Before my journey home, I believed Britain’s war on drugs had been like most of our foreign policy: a cry of “Me too!” in a bad American accent. We jail huge numbers of people, but a little less than the United States. We back the drug wars abroad, but not quite so intensely. It turns out I was a little right and a little wrong. There is one significant area in which we are worse: black men are ten times more likely to be imprisoned for drug offences than white men in Britain, a figure beating both the United States and apartheid South Africa.
