Britian’s drug Czar conspires with legalizers

October 6th, 2008  |  Published by BRAHA Editor in Drug Prevention


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Is This A Sinister Conspiracy To Get The World Hooked?

Commentary by Melanie Phillips

The sensational disclosure that the former deputy drug czar Mike Trace has assembled a secret network to pressurise governments into legalising drugs lifts a veil on an operation as sinister as it is extensive.
The implications are simply astounding. Despite his official role in combating drugs in Britain, Europe and the United Nations, Mr Trace is revealed to be the driving force behind a co-ordinated international effort to disband the world’s anti-drug laws by stealth.

As a result of the relentless bombardment of legalising propaganda disguised as ‘harm reduction’, the public in Britain and Europe have become increasingly receptive to the idea that the real problem is not the drugs themselves but the law that makes them illegal.

With the public thus softened up, the legalisers’ main obstacle now is the UN conventions on drugs, passed in 1961, 1971 and 1988. These require countries to prevent possession, use, production and distribution of illegal narcotics.
In 1998, the UN embarked on an ambitious ten-year programme to move towards a ‘drug-free world’, committing itself to reducing demand and preventing illicit drugs from becoming a way of life – the very situation that ‘harm reduction’ policies institutionalise.
This April, countries are to review progress at a UN drugs meeting in Vienna. Drug legalisers are now co-ordinating all their efforts to getting repeal of these three UN conventions onto the agenda at that crucial Vienna meeting. They are doing so by gaining a critical mass of influence over all the principal participants in that debate.
Their campaign is like a vast iceberg. A small part recently became visible in the European Parliament, when no fewer than 108 MEPS signed a petition to abandon the conventions and legalise drugs.
Below the surface, campaigners are agitating covertly to manipulate public opinion and government ministers through propaganda and pressure. And at the centre of this, pulling the strings of an operation linking Europe and the US, sits Mr Trace.
His positions give him unrivalled influence. Since 1997 he has been at the heart of the British establishment, first as deputy drug czar and then as Director of Performance at the Government’s National Treatment Agency. He is at the heart of Europe as chairman of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, the body which effectively draws up EU drug policy. And now he is at the heart of the UN as its head of demand reduction.
In all these posts, he is supposed to be upholding laws to reduce drug use. Now he is revealed — in his own words — as a fifth columnist, an underground agitator working covertly to undermine these very laws and being secretly paid to do so by notorious international legalisers.
What stands revealed is not merely deep duplicity and a cynical abuse of trust. The scale of the network he is co-ordinating is astonishing. The British headquarters of his operation – created from the shell of the ailing drug charity Release – is being financed in part by the Open Society Institute, funded by the billionaire financier George Soros.
Like other Soros-funded outfits, the OSI openly campaigns for ‘harm reduction’ and legalisation on the grounds that the war on drugs causes more harm than drugs themselves.
Mr Soros, whose billions have funded much of the legalising propaganda that has been bamboozling Britain and Europe for years, wrote in his autobiography that his remedy for drug abuse would be to establish a ‘strictly controlled distribution network’ through which he would make most drugs legally available.
Meanwhile, the makeover of Release is being overseen by a telling group of influential worthies — including a former Home Office civil servant who was involved in drugs policy. Just what have we come to when such pillars of Britain’s establishment are conniving at a clandestine attempt to undermine UN efforts against drug use?
But that’s not all. For Mr Trace’s attempts to obtain additional funds from European sources disclose a vast and intricate web of non-governmental organisations, all beavering away at drug legalisation.
In particular, Mr Trace sought funding from the Brussels-based Network of European Foundations for Innovative Cooperation (NEF). This innocuous-sounding grant-giving body has actually spawned a proliferation of drug legalisation efforts through its offshoot ENCOD, the European NGO Council on Drugs and Development.
ENCOD says that ‘drug use as such does not represent the huge threat for society as it is supposed to do’. The real threat, it says, is posed by the war on drugs to the ‘millions of peasants in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia’ — the people cultivating the drug crops! So it wants a legal framework to bring about the industrialisation of drug production, no less. And to achieve this, it proposes that public opinion should be softened up by ‘harm reduction’ policies which will pave the way to eventual legalisation.
The appalling thing is that this crazy, nihilistic agenda is now being accepted into mainstream thinking. Is the British government aware, for example, that its favourite drug charity DrugScope, which furnishes so much ‘objective’ information and advice on which the Home Office bases its drugs policy, belongs to ENCOD and therefore presumably subscribes to this shocking doctrine?
ENCOD, moreover, has close links to the Radical Transnational Party, the drug legalisation outfit which has a toehold in the European Parliament and which has been the driving force behind the MEPs’ legalisation petition.
If these MEPs can persuade the EU to adopt their position, the legalisers’ hand at the Vienna meeting will be immeasurably strengthened. Meanwhile, Mr Trace is boasting that through his influence over both the UN official responsible for drugs policy and the Greek foreign minister — the key EU functionary, since Greece currently holds the presidency — he will influence the Vienna meeting from the inside towards legalisation.
These disclosures pose some urgent questions. How much influence did Mr Trace exercise over the British government’s reclassification of cannabis and other lurches in drugs policy? Is the Home Office aware of the web of deceit and manipulation which it has been helping to fund?
Are the organisations Mr Trace works for aware of his covert activities? How far has he influenced the vital European Monitoring Centre and compromised its statistics? Are European governments aware how they are being manipulated?
And will the world now finally wake up to the fifth column in its ranks that is well on the way to making widespread and growing drug addiction a permanent reality?

