Legalisation: Has The War On Drugs Failed? (Neil Woods, ex-police officer)

**Gabriel Gatehouse** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Gabriel Gatehouse, and before this week's episode of Radical, a quick word about next week's guest. Have you thought about what you want to happen to your body when you die? Burial? Cremation, maybe?
Christopher Hughes has a different idea. It's called teramation, where your body gets turned into soil. It's basically human composting. It's legal in some parts of America, but not here in the UK.
Not yet, anyway. Christopher wants to change that. He spent more than 30 years as a mortuary technician for coroners in the UK and across the world. He's come across different approaches to death on his travels, but composting, he says, makes the most sense to him. It's a fascinating idea, but also one that potentially has a radical impact on those we leave behind. As ever, we want your help examining the issue, so please send us your questions for Christopher, which will feature in our bonus Q&A podcast after the main show. You can leave us a WhatsApp voice note on plus 44 330 123 9480, or you can email us. The address is radical at bbc.co.uk.
And now on with this week's show.

**Jenny Kleeman** (1:28)
Hello, and welcome to Radical, conversations about the underlying forces reshaping our world and the radical ideas that could define the future. I'm Jenny Kleeman, and today I'll be speaking to someone who argues we should be taking a completely different approach to the problem of drugs. For more than half a century, Britain's approach to drugs has been rooted in prohibition. Successive governments have spent billions trying to disrupt supply, punish dealers, and deter use. Yet illegal drugs remain widely available. Drug-related deaths are at the highest levels since records began, and organized crime continues to profit from a vast underground market. My guest this week thinks this is evidence that the war on drugs was the wrong idea from the start. His name is Neil Woods, and he spent 23 years as a police officer, including 14 years working undercover, infiltrating drugs gangs. He convinced dealers he was an addict, gathered evidence against high-level figures, and repeatedly put his life on the line in operations that earned him numerous plaudits.
But those years and those experiences eventually convinced Neil that enforcing the law wasn't providing any practical benefit for society. It was only causing harm. So after leaving the police, he started a new career, becoming one of the UK's most prominent campaigners for drug policy reform. His radical proposal is that we should completely change our approach to drugs in this country, not simply by decriminalising possession, but crucially by taking legal control of the drugs market itself, allowing government to regulate a market it now prohibits, pushing out organised crime and improving public health.
This is a controversial and very complex topic. There are many opponents to Neil's ideas. And of course, we know some drugs can come with serious impacts on physical and mental health. But as always on this podcast, we'll approach the conversation with an open mind and a critical lens. So with that in mind, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Neil Woods.
Neil Woods, thank you so much for joining us.

**Neil Woods** (3:44)
Well, thank you so much for inviting me.

**Jenny Kleeman** (3:46)
Legalizing drugs is a kind of giant, easy headline. But this is not an easy issue. And there are many different kinds of drugs and many different ways of legalizing them. So what exactly are you advocating?

**Neil Woods** (4:02)
I'm advocating for taking control.
Because prohibition is the surrendering of control. I mean, the whole point of drug policy, the 1961 Single Convention and the conventions that followed from the United Nations, was to achieve a drug-free world. That was the aim of those treaties. And that's the aim of the legislation that each country brought into place following those treaties.
Since prohibition began, the numbers of people using drugs have increased more than the size of population increases. So it's constantly accelerating. So it's failed. Prohibition has failed. It's created a behemoth of transnational organized crime, which is gradually corrupting entire nation states, not just individual bureaucrats or politicians or police officers. So my background is in policing. So to me, this is a law enforcement issue. This is about beating organized crime. And for many within the drug law reform community, actually, the L word, legalize, is a bit of a dirty word, because it conjures ideas of a lack of control, maybe wanton human behavior. But we are talking about taking control here, that we're talking about regulation.

**Jenny Kleeman** (5:20)
So how would this work in practice? If you're decriminalizing possession of drugs, would you also be expecting the government to take control of the supply? How would that work?