. “Someone’s going to have to get killed for them to do anything,” Lejon told me.

An ambulance pulled up, and the EMTs walked over to get a rundown from the cops. Then they went inside with two of the officers and came out with Craig on a gurney. Craig is in his seventies, and looks, if anything, older. He’s a small, stout Japanese-American man with sheet-white hair and an unkempt beard and moustache. His belligerence with the family stopped as soon as the first responders arrived. Suddenly he was compliant and reasonable.

This, according to Lejon, was a tactic of his stepfather’s. “He’s a very intelligent man,” Lejon said. His antics cease the moment he’s interacting with the authorities. Craig was deemed stable and released back to the family that evening, at which point the chaos flared right back up again.

It’s a pattern Officer Lande has seen time and again. “People have crises, they go to the hospital, they get stabilised,” he said. “They agree to a treatment plan. Then there’s no follow-up.” He continued: “Having a system of coercive mental healthcare that’s limited to emergency psychiatric crises that’s wedded strictly to voluntary participation — you’re condemning people to not getting the level of care they need. You’re condemning them to never get better.”

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Craig is drug-addicted and psychologically debilitated, but he at least has a house to sleep in and a family to keep tabs on him. Hundreds of thousands of Americans suffering mental illness and substance addiction lack even that basic structure to their lives. In recent months, we’ve seen what happens when the most violent among them are left to their demons: America’s cities have been struck by a series of grisly, unprovoked murders of women committed by homeless men.

The deceased in these homicides were not the only victims. The acutely mentally ill and drug-addicted are prisoners of their sicknesses, and despite all the money we’ve thrown at homelessness, our policies have amounted to a wholesale abandonment of these broken people to their grim fates.

In San Francisco, that chronic failure has become the city’s official policy. An entire downtown neighbourhood, right in the heart of the city, has been effectively ceded to drug dealers, addicts and the mentally ill, all in the name of compassion. Users in the Tenderloin smoke fentanyl and shoot heroin on the sidewalks in broad daylight. When it rains, the train station there becomes a huge underground shooting gallery.

Following the spectacular failure of the War on Drugs, the prevailing ideology in the addiction treatment world became “harm reduction”. Harm reduction aims to respect the rights and dignity of drug addicts by destigmatising their drug use; to minimise the social harms that accompany drug addiction such as crime, incarceration and discrimination; to save lives by providing safeguards against overdoses; and to offer detoxification but not to require it as a condition for social services and subsidies. The motto of harm reduction is “meeting people where they’re at”, rather than compelling abstinence as a one-size-fits-all-solution.

But the approach has its critics, who view it as well-intentioned but ineffective. “There are aspects of harm reduction that I support, and there are aspects that blur the lines between harm reduction and enabling,” said Tom Wolf, a former addict in San Francisco. “The most important thing is to have a full continuum of care that focuses on recovery, not an indefinite maintenance of one’s addiction.”

“Out of thousands of people I saw maybe two get clean,” said Ginny Burton, a former addict in Seattle, describing her work as a case manager employing the harm reduction model. “What I’ve seen actually work, and experienced myself, is separation. Separate the person from the destructive environment. Maintain that separation long enough for the person to get clarity. Then implement services based on priority of need.”

This is how she got clean. “Thank God I was arrested,” she said. But in cities like Seattle and San Francisco, the enforcement policies that resulted in her arrest don’t exist anymore. “If I was loaded today, I wouldn’t be able to pull myself out,” she said. “I wouldn’t be arrested.”

Tom Ostly, who was a prosecutor under the former San Francisco District Attorney, agrees that the state’s coercive powers are what are needed to jolt drug-addicted people into making the commitment to go clean. He once prosecuted a man who had walked up to a random man on the street, punched him in the face and broke his nose. The whole assault was caught on video. With his priors, the defendant was facing 12-15 years in prison.

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It turned out the man’s son had died, and the grief had turned the father into a drug addict. The day of the assault was the anniversary of his son’s death. He had been on a self-destructive spiral. Facing 15 years in prison, he agreed to go to intensive drug rehab instead, where he received counselling for PTSD. He’s now taking classes to be a drug counsellor and will soon graduate from college.

Those kinds of prosecutions just don’t happen anymore in San Francisco, where it’s considered more humane to allow people to continue killing themselves with drugs than to force them to stop. “The current administration lets everyone out and gives them no services,” said Ostly. “It’s bullshit.”

Jail is a lousy place to get clean, and drug use in and of itself should not be treated as a crime. Those lessons have come across loud and clear from the failed War on Drugs. But in rejecting the politics of mass incarceration, we’ve also thrown out the very idea of coercion. And without that, we’re empty-handed in the struggle against addiction and the rampant crime that it engenders.

Drug addiction itself is coercive. Giving an addict the “choice” to continue to use or to voluntarily get clean is as illusory as pushing someone off a roof and giving them the choice to either fall or fly. The current approach in cities such as San Francisco, Officer Lande said, “assumes people exercise full voluntary volition over their behaviour, and they don’t”. The decision to get clean has to be as non-optional as an addict’s “choice” to continue using. It has to be forced.

That doesn’t have to mean jail — in fact, it shouldn’t. Ginny was incarcerated repeatedly, but she finally got clean not through the criminal justice system but through her diversion to drug court and mandated rehabilitation. Nevertheless, coercion was an indispensable element in that successful intervention. The certainty of consequences is what finally broke through the fog of addiction.

“You don’t want to overly criminalise people,” said Officer Lande. “But you have to have some non-carceral way. Some judicial process beyond what the current system has.”

“Right now it’s very black or white,” he continued. “You’re either a psychotic or you’re not. You’re either a grave danger to others or you’re not. We don’t have anything in that grey area. We just have to wait until people are hitting rock bottom before we can do something.”

But now, rising crime is rapidly undermining the progressive consensus. Homicides rose 30% in 2020, and over two-thirds of America’s largest cities will have had even more homicides in 2021 than in 2020. At least 13 big cities will set all-time records for homicides, including Philadelphia, Austin, and Portland. Meanwhile property crimes in California’s four largest cities rose 7% between 2020 and 2021. Car break-ins in San Francisco declined temporarily in 2020, because Covid emptied the city of tourists, but they have since skyrocketed, reaching 3,000 in November. Many residents have stopped bothering to report crime.

Of course, many crime rates are still below what they were in the Eighties. And progressives are right to say that we shouldn’t panic about rising crime, since past panics contributed to cruel and crude responses, including overly long prison sentences with little in the way of real rehabilitation programmes. That’s why, in the late Nineties, I worked for George Soros’s foundation, among others, advocating for drug decriminalisation, reduced sentences for nonviolent crimes, and alternatives to incarceration.

But today it’s clear that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. In 2000, when I stopped working on criminal justice policy, progressives were advocating mandatory rehabilitation as an alternative to incarceration. Now, progressive prosecutors are simply releasing criminal suspects from custody without requiring rehab or extended probation. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for instance, a man who had run over the mother of his child with his SUV was released on $1,000 bail. Neither he nor his SUV were put under electronic surveillance. Soon after, he killed six people and injured another three dozen — by running them over with his SUV.

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Climate change is no catastrophe

By Michael Shellenberger

Meanwhile incarceration rates in the United States are at a 30-year low. In 2019, there were 17% fewer prisoners in the US than in 2009. And while progressives are right to point out that nearly half of the people in federal prisons are there for nonviolent drug offences, it’s worth noting that there are eight times more people in state prisons than federal prisons. And just 14% of people in state prisons are there for nonviolent drug offences. Half are there for murder, rape, robbery and other violent offences.

While homicides and other violent crimes merit special attention, crimes driven by drug addiction, such as shoplifting, public camping, and public defecation, undermine the fabric of city life. Progressives sold their criminal justice reforms on the idea that nonviolent offenders would be released into some kind of supervisory care, focused on treatment and rehabilitation. But often that did not happen.

Consider San Francisco. Its jail population plummeted to 766 in 2021 from 2,850 in 2019. If progressives had done what they’d promised, there would be 2,000 extra people on probation being supported to stay sober and out of trouble. That hasn’t happened. And that’s troubling because many who are released re-offend. Half of all offenders — and three-quarters of the most violent ones ­— who were released from San Francisco jails before trial, between 2016 and 2019, went on to commit new crimes. Instead of benevolent paternalism, progressives delivered libertarian anarchism. And yet all that would have been required would have been weekly drug testing, check-ins with probation officers, and electronic monitoring.

