YOUR HEROIN, SIR
this text about Frankfurt Resolution has been published on "The Lancet", Vol.337: feb 16,1991

Last November, a conference held in Frankfurt ended with a resolution that included the following items. "The attempt to eliminate drug consumption from our civilisation has failed. The demand for drugs has lingered despite all efforts, and everything points to the fact that we will have to continue living with drugs and drug users in the future. Drug use is based on deficits of society and cannot be prevented by drug policy... The priorities of drug policy have to be changed dramatically. The aid for drug users must no longer be threatened by criminal law... Prosecution must be limited to fighting illegal drug trafficking. Everybody who wants to reduce criminality, harm, misery, and death must liberate users from the pressure of prosecution concerning the consumption of drugs and must not tie the offers af drug aid to the strict goal of total drug abstinence... Within drug policy we need a separation of cannabis and other illegal drugs... Therefore we demand ... the decriminalisation of buying, possessing, and consuming cannabis... Consumption of drugs, i.e. buying, possessing, and consuming of small quantities of drugs must be declared free of prosecution."

The participants were not a group of liberally minded psychiatrists; nor was this a gathering of reformed and reforming drug addicts. The delegates were representatives of European cities at the centre of the illegal trade in drugs - police chiefs, city medical officers, and burgomasters among them - who met to acknowledge that prohibition had failed to cope with drug addiction and all its trappings and to formulate some constructive proposals.

Most drug addicts live in cities, bacause that is where the drug market thrives; with the dismantling of European barriers in 1992 it is all the more important that cities across the continent coordinate their drug policies. The Frankfurt resolution ended with a call for a European institute for scientific research into drug-related problems, to be founded in close cooperation with the Council of the European Community and the European section of the World Health Organisation. Meanwhile, the cities representatives have laid their own plans for coordinating activities and for exchanging specialists in drug treatment, prevention, policing, and public health. They also aim to meet annually; Zurich will host this year's conference.

The enduring popularity of prohibition as a governmental anti-drugs measure has also puzzled some economists. Richard Stevenson, a healt economist at Liverpool University, has long promoted the economic reason for reviewing this policy and over the years has seen the pendulum swing gradually in his direction. In his latest analysis he comments that the resilience of the illegal drug market is not surprising since it is a higly profitable trade world wide. He argues that as long as profits remain high, policies directed to the supply side of the market are essentially doomed - "Still worse, supply side policy causes the cost of drug abuse to spill over in external costs to the whole of society".
Would legalisation of drugs be such a bad things?

For criminals, yes - as Stevenson notes, they would hate it. He does not disagree with the view that drug use might increase as a result of legalisation, but comments that the amount of drug addiction and drug-related harm could fall. In the Netherlands, for example, ready availability of high quality cheap heroin for some years has not been accompanied by a detectable increase in addiction rates. How would legalisation work? If hard drugs were to be more freely available there would have to be form of state monopoly in the production and distribution, with guaranteed pharmaceutical control of purity and supply. Not event the most ardent anti-prohibitionist believes that legalisation will cure all drug-related ills, but the abject failure of prevailing policies is now so generally acknowledged that the momentum towards decriminalisation is surely becoming unstoppable.