The War's over then?

That's the war on drugs. Last week the Home Office released what seemed to be very encouraging news on seizures of illegal drugs.

In their headline they declared that in 2006-07 the police and HM Revenue & Customs in England and Wales made a record-breaking 186,028 number of seizures. This was an increase of 15% on the previous year, and continues a trend - a rise from 2004 to 2006/07 of 73%.

You might feel tempted to think that at this rate such drugs will soon by unavailable in this country, and the war will be over. Two things should make you look further - the story that much is being re-exported, and yet there is still enough to be confiscated, and the fact that street prices are not rising steeply, but rather are falling, suggesting that there is still much about.

In fact the deliberate attempt to mislead, by spinning the figures, is that they are quoting the number of seizures rather than the amount seized. (The figures for the latter indicator are hidden away from the casual reader among the statistical tables.)

In fact the quantity of drugs seized has declined in total for class "A" drugs in every year since 1999. In 2006-07 the total amount seized was down by 30% on the previous year. For individual drugs the falls are 64% since 2001 on heroin and from 2003 for cocaine - the peak years for quantity seized.

So the great success announced with a fanfare really says that there were more seizures but they were all on average much smaller. Are the seizures from lower down the chain of distribution, while the Mr. Bigs are not losing their supplies directly?

If the total being confiscated is falling year by year, then the battle is by no means over.