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Will California ever be safe?

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Still, if we are to reduce crime without returning to an era of mass incarceration, we need a new consensus around criminal justice — one that prioritises prevention and rehabilitation, rejects calls to defund the police, and views probation as critical to making alternatives to incarceration work. And all of that starts with understanding why people commit crimes in the first place.

Progressives attribute crime to “root causes” like poverty, inequality, and structural racism. San Francisco’s District Attorney Chesa Boudin, for example, recently claimed that, “Affordable housing, quality education, access to health care and addiction services can provide the stability that empirical evidence has shown actually deters criminal activity.” Of course these things are important, but there is no evidence that they prevent crime. Indeed, the study Boudin cited simply found that, in 12 cities where over 10% of population received welfare benefits, “more crime occurs when more time has passed since welfare payments occurred.” It did not look at the role of any of the factors he referenced.

Indeed, there is little evidence for the claim that poverty and structural racism have any impact on crime. African American crime rates were lower during the Forties and Fifties, when segregation was legal, poverty more widespread, and discrimination more overt, than between 1965 and 1990. Indeed, homicides among African Americans shot up after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And though it’s true that homicides rose during the first few years of the Great Depression, they then declined in most major cities afterward. And rates of crime, including homicide, kept declining after the 2007 financial crash and resulting recession, the worst since the Depression.

Homicide is irrational and emotional, experts agree, not a natural and predictable response to personal setbacks. Social conditions like poverty, oppression, and unemployment do not drive violent acts; people suffering from these conditions have varied rates of violence throughout history. Rather, one of the most important factors, when it comes to homicide, is the public’s belief in the legitimacy of the criminal justice system, as well as things like patriotism and “fellow feeling”. Homicide rates among unrelated adults in the United States closely follow the proportion of the public who trust their government to do the right thing, and believe that most public officials are honest. As trust in government fell in the late Sixties and early Seventies, homicides increased. When trust in government rose in the Fifties and mid-Nineties, homicides decreased.

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The day American justice died

By Bret Weinstein

So anti-police protests take a toll. In 2014, a white police officer in Ferguson killed an unarmed 18-year-old black teenager, causing demonstrations across the US. Afterwards, the police chief in nearby St Louis noted that, “the criminal element is feeling empowered by the environment.” In 2015, the US Department of Justice asked one of the country’s leading criminologists, Richard Rosenfeld, to investigate whether homicides had risen after the incident. At first, Rosenfeld was sceptical, noting that homicides in St. Louis had started to rise before then. But after looking at the evidence, he changed his mind. “The homicide increase in the nation’s large cities was real and nearly unprecedented,” he wrote in his 2016 report. Rosenfeld had found a 17% rise in homicide in the nation’s largest cities, between 2014 and 2015.

Rosenfeld told me, when I interviewed him, that last year’s Black Lives Matter protests had contributed to the homicide increase. “When people believe the procedures of formal social control are unjust,” noted Rosenfeld, “they are less likely to obey the law.” And BLM protestors fail to recognise that the people who suffer most, when the police can’t do their jobs, are black Americans, who are more likely to be victims of violent crime. They are seven to eight times more likely to be homicide victims than white Americans.

But progressives have gone one step further, by undermining the idea that police actually have any power to reduce crime. “Law enforcement is not going to prevent the violence,” claimed Philip Atiba Goff, CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, a few weeks ago. In 2020, then–vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris tweeted, “America has confused having safe communities with having more cops on the street. It’s time to change that.”

Researchers find that negative publicity about the police has a powerful impact on police officers. Little wonder, then, that in 2020, at least two dozen police chiefs or senior officers resigned, retired, or took disability leave in America’s 50 biggest cities. 3,700 beat officers left. Today there are fewer police officers per capita in America than at any time since 1992.

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San Francisco's progressive nightmare

By Oliver Wiseman

What liberals ignore is that there is good quantitative evidence that more policing can reduce crime. They argue that the police don’t actually prevent crime, they just punish people after the fact. But in 2009, President Obama’s stimulus package offered a billion dollars in grants to struggling American cities, to fund the police; cities qualifying for the grant increased policing by 3.2% and experienced a 3.5% decline in crime.

And there’s another inconvenient truth that liberals ignore: the evidence suggests that fewer cops may mean more police misconduct, because the remaining officers must work longer and more stressful hours. Working a 13-hour, rather than 10-hour, shift means cops are far more likely to experience public complaints against them, while back-to-back shifts quadruple the likelihood.

Still, progressives are busy gaslighting the public about their efforts to defund the police. A progressive columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote, “while there is continuing debate about what is driving the violent crime increases … we know for a fact that defund had nothing to do with it. Because defund never actually happened.” This is patently untrue. After the Black Lives Matter protests, more than 20 big cities reduced police budgets by at least $870 million. The LAPD’s budget was slashed by $150 million in July, for instance. It’s just that homicides rose so quickly that most cities reversed their defunding budgets. “From New York City to Los Angeles,” noted the Associated Press at the end of last month, “in cities that had some of the largest Black Lives Matter protests … police departments are seeing their finances partially restored in response to rising homicides, an officer exodus, and political pressures.”

San Francisco is a classic example. After Black Lives Matter protesters last year demanded that cities “Defund the Police,” Mayor London Breed held a press conference to announce that her city would be one of the first to do exactly that. Breed announced $120 million in cuts to the budgets of both San Francisco’s police and sheriff’s departments. Last week, Breed u-turned dramatically, announcing that she was making an emergency request to the city’s Board of Supervisors for more money to fund the police and support a crackdown on crime, including open-air drug-dealing, car break-ins, and retail theft.

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Has BLM picked the wrong target?

By Remi Adekoya

Progressives denounced her plan. They oppose enforcing laws, when addicts and mentally ill people break them, because they believe “the system” is fundamentally racist, wrong and the cause of social injustice. This explains why progressives are narrowly focused on black people killed by the police, even though 30 times more black people are killed by civilians. And it explains why Boudin and other progressive prosecutors are obsessed with emptying prisons. (“The challenge going forward,” said Boudin in 2019, “is how do we close a jail?”)

Still, there’s reason to be hopeful. When Breed announced a sweeping crackdown on open air drug dealing and crime, she said, “I’m proud this city believes in giving people second chances.”

“Nevertheless, we also need there to be accountability when someone does break the law … Our compassion cannot be mistaken for weakness or indifference … I was raised by my grandmother to believe in ‘tough love,’ in keeping your house in order, and we need that, now more than ever.”

My time working in justice reform taught me that tough love works. The Netherlands and Portugal are often held up as progressive utopias, and while it’s true that both have reduced criminal penalties, both nations still ban drug dealing, arrest drug users, and sentence dealers and users to prison or rehabilitation. “If somebody in Portugal started injecting heroin in public,” I asked the head of drug policy in that country, “what would happen to them?” He said, without hesitation, “They would be arrested.”

And being arrested is sometimes what addicts need. “I am a big fan of mandated stuff,” says former felon Victoria Westbrook. “I don’t recommend it as a way to get your life together, but getting indicted by the Feds worked for me.” Today Victoria is working for the San Francisco city government to integrate ex-convicts back into society.

It’s hard work, but it pays off. Over the last 20 years, Miami has reduced its “homeless” population by 57%, despite skyrocketing rents, by closing open drug scenes and providing free psychiatric care, drug treatment and basic shelter. In High Point, North Carolina, police targeted three neighbourhoods with persistent crack cocaine dealing. There, police officers, accompanied by local community workers, met with dealers in person, asked them to stop, and offered them job training, tattoo removal and help restarting their lives. The officers gave the dealers unsigned arrest warrants, ring binders of the evidence against them, and video proof of their crimes. It proved to be good motivation for the dealers to clean up their acts.

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Why anarchy has come to America

By Mary Harrington

People in progressive cities are often shouted down for even suggesting a role for law enforcement. “Anytime a person says, ‘Maybe the police and the health care system could work together?’ or, ‘Maybe we could try some probation or low-level arrests,’ there’s an enormous outcry,” said Stanford addiction specialist Keith Humphreys. “‘No! That’s the war on drugs! The police have no role in this! Let’s open up some more services and people will come in and use them voluntarily!’”

