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6 September 2001 Edition

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Why are we fighting the War on Drugs?

In an article that many will find controversial, MICK DERRIG argues that the War on Drugs has failed, that drugs are a part of civilised human society, and that alternative aproaches to drug addiction, based on harm reduction, are needed.

     
The ``War on Drugs'' is easily the most futile conflict in human history. Drugs have won. Drugs will always win
How long have people been taking drugs? It's a serious question.

The answer is for about as long as humans have lived in settled communities. That long.

Ever since humans found an alternative to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and lived in settlements growing their food. That long. Hunter-gatherer peoples today have extensive knowledge in finding and consuming plants that have hallucinogenic properties.

Once people started to control nature through agriculture, apart from supplying us with a steady, reliable source of food, it also started to be used to provide us with substances that would alter our state of consciousness. This is the essence of drug taking.

Since the plough replaced the spear, people have grown substances to alter consciousness.

The first people to develop agriculture and live in the one place were the Sumerians. In what is today Iraq, they invented farming and started to domesticate animals for their needs.

They stayed in one place so they could start to acquire things around them. We call the process ``civilisation''. Drugs and civilisation have a long and, perhaps, symbiotic relationship. Why then do we try and pretend that they are separate and archenemies?

Answer that question and we may get an answer to why we are currently engaged in a totally futile exercise worldwide.

There is a global conflict raging at the moment that kills tens of thousands every year and blights millions of lives. It distorts entire societies and makes evil men rich beyond anyone's hallucinatory consumer dreams. Yet, there is no Peace Initiative or international diplomacy to address the root causes of this conflict.

The most surprising thing about this conflict is that, daily, it rages on unnoticed as something that humans, collectively, could change.

The ``War on Drugs'' is easily the most futile conflict in human history. Drugs have won, drugs will always win.

Professor Steven Duke of Yale Law School, in his valuable book, America's Longest War: Rethinking Our Tragic Crusade against Drugs, and his scholarly essay, Drug Prohibition: An Unnatural Disaster, reminds us that it isn't the use of illegal drugs that we have any business complaining about; it is the abuse of such drugs.

It is acknowledged that tens of millions of Americans have at one time or another consumed, or been exposed to, an illegal drug. But the estimate, authorised by the federal agency charged with such explorations, is that there are not more than 1 million regular cocaine users, defined as those who have used the drug at least once in the preceding week. There are (again, an informed estimate) 5 million Americans who regularly use marijuana; and again, an estimated 70 million who once upon a time, or even twice upon a time, inhaled marijuana.

From the above, we reasonably deduce that Americans who abuse a drug, here defined as Americans who become addicted to it or even habituated to it, are a very small percentage of those who have experimented with a drug or who continue to use a drug without any observable distraction to their lives or careers. About such users, one might say that they are the equivalent of those who drink but do not become alcoholics.

How many users of illegal drugs in fact die from the use of them? The answer is complicated in part because marijuana finds itself lumped together with cocaine and heroin, and nobody has ever been found dead from marijuana. The question of deaths from cocaine is complicated by the factor of impurity. When alcohol was illegal, the consumer could never know whether he had been given relatively harmless alcohol to drink - such alcoholic beverages as they can find today in the liquor store - or whether the bootlegger had come up with paralysing rotgut. By the same token, purchasers of illegal cocaine and heroin cannot know whether they are consuming a drug that would qualify for regulated consumption after clinical analysis.

More people die every year as a result of the war against drugs than die from what we call, generically, overdosing. These fatalities include, perhaps most prominently, drug dealers who compete for commercial territory, but also people who are robbed and killed by those desperate for money to buy the drug to which they have become addicted.

It transpires from US research that treatment is seven times more cost-effective.

The cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs, combined with intensive education of non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs. In the US, there has been a substantial reduction in the use of tobacco over the last 30 years, and this is not because tobacco became illegal but because a sentient community began, in substantial numbers, to apprehend the high cost of tobacco to human health.

If figures were available would they be any different in Ireland?

Most people can use most drugs without doing much harm to themselves or anyone else. Only a tiny percentage of the 70 million Americans who have tried marijuana have gone on to have problems with that or any other drug. The same is true of the tens of millions of Americans who have used cocaine or hallucinogens. Most of those who did have a problem at one time or another don't any more. That a few million Americans have serious problems with illicit drugs today is an issue meriting responsible national attention, but it is no reason to demonise those drugs and the people who use them.

Drugs are here to stay. The time has come to abandon the concept of a `drug-free society'. We need to focus on learning to live with drugs in such a way that they do the least possible harm. So far as I can ascertain, the societies that have proved most successful in minimising drug-related harm aren't those that have sought to banish drugs, but those that have figured out how to control and manage drug use through community discipline, including the establishment of powerful social norms. That is precisely the challenge now confronting Irish society regarding alcohol: How do we live with a very powerful and dangerous drug - more powerful and dangerous than many illicit drugs - that, we have learned, cannot be effectively prohibited?

Prohibition is no way to run a drug policy. Prohibitions for kids make sense. It's reasonable to prohibit drug-related misbehaviour that endangers others, such as driving under the influence of alcohol and other drugs, or smoking in enclosed spaces.

There is a wide range of choice in drug-policy options. These options fall under the concept of harm reduction. That concept holds that drug policies need to focus on reducing crime, whether engendered by drugs or by the prohibition of drugs. And it holds that disease and death can be diminished even among people who can't, or won't, stop taking drugs. This pragmatic approach is followed in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia, and parts of Germany, Austria, and a growing number of other countries.

