Portugal decriminalised drugs in 2001 – should the UK? (Picture: Blair Gable/Reuters)

Drugs are a great evil – but it takes a lot of political courage to admit that keeping them illegal has completely failed.

There are now signs some MPs are realising the impulse to lock up drug users rather than treat them hasn’t worked for decades.

Yesterday’s report by the Home Office demonstrated that countries with severe penalties for using drugs, like Japan, haven’t seen lower levels of drug use than those which have more liberal laws.

‘Liberal’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘letting people get away with it’, by the way.


So why is it so hard for politicians like David Cameron to actually suggest to voters they’ve been wrong for so many years?

David Cameron can’t quite bring himself to back decriminalisation (Picture: AP Photo/Yves Logghe)

Here’s what the prime minister has to say on the question of reforming our drugs laws:

We’ve been focusing on education and prevention, and treatment… The evidence is what we’re doing is working. I don’t believe in decriminalising drugs that are illegal today. I don’t want to send a message that somehow taking these drugs is OK or safe.

It’s almost as if he wishes drugs were already legal.



They’re not, prime minister. Changing that is going to take some real bravery from a frontline politician.

It’s a shame Cameron isn’t going to be the man to do it.

Still, all is not lost.

Reformers like the Liberal Democrats privately say they think it will take ten years or so before the penny drops and we get actual change in Britain.

Maybe they’re dreamers like the Scottish nationalists who insist that it’s not a matter of ‘if’ but merely ‘when’.

Perhaps, but my money’s on the next leader of the Conservative party adopting a more sensible approach that makes tentative steps towards decriminalisation.

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More and more states are choosing to decriminalise drugs – and their success is only encouraging others.

In Portugal, for example, 12 years have passed since they changed their position. (Offenders are sent to a ‘dissuasion board’ and can be helped off drugs via health treatment.)

Over that time drug use has fallen while drugs users’ health has significantly improved. The opposite took place in the Czech Republic, where they criminalised drugs.

As Home Office minister Norman Baker put it in the Commons:

The debate has now been opened. We can no longer rely on the stonewalling that we have so often had about drugs policy in this country. There are genuine debates to be had about the way forward and I think the genie is out of the bottle and it will not be going back in.

You’d never imagine the Tories shifting on this without a nudge. Fortunately, the public is giving it to them.

This week’s Sun carried a revealing poll which showed that 71 per cent think the war on drugs has failed. Two-thirds backed a legal review.

Sooner or later politicians whose gut instinct is to stick with the status quo are going to realise their approach is losing them votes.

As soon as that happens we’ll see change. And, judging by the way public opinion is shifting, it doesn’t look like we’re going to have to wait much longer.