But there is strong quantitative evidence that probationary programs that are “swift, certain, and fair” reduce arrests, recidivism, and drug use. The most famous of these programmes is Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE). It incentivised offenders to follow probation rules by applying guaranteed, immediate, and short jail time for parole violations like failing a drug test. One study found that HOPE reduced drug use by 72%, future arrests by 55%, and incarceration by 48%.

A researcher summarised the benefits of the program, saying, “HOPE actually gets people to change their behaviour by setting up a circumstance where their natural behaviour moves in the right direction. They don’t want to be arrested and go to jail, so they stop using. That’s a profoundly rehabilitative thing to do.” In other words, HOPE rewards addicts and criminals for behaving well, instead of simply expecting them to.

It’s time for a new consensus on crime. Enforcing laws will reduce violence. Pushing offenders to take responsibility for themselves, when they leave prison, will lead them to independent lives, rather lives of crime. Progressives have done their best to undermine justice, as well as common sense, for two decades. As well as refunding the police, we should apologise to them.

Understand this imperishable fact and it becomes clear how the country fell so quickly to the Taliban over recent weeks.

The Afghan poppy has been an economic and political force for almost 150 years. As James Tharin Bradford explains in Poppies, Politics, and Power, its modern state was built in the late 1800s “in the shadow of poppy production”. But the emergence of the international drug control regime in the early 20^th century saw opium production banned. Afghanistan could no longer legally sell drugs, and as a result it lost a major source of state income as well as control over many of its rural areas, which relied on opium to survive and just carried on producing it regardless of the prohibition that Kabul was now obliged to enforce. For the first time the poppy came between the peripheries and central authority.

But then in 1979, the Soviets invaded — and opium production spiralled. The mujahedin that resisted Moscow needed cash to fight, and their make-up and available options meant they relied on two things: the rural economy and the global drug trade. Drug production may have remained illegal until 1992, but that didn’t stop Afghanistan becoming one of the most valuable opium suppliers in the world during the 1990s.

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Can the Taliban bring peace?

By Aris Roussinos

Indeed, by 1999 the country produced 79% of the world’s illicit opium. Even when, a year later, the Taliban banned its production, it still accounted for 70%. Today, it remains the country’s most valuable cash crop worth $863 million, and the “industry” is the largest national employer with more than 500,000 people in the equivalent of full-time work.

Now that the Taliban are back, there are fears that Afghanistan’s drug production — which now also includes marijuana and increasingly methamphetamine — will explode. People are worried. “Taliban mulls flooding the West with heroin to shore up Afghan economy,” according to The Telegraph. What next?

It is important to understand what the Taliban is not: it is not a drug cartel and Afghanistan was never the narco-insurgency or state of popular imagination. The group’s views on opium are almost as variegated as the Talibs themselves. Some will tell you that Opium is haram, forbidden. The Taliban banned its production in 2000 on the grounds that it was not Islamic (though political motives were probably more important). But Islam can be flexible, if necessary. Even its most ardent commandants have a surprising amount of wiggle room; for example, if you’re starving, you can even permissibly consume the “donkey you cannot eat” (the pig).

Similarly for the Taliban, matters of religion — though never the fundamentals — can be shaped according to the economic and political realities on the ground. It is this ability that informs how they deal with opium, and, therefore, what is likely to come to Afghanistan, its neighbours and perhaps the West. It also explains how the group took control so quickly and what will characterise their rule if they are to hold on.

In Afghanistan, power does not automatically stem from the state — it is negotiated and bargained for. The nature of these negotiations is complex because they differ depending on the social, geographical and economic terrain of Afghanistan, which is incredibly varied. To rule there you must manage this problem by negotiating effectively. While former President Ashraf Ghani sat in Kabul trying to nation-build by spreadsheet and hanging out on Google Meets, the Talibs were out in the villages talking to who mattered and ladling out cash. It is this that enabled them to charge through Afghanistan without much resistance. They didn’t really defeat the Afghan army; they just made lots of deals.

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How the neocons got away with it

By Razib Khan

The mountains and rural areas — especially in the poppy-growing southwest of the country — are the constituencies that anyone who wants to govern must get on-side. It is not an easy task. As David Mansfield, an international expert on opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan and the author of A State Built on Sand, points out: these are tough people who will resist the interference of outsiders — including those in government in Kabul. “They do not like being told what to do,” he tells me. “Push them too hard and they will react. The Taliban has had to consolidate their position within those rural communities over time — which means respecting their economic interests” — integral to which is the poppy. Given the choice, there is no choice: opium farming is their default setting.

This had egregious consequences for effective central governance over the past 20 years. Take the case of the southern district of Nangarhar. Both Washington and Kabul were obsessed with building the Afghan National Army (ANA) as a means of securing the state and promoting national unity. Salaries were good, recruitment was aggressive. Mansfield explained to me that for every year that poppy production was banned from 2001 to the present day, more sons from the poppy-growing southern districts swelled the ranks of the ANA and the police.

The local Talibs were upset; they hassled people. But they always got the same response: “We have no love for the army or the state. My son will gladly leave the ANA tomorrow, but you will need to pay his salary — it supports our family.” It’s not that the farmers were especially loyal to the Taliban. They just disliked a government that wouldn’t let them farm and had no interest in dialogue or respecting their way of life — which, of course, left the path clear for someone who would do both.

So what did the Taliban do? They couldn’t kill everyone. Once again, they made deals. Sons could come back from the army to visit their towns and villages — but not in uniform and only at night. And, yes, ok: the villagers could grow poppies once again to earn money that way instead. This is what has been happening all these years. Negotiations and compromises like these — in a variety of forms — took place across the country and is just one reason why the ANA collapsed so quickly, and why the provinces did not resist the Taliban.

Now they are back in power. It seems unlikely the Taliban will risk alienating an important community based around an industry that some of their commanders have healthy financial interests in to boot. And even if the Talibs wanted to ban opium production they know it would not work. “Theoretically they can prohibit it, but that doesn’t mean they can control it,” says Mansfield. Then there are the political considerations: start your reign by giving orders that people ignore and watch the veneer of power crumble.

But what about after they have consolidated their hold on things? Once again, it depends. Right now, the price of opium is low. It doesn’t make much economic sense to start wide-scale production in the face of international opposition. Right now, the Taliban is still consolidating its power and — rhetorically at least — seeking relations with as many countries (Israel excepted) as possible. At the very least it makes sense not to alienate everyone immediately. But of course, if the economy collapses, if job in cities disappear and government jobs become fewer, not to mention the end of the multiplier effects of the aid economy as NGOs flee alongside Western powers, then things might look very different.

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Why were we shocked by Afghanistan?

By Philip Hensher

And there is something else, too. An ODI report last month found that funding from international donors to Afghanistan’s remote provinces has been small, compared with the trade in legal and illegal goods that happens mostly off-the-books. In the southwestern Nimroz province, for example, money from Kabul amounts to about $20 million annually, whereas informal “taxation” from smuggling and other illegal activities raises about $235 million annually.

Crucially, as the authors note, “after the withdrawal of US and allied troops, money becomes the main instrument available to international partners during negotiations”. Simply put, cash is the only leverage we might have over the Taliban in future. But with so many hidden sources of it circulating, it could turn out to be not very much leverage at all. The Taliban could well prove to be beyond Western influence. If the group decides to sanction opium production once more, who will stop them?

Whatever happens, it will be informed not by international opinion but what the Afghans negotiate — or fail to — among themselves. Whether in the 1800s or the 1990s or the last 20 years of Western occupation, those who control Kabul do not control the periphery. As Mansfield concludes, “those in Kabul have to tread carefully. The provinces may be unruly, but they have their own way of doing things as everyone who has tried to govern over the last 40 years has discovered to their cost.”

Almost 20 years ago, Tony Blair told the Labour Party conference that 90% of the drugs sold on British streets came from Afghanistan. He was looking for an excuse to invade, of course — but Afghan heroin had been a problem for Britain, and the world, for decades. We have reversed into the future. Once again it is not only the Taliban the West must now worry about in Afghanistan, but also the poppy — and the power it wields across the world.

