Letter to The HeraldDreadful drugs failure presented as successON June 30 you uncritically presented the Scottish Drug Enforcement Agency's annual report as a success when it was in fact one of the most devastating indictments of the failure of the law-enforcement agencies in Scotland to make even the slightest of impacts on the black market in illegal drugs.
The SDEA report stated that £55m of Class A and Class B drugs were seized in Scotland by the SDEA, the police forces, Customs and Excise, and other law enforcement agencies. This was presented as a seemingly huge haul which had Jim Orr (SDEA director) and Cathy Jamieson (justice minister) patting themselves on the back for a job well done. The report implied that the law-enforcement side of the war against drugs was making good progress. Simple arithmetic suggests otherwise.
Heroin addicts spend an average of £17,500 a year maintaining their habits. There are some 30,000-55,000 opiate addicts in Scotland. Even if we exclude methadone addicts and use a conservative estimate of 30,000 Scottish heroin addicts, the lowest possible estimate of the value of the heroin market in Scotland is £525m. The UK cannabis market is estimated to be around £5bn a year (Observer, February 2, 2003). For Scotland an annual cannabis black-market estimate of £500m won't be far off the mark.
To go back to the SDEA's annual seizure of £55m, it was stated in the report that it included a single record bust of a £25m consignment of cocaine. Therefore the total of all the heroin and cannabis seized last year by all law-enforcement agencies in Scotland would be included among the remaining £30m of seizures - along with all the rest of the cocaine, ecstasy, amphetamines, and LSD intercepted.
Only when you compare this paltry £55m of seizures with the very conservative estimates of Scotland's heroin black market (£525m) and cannabis black market (£500m) do you realise that all the law-enforcement agencies put together are incapable of taking off the streets even 5% of Scotland's illegal market in Class A and Class B drugs.
But it gets worse. If the total UK black market in illegal drugs - estimated at £20bn annually - is accurate then that would mean the total black market in illegal drugs in Scotland - where drug use is higher than the rest of the UK - is closer to £2bn per annum. The SDEA, police, and Customs may therefore be intercepting around 2½% of the Scottish illegal drugs market in a record year.
This isn't a success. This SDEA report is a devastating indictment of failure being presented as its complete opposite. This report should be held up as further confirmation - if it was ever needed - that every law-enforcement initiative against drug use has made practically no difference to the amount of black-market drugs hitting the streets.
The damage that drug prohibition does to our society is bad enough without the government and its agencies trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the public in order to maintain funding for a futile and destructive war against drugs that was lost a long time ago.
Kevin Williamson, drugs spokesperson, Scottish Socialist Party, 73 Robertson Street, Glasgow.
