Legalising drugs would cause less harm AND cut crime, says former senior civil servant

Drugs should be legalised because Labour's attempt to get tough with dealers and users was failing, the former head of the Government's anti-narcotics unit said yesterday.

Julian Critchley - now a teacher - advocated allowing people to take drugs that are currently illegal, including killer Class A substances such as heroin and crack cocaine.

He said this would reduce the 'enormous' harm to society caused by drugs and cut crime.

But senior MPs, police chiefs and anti-narcotics campaigners lined up to condemn him as 'utterly irresponsible'.

Mr Critchley, who was at the heart of Labour's war on drugs a decade ago, said the policy was failing and compared it to 'shifting the deckchairs around on the Titanic'.

He said: 'It's much easier to come out with soundbites about being tough on drugs and continuing to crack down on drug dealers when in actual fact we know that doesn't work.'

The mandarin ran the Cabinet Office's Anti-Drug Co-ordination Unit in the early years of the Labour Government.

He worked with outspoken former police chief Keith Hellawell who was appointed as Tony Blair's drug tsar before falling out spectacularly with ministers after accusing them of 'closing their eyes' to the problem.

He said he was in 'no doubt' that legalising illegal narcotics would lead to a fall in crime, including drug-smuggling and dealing by vicious organised gangs.

Giving heroin addicts the drug on prescription would also stop them stealing to raise money to fund their habit, he added.

He claimed this approach was supported by hypocritical senior ministers, police chiefs and health leaders.

But he said it was 'truly depressing' that they stayed silent because of the need to appear tough on drugs.

He said: 'It was a slightly bizarre experience to attend a lot of meetings with people whose jobs were to produce and manage the Government's drugs strategy.

'On the fringes of those meetings there was a very large amount of agreement that actually this drugs strategy was shifting the deckchairs around on the Titanic.

'We were trying to minimise harm but ultimately we knew that this was fiddling while Rome burnt.

'The drugs strategy doesn't work, cannot work, because we have no way of controlling the supply of drugs.'

In a contribution to a BBC internet debate, Mr Critchley said he joined the unit 'more or less agnostic' on drugs policy, but added: 'I was certainly not inclined to decriminalise.'

But he soon realised that enforcement of drugs was 'largely pointless' and had 'no significant, lasting impact on the availability, affordability or use of drugs'.

He dismissed arguments that legalising illegal drugs would lead to an increase in their use.

He said: 'This, it seems to me, is a bogus point: tobacco is a legal drug, whose use is declining, and precisely because it is legal, its users are far more amenable to government control, education programmes and taxation than they would be were it illegal.'

Pointing out that drugs were already easy to obtain, he said: 'The idea that many people are holding back solely because of a law which they know is already unenforceable is simply ridiculous.'

Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve condemned Mr Critchley's view and said the drugs problem should tackled with tougher sentences, border guards to stop smugglers and better treatment for addicts.

He said: 'Drugs wreck lives, destroy communities and are a major cause of crime.'

A spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers said: 'Legalisation would greatly exacerbate the harm to people in this country, not reduce it.

'It simply does not make sense to legitimise dangerous narcotic substances which would then have the potential to ruin even more lives and our neighbourhoods.'

Mary Brett, spokesman for Europe Against Drugs, said: 'For a teacher to say this is completely irresponsible. What about the damage done by people using so-called legal drugs, the violence, car accidents and murders?'

A Home Office spokesman said: 'We have no intention of either decriminalising or legalising currently controlled drugs for recreational purposes.

'Drugs are controlled for good reason - they are harmful to health.'

A report last month from the UK Drugs Commission found traditional methods to crack Britain's £5.3billion drugs market were not working.