A series of ballots were held in states across the country on this issue — and the results demonstrate that the disastrous War on Drugs, launched half a century ago by a crooked Republican president and adopted enthusiastically across the planet, is rapidly coming to an end in the US. The most dramatic advances were in a pair of staunchly Democrat states, yet even in some of the most conservative corners of the country such as Mississippi, Montana and South Dakota voters strongly backed measures to liberalise drug laws, even as they supported another term of Trump.

In every state where a proposed drug reform was on the ballot — there were six plus DC — it won. British politicians, so scared of electoral and media backlash on this issue, should note how far and how fast the American electorate has moved in the wake of the terrible opioid epidemic that struck the country so hard. A poll last week found cannabis legalisation is now backed by 68% of Americans — a figure that has more than doubled in two decades to its highest level yet, with almost half of Republicans supporting the idea. “Voters kept on being told that legalisation would unleash chaos but they can see that has not happened so now things are shifting further,” said one Democrat drug reform advocate.

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Lockdown won't end the war on drugs

By ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN

Most striking was the passing of Measure 110 in Oregon. This western state was the first to decriminalise cannabis possession in 1973, just two years after Richard Nixon declared drugs “public enemy number one”, as his way of uniting Middle America against both African Americans demanding civil rights and hippies leading the anti-war movement. Now it has decriminalised possession for personal use of all drugs, while diverting funds from marijuana taxes into cash-starved harm reduction and treatment projects. People caught in possession of, say, heroin will be told to pay a $100 fine — but it is waived if they agree to enter recovery services.

Oregon’s bold move is “arguably the biggest blow to the war on drugs to date”, said Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which pushed the idea. The reason is simple: the American state, like others struggling with high rates of addiction, has seen that trying to defeat the drug industry by locking up users is a failure that backfires on society. Almost one in eight people in Oregon admits to use of illicit substances over the past month. This results in about two deaths each day and more than 10 people convicted daily on drug charges. So they have chosen to follow Portugal’s successful stance, which was, in 2001, to decriminalise drugs and invest in public health efforts to fight addiction. The number of heroin users and drug-related deaths there has plummeted.

Meanwhile, Washington DC followed four other liberal cities in three states by agreeing to decriminalise therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs. The initiative to sanction the use of ayahuasca, magic mushrooms and mescaline was supported by more than three-quarters of voters, following on from the furious national debate that has broken out over policing and a milder one over use of such drugs for treating mental health problems. The push came from Melissa Lavasani, a mother of two and city government official whose depression was cured by microdosing. “What are the moms at school going to say about this?” was her first thought at the idea of publicity. Now we can see their answer: what a sensible idea.

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The absurdity of legalising drugs

By Peter Franklin

Then there is cannabis. Four more states — Arizona, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota — voted last week to legalise and regulate recreational adult markets for the drug. This means more than a third of Americans now live in one of the 15 states where adult citizens can buy, grow or consume cannabis without fear of the law. Mississippi, one of the deepest red states in the US, ignored its Republican governor’s warning about “stoners” and “pot shops everywhere”, to endorse medical cannabis, becoming the 38th state to sanction such use. Politicians who make such pronouncements seem like dinosaurs even in US conservative circles, given that some of the most die-hard Trump supporters such as Florida’s Republican congressman Matt Gaetz enthusiastically push reform.

As I have seen for myself covering this story, the rules on medical cannabis vary hugely from state to state. In some it is de facto decriminalisation and many ‘patients’ seem suspiciously young, while in other places, such as New York, there is strong focus on health. One of the biggest firms in the market is Columbia Care, which was co-founded by former London police officer Michael Abbott and is now a listed company worth almost $1bn. “We know politicians are trailing behind the voters,” said Adam Goers, the firm’s vice president for corporate affairs. “Reform is being driven by Republican mums whose kids have epilepsy in places such as Texas, Georgia and Virginia, not just hippies and social justice advocates.”

Yet last week’s ballots in Oregon and Washington show how the US drug debate is moving beyond cannabis into tougher terrain, with questions as to the best way for society to live with drugs, while curbing their potential for serious harm. It seems clear that punitive prohibition is both pointless and highly damaging. It fails to stop the flow, while fuelling the deaths, the destruction of families, the despoliation of communities and the dreadful violence of gangs fighting to control the lucrative trade bequeathed by Nixon. Never forget that Trump rose to power with the support of scores of small towns left battered by economic change and then shattered by an opioid epidemic causing more carnage among Americans than the Vietnam War at its peak.

Britain is now being left behind as the US joins more progressive nations in shifting from punishment towards harm reduction, although parts of our own nation have higher drug-related death rates. Most of our blinkered politicians seem impervious to the rising tide of these deaths of despair, which disproportionately hit the most deprived communities they claim to care about in their hollow speeches. They avert their gaze from Europe’s worst fatality rates, leaving any progress reliant on police chiefs infuriated over the squandering of their resources and ordinary citizens pushed to the limit. People such as Charlotte Caldwell, the battling mother of a boy with life-threatening epilepsy who forced the theoretical legalisation of medical cannabis, and Peter Krykant, a Glasgow outreach worker who defiantly set up a mobile drug-consumption unit after the government thwarted official plans.

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Scotland's drug shame

By Darren McGarvey

But just as in Britain — where five police forces tired of fighting an unwinnable war have stopped arresting users in favour of diversion into treatment — the legacy of haphazard liberalisation led by states in response to local initiatives is a legislative mess. Firms such as Columbia and scores like them can list on Canada’s stock exchange but not move products across state borders, and struggle to secure banking and insurance with prohibition at federal level. There are high street cannabis shops and clinics in some states — and in one state, all drugs are decriminalised — but in others, thousands of people are still being arrested. There are also people stuck for life behind bars without hope of parole having been caught with small amounts of cannabis after previous convictions.

This is an issue, like gay marriage, that shows how fast attitudes in society can shift. Joe Biden, the President-elect, is an old-school drug warrior who seems to have repented while his younger running mate Kamala Harris comes from California and clearly understands the emerging agenda. Decriminalisation is now endorsed by 31 United Nations agencies as well as many medical leaders in Britain. Yet how much better to have such important public health reforms led by politicians guiding policy in tandem with experts, as seen in countries such as Canada, Luxembourg and Uruguay, rather than a random process driven by families and activists, some of whom are industry-funded. There is always a danger that any political void will be filled by self-serving commercial interests.

Attempts to try to stop the supply and use of drugs are absurdly ineffective. Just look at the falling prices, rising potency, new synthetic products being created and the hideous number of overdose deaths. Stuffing people who use drugs in prison is cruel and destructive, especially if they are suffering from mental health problems. Given the shocking racial disparities in drug convictions, these issues are entwined closely with the explosive race debate. It is significant that one other US area where there is consensus across tribal divides is the allied issue of prison reform. But at least the US is moving towards more progressive policies on drugs. Slowly but surely, it is ending its long war while Britain fights on with self-harming futility.

El Chapo continues to have a cult-like following in parts of Mexico because his organisation helps citizens when the Mexican government is absent or incompetent. By distributing aid boxes in the city of Guadalajara, the family business, El Chapo 701, is betting that many Mexicans will trust them more during the current crisis than President López Obrador, who is leading a nation suffering severe economic stress.

The absence of the state allowed mercenary drug militants, the mafia and gangs to thrive, long before the arrival of Covid-19, and this current pandemic has merely reinforced the ability of these groups to capitalise on a once-in-a-century emergency. Many militant groups, dismissed in the West as terrorists, are stepping up to help impoverished communities that rarely if ever see state support. Think the Taliban in Afghanistan, MS-13 in El Salvador and gangs in Rio De Janeiro’s favelas.

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Mexico's bloody drugs struggle

By Ian Birrell

In Italy, too, organised crime entities are giving out food and providing essential services to citizens. As the Italian writer Roberto Saviano recently observed:

“In Italy, criminal clans which have lost their traditional drug-dealing spots outside schools and parks have resorted to home delivery on request, adopting a method known in Anglo-Saxon countries as Dial-a-Dealer.

“But there is another door-to-door service that Italian mafia clans — and in particular the Camorra of Naples — have established: daily home deliveries of essentials. In the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods of Naples, where many people had jobs in the black economy and are now out of work, it is the clans that step in to provide welfare, giving families bread, milk and other basics.

