Drugs legalisation
Ex-minister Bob Ainsworth: Make drugs legally available
An ex-minister who had responsibility for drugs policy has called for all drugs to be legally available.
Bob Ainsworth, a Home Office minister under Tony Blair, said successive governments' approaches had failed, leaving criminal gangs in control.
The Coventry North East MP wants to see a system of strict legal regulation, with different drugs either prescribed by doctors or sold under licence.
Ministers have insisted they remain opposed to legalisation.
Media backlash
Mr Ainsworth is the most senior politician so far to publicly call for all drugs, including heroin and cocaine, to be in any way legalised.
He said he realised while he was a minister in the Home Office in charge of drugs policy that the so-called war on drugs could not be won.
The Labour backbencher said successive governments had been frightened to raise the issue because they feared a media backlash.
But he predicted in the end ministers would have no option but to adopt a different approach.
He said: "Politicians and the media need to engage in a genuine and grown-up debate about alternatives to prohibition.
Billions spent
"Leaving the drugs market in the hands of criminals causes huge and unnecessary harms to individuals, communities and entire countries, with the poor the hardest hit."
Mr Ainsworth said billions of pounds was being spent "without preventing the wide availability of drugs".
"We must take the trade away from organised criminals and hand it to the control of doctors and pharmacists."
BBC Home Editor Mark Easton said under such a system heroin and cocaine might only be available on prescription from registered doctors, while cannabis might be sold in a similar way to tobacco.
"Under such a system, those who supplied or sold drugs without the requisite licence would still be operating illegally, in the same way as those who sell tobacco, alcohol or prescription drugs without a licence or proper authority would be currently," he said.
However, all three main parties at Westminster remain opposed to legalisation, with a Labour spokesman saying Mr Ainsworth's were "not the views of Ed Miliband, the Labour Party or the public".
Last week, Home Secretary Theresa May said the government's drugs strategy would remain focused on rehabilitation and reducing supply.
Crime Prevention Minister James Brokenshire said: "Drugs are harmful and ruin lives - legalisation is not the answer.
"Decriminalisation is a simplistic solution that fails to recognise the complexity of the problem and ignores the serious harm drug taking poses to the individual.
"Legalisation fails to address the reasons people misuse drugs in the first place or the misery, cost and lost opportunities that dependence causes individuals, their families and the wider community."
'Change needed'
However, former chief constable of Cambridgeshire Police, Tom Lloyd, said something had to change.
"We've got so used to 40 years of prohibition which, in my experience of over 30 years of policing, has led to massive cost, a failure to achieve the primary aims, which is the reduction of drug use, and a range of unintended harmful consequences," he said.
Former Criminal Bar Association chairman Paul Mendelle QC called for a full examination of the evidence which supports drugs policy.
"Illegalising [the drugs trade] is the legislative equivalent of putting a sheet over your head and hoping it will go away," he told BBC Radio 5 live.
However, anti-drugs campaigner Debra Bell, whose eldest son William began smoking cannabis at 14, believes that he would have progressed to taking class A substances had they been legally available.
"Just the fact that Bob Ainsworth is talking in this way will send strong signals to some children - a green light - to start experimenting and I really don't think that's the way forward in a civilised society," she argued.
(Published by BBC - December 16, 2010)