Johann Hari

A month ago, the British police boasted that they had smashed the biggest drugs ring operating on our streets. Detective Superintendent Sharon Carr declared: "We have knocked out this network ... The price of cocaine on the street will go up."

Another police officer explained that this would have a "massive impact" on the British drugs trade. It was the biggest victory for the drug prohibitionists in a decade; if their approach is ever going to work, it is at moments like this.

So, four weeks on, what has the practical effect of this unprecedented raid been? Are there fewer dealers on the streets? Is cocaine more expensive? Are addicts beating on the doors of the tiny number of rehab centres we have?

Ross Hawkins, in an excellent report for BBC Radio 5 Live, discovered that, "Certainly, in Scotland, Liverpool and Birmingham, there was no impact on the price at all [or, therefore, on availability, since price responds to scarcity] ... In London, there was a very short-term impact. It lasted for five or six days, with the price going up by a few pounds a gram. It was very much a tremor. It was all over in a week."

I cannot see how anybody can now defend the policy of criminalising drugs. Tens of thousands of police hours and millions of pounds have been invested in busting this massive drugs ring - all to virtually no effect. Prohibition's biggest success in years amounts to - nothing. No matter how many police resources are thrown at this problem - and the Government has increased them to an unprecedented level - huge quantities of drugs still get through. All that time and money could have been spent on catching burglars, rapists and murderers, instead of running after the fantasy of a drugs-free Britain. You are less safe because of prohibition.

As Mike Trace, the former Deputy Drugs Tsar and now Chief Executive of the Blenheim Drugs Project, explains: "It's just too easy to get fresh drugs into this country. The reality in Europe is the multiplicity of sources of supply ... If you take one source of supply out, however big, there are so many other sources of supply that they fill the gap very quickly."

This country has millions of drug users, and it always will have. Anybody who denies this - who thinks prohibition can be effective if only we work even harder, or throw more money at it - is deluded.

That much is now obvious; but there is another dimension to this debate that is too rarely acknowledged. The fantasy-politics of prohibition harms everybody in Britain, but the further back you travel along the supply chain, the more damage it does.

The drugs gang that our police ineffectively swatted was supplied with its heroin and cocaine from Colombia, so let's take a look at what our policy does in that country.

The biggest industry in Colombia is the drugs trade. Eighty percent of the world's cocaine originates there - yet the Government cannot tax or benefit in any way from this massive indigenous network of businesses. This is solely due to immense US and European pressure to fall in line with strict prohibition. No; somebody else benefits entirely - radical dissident groups, who use drugs trade profits to buy weapons and destabilise the entire Colombian state. They are either involved directly in trafficking themselves, or they charge a "tax" (effectively a protection-racket fee) on those who do.

The effect of a civil war fuelled almost entirely by the illegal drugs trade (with a neat sideline in kidnapping) is that two million Colombians have fled their homes due to the fighting, 35,000 Colombians have been massacred in the last decade, and 300,000 have been made homeless. All hopes of building a functional Colombian state have been scuppered and civil rights have been annihilated.

In the past five years alone, over a million people from the wealthy middle class have fled the country.

Drugs prohibition does all this. If the Colombian Government could shift strategy and legalise drugs - thereby bankrupting the criminal gangs controlling the trade and constantly attacking the Government - they could begin to raise a serious income and take control of their country as preparation for building a proper democracy.

As if this damage to ordinary Colombians is not bad enough, we then hammer them even more. As part of America's "Plan Colombia" (spearheaded by a smirking President, who is widely believed to have recreationally used cocaine himself), more than 200,000 gallons of herbicide have been sprayed from the skies on desperate peasant farmers. The toxins are designed to kill their coca crops, preventing them from supplying cocaine (and from earning an income - but who cares about that?).

They also kill legal crops like banana and corn, devastating developing economies, and they destroy local ecosystems. Serious concerns have been raised by doctors that they might even cause cancer when ingested through the water supply.

And all for what? Thirty years after Richard Nixon launched the "War on Drugs", heroin and cocaine have never been easier to buy on British and American streets. This war is about as successful as his other huge fight - in Vietnam. Here is one occasion when I can happily say to George Bush and Tony Blair: you really do have to stop the war.