“According to Italian anti-mafia sources, the Camorra has also started providing loans — but not at its usual high interest rates — of between 50% and 70%. Demand for loans is so high in this period that it is still profitable to offer competitive rates, even lower than those offered by the banks.”

It’s easy to presume that the global drug trade will irrevocably change after the pandemic passes or eases. Pro drug-war warriors and policy optimists will tell you that it will be increasingly difficult for cartels to use the same trafficking routes as before due to uneven global lockdowns, stronger law enforcement and decreased global demand.

Believe none of it. I’ve spent the last five years investigating the global drug war for my new book, Pills, Powder and Smoke: Inside the Bloody War on Drugs, and a key component of my research is the often hidden aspects of the drug war that garner little Western media coverage. From Guinea-Bissau in West Africa — a key cocaine smuggling hub — to Honduras — where Washington’s violent drug war is fuelling rampant corruption and violence — there’s no evidence that these hidden elements will dissipate when the world overcomes Covid-19.

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What's driving so many kids to 'go country'?

By Max Daly

Western supply of illicit substances is currently reduced, and users may instead look for more dangerous alternatives, but it won’t last. If anything, when life snaps back to a form of normality, it’s likely that in many Western countries interest in procuring cocaine, heroin, psychedelics and other drugs could increase as society looks to celebrate personal freedom while coping with economic depression.

Dark web drug sales, a safe option compared to purchasing illicit substances in person with a dealer, will continue to grow. A friend who uses heroin in Australia tells me that he’s had no issues in the past few months accessing the drug, though many people he knows have now moved online to buy MDMA [ecstasy], cannabis and poppy seeds to grow opium.

This is a pandemic that isn’t distributed evenly: it disproportionally affects people of colour, and it’s likely that law enforcement will continue to police illegal drug use most severely in minority community neighbourhoods. It’s a grimly familiar tale for the most affected communities in the US, UK, Australia and Europe.

Most drug users in these countries rarely if ever think about the source of their drugs. Next time a friend wants to use cocaine, ask them if they know where it’s from and who has suffered to get the drug up their nostril. The cocaine trade is in limbo in the source countries like Colombia (although relatively healthy across Europe) but this paralysis won’t last.

Cocaine is a dirty drug that causes a horrific amount of misery (and although Western users are complicit in continuing the trade, it’s the prohibitionists who are most to blame for refusing to imagine a more ethical alternative). Read journalist Toby Muse’s new book, Kilo: Inside the Deadliest Cocaine Cartels — from the Jungles to the Streets, for brilliant and rare insights into the trade.

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The Covid-19 class war

By James Bloodworth

Nations have choices to make when deciding drug policies during a pandemic. Do they maintain the default “war on drugs” rhetoric and implementation or try something more humane and sensible? Argentina is using seized assets from drug traffickers and sending those resources to federal police. Such an idea is open to abuse — corrupt police and officials can use the assets for political influence — but in theory the initiative is a good one if the resources are redirected cleverly and morally.

In the UK, drug dealers are finding innovative ways to deliver drugs, including dressing up as nurses, delivery drivers and joggers to get heroin to those who want it. Dealers are born to be ingenious. One drug worker from Sussex told Vice: “A mini-cab driver told me he would normally be ferrying kids around on school runs, but now he’s staying busy by driving all the dealers around town.” In Berlin, dealers are still selling their goods as normal while wearing face masks and gloves.

One UK dealer told Vice that although prices for many products have increased, “markets have to innovate and diversify in response to change. So, I’m importing and selling concentrates and vape pens, called Shatterpens. They contain pure cannabis oil, extracted with C02, no solvents.” He said that domestically-grown hash and cannabis were far more in demand while the lockdown continued. Police are still targeting drug importers and yet the smell of futility hangs over these efforts.

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Is the lockdown doing more harm than good?

By Tom Chivers

Covid-19 is forcing enterprising drug cartels to adapt to radically shifting circumstances (though traffickers are likely to re-emerge with vigour once trade routes re-open and dealers and users spend more time outside their homes). Take the ingredients for fentanyl, for example, up to 50 times more powerful than heroin and a key cause of US deaths during the opioid crisis. Although Mexican cartels produced fentanyl for the US market, they used to rely on precursor ingredients including from one state-backed factory in Wuhan (the Chinese city where Covid-19 reportedly originated).

This factory has now shut down and traffickers are increasingly forced to raise the prices of whatever stocks they still have. It’s unsustainable in the long run, and fentanyl users in the US will inevitably find alternative ways to source the drug, but Mexican cartels are no less affected by the coronavirus than other profitable businesses. Some Mexican entrepreneurs are shunning cartels entirely and growing blood-free cannabis (an initiative that pre-dates the pandemic but will hopefully increase after it passes).

Covid-19 is likely to be a massive, temporary inconvenience for the global drug trade and little more. Why? Because Western demand for illicit substances has never been higher and will continue to be so (and yes, some people are still attending drug-fuelled parties during the pandemic).

One of the main takeaways from my years investigating the drug trade has been the staggering hypocrisy of those pushing a brutal “war on drugs”. There are no statistics that support its success: arrest one drug kingpin and 20 more will emerge in his place, and yet year after year governments and many in the media push for no softening of prohibition.

Although the full legalisation and regulation of all drugs is now on the agenda in the nations most directly affected by the violent status quo, there are dangers of legalising drugs without considering all the ramifications (look at California and its failure to support the African-American community after cannabis legalisation). Covid-19 has highlighted the existing racial, social and political fault-lines around drugs, and those who use and produce them; but too often the most marginalised in the West and around the world are forgotten in the rush to judgment.

But is this a true reflection of the facts? Knife crime, it’s true, has risen in London, but it is not significantly higher than it was in 2011/12. There were just over 14,000 knife or sharp instrument crimes recorded by the Metropolitan Police in 2011/12; there were 14,700 in 2017/18.

The more worrying statistic, in fact, is that knife crime is rising more steeply outside the capital, beyond Khan’s purview. 42 out of the 44 police forces across England and Wales have reported rises since 2011. There were 39,818 offences in the 12 months to September 2018, compared with 23,945 in the year ending March 2014. Knife crime has now risen for the fourth consecutive year in England and Wales.

As the BBC reports:

West Midlands Police has seen an 87% increase in knife crime offences since 2013/14, while there has been a 47% rise for the Metropolitan Police, a 95% increase for Cambridgeshire Police, and a 99% increase for Thames Valley.

Of course, behind every statistic is an individual tragedy. There was heavily pregnant Kelly Mary Fauvrelle, who was killed on 29 June in Thornton Heath, aged 29. Or Jodie Chesney, a 17-year-old who was stabbed and killed while playing music in a park in Harold Hill, Havering, on 1 March. Or 16-year-old Sidali Mohamed, a refugee from Somalia who was stabbed to death outside a Birmingham sixth form college on 13 February. Many of the victims are, indeed, extremely young. The number of 16-year-olds treated for stab wounds has doubled over the past five years.

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Do police numbers really affect knife crime?

By Tom Chivers

So what is to blame? Suspicion has fallen on everything from austerity to drill music to family breakdown to the personal failings of Sadiq Khan. But some of these explanations carry more weight than others.

Austerity measures introduced since 2010 do appear to have had an effect, though not always in an obvious way. A recent study by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Knife Crime found that councils which had implemented significant reductions in youth services were more likely to have seen an increase in stabbings. Correlation does not equal causation, of course, yet the four areas worst-hit by youth spending cuts saw some of the largest increases in knife crime. Nationwide, councils have cut spending on youth services by about 40% since 2014; Wolverhampton, which reduced spending by 91% is covered by the West Midlands force, which has reported an 87% rise.

Labour, meanwhile, has been quick to blame falling police numbers for rising knife crime. “You cannot keep people safe on the cheap and these deep cuts have had terrible consequences,” the Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott wrote recently for the political blog Left Foot Forward.

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Britain’s most senior police chief, Cressida Dick, appears to agree, and has claimed that there is “some link” between violent crime and falling police numbers. The number of police officers in England and Wales has been cut by more than 20,000 since 2010. This seems the most obvious place to start pointing the finger. However Theresa May caused consternation earlier this year when she said there was “no direct correlation between certain crimes and police numbers”.

