What does the drug war cost Bermuda each year? How about $300 million and rising? Here The Royal Gazette looks at the figures behind the misery as part of a series on drugs and their impact on the Island.

Bermuda pays a heavy price for its drugs war in both financial and human terms.

Drugs supply is kept artificially low given the gauntlet importers run dodging the authorities to get their illegal wares here. Yet demand is constant.

That in turn means street prices are kept high and those large profits can spark deadly clashes as gangs battle over lucrative turf.

Addicts pay top dollar for their substance and then get tempted into crime and prostitution to cover the vast gap between their cravings and their income.

Intravenous drug users risk HIV and hepatitis from sharing needles while drug mules risk life and liberty by packing their bodies full of potentially lethal chemicals.

The dealers' need to squeeze the product to maximise yield means impurities are introduced into the drug all the way down the chain, meaning addicts play Russian roulette with a purchase which varies in potency from day to day. Overdoses and deaths are the inevitable result.

Yet for those with nothing but contempt for the drug barons, their drug mules and their clients, the price is high too if you stop to look at the figures.

In 1999 the Bermuda Police force stood at 322 officers, supported by 86 civilians a total of 408 people in an annual budget $41 million.

But this year the Bermuda Police Service had 477 officers a rise of 155 officers, now supported by 114 civilian staff, making a total of 613 people operating on an annual budget of $60.5 million.

That's a staggering 52 percent rise in manpower in just ten years.

And yet they have not been noticeably successful in stemming the drugs tide. Violent crime rose 44 percent between 2000 and 2007.

How much of that can be blamed on the drugs trade?

One former senior Police officer talking on condition of anonymity, said those in law enforcement circles estimate that 80 to 90 percent of most crime categories are linked with drug and alcohol.

"There's an abundance of evidence to link crime and drugs.

"Ask any corrections officer, probation officer, Police officer or your own neighbour and the answer will be the same drugs drive the crime rates."

The officer noted that the Misuse of Drugs Act was enacted in 1972.

"We can say that we're just about to enter our fifth decade of a 'war on drugs'.

A single drug-driven offender can commit dozens of crimes per week, said the former top cop, and when they are removed from the streets crime rates plummet which is why Police target certain individuals.

"Just look at the variation of housebreaking/burglary offences in the last ten years to see how Police arrests of prolific offenders reduced crime. But, the revolving door syndrome is still at work.

"Let loose in a society, where these offenders are ill-equipped to cope, they resort to crime on their release from prison and crime rates escalate again."

It currently costs $80,000 to house each prisoner per year and last year, Government figures showed the re-offending rate stood at 78 percent up from 68 percent from the previous year, with a total of 332 prisoners re-offending.

However a new way of calculating the figures saw that rate fall to 42 percent this year with 193 prisoners re-offending.

According to the King's College of London International Centre for Prison Studies, Bermuda has the 15th highest prison population in the world per head of population.

The depth of the link between drugs and criminality is clearly shown in figures released two years ago which showed heroin use among new prisoners had doubled to 30 percent, while cocaine use had soared to 57 percent. And, of the 325 new inmates tested, 57 percent showed up as marijuana users.

In total, 64 percent of new inmates had at least one drug in their system.

But it is the problems caused by criminals out on the streets which concern most people as rival groups clash with machetes and guns.

The former Police officer said the gang culture was thriving in Bermuda because of the vast money to be made in drugs.

"Remove the incentive, or at least seriously disrupt it, and we'll have a chance to curtail the growth and livelihood of the gang culture.

"Only then can we expect a reduction in violent crime and criminal gang activity."

So if Police are costing $60 million per year, what of the other frontline services dealing with addicts and the criminal havoc they wreak?

• Bermuda's Corrections Department is a $30 million-a-year operation requiring around 250 staff.

l The Customs Department costs the taxpayer $21 million a year and has a staff of 236 people.

• The National Drug Control Department runs on nearly $5 million a year and employees 28 staff.

• The Department of Court Services employs 38 staff and costs $5.2 million.

• The Department of Public Prosecutions employs 24 staff and costs $3 million.

No one is suggesting any of those services would wither away if the drugs menace was somehow magically cured.

Nor is anyone saying that $124 million, or anything approaching that sum, would be saved if the laws were suddenly changed.

But the figures give an indication of the scale of resources now being trained on the drug problem with little sign of success.

And what about the money being made on the other side of the drugs war?

Recently Police have been reluctant to estimate drug costs, claiming that mentioning the figures glamorises an illegal activity.

