Decriminalizing cannabis: Europe one step ahead

Gwynne Dyer, Columnist, London

"It's moving further towards decriminalization than any other country in the world," warned Keith Hellawell, the ex- policeman who was the British "drugs tsar" until the Labor government belatedly realized that his job was as ridiculous as his title. He was responding to British Home Secretary David Blunkett's announcement on July 10 that being caught with cannabis* will in future be treated no more seriously than illegally possessing other Class "C" controlled drugs like sleeping pills and steroids. He was technically wrong, but in terms of its political impact he was right.

Hellawell was technically wrong because Britain is not leading the parade of European countries who have broken away from the prohibitionist U.S. approach. Even after Blunkett's changes, Britain will lag behind other European countries like Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal in its laws on recreational drug use. But he was right because Britain is a) still more or less a great power, and b), speaks English.

The main engine of the "war on drugs" is the United States, which managed to enshrine its prohibitionist views in international law during the Cold War by a series of treaties that make it impossible for national legislatures to legalize the commonly used recreational drugs. All that other countries can do without Washington's agreement is to "decriminalize" the possession and use of at least some of the banned drugs.

Numbers of smaller European countries have already decriminalized various drugs, but what the Portuguese or the Dutch do will never have an impact in the U.S. Britain is one of the very few countries whose example will ever be seen as relevant in the country that is the real home of the "drug war".

Britain's decriminalization of cannabis, and even more importantly its partial return to the old policy of prescribing free heroin for addicts on the National Health Service, could finally open the door to a real debate in the U.S.

The actual changes in British law are rather timid. In future British police will generally confiscate cannabis and issue warnings to users, rather than arresting them, but "disturb public order" by blowing cannabis smoke in a policeman's face and you're in jail. Moreover, only a small fraction of Britain's 200,000 heroin users will get free prescriptions. Nevertheless, this is by far the biggest crack that has yet appeared in the prohibitionist dam.

Until the late 19th century, all kinds of recreational drugs were legal throughout the Western world. Florence Nightingale used opium, Queen Victoria used cannabis, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writes in a matter-of-fact way about Sherlock Holmes injecting drugs with a syringe.

Then came the Women's Christian Temperance Union, most powerful in the deeply religious U.S., which succeeded in banning one drug after another (mainly on the grounds that they were associated principally with Chinese, Blacks and other racially "inferior" groups) until by the early 20th century only the mainstream Western drugs, alcohol and tobacco, were still legal in the U.S.

For almost two decades, in the 1920s and 1930s, the WCTU even succeeded in prohibiting alcohol in the U.S. Organized crime expanded tenfold to meet the opportunity created by this newly illegal demand for alcohol -- Al Capone was just as much the result of alcohol prohibition as Pablo Escobar in Colombia was of America's "war on drugs" -- but eventually there was a retreat to sanity in the case of alcohol.

There will eventually be a return to sanity on "drugs", too, but Britain's decriminalization of cannabis is only a very tentative first step.

The "war on drugs" is one of the most spectacularly counter-productive activities human beings have ever engaged in.

"We have turned the corner on drug addiction," said President Richard Nixon in 1973, and predictions of imminent victory continue to be issued at frequent intervals, but the quality of the drugs gets better and the street price continues to drop.

As any free marketeer should understand, making drugs illegal creates enormous profit margins and huge incentives to expand the market by pyramid selling. When cocaine was still legal, annual global production was 10 tons. Now it is 700 tons.

Drug prohibition greatly increases the number of users, fills the jails with harmless people, channels vast sums into the hands of the wicked people who work to expand the lucrative black market, and causes a huge wave of petty crimes. It is estimated that between half and two-thirds of the muggings and property crimes in both Britain and the U.S. are committed by cocaine and heroin addicts desperate to find the inflated sums needed to satisfy their habit.

Cannabis users are overwhelmingly neither addicts nor criminals. The more significant part of Blunkett's initiative is his willingness to revive the old policy of prescribing heroin to addicts (now around 200,000 in Britain, compared to around 500 when that policy was dropped at Washington's behest in 1963). He's only willing to let a small proportion of them have it on prescription for now, but since those will be the only heroin addicts who stay alive and for the most part stay clear of crime, the rest will also be back on prescription sooner or later.

It will be many years yet before mainstream American politicians gain the political courage to take on the prohibitionist lobby directly, but the external environment is changing.