Daily Mail, January 14 2003

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 Transnational Radical 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?

Posted by admin at January 14, 2003