Losing the War on Drugs

Not that this all that much of a surprise:

The agency leading Britain’s fight against organised crime is struggling to cope with the soaring scale of heroin trafficking, it admitted yesterday.

The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) claimed it was making headway in tackling fraud, gun-running and the cocaine trade but that success in tackling heroin smuggling was “more elusive”.

Soca stated in its annual report: “While interdictions of both heroin and opium base surpassed those of the previous year and good leads to money flows were secured, there remained much to do, in the light of increased production, against this very difficult target.”

The agency’s pessimism over the heroin supply is reflected in street prices, which, according to the charity DrugScope, have fallen £10 per gram since 2004.

Seriously, I mean who would even raise an eyebrow at this result? It simply isn't possible to interdict enough of the trade to make any difference and still retain any semblance of our still being a free country.

Police will be able to seize high-value assets from suspected drug dealers as soon as they are arrested under plans to be unveiled this week by Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary.

Don't worry though, as you can see we've already got people working on that free country part.

A quite serious question here. Leave aside all of the more controversial (although they are my own) views on the legalisation or at least decriminalisation of drugs, the reductions in harm that would results and so on.

Which would you prefer (and yes, they are mutually exclusive for our purposes here)?

1) A country in which some hundreds of thousands take illegal drugs, some tens of thousands blight their lives by doing so and some thousands each year die.

2) A country in which the government can take away everything you own at the moment of your arrest (note, please, not conviction or even trial, not even at charging: purely at arrest)?

Might I suggest that those who pick 2) should go and look up the meaning of "civil liberties"?

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