Indeed, it is difficult to draw a definitive causal link between rising knife crime and falling police numbers, as Tom Chivers has argued. Violent crime typically occurs in the heat of the moment and is less prone to influence by rational calculations about the likelihood of getting caught. Yet this is not proof of no link.

Police chiefs point to the “county lines” phenomenon to explain the problem. This is where inner-city drug gangs transport drugs – and violence with it – to small towns and rural areas using children and young adults as drug mules. County lines activity was reported by 71% of police forces in England and Wales in 2016. Internal police documents seen by The Guardian reveal that “85% of forces report knives referenced in relation to county lines intelligence, 74% report firearms referenced”. Welfare cuts may also have contributed to the problem, as a nationwide increase in youth homelessness has left more young people susceptible to the lure of gangs.

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Why I regret my war on drugs

By Charles Falconer

There is also an ethnic disparity in knife crime – in terms of both its victims and perpetrators – which may relate to this. Black men make up 44% of victims and 48% of suspects of knife crime, according to a Freedom of Information request by Sky. Just as homeless young people can be drawn into gangs, those from fatherless homes may be lured in too. Six in ten black Caribbean children and those in mixed-race households grow up in single-parent families. The comparable figure is 22% for those from white families.

Britain’s law and order brigade – and many of Sadiq Khan’s critics – are inclined to call for more stop and search whenever knife crime is reported in the news. Yet it was Sadiq Khan’s predecessor as Mayor, Boris Johnson, who significantly rolled this back.

As the Mayor Watch website notes:

“By October 2013 [during Boris’ second term as Mayor] the number of stops in some boroughs had fallen by as much as 43%.”

One of the reasons stop and search is so controversial is because it so disproportionately affects the black population. Forty-three per cent of those targeted by stop and search in 2018 in the capital were black, according to the London Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. Despite accounting for 59.8% of London’s population, white people made up only 35.5% of stop and searches. Sadiq Khan recently promised a stop and search “blitz” – three years after promising to “do everything in my power to cut stop and search”.

Yet the effectiveness of the tactic is limited, and potentially damaging to community relations. According to a study carried out over ten years by the College of Policing, higher rates of stop and search were associated with “very slightly lower than expected rates of crime” in the following week or month – but only for certain crimes such as burglary and drug offences.

Sentencing, too, is still mired in confusion: tough-sounding announcements from the government are often unmatched by actions on the ground. The Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 introduced a minimum custodial sentence of six months for repeat knife crime offenders. Yet recent figures show that two-thirds of those caught carrying a knife escaped a custodial sentence, while one-in-five repeat offenders were still avoiding prison.

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Perspective is important. Violent crime in England and Wales is significantly down on where it stood two decades ago. Two in every 100 adults were victims of violent crime last year, compared with five in every 100 adults in 1995. There does appear to have been an uptick since 2015 – it rose by 19% in the year to September 2018. Yet it is still far lower than it was during the 1990s.

It is also far lower in London than in most American cities, despite Trump’s intervention.

Knife crime is a complex issue that has a range of societal and structural causes. Reducing it will require an approach that not only apprehends the perpetrators but which also deals with the underlying causes: economic insecurity and austerity, lenient sentencing, family breakdown, structural racism, the glamorisation of gang violence as well as the failing ‘war on drugs’.

The notion that Sadiq Khan alone is responsible for the spike in knife-related crime – barely three years after taking office – carries little weight when knife crime has been rising faster outside of the capital. Those jumping on every tragedy to designate London ‘stab city’ or ‘Londonistan’ appear more concerned with damaging community relations than with preventing the further loss of life.

But this is unfair. What the Pharisees were trying to do was entirely laudable – they sought to extend the rules that religious conservatives believed only applied to priests in the Temple, and make them applicable to all Jews. In modern terms, the Pharisees wanted to democratise religion, to take it out of the Temple into the market place.

Christians have not only been unjustifiably harsh on the Pharisees – not least under the influence of St Paul who was himself an ex-Pharisee – they have also, precisely because of this, lost sight of a basic Christian message.

To put it crudely, Christian morality is unattainable: its basic teachings are set up as to be virtually impossible for anyone to follow. For example, in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus argues that adultery is not just having sex with someone who is not your wife, but even to look at a woman lustfully counts as adultery. This is a council of perfection that, pretty much, no man can meet. And so hypocrisy is endemic to the whole Christian project. To put it another way, Christianity deliberately engineers a crisis of moral failure among its adherents, thus to oblige them to seek repentance and an awareness that they depend upon God for their salvation, not on their own pathetic efforts.

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Why I regret my war on drugs

By Charles Falconer

This is part of the back-story to the complicated moral valence of the word hypocrisy. These days, however, the charge of hypocrisy has risen high up the league-table of moral crimes with which to charge someone. And yes, I am thinking about Michael Gove and his cocaine admission.

I have a theory about why hypocrisy has become moral crime number one: because in an age of moral relativism, where it is widely believed that our values are self-generated, inconsistency is just about the only thing we can get someone on. If morality is our own business, our own invention, then not living up to our own rules is the only thing that counts as moral failure. And, so, moral disputation becomes a game of “gotcha!”.

I have a totally different take on hypocrisy. Better to have high standards that you fail to meet, than low standards that are designed around your own moral (in)capacity. For me, hypocrisy is an inevitable by-product of upholding high – even objective – moral standards. If you are not a hypocrite, you are just not trying hard enough.

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Why God needs skin in the game

By Giles Fraser

Take the case of Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes, a mischief-making journalist who made his name with a succession of stories exposing the failures of politicians. He came onto the Moral Maze programme this week, having accused Gove of double standards – the politician was taking cocaine at the same time as condemning the practice in his Times column.

I do not condemn Staines for his “gotcha” approach to journalism. That is his job, and he serves an important function. Nonetheless, his own position struck me as a different form of failure.

He proudly admitted his regular and continued cocaine use, and refused to see anything wrong with that. He was colourful and entertaining and refreshingly open. Indeed, so open that he was even prepared to admit that as a father of teenage girls, his position to them on drug use was: do as I say not as I do. So an honest hypocrite then.

But nonetheless, I was left with the impression that his position was designed with maximum consistency in mind. He had formulated his moral position so that it could easily fit around his personal proclivity for recreational pharmaceuticals. And that is surely the wrong way around. In the world of “gotcha” morality, Staines is well protected against the very strategy that he employs to devastating effect against others. But at what cost?

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How moral is mockery?

By Giles Fraser

The guest that followed him on the Maze told a very different story about our moral formation. The psychoanalyst Dr Aaron Balick says we are all hypocrites; hypocrisy is constitutive of the human condition. And this was an unsurprising observation for a psychoanalyst to make, because in his working life he is constantly dealing with the gap that exists between people’s self-presentation and the deeper reality of their lives.

An important part of the psychoanalytic enterprise is to bring these different parts of our lives into a more fruitful conversation with each other. The Staines position seems to me a denial of the deep contradictions that form us as human beings. This makes him bullet-proof on the chat-show, but, I suspect, tragically exposed on the couch, if he were ever to find himself there.

Now, I apologise to Staines for using him as my example here. I do not know him. And he was entertaining company. But he is an interesting example because of his professional career as a hypocrisy hunter.

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How Parliament disdains the people

By Giles Fraser

His work speaks to much of our current political predicament. On the one hand, we want out politicians to be like us, to share our complexity and to have experienced some of the same moral challenges and failures of our own lives. Thus we scorn Theresa May for the inanity of her confession that the worst thing she has ever done is run through a wheat field. If that really is the worst thing she has ever done, then she really is the Maybot – something, as the word implies, less than fully and messily human. Yet, at the same, time, we condemn our politicians when they are exposed for doing something a little more morally problematic (and interesting) than wheat-field trespass. We ask the impossible of them. And we set them up to fail.

Balick argues that we take pleasure and relief in exposing the hypocrisy of others because it is a convenient way of pointing away from our own failures. “Gotcha” morality is a strategy of misdirection. “Use every man after his desert and who should ‘scape whipping?” was Hamlet’s response to the pompous and self-righteous Polonius, a line that Freud himself quotes with approval in one of his letters. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

Personally, I am more comfortable with politicians who are hypocrites. Being one myself, I understand the type. The Pharisees were basically right: better to aim high and fail, than to be complacently content with the small and closed world of our own moral limitations.

