("THE TIMES" APRIL 10TH, 1990)

What is called the international war on drugs has come to London this week with governments vying with each other over the money, weapons and commitment they will hurl into the fight. In Britain, the thunder of struggle may seem distant, echoing from the streets of America and the jungles of Thailand and Peru. Ministers can thus sound as belligerent as they please. Their mind-set is that of generals in some far-off trench war: send more troops, make one more push, victory is round the corner.

Yet a subtle shift in strategy is now detectable from America, where the war is not far off and where defeat stares every city politician in the face. When George Shultz, Milton Friedman, past White House drugs advisers and some 40 percent of American public opinion are for relaxing criminal sanctions on drug users, then fresh ideas are clearly in the air. Even George Bush, who had recently seemed ready to make the cocaine war his personal Vietnam, is now turning his attention from the supply to the demand side of this booming market.

The harmfulness of heroin, cocaine and their derivates is not the issue. An ideal society might wish to be rid of them - though conventional opinion must accept that many users of cocaine see it as no more vulnerable to abuse than alcohol or nicotine, while cannabis is acknowledged to be less harmfull or addictive than either. The boundary between what is legal and illegal in narcotics is a matter of past history and culture, which is why many blacks and young people are cynical at their narcotics being banned by those who see drunkenness as virility, permit alcohol advertising and accept sponsorship from tobacco firms.

What is now giving the illegal drugs their international status is not their existence but the social, economic and legal context in which they are traded, in other words the consequences of their illegality. The vast and ever-growing drugs industry is the modern world's most graphic illustration of economic anarchy at work.

The upsurge in favour of decriminalization in America is due to crude realism. Discouraging consumption through prohibition has failed- Cocaine is so widely used as to be the country's most valuable import. Tens of thousands of Americans work in the industry. Billions are at stake. Working-class, non-white Americans use illegal narcotics in a wholly unregulated fashion. Because the market is unrestrained, drugs, drugs are traded free of duty and therefore offer a cheaper escapism than alcohol. Such huge, illicit profits mean that 70-80 per cent of all America's urban crime is drug-related.

Few observers of this scene doubt that, somehow, the next decade will see at least part of this international business brought within legal control. Only when supply is taxed and regulated can criminals be removed from the supply chain, and demand tackled through education and taxation. An unwelcome indusrty which cannot be contained, let alone banned, must be regulated some other way. This is the lesson of the pre-war prohibition of acohol in America and of off-course betting in Britain.

A step that merits wider debate in Britain is to take cannabis off the banned list. Dealing would be removed from the racketeers and from the corruption of their burgeoning opponents among customs officers, policemen and globetrotting defence consultants. Proceeds from taxing cannabis could be directed into encouraging the young to avoid all forms of narcotics, legal and illegal. Whether or not this led to switching from nicotine to cannabis is immaterial, though cannabis is the less addictive. The key is to remove cannabis consumption from criminal culture.

Such a step would not be easy, any more than would any wider decriminalization - as American politicians are finding. We all have a curiously deep aversion to the ways in which other generations and cultures go about relieving life's harsher realities. One man's drunken spree is another's bad trip, the one deserving a sympathetic smile, the other a savage jail sentence.

Politicians have a duty to lead as well as follow public opinion in matters of social behaviour. But if they lead too far ahead, they will lose touch, lose support and defeat the end in view. Drugs are one such case. The best that might come out of yesterday's conference is an acceptance that more of the old repression simply will not work. The drugs trade is now rotting whole areas of international relations, and rotting the heart of cities in Europe as well as in America. It is crime that feeds on itself. Combatting it requires not belligerence, but clear thinking, courage and common sense. An increasing number of Americans realize this. Europe's democracies have yet to show the same realism.

Pharmacological escape is a threat to any civilized community - past, present and future. But it is a containable threat. Hysteria jeopardizes that containment and turns threat into reality. Getting a grip on our response to drugs may be as difficult a challenge as getting a grip on drugs themselves.