The most optimistic reading of the remarks by Europe’s top anti-drugs official yesterday was that the war against drugs is in a quagmire. In Britain, new government statistics suggest that there is a serious and growing drug problem. Although the illicit nature of drug use means that no calculation can ever be wholly accurate, the Home Office estimates are probably more robust, and more alarming, than anything previously published. The number of problem drug users is reckoned to be 327,466, which is a tally of directly damaged and destroyed lives. They put the illicit drug market in the UK at about £5.3 billion, and the economic and social cost to the country at a staggering £15.4 billion. This is failure on a colossal scale.

What should be done? The sheer size of the drugs industry is often used to argue that prohibition is doomed to fail. And it is certainly true that, on the basis of these Home Office figures, UK Drugs Inc is around the same size as British Airways — a huge and powerful (and legitimate) organisation — with UK Drugs Inc presumably making exponentially higher (and untaxed) profits.

The drug barons’ grip does not seem to have been shaken by the record hauls of illicit substances bagged by customs officers in recent years: falling prices suggest that supply has barely been dented. Nor do our legal sanctions seem to have had much success in deterring demand. Government surveys show large numbers of young people apparently happily admitting to having experimented with a range of drugs. And this illicit industry fights hard and dirty to expand its market. Many addicts become pushers in order to fund their habit, and they have few scruples about where they sell their dangerous wares — on the street or at the school gate. Drugs have become the lifeblood of organised crime, and inevitably associated with prostitution, shootings and standover tactics. The Home Office finds that the largest component of the social cost of drugs, around 90 per cent, is drug-related crime.

It is tempting to hope that legalisation might cut out much of this violence and crime, by removing most of the profit margin from the drugs barons. However, while the legalisation lobby makes a persuasive case, there is a lack of clarity about how exactly its ideas would work in practice. If harm reduction is the aim, can one be sure that harm reduction would really be achieved? Reducing prices might remove incentives for criminals to supply the market. But would it not also result in an increase in addicts, because drugs would be even more easily available more cheaply? Would the act of legalising in itself send a powerful signal that Parliament is condoning drug taking? And might regulated companies acting above-board not be even more effective at marketing these substances than the drugs barons have been, with their access to more conventional methods of advertising? And if half of all beds for drug treatment are empty, as we report today, is the Government really doing all it can to treat addicts successfully?

More debate is needed. There is no point in pretending that all is well with current policy. That Pete Doherty keeps returning to court with no more than a community sentence, for example, shows that heroin has almost been decriminalised. It is time to confront practical realities in both the sheer scale of our failure, and the hard choices to come.