#mike barton

A while ago the chief constable of Durham police, Mike Barton, came to the university to take part in a series of talks called 'difficult dialogues'.

About a fortnight prior to this, he took the step that many senior figures in law enforcement have been taking - coming out against the 'war on drugs'. He argued that this war has comprehensively failed. He described how the sale of hard drugs was pumping tens of thousands of pounds a week into organised criminal gangs and that the best that his force could do was to shut down as many open drug markets as possible. Of course, the black market economics of the drugs trade means that these markets will always come back, so it was with a visible sense of desperation that Mr. Barton sought to open debate.

I was thoroughly impressed by the chief constable. It was refreshing to hear such an open and candid case being made for decriminalisation and a change of attitudes. Afterwards, as I shook his hand, I said that a year ago if someone had told me I'd hear such things from a senior police officer I'd have thought they were tripping serious melons. But no, here in County Durham, we have a chief constable who wants to take steps towards decriminalising seriously addictive substances and taking drugs out of the realm of force placing them in the remit of our health system - hazaar!

It became clear that Mr Barton was principally concerned with the discussion surrounding drug taking. Fittingly, I think he may have been consciously controversial for the sake of argument, which I certainly applaud. The discourse that shrouds drug taking is rightfully scrutinised for its effects on young people and their perspectives towards mind-altering substances. This 'drug education' as many will certainly think, is not only inaccurate and patronising but also counter productive if the aim is to create a generation of tee-total sober types.

I can only speak for my school when i criticise the formal education I was given, but from what I could glean from the talk it seemed that my experience was fairly universal. At the relatively doctrinaire Oxford private school that I attended, drugs were dealt with as though they were beneath people like us and were only done by desperate dropouts. They were described in the context of their adverse effects which themselves were often grossly exaggerated. We learnt how much prison time to expect from possession and distribution and how much hospital time to expect from an overdose. All the while, 'drugs' and 'drug taking' were mysteriously set apart from normal and rational behaviour. The palpable undertone to all the 'education' I received was a patronising fakery that deemed my class-mates and I to be above such foolishness. Though the information I received was mostly accurate, it left a sour taste in my mouth because really it was all a polite and well-meaning fiction that aimed not to educate but to nudge us away from drugs.

Now what's wrong with that? Should we instead extol the virtues of spangling, tripping and gurning one's way through life? Well no. But if the goal is to stop a generation of teenagers from doing something, the best thing to do is recognise their personal responsibility. At a time of heightened curiosity about the mind, the world and one's place within it, the worst way to treat adolescents is as though they are above something. It spawns a distrust of authority when one's personal responsibility and agency is removed from the equation. Worse still, it makes kids want to find out what is being hidden and from what they are being shielded. If one source of education is debunked, the remaining source is personal experience and all the pitfalls therein.

I noticed this sense of imbalance between the two sources of education particularly strongly one break time when a very well-meaning teacher of mine came to talk to me about smoking. After our terse and rather awkward discussion he leaned in a bit closer and in hushed tones said, '...and it's only tobacco right Toby? not weed..? Because I had a friend at university who really screwed his life up on that stuff'. A well-meaning comment on the dangers of marijuana rendered completely ineffectual because my friends and I were being educated far better through our own experiences. The severity with which he was speaking of weed seemed frankly quite silly, not simply because I smoked every day, but because I knew dozens of people my age who maintained a fairly outrageous array of habits while still managing to achieve, create, succeed and be happy