m.phillips@dailymail.co.uk

…………………

Drugs Fifth Columnist

Figurehead of Blair’s battle to cut drug abuse is revealed as mastermind behind legalisation campaign

By Steve Doughty
Social Affairs Correspondent

For more than five years, Mike Trace has been a key figure in Tony Blair’s ‘war’ on drug abuse.
He was appointed deputy drug czar when Labour returned to power and remains in a government job.
Yet at the same time as he was speaking out in favour of keeping dangerous drugs against the law, he was planning a campaign to legalise them.

He even boasted of being a ‘fifth column’ working to overthrow the current laws, and is now taking his agenda to the European Union and the United Nations, where he has manoeuvred himself into powerful positions.

Last night there was outrage and disbelief that a man supposedly hired ‘to lead the battle against drugs misuse’ was a legaliser all along.

It was in 1997 that former police chief Keith Hellawell was appointed drugs czar, with former social worker Mr Trace as his deputy.

Their job was to achieve government targets which included cutting levels of hard drug-taking by half by 2008.

The two men were removed from their posts in 2001, by which time the government had abandoned its targets and dropped the ‘war on drugs’ rhetoric.

In the autumn of 2001 Home Secretary David Blunkett announced the new policy of reducing penalties for possession of cannabis while police began going soft on cannabis in experimental areas.

While Mr Hellawell was out on his ear, however, Mr Trace’s reputation in Whitehall remained strong. He took up a job with the National Treatment Agency, which runs treatment programmes for addicts.

And with Mr Blair’s backing, he was made chairman of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, a Lisbon-based organisation which exists to provide ‘objective’ and ‘reliable’ information on drug abuse to the EU.

He is about to give up his British job after being appointed Head of Demand Reduction at the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention in Vienna. Yet, despite his supposed impartiality in these roles, he has set up a pressure group named Forward Thinking on Drugs, dedicated to persuading politicians that ‘citizens should not be persecuted or criminalised purely for the act of possessing’ drugs.
Mr Trace, 41, has told potential cash donors that it is an ‘agency’ devoted to three principles: that drugs should not be criminal; that the role of the state in drugs should be to help users avoid harm; and that treatment should be provided for addicts.

In one letter he says of his involvement that a ‘fifth column role would allow me to oversee the setting-up of the agency while promoting its aims subtly in formal government settings’.

However, he is now anxious to play down his own part in setting up the pressure group. He says in one e-mail: ‘Now I have taken up my post at the UN, I absolutely cannot be associated with a lobbying initiative’.
And he warned a colleague in the group last month: ‘A small but crucial point – can I from now on not be referred to by name in any written material? (Deniability considerations).’

Yesterday he denied having anything to do with the group, but after the Daily Mail reminded him of his letters and e-mails, Mr Trace said he had advised the pressure group and that his role in it was ‘half-way between’ that of founder and adviser.

He added of his letter that described himself as a fifth columnist in the drugs war: ‘That is a light-hearted comment’.

Peter Stoker, director of the National Drug Prevention Alliance, said it was ‘ironic’ that Mr Trace was now head of ‘demand reduction’ at the UN drug control agency. ‘You either have to be in favour of demand reduction or liberalisation — not both’, he said. ‘They are mutually exclusive’.

Mr Trace admitted when he took his role as deputy drug czar that as a student at Bristol polytechnic in the early 1980s he had smoked cannabis.

Yesterday he said he was not in favour of legalising drugs but wanted a review of the way drug laws operate.

‘We need to confront the problem head on’.

Editorial comment:

Fifth Column

What a wonderful comment on Britain’s gloriously confused guidance on the evils of drugs. The man who helped to shape it as deputy drug czar, and who is now a major player in forming policy for EU and UN bodies fighting narcotics, turns out to favour the legalisation of cannabis and other dangerous substances. He boasts of acting as a fifth column for the pro-drugs lobby.

It is, of course, difficult to believe anything this government says. But if ministers have any interest in preventing the deaths of thousands of youngsters on sink estates, they will agitate for this treacherous and irresponsible creature to be removed from his international posts without delay.

Author: Melanie Phillips
Source: Northwest Center for Health & Safety


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