Why I like my politicians to be hypocrites

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1. End austerity

Austerity has failed. It must be killed off for good. We have seen over the past decade, just as we saw in the 1930s, that cutting and slashing is the worst possible response to an economic crisis. By sucking activity out of the economy, austerity reduces tax revenues, hits public services and incomes, and prolongs recovery, thereby causing unnecessary pain and suffering to working people.

We need to resist the idea that a government should manage the nation’s finances in the same way that a household manages its budget. On the contrary, when everyone else is retrenching, it is the government’s job to lean against market logic and maintain spending and investment so as to keep the economy buoyant and tax revenues healthy.

Full employment, not inflationary targets, should be the prime goal of economic policy, and we should reinvigorate our much-neglected manufacturing sector by ending the overvaluation of our currency and making our exports more competitive in the international marketplace.

2. Renationalise our railways

We should take our railway system back into public ownership. Privatisation has led to an unreliable, overcrowded, fragmented, overpriced and investment-starved service. It has failed both the passenger and taxpayer.

Since our railways were sold off, government direct subsidy and fares have increased in real terms by 200% and 20% respectively. It is a scandal.

Renationalisation would be a hugely popular measure with the public. Post-Brexit would be the perfect occasion: we will be free from EU laws prohibiting public ownership of railways.

In keeping with our determination to make our air cleaner, we should redirect funds set aside for road-building and the aviation industry to a substantial expansion of our railway network. Our over-reliance on the car must end.

Poor transport links have contributed to economic decline in many of our coastal communities. We should assist regeneration efforts by reconnecting these isolated communities with our public railway system.

HS2 is an unnecessary folly. We should scrap it.

3. Time for an English parliament

We should create an English parliament with real democratic power inside a federal United Kingdom. For too long, the English have – in contrast to the Scots, Welsh and Irish – been denied their national identity and political representation. This lack of empowerment has deepened a sense of alienation and resentment among the English.

Surveys show that the overwhelming majority of people in England identify strongly as English. This is particularly so in areas that voted for Brexit.

Creating a fairer economy will not by itself bring people together. Where we currently have disunity and atomisation throughout our communities – not least because identity politics proliferates – we must foster instead a spirit of civic nationalism that generates a sense of belonging, patriotism and shared citizenship between all of our people.

So it’s time we again recognised England as a legitimate political and cultural entity in its own right – and gave the English their own parliament.

4. Actually wage the ‘war on drugs’

The scourge of drugs and our failure to tackle it has caused widespread devastation. The degree to which it has afflicted our communities – through crime and family breakdown – is inestimable. Our indulgence of illegal drug use has also contributed to the misery and carnage in supply countries such as Colombia and Mexico.

There is no ‘war on drugs’ in the UK; it is a myth. Our authorities routinely ignore illegal drug taking. We have decriminalisation in all but name.

The ‘turn a blind eye’ approach has plainly failed. Instead, we should mirror the approach of Japan – a free, law-governed and deeply civilised society – which enforces its drugs laws rigorously and, as a consequence, sees much lower usage. Because deterrence works, Japan’s prisons aren’t packed with illegal drugs users.

Cannabis, the use of which is becoming increasingly correlated with mental illness in scientific studies, should remain illegal.

5. Get a grip on immigration

Our failure regarding immigration has reinforced the disconnect that has emerged between the political establishment and the majority of voters over recent years. We have a proud tradition of welcoming new arrivals to our shores. The vast majority of Britons are decent and tolerant; they simply ask for proper control of the system.

Yet rapid and large-scale immigration into hard-pressed communities has violated the sense of place and belonging felt by many of our citizens. And by facilitating the transfer of workers from low to high-wage economies, free movement laws have proved to be a boss’s dream, as they drive down labour costs.

Migrants are, of course, not to blame personally. But all governments should seek to regulate the labour supply – which is, after all, just another market dynamic – so as to secure the best outcome for workers.

We should celebrate immigration, but we must also get a firmer grip on the system and ensure that future numbers are modest and manageable.

Click here to compare Paul Embery’s pledge card to the others in our Beyond Brexit series.

I am far from alone in having supported these policies. Yet perhaps my responsibility was more than most, since I was in charge of the justice system from 2003 to 2007 – one of the departments that put prohibition into action. But it is now time to acknowledge our collective failure, accept the evidence and start examining alternatives – ones that include the legalising and regulating of drug supply.

This sounds controversial, even though drug reform is sweeping much of the world from Canada to South Africa, the United States and Uruguay. But I make the suggestion based on evidence and my determination to protect the public from the ever more obviously cruel consequences of a wrong policy – not from a libertarian stance in favour of free choice.

In 1961, when I was ten years old, Britain signed the United Nations Single Convention on Drugs committing all member states to a global prohibition on production, supply and use of certain drugs for non-medical use. Xenophobia was the foundation of the convention, identifying those who were associated with the use of cannabis, opium and cocaine – namely Hispanics, Chinese and Afro-Americans.

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The cosy relationship between big pharma and doctors is killing people

By Charlotte Pickles

Ten years later, the Labour Party supported the passing of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. It has continued to support drug prohibition ever since – in government and in opposition – although this pernicious policy has brought distress to millions and death to tens of thousands.

Prohibition, though, was a failure. You just have to look at the number of overdose deaths in Britain compared with countries that have moved from punishment to treatment, such as Portugal, to see this approach has been catastrophic. It created a fiercely hostile environment, acted as a barrier to troubled individuals seeking help and, in the process, hugely damaged the criminal justice system.

Westminster produced a lethal combination of political conformity and enduring cowardice, retaining the status quo as the body count rose and communal pain surged. For my own party, this was especially cruel since the damage is most acute in the poorest communities.

Westminster also produced cliches. “Tough on crime tough on the causes of crime” was the ultimate political sound bite. The perfect triangulation, providing all the benefits of sounding authoritarian and liberal at the same time. It was smart politics, protecting the Left from attack by a hostile media. It reflected the mood of the political time. Yet it prevented us politicians from acknowledging the damage done through criminalisation and from considering alternatives to a crime-led approach.

Further reading

America's other drug epidemic

By Peter Franklin

Relying on prohibition as the main policy tool gifted the drugs trade to criminals, creating a free and uncontrolled black market in which the biggest profits went to the most violent players. Meanwhile, we criminalised generations caught up in drugs, betraying people who should have been able to look to the Labour Party for a way out of their abandoned hell.

The main casualties were – still are – the poorest in society, since the drug war is in effect an attack on the working class. Clearly many users do not get caught up in crime or problematic use. But of the minority who do become hooked, often to blot out trauma or mental health troubles, some will deal to feed their habit or commit acquisitive crime to pay for supplies. If the official response is courts and criminalisation, this minority is further marginalised and even less likely to seek help. So there is no treatment and terrifying numbers die: because of overdoses after buying unknown drugs; because of impurities as gangsters pad out the products; and because of diseases caused by sharing needles.

We lose ten people a day in drug-related deaths. That means 70 Britons are dying each week, 280 each month – and most of these deaths are preventable. Perpetuating this dynamic is anathema to our values. It’s an issue that cuts across party lines: we are trapped in a drug policy crisis and Westminster needs to wake up to it.

For every pound we spend fighting the drug war, we have to spend many more just to clear up the mess. It is a terrible irony that the Home Office is pursuing a policy that creates half of all property crime and channels a vast income stream towards organised criminals. And the war on drugs is also filling our prisons. We currently have the highest prison population in Western Europe. And these prisons are awash with drugs, creating new addicts.

The drug laws are disproportionately enforced against black people. More and more we are seeing reports of how children and teenagers are being exploited to deal drugs across county lines, in operations similar to Prohibition-era bootlegging. Meanwhile the drugs on sale are growing stronger and cheaper, which is more clear evidence of failure. It is often easier for youngsters to buy cannabis and ecstasy than alcohol.

Further reading

When will politicians quit the war on drugs?

