Dame Judi Dench, Sir Richard Branson, actress Julie Christies and Sting have added their support to an ex-drugs minister and three former chief constables in calling for the decriminalization of the possession of all drugs. These celebrities together with leading lawyers, academics, artists and politicians have signed an open letter to David Cameron to mark this week's 40th anniversary of the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act. The letter, published in a full-page advertisement in Thursday's Guardian, calls for a “swift and transparent” review of the effectiveness of current drugs policies.
The letter says that all the past 40 years has produced is a rapid growth in illicit drug use in Britain, and significant harm caused by the application of the criminal law to the personal use and possession of all drugs. They claim, “This policy is costly for taxpayers and damaging for communities…Criminalizing people who use drugs leads to greater social exclusion and stigmatization making it much more difficult for them to gain employment and to play a productive role in society. It creates a society full of wasted resources.”
The letter entitled Drugs – It's Time for Better Laws, has been organised by the national drugs charity Release. Other signatories include the film director Mike Leigh, actor Kathy Burke and leading lawyer Sir Geoffrey Bindman QC. The former Labour drugs minister Bob Ainsworth and three former chief constables, Paul Whitehouse, Francis Wilkinson and Tom Lloyd, have all put their names to the letter.
The letter goes on to say that nearly 80,000 people were found guilty or cautioned for the possession of illegal drugs – most of whom were young, black or poor – in 2010. Over the past decade, more than a million people have ended up with a criminal record as a result of the drug laws. This move comes with Thursday's New York launch of the report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which counts three former South American presidents, the former secretary-general of the United Nations Kofi Annan and Sir Richard Branson among its membership.
The campaign defines decriminalisation as a model that adopts civil rather than criminal sanctions such as confiscation and warnings and fixed penalty fines rather than arrest, prosecution and a criminal record.
Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, who is to appear at the launch said, “The war on drugs has failed to cut drug usage, but has filled our jails, cost millions in tax payer dollars, fuelled organized crime and caused thousands of deaths. We need a new approach, one that takes the power out of the hands of organized crime and treats people with addiction problems like patients, not criminals…The good news is new approaches focused on regulation and decriminalization have worked. We need our leaders, including business people, looking at alternative, fact-based approaches. We need more humane and effective ways to reduce the harm caused by drugs. The one thing we cannot afford to do is to go on pretending the 'war on drugs' is working.”
Ainsworth, the former Home Office drugs minister and defence secretary, last December described the war on drugs as “nothing short of a disaster” and called for the legal regulation of their production and supply.
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