But one unofficial Police estimate in 2005 put Bermuda's drug habit at $200 million a year giving a total drug war bill which is arguably approaching $300 million.

While all other MPs contacted for comment ignored the chance to discuss Bermuda's drug laws, Opposition MP John Barritt did respond to say a rethink might be necessary.

He said: "I do not believe our war on drugs in Bermuda has been very effective, at all.

"I don't think it unreasonable to wonder out loud whether there is the political will to come to grips with the problem."

He said the National Drug Control department had been shunted from ministry to ministry, sapping strength and focus from the various programmes.

And he wondered, given the number of fatalities on the roads, why Bermuda's laws had not been modified to penalise those driving under the influence of drugs.

Mr. Barritt said he favoured giving people a second chance and he was concerned that young people who made the mistake of dabbling in weed were restricted in travel, education and job opportunities when they got caught.

"I am all for reviewing what we have, looking at what is working and what is not, honestly and openly, and then fighting and pushing for what we think will work.

"I would therefore be prepared to look at our laws as they relate to cannabis in that context, and to debate the issues that arise."

But Mr. Barritt cautioned that he did not want to encourage people to think that it was acceptable to live their lives stoned.

"I also feel the same way about alcohol. These drugs and their so-called 'beneficial' use are vastly overrated."

Mr. Barritt urged the beefing up of the anti-drug message.

"It is ultimately behaviour we have to modify and to give our young people, and the not so young as well, the tools to make the right choices."

Others are prepared to go much further.

KEMH surgeon Joseph Froncioni said: "Hard drug addiction is a sorry state for the individual.

"However, if control of these substances is left in the hands of criminals, it is society that suffers the consequences resulting from addicts' desperation to fund their addiction."

And Coalition for the Protection of Children head Sheelagh Cooper said: "What we are presently doing is not working.

"There are more addicts, more violent crime, more property crime, and increasingly invasive gang behaviour, more deaths on the roads and more guns.

"Decriminalising marijuana may be one of the possibilities to consider as we move forward.

"If marijuana were legalised or decriminalised, it would remove the profit motive and help put an end to the senseless violence that stems from drug battles."

The question is are the politicians willing to consider a change of heart?

l TOMORROW: Dr. Froncioni makes the case for legalising drugs while drugs counsellor Sandy Butterfield makes the case against.

How countries around the world are dealing with the scourge of drugs

The governing Progressive Labour Party is to debate Bermuda's cannabis laws next month, according to retiring chairman David Burt. But will that debate go far enough and who gains when the state interferes with what people put in their bodies? The Royal Gazette looks at how other countries are handling the drug problem and whether the worldwide war on drugs is working.

It sounds like some Orwellian nightmare the state injecting its own citizens with heroin.

Meanwhile, taxpayers toil away to fund the $25,000 per annum cost to enable each hard-core addict to loll about enjoying state-funded fixes.

The whole scenario might sound like an exercise in the grotesque but in fact there is an experiment based along those lines now being conducted in Britain and health experts like what they see.

Drug-fuelled crime has been slashed among those in the experiment, meaning safer streets and homes.

And far from being an attempt to keep addicts in a drug-addled stupor the trial is, very slowly, helping some reduce their dependency and get lasting help, rather than prey on the taxpaying majority through addiction-fuelled crime sprees.

The experiment began four years ago and has shown some real results in reducing crime and the use of street heroin, according to the King's Health Partners Academic Health Sciences Centre (AHSC).

In a summary of the results published this month of the Randomised Injectable Opioid Treatment Trial (RIOTT) the AHSC said the UK's most chronic heroin addicts can be treated successfully using the radical new treatment.

Participants were heroin addicts seemingly immune to years of treatment, rehabilitation and even prison said the AHSC. For these people, daily use of 'street heroin' had been the norm, even while in conventional treatment.

The RIOTT trial, coordinated by the National Addiction Centre and sanctioned and funded by government, began four years ago.

It saw addicts split between three groups some given supervised injectable heroin, some were given supervised injectable methadone [a heroin substitute] and some were given oral methadone.

The trial hit its target early reduced use or abstinence from 'street' heroin and continued during the six-month trial. Those on injected heroin did best clients spending an average of just over £300 [approximately $480] a week on drugs cut it down to an average of just under £50 [approximately $80] a week at six months.

Many shunned crime altogether while others substantially cut their crime sprees. Weekly spending on street heroin for the 40 people in the test fell from nearly £14,000 [approximately $22,000] a week to under £2,000 [approximately $3000] at six months.

And crime was cut massively. Prior to entering RIOTT treatment over half of the clients in each treatment group were committing a mean number of between 20-40 crimes in a month.

