The UN has had a formal commitment to reducing demand for drugs (and harm to users) since the late 1980s, but in practice all its efforts have been focused on policing, attacking criminal gangs and fumigating the drugs crops of very poor farmers in the Third World.Trace’s appointment seemed like a real turning point. Lauded by Costa as the new face of UN drugs policy, it seemed as though a small crack had appeared in the disastrous strategy of global prohibition. “I applied the same principles to the international scene that I applied at the British level,” he says “Indeed, it was even more stark at the UN. The organisation has invested hundreds of billions of dollars over the years in an attempt to eradicate a market in drugs The market was small when it started and it’s massive now.

“If either of those tactics had a proven track record I would be a convert, but they don’t work What you can do, though, is reduce the harm that drugs do. So we need to move our investment away from enforcement and into harm reduction. The best use for our limited resources is targeted interventions on the most problematic use.”With this in mind he was approached in summer 2002 by Antonio Maria Costa, the new head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Costa wanted Trace to run his demand reduction programme, a position that would put him at the very heart of global drug strategy. I have to start from that premise.”"Nobody really knows what the best way to proceed is once you admit that,” he says, “but I think the best route for Western democracies – who have high levels of drug use – is to admit that there is now a very large body of evidence that shows you aren’t going to bring rates of use down through harsh penalties. They lost their nerve in 1999, and from then on it was all downhill.”Trace lost his job when the drugs tsar experiment was scrapped in 2000.

Within a few years he was being accused of leading a dark internal conspiracy to subvert drugs policy at the very highest levels.So what is his real attitude to drugs policy? Certainly, most legalisers I know do not regard him as one of their own. “To paint me as an extreme liberaliser – the way that the Daily Mail and other papers have – is just bizarre,” he chuckles.”All I say is we need to acknowledge a pretty basic fact: that it is not a good deal for the taxpayer when the police spend billions of pounds trying desperately to enforce the drugs laws against every last user It’s just not a good return on that investment. Nor can education and prevention ? matter how good it is – end the problem We just have to be honest about that. The evidence is overwhelming.”"You can’t end drug use and you can’t educate it away,” he concludes. We agreed to put the issue on the back-burner for the first couple of years and concentrate instead on the drugs that do most harm.”Together they put together a broad policy document, “Tackling Drugs To Build a Better Britain”, which was published in 1998. It advocates a harm reduction approach to addiction, and led to a considerable increase in the number of NHS prescriptions of methadone The policy slashed crime rates “I’m proud of that,” Trace says “It’s now used around the world as a model. OK, there’s a lot of mothering and apple pie in it, but it was a good plan That was a good year.