Johann Hari

London is a city soothed and stirred by illegal drugs, from the junior doctor keeping himself awake on a 48-hour shift (how did you think they manage it?) to the teachers relaxing with a spliff after a rough day to the City boys snorting charlie in a £20-a-drink club. Cannabis and cocaine are as densely interwoven into this city’s tapestry as alcohol. Trying to drive drugs from London is as futile as the attempt to drive the Demon Rum from Chicago in the 1920s – yet still the Metropolitan Police, goaded by our politicians, chase after this drug-free dragon.

At a time when there is a rape in this city every six seconds, last Saturday night the Met thought it was a smart use of 200 officers and months of pre-planning to crack down on a group of people who were dancing. This army of officers lowered the temperature of the Fridge, one of Brixton’s best clubs, by surrounding it, sealing the exits, and seizing a dozen people who now face long prison sentences. For most of the bewildered people locked down, their worst crime was excessive gurning.

John Roberts, the Met's lead member for Lambeth, claimed that the operation was “part of a much bigger picture” which involved targeting “the anti-social criminality that drug dealing breeds and the misery that is causes”. But there is an irony in his statement. It is not drug use that creates anti social criminal gangs – it is drug prohibition. Criminalizing drugs does not stop people using them, as anybody who has ever been clubbing knows. It simply hands the multi-billion dollar industry to armed criminal gangs who flood London with guns to protect their patches.

Don’t take my leftie-legalizer’s word for it. Listen to Michael Levine, who had a thirty year career as one of America’s most distinguished federal narcotics agents. In his time, he led a thousand raids like last Saturday’s, as well as infiltrating some of the biggest drugs cartels in the world – and he now explains, in sad tones, that he wasted his time. In the early 1990s, he was assigned to eradicate drug-dealing from one New York street corner – an easy enough task, surely? But he quickly learned that even this was physically impossible, given the huge demand for drugs in cities like London and New York. He calculated that he would need one thousand officers to be working on that corner for six months to make an impact – and there were only 250 drugs agents in the whole city. One of the residents asked him, “If all these cops and agents couldn’t get this one corner clean, what’s the point of this whole damned drug war?” You could ask the same about the midnight Fridge raid - the first midnight Fridge raid in history that I (and my swollen gut) have disapproved of.

When Levine rose undercover to the top of la Mafia Cruenza, one of the biggest drug-dealing gangs in the world, he learned, as he puts it, “that not only did they not fear our war on drugs, they actually counted on it… On one undercover tape-recorded conversation, a top cartel chief, Jorge Roman, expressed his gratitude for the drug war, calling it ‘a sham put on the American tax-payer’ that was ‘actually good for business’.” He was right – prohibition is the dealer’s friend. Legalization is his greatest enemy. Shocked, Levine recounted this to his bosses, who explained yeah, we know, but we have to keep pointlessly going through the motions of a drugs war because the alternative is “politically unacceptable.”

But what is that alternative? It is to seize control of the drug supply back from the criminals and hand it to off-licenses, pharmacists and doctors. We do not have a choice about whether Londoners use drugs – but we do have a choice about whether those drugs are controlled by gun-toting gangsters. In the real world – as opposed to the Met’s fantasia – the only way to clean out the Fridge is to legalize, legalize, legalize.