Yet at six months, the proportion committing crimes in each group more than halved and the mean number of crimes committed in the past 30 days reduced to between four and 13 less than a third of previous levels.

Put another way, those same 40 people had been responsible for 1,731 crimes in the 30 days prior to entering RIOTT treatment.

Yet after six months, this had fallen to 547 crimes a reduction of 1,184 crimes per month.

Prior to entering RIOTT treatment, around three quarters of each group were also using crack. But at the close of the trial the proportion using crack had reduced across all treatment groups as had the amount of crack used.

There were improvements in physical and mental health and social functioning across all treatment groups over the six months. But it all comes at a price.

The cost of producing positive results in this 'difficult to treat' group is around £15,000 per patient per year roughly the equivalent of $24,500.

A large sum, but much less than the $80,000 Bermuda spends per year on housing each inmate at Westgate.

And there are other clear, tangible benefits. Not having to put in so much energy into chasing drugs means an addict can pursue other interests, begin to form a routine and even look for work.

One addict told the BBC she was now seeing a psychologist about looking at why she used drugs.

One of the heroin addicts, a 34-year-old man called John, had been addicted for eight years when the trials began. He fed his habit by dealing.

He told the BBC: "My life was just a shambles... waking up, chasing money, chasing drugs," he said.

But John said the scheme had transformed his life "100 percent" and he now had a part-time job.

"It used to be about chasing the buzz, but when you go on the programme you just want to feel comfortable," he said.

The UK's National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse (NTA), which administers drug treatment in England, said the results were "encouraging".

In its drug strategy, published last year, the UK government said it would roll out the prescription of injectable heroin, subject to the findings of the pilot scheme.

Britain is by no means the only country examining how it copes with the drugs menace.

In Mexico the drug war is at its height. Battling gangs are able to stalk and murder Police and politicians at will, while politicians are easily put on the payroll.

After one head criminal was arrested his gang launched 15 coordinated attacks on Police stations and officers in eight cities across three states. In one attack, gunmen hijacked a bus carrying 12 Police officers and killed them all.

Drug-related murders rose from 2,275 in 2007 to 5,207 in 2008, according to an unofficial tally by a Mexico newspaper.

The 2009 toll stood at 3,757 as of August 17. Of those, 104 victims had been decapitated, and 306 showed signs of torture. Now the US is to launch $1.4 billion in further aid in a bid to stop the drugs and mayhem continuing to flow over its borders.

However Mexico is adjusting its drug laws and last month changed the law to decriminalise possession of small amounts of drugs including heroin, cocaine and marijuana.

The new law, removes criminal penalties for possession of drugs considered to be for personal use e.g. up to five grams of marijuana [roughly three to five joints] and half a gram of cocaine, [equivalent of three to eight 'lines']. The law will offer treatment instead of incarceration for people caught with personal use.

That stance was welcomed by Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, who said Mexico's new law to decriminalise personal possession of illicit drugs is consistent with the broader trend throughout Western Europe, Canada and other parts of Latin America to stop treating drug use and possession as a criminal problem.

But he said it contrasted sharply with the United States, where arrests for marijuana possession hit a record high last year roughly 800,000 annually and now represent nearly half of all drug arrests nationwide.

One journalist writing in Esquire magazine calculated the American death toll from the war on drugs was touching 15,000 a year with about 6,500 drug related murders and the rest from overdoses caused by dirty drugs.

It's clear people around the world pay a high price for the conventional ways of combating drugs some of which end up in Bermuda.

But the drug industry rolls on. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, while pressing the case for keeping drugs illegal, ironically defeats many of its own arguments.

It says: "In some parts of the world, drug enforcement has been used as a pretext to wage war on marginalised communities, resulting in serious human rights violations."

And once drug selling is handled by street gangs it becomes notoriously difficult to crack, with members viewing death and prison as occupational hazards.

Despite satellite technology which can photograph opium poppies growing in fields around the world, the bar charts in the UNODC's 2009 report show the volume of drug production is consistent, stockpiles fill in when seizures increase.

Despite having US and British forces on its territory, Afghanistan is still able to pump out vast quantities of heroin just 11 percent was seized last year.

Few drugs are consumed in the poor countries which produce them, they are sent to the richest countries which consume them. Countries like Bermuda.

Despite billions of dollars spent by law enforcement worldwide the conveyor belt of drugs keeps rolling on. The question is: does anyone really know how to stop it?

l TOMORROW: Surgeon Joseph Froncioni makes the case for legalising drugs while drugs counsellor Sandy Butterfield makes the case against.