American drug warriors and Britain's Drug ``Czar'' like to denigrate the Dutch, but the fact remains that Dutch drug policy has been dramatically more successful than US or British drug policy. The average age of heroin addicts in the Netherlands has been increasing for almost a decade; HIV rates among addicts are dramatically lower than in the US or Britain; police don't waste resources on non-disruptive drug users but, rather, focus on major dealers or petty dealers who create public nuisances. The decriminalised cannabis markets are regulated in a quasi-legal fashion far more effective and inexpensive than the US equivalent.

The Swiss have embarked on a national experiment of prescribing heroin to addicts. The two-year-old plan, begun in Zurich, is designed to determine whether they can reduce drug- and prohibition-related crime, disease, and death by making pharmaceutical heroin legally available to addicts at regulated clinics. The results of the experiment have been sufficiently encouraging that it is being extended to over a dozen Swiss cities. The Dutch and Australians are initiating similar experiments. There are no good scientific or ethical reasons not to try a heroin-prescription experiment in Ireland.

Those who focus on the victimisation of our young people by predatory criminals can hardly support our massive diversion of law-enforcement resources to apprehending and imprisoning non-violent drug merchants and consumers.

The War on Drugs has created a counter-insurgency version of the military industrial complex. The War On Drugs allows states to develop huge paramilitary armies that - just coincidentally - spend most of their time in areas of poverty, just the sort of areas that tend to rise in revolt against the established order. What a bit of luck that they have a legitimate reason to be in those areas cataloguing and surveilling the youth of the area - especially young males.

All of this does not mean that drug dealers are not lowlifes who have to be dealt with by any self-respecting community. What criminal prohibition of drugs does (well, some drugs) is to create empires for them.

Al Capone was a nasty little criminal of no importance until Christian fundamentalists with the ear of the White House managed to get booze banned. Suddenly, the population was criminalised and scum like Capone became rich beyond anyone's wildest hallucinations. Also, it corrupted the rule of law itself.

After Prohibition went, people still got drunk - people will always get drunk. Those who are prone to addiction will become addicts. What we don't have is an underground economy for organised crime based on booze.

Addiction will always be worse in areas of exclusion in my view. Gin - now a rather naff drink to be taken with tonic by ladies and Freemasons - was once the crack cocaine of Victorian England. Made in baths, it made people blind. It was called ``the quickest way out of Manchester''. Gin was not the problem - poverty was.

     
People do get addicted to drugs - many are addicted to booze - but they need help. They don't need to be criminalised
The worst thing you can do with any substance that people take is to make it illegal. Immediately you criminalise people who wish to use it. Overnight you create lucrative markets for people to do well from illegal things - criminals. If drugs became legal tomorrow - that is the dangerous drugs that are currently illegal - then two things would happen immediately. Firstly, the criminal empires built on illegal substances would crash like Wall Street in 1929.

Secondly, the substances that people take - e.g. heroin - would come under the appropriate health and safety legislation. The main health dangers to people injecting heroin is that they use dirty needles and that the ``smack'' is cut with so many other substances to make it go further that they get infected with various things stemming from the other substances. Drug dealers have even used brick dust to dilute the heroin.

Amazing as it may sound, pure heroin is not a harmful substance. Drink, by contrast, is a massively harmful toxin, but it's okay - it's legal. It's implicated in road deaths, domestic violence and general closing time madness. Nicotine, its bar room cousin, costs the health service millions a year.

Both of these legal drugs shorten lives and cripple healthy people - making them old before their time and in the case of booze, making otherwise sensible people homicidal monsters after a few hours ``socialising''.

The problems with banned drugs in our society are that they are banned. Legalise cannabis and you deprive a huge stable income to major criminal enterprises. The criminals who murdered Veronica Guerin were cannabis barons. Indeed, lawmakers who are regularly smashed by booze themselves, vote huge budgets to the police to prevent people taking far safer substances, such as cannabis.

So what happens when the War on Drugs is over? We immediately bankrupt the drug criminals, we allow the full rigour of the law to regulate the sale and quality of the drugs sold at the local pharmacy, off-licence (or wherever).

     
In the US, there has been a substantial reduction in the use of tobacco over the last 30 years, and this is not because tobacco became illegal but because a sentient community began, in substantial numbers, to apprehend the high cost of tobacco to human health
The money saved on this futile conflict is put into addiction services similar to Alcoholics Anonymous. People do get addicted to drugs - many are addicted to booze - but they need help. They don't need to be criminalised.

Many people take cannabis or ecstasy socially and within limits where they can function in their lives - just like the guy who looks forward to his few pints on a Friday night. No one thinks that yer man in the corner of the pub is committing a crime for enjoying a few lunchtime pints on a Sunday while watching the game on Sky Sports. At the moment that's exactly the view we have of 20-year-olds who drop an E at a Rave or some young solicitor who rolls a spliff.

Future generations will look back at the madness of the last few decades and wonder why we poured billions into a meaningless global war that we didn't need to fight. They will, I suspect, scratch their heads in puzzlement in the same way that we look at the American lawmakers who - morally panicked by the Temperance Movement - decided to make a bottle of Bourbon an illegal item.

The banning of booze unleashed a shooting war on the streets of American cities, as the Prohibition-engineered crime bosses fought for the dollars of a criminalised nation. Prohibition in the States was crazy - and it came to an end. Before it came to an end, it created criminal empires, distorted society, criminalised good people and brought the law into disrepute.

The criminalisation of the users of other drugs is equally insane and cannot be sustained. The ancient Sumerians would not, I suspect, have understood why we created mayhem in the forlorn attempt to repress an entirely human need.

Two words from their ancient language today are still in use in modern English. Firstly, their word for the liquid they produced from their crops - alcohol.

Secondly their word for garden - Eden.

Taking drugs is as old as that - it's part of being human.


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