Drugs ban doomed to failure - US police chief

The ban on illicit street drugs should be ended as hard-line legislation against drugs is doomed to failure, a US police chief warned today.

Jerry Cameron, a police veteran with 17 years' experience, urged the Government not to make the same mistakes the United States has made in its war on drugs.

Mr Cameron said there was ample evidence the hardline crackdown with severe prison sentences for having street drugs such as cannabis and heroin in the United States had failed to deal with the problem.

"If someone wants to try a drug they are going to try it, the law makes no difference," he said.

"In a free society you just can't keep people from doing things which are sometimes foolish."

At a conference in Dublin, Mr Cameron said the mission of the Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) was to save lives and lower crime rates by ending prohibition.

"I would urge the Irish as a sovereign national country to get their own experts together, and dismiss this idea there is only one approach and come up with an Irish solution to Irish problems and do not let the US lead you down this path that we have gone down," he said.

Mr Cameron said prohibition simply never worked and results in criminal activity.

"I certainly think the first step is physicians ought to be able to prescribe anything that they believe will help their patient, the police have got no business practising medicine," he said.

Mr Cameron said if the profit motive was removed from the criminals by making drugs legal then law enforcement could regain some control in the area.

"The biggest thing is the violence that is associated with black markets when you buy a product from a person and it is defective; with a drug you can't take him to court and you have to solve it in another way. . . and in the US we do that with guns," he said.

"I don't think Ireland has started to experience the full consequences of the black market, but it will," he said.