By Ian Birrell

The damage goes way beyond our own borders. As signatories to UN prohibitionist treaties on drugs, our government is complicit in creating carnage from Mexico (30 000 people died in drug war violence last year) through to Mali (when the cocaine supply route shifted to West Africa and helped foster a coup). The global drug war is undermining security in as many as 60 nations while contributing to human rights abuses from the Philippines through to Bangladesh and Iran. In the United States, similar policies contributed to the deaths of 61,000 opioid users last year alone.

I recently returned from Portugal, where drug users are decriminalised and a health-based approach to drug use is in place. Consequently they have a drug-related death rate one-20th of ours. But the Portuguese have not legalised and regulated drug supply and the trade is still left in the hands of criminals, so I would like to see Britain go further. After all, legally regulated cannabis is now on sale in 10 US states, Uruguay and, from mid-October Canada, leaving governments in control of supply. There is no reason why this cannot be done here for all other drugs. The precise regime would be different for different drugs: for example heroin would only be available on prescription, with support from a clinician.

The British Medical Journal recently joined the ranks of those supporting the legal regulation of all drugs; even The Sun has asked if we should decriminalise drug possession. The Prison Governors Association accepts the war on drugs has failed. More tellingly, every cross party group that has ever examined UK drug policy has called for fundamental reform, including the Home Affairs Select Committee report of 2002 that called on the government to explore legalisation and regulation at the UN.

We must accept the facts.

So yes, I have changed my mind and I am now of the view the Labour Party cannot achieve its goals for disadvantaged individuals and poorer communities if prohibition remains in place. We need policies based on safety and health, not punishment. Numerous MPs on all sides now say the drug war has failed – but it would be more honest to say that it is we parliamentarians who have failed. We have individually and collectively failed to engage with the overwhelming evidence of catastrophic policy failure.

So where do we go from here?

The Labour party should call for an end to the drug war and commit to the legal regulation of drug production and supply in its next manifesto. Already two MPs – Thangam Debbonaire and Jeff Smith – have initiated the Labour Campaign for Drug Policy Reform. We have a radical Labour leader. And as a party we believe that the state should intervene where necessary to help and protect communities, especially the most disadvantaged and those devastated by violence. But for much too long, the Labour Party has failed to engage with these issues and ended up following a stale consensus driven by right-wing Republicans such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

We need to accept there are alternatives to policies that have failed so many working class communities. We need to admit that we abandoned whole generations to the scourge of drug addiction. We need to confront our political failures and listen to those police chiefs pushing for saner policies. Above all, we need to take back control of drug supply from the most violent gangsters. And it needs to be done sooner rather than later.

Further reading

The even more deadly hurricane surging across America

By Ian Birrell

‘Look at me’ says the politician or pundit who uses it approvingly, ‘look how tough I am’ .

But for the politician or pundit who uses it disapprovingly, there are equal and opposite pretences: ‘look at me – see how reasonable I am, how realistic!’

But the war on drugs isn’t a war at all. It is an ongoing and complex process of law enforcement. It has different components which are handled in different ways by different jurisdictions and with differing degrees of effort, intelligence and success. Generalisations are impossible – except one: unlike war, law enforcement is never ‘won’.

Unless rendered obsolete by broader economic, social or technological change, crimes are rarely, if ever, eliminated. Theft, fraud, counterfeiting, people trafficking, knife crime, smuggling, tax evasion: there’s no end to any of those – and yet the ‘war’ against them all continues because the aim is not victory, but containment.

Further reading

Why I regret my war on drugs

By Charles Falconer

The complaint that government action against an undesirable activity ‘will only drive it underground’ overlooks the fact that this is better than the alternative – i.e. having it out in the open. There are certain things that law-abiding people are entitled not to have normalised; not to have their children see; not have to struggle against alone without the law on their side. And that’s especially important for the poorest and most marginalised communities.

None of that means we should abandon those who slip into the clutches of drug dependency – and want help. I think that prison for petty offenders is, for the most part, uselessly punitive. Aside from the waste of lives, there is the waste of money, which, in the case of most drug offences, would be much better used for treatment and rehabilitation. With due attention to context, we should look to other countries for examples of successful treatment-first, prison-last, approaches.

However, a compassionate, rehabilitative approach to drug dependency and legalising drugs are two different things – and the former does not require the latter. Indeed, the criminal justice system can play an active and constructive role. The fear of getting caught, the shock of conviction, the mandating of treatment and the restriction of supply can all help in the process of getting people off drugs and keeping them off.

Further reading

When will politicians quit the war on drugs?

By Ian Birrell

This would require a realignment of the whole system around new priorities, but other countries show that it can be done while keeping drugs illegal.

Here’s another two things that can go together: the availability of a legal, regulated and abundant supply of drugs and a thriving criminal trade in the same or similar substances. In theory, legalisation should mean no more illegal supply – after all, why go to some guy down an alleyway when you could go to a licensed outlet with unadulterated products sold in standard units?

In practice, it’s more complicated than that – as America’s opioid epidemic proves beyond doubt. Far from pushing out the pushers, the over-prescription of entirely legal opioid-based medications has created new opportunities for them. By expanding the size and the demographic diversity of the opioid dependent population, the legal trade has expanded the market for illegal opioids including heroin. If your prescription has run out, or you need something cheaper (or stronger or perhaps merely different) then the dealers will sort you out. Of course, the product may or may not be cut with super-strength synthetic opioids like fentanyl – which is key factor in the epidemic’s horrific and worsening death toll.

Remember, all of this has happened in the context of a regulated and abundant supply of unadulterated opioids, and yet everything that isn’t supposed to happen has happened. The criminal trade hasn’t just survived, it has extended its reach – and innovated in all sort of dangerous new ways.

I suppose it might be argued that if a wider range of opioids were legal in America, there’d be no space for a parallel black market (though, of course, there’s a brisk criminal trade in the licensed opioids too). Indeed, many people in the liberalisation lobby (including Lord Falconer, if I understand him correctly) say they want to legalise all drugs.

This raises a number of questions. For a start, what do they mean by all? Cocaine? Heroin? Crack? Crystal meth? Fentanyl? Carfentanil? Is there any poison that they wouldn’t put on the shelves? Or do they intend to keep fighting a ‘war’ on some drugs?

Further reading

How to create a drug epidemic

By Peter Franklin

Would the consumption and distribution of non-recreational drugs be liberalised too? What would be logic of maintaining tougher restrictions on non-psychoactive substances because of something that they don’t do?

Will the licensing and regulation of ‘recreational’ drugs include the same sort of testing regime that would apply to a medicinal drug – if so, who will pay for the trials and associated bureaucracy? How will they recoup the cost? And is it unreasonable to ask how many lab animals will suffer and die in the process?

Perhaps there’ll be a lower set of standards applied – and products sold on a caveat emptor basis, like tobacco is. Except that the warnings on cigarette packs are based on extensive scientific research – including large-scale population studies. Do the legalisers mean to license potent substances for which the corresponding evidence base is inadequate or non-existent? Will licensed manufacturers and vendors be issued with blanket immunity from future lawsuits?

Further reading

It's slow, overdue but it's well underway. We're on the path to the decriminalisation of drugs.

By Ian Birrell

Of course, a number of drugs that are used recreationally are also licensed under carefully controlled conditions for medical use. Would comprehensive legalisation mean licensing the same substance under two different regulatory regimes – one much laxer than the other? And what about those substances currently licensed for veterinary use that are misused by humans – for instance, some animal tranquillisers? Will there be a stricter standard of regulation for pets than people?

Campaigners who say they want to legalise ‘all drugs’ and also regulate them are contradicting themselves. Meaningful regulation means significant restrictions on how drugs can be sold. At the very least it has to mean no selling to children and teenagers; limits on the quantity that can be sold to each individual; standardisation of dose and potency; restrictions on re-selling, the strictest controls on combining different substances; and various other essential safeguards. Presumably, the regulated supply would also be subject to the same sort of taxes that alcohol and tobacco are – indeed that is one of the promised benefits of legalisation.

Thus even if we accept the frankly absurd proposition that “all drugs” should, could and would be legalised, regulation and taxation would leave a whole range of circumstances in which they’d remain outside of the rules. In which case, that leaves two possibilities: either the rules would be enforced – meaning that the ‘war on drugs’ will continue; or the rules wouldn’t be enforced, meaning that the promises of ‘regulation’ are a sham.