Johann Hari: Tragic victims of a self-defeating policy

This is the story of two victims of a war that cannot be won and should not be fought. You have heard of the first: Rhys Jones, the 11-year-old in Liverpool who was shot in the neck as he played on his bike. You have not heard of the second: Andres Sauzo, a 24-year-old Mexican man who had his arms, legs and head chain-sawed from his body, and was found rotting in five bin bags scattered across his home town of Zihyatanejo. They are casualties – either direct or indirect – in a war that kills tens of thousands of people a year, and could end tomorrow, if we chose to.

Rhys and Andres were killed because of a political decision by the US government to wage a global "war on drugs", and demand other governments fall into line. When you criminalise a massive and growing industry – some 5 per cent of the world's entire economic activity – it does not go away. It is handed to armed criminal gangs, who flood the streets with guns to secure a slice of the riches.

This is what has happened in Liverpool over the past three decades. The city is enduring a turf-war between two local drug-gangs, the Croxteth Crew and the Strand Gang. These armed crews exist to receive, transport and sell drugs, and it is the source of their appeal. The criminalised drugs trade provides them with a fat income – thousands a month, on estates frozen in poverty. This means that they can afford the best in areas used to the worst, so the local kids idolise them and perform all sorts of criminal stunts to join their posses.

Each gang has been merrily killing kids on "the other side" for years, in an attempt to gain a part of their trade, or to stop them from trying to seize theirs. Rhys, because of where he lived, may have been seen as one of the other side's kids. Or he may have been the victim of a new, dark initiation ritual. It is almost guaranteed that the guns used in the killing of a child in Britain will have been bought with money handed to gangsters by drug prohibition. Scotland Yard estimates that 95 per cent of guns on its patch are related to the drugs trade.

Prohibition creates a need for armed gangs, as the connecting tissue between the people who grow or manufacture illegal drugs, and the millions of people who want to buy them. The Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman put it best: "Al Capone epitomises our earlier attempt at Prohibition; the Crips and Bloods epitomise this one." We already know this was the reason for many of the shootings of black teenagers in London earlier this year: two of the most powerful drug dealers in South London were sent to prison, so a slew of gangs fought to take over their patch and their profits. A majority of the boys who were gunned down were rivals for these riches.

The drug that the Croxteth Crew and the Strand Gang specialize in – heroin – was actually safely controlled in Britain by doctors and pharmacists until the 1970s. They gave small, regular prescriptions to addicts, who in turn committed virtually no crime. This policy worked well. It was only stopped because the US government under Richard Nixon applied massive diplomatic pressure to join his country's Puritan crusade against drugs. Once the doctors were banned from prescribing heroin, the gangs stepped in, and they have grown ever since.

The scattered proposals tossed out this week to deal with drug gangs are elaborate evasions of the real issue. Banning gang videos on YouTube is barely even a sticking plaster, while the Cameroonian idea that gangs are the rancid afterbirth squeezed out by single parents simply doesn't match with the facts. Denmark has the highest rate of single parenthood in Europe – but it has virtually no gangs, except among recent immigrant communities, who overwhelmingly consist of stable two-parent families.

No: if we want to stop gang culture, we need to take back the industry that makes gangs rich, and give it once again to doctors, pharmacists and off-licenses. Legalizing drugs rips the spine out of gangs. Of course they will try to move into other industries – protection rackets, cigarette smuggling and so on – but these have far lower profit margins. In a legalised economy, the gangs would no longer be the richest kids on the estate, and could barely afford firepower, so the core of their glamour would melt away.

For a case study of what happens when you try the opposite strategy – ever-more-aggressive prohibition – we need to turn now to Andres. His is a case I stumbled across when I was reporting from Mexico last year, a fleeting News in Brief remembered now only by his family. After his mutilated corpse was found in black sacks, the undertakers wanted to cremate him, but his family insisted on the traditional open-casket coffin, now filled with carved chunks. Soon after, they began to be plagued by telephone calls from gangsters demanding to know where Andres's girlfriend was, so they could cut her up too. His mother, Gomez, was too scared to call the police; as a report put it, "she just changed her phone number and prayed."

Andres was killed by a gang who believed he was trying to muscle on to their patch. He is one of 2,000 such victims there in the past year alone. In Liverpool, drug gangs control about 5 per cent of the economy, and that's enough to cause misery and chronic fear on their estates. In poor countries like Mexico and – to a much larger extent – Colombia and Afghanistan, they can become rich enough to out-gun the local police, and effectively take over whole swathes of territory. Mexican politicians know this privately. Vicente Fox, the last President, explained in an interview that legalisation was the sensible solution – but later nervously acknowledged that the US wouldn't stand for it.

The new president, Felipe Calderon, has followed US orders more closely: he has been sending in the army to crack down on drugs cartels. This has had no effect on drug supply – in fact, the street price of cocaine in the US has actually fallen, indicating higher supply – but it has caused the rate of drug murders to double. Why? As one gang is broken up and jailed, a slew of new gangs fight it out to control their old patch – just as in London, and everywhere else. Civilians, often kids, are caught in the crossfire.

Whatever we do, chronic drug use will be a tragedy for the individual addict. But this policy of drug prohibition converts the tragedy into a disaster for millions more. It is flooding our country – and much of the world – with gun-toting gangs whose weapons kill dozens of people like Rhys and Andres every day. How many more have to be shot or carved up before we bankrupt the gangs through legalisation, and transfer all the money we burn on chasing them into rehab and prescriptions for addicts?

j.hari@independent.co.uk