No quick drug fix - failure of British drug legalization

National Review, March 24, 1989 by Anthony Lejeune

The street value of cocaine is three times as high in London as in New York, which renders the British market particularly attractive to the international drug trade. The police and the Customs agents believe that Britain is now a prime target. Cocaine usage has been percolating down the social scale, although the media inevitably highlight the prosecution of celebrities-or their children.

There was a tragic affair at Oxford University, where Olivia Channon, the daughter of a minister in Mrs. Thatcher's government, died of an overdose and two of her friends were convicted of helping to supply the drugs. When I was an undergraduate journalist at Oxford thirty years ago, I wrote an article about drugs in the university; by which I meant benzedrine and sleeping tablets. In the 1970s marijuana was not uncommon, although never as ubiquitous as in America. Now there is heroin and cocaine as well: but how prevalent? The undergraduates to whom I've spoken all say that drug-taking-apart ftom the odd puff of marijuana-is confined to small, discreet groups. On the other hand, Bristol University's student magazine published a survey, purporting to show that 50 per cent of students took drugs and 34 per cent hard drugs. But those alarming figures, if true, presumably refer to experimental rather than regular use.

Edinburgh has probably the highest concentration of drug users in Britain. Most of them now carry the AIDS virus. As an experiment, free needles have been offered on the National Health Service: but there have been few takers, for fear of being subjected to compulsory treatment. The government has mounted several nationwide television and poster campaigns aimed at the young. With the slogan "Heroin really screws you up" and against a dank and gloomy urban setting, the first showed a miserable youth increasingly debilitated and cut off from his wiser friends. Although the government claimed good results, with a higher proportion of youngsters saying in opinion polls that they would reject an offer of heroin, the campaign was controversial. Its critics argued that the weird settings bore no relation to young people's actual experience and that the emaciated central characters had an attraction of their own for some girls. The emphasis has now shifted to cocaine and, more generally, to the danger of needle-sharing.

THERE ARE new players on the other side of the game. London has its own counterparts, called "Yardies," of the "Posses" in America: Jamaican-born gangsters who handle the retail end of cocaine distribution. The Yardies, to whom at least six murders have been attributed, often buy from Posse contacts. Meanwhile, the Chinese Triads, moving out into the world ahead of the impending takeover of Hong Kong by Communist China, and the traditional Mafia, still very much alive and bloodily kicking, have begun maneuvering for control of the drug routes from the Far and Middle East.

The British police and Customs have a few officers stationed abroad, and the American enforcement agencies are always represented in London. They are all grimly aware that Britain's drug problem has increased and is increasing; that as the American market approaches saturation, international suppliers are looking across the Atlantic; and that crack presents a terrible new threat.