Stamp out drugs: A futile campaign?

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The dam burst last weekend. There had been cracks in the consensus and growing trickles of dissent, but suddenly the issue of legalizing the use of marijuana (cannabis) is in a major country -- and an English-speaking one, at that.

In Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland it is practically impossible to get arrested for buying or using "soft drugs". In the Netherlands, users may buy up to five grams of cannabis or hashish for private use at 1,500 licensed "coffee shops," and they are opening two drive-through outlets in the border town of Venlo to cater to German purchasers. Even in Canada, Conservative leader and former prime minister Joe Clark is openly calling for the decriminalization of cannabis. But that is still far short of what Sir David Ramsbotham, the outgoing Chief Inspector of Prisons, suggested last Sunday in Britain.

"The more I look at what's happening, the more I can see the logic of legalizing drugs, because the misery that is caused by the people who are making criminal profit is so appalling and the sums are so great that are being made illegally. I think there is merit in legalizing and prescribing, so people don't have to go and find an illegal way of doing it," he said.

He said "drugs", not just "cannabis"; "legalizing and prescribing", not just "decriminalizing". Over the past week former Home Secretaries Lord Jenkins and Lord Baker and outgoing British "drugs tsar" Keith Hellawell have called for a debate on decriminalizing "soft drugs". And the new Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has supported a local experiment in the south London district of Brixton where police will simply caution people found with cannabis. No trial, no criminal record.

Peter Lilley, former minister for social security and Conservative deputy leader, has quoted a recent study in the respected medical journal The Lancet which concluded that "moderate indulgence in cannabis has little ill effect on health, and decisions to ban or to legalize cannabis should be based on other considerations." For Lilley, banning cannabis is indefensible and unenforceable in a country where far more harmful drugs like alcohol and tobacco are legal.

Magistrates should issue licenses to local shops for the sale of limited amounts of cannabis to people over 18, Lilley said. Like tobacco, it would be taxed and carry a health warning -- and the tax yield on an estimated annual British consumption of 1,500 tons of cannabis a year has been calculated at about US$23 billion if the cannabis were produced and marketed in exactly the same way as tobacco, enough to cut the standard rate of British taxes by 5 percent.

Of course many people would grow their own, and given the black market, too high a rate of taxation on cannabis would simply push consumers back to private dealers. Most experts think the highest practical rate of taxation would be $3-$4 per gram (against a production cost of around $0.75), which would yield a mere $7billion to $8 billion a year in extra tax revenue. But it would also cut law enforcement costs -- and it would keep ordinary cannabis users out of contact with "hard drug" dealers.

In Britain, polls show that opposition to legalizing cannabis has dropped from 66 percent to only 51 percent in the past five years, and nay-sayers are overwhelmingly in the older age groups.

It is a welcome outbreak of sanity, and even mere decriminalization in a major English-speaking country would have a profound effect on the debate in the United States, the heart and soul of the prohibitionist movement.

But actual legalization of cannabis in Britain is unlikely because the U.S. government strong-armed all its allies into signing three international conventions in the 1970s and 1980s that define cannabis as a dangerous drug.

To break out of those treaties would involve a larger effort of political will than any government with many other items on its agenda would be willing to undertake. So millions of Britons may benefit from the decriminalization of cannabis, but the potentially large social and tax benefits of outright legalization are likely to be lost.

The bigger problem, however, is that even most British advocates of decriminalization or legalization are too ignorant or too timid to extend the same argument to "hard drugs" like heroin and cocaine -- the kind that lead you into a life of crime and destroy your body and mind, if you believe the drug warriors.

Indeed, the whole policing experiment in Brixton which is the entering wedge for decriminalizing cannabis in Britain is being justified as a way of freeing up scarce police resources to tackle the problem of "hard drugs".

Nobody should use heroin, a highly addictive substance, for fun (though its slower-acting form, morphine, is universally used for pain control in medical practice). Nobody should smoke cigarettes either, since they are even more addictive. But nobody in their right minds would consider making cigarettes illegal.

The consequences of banning tobacco, in terms of creating a huge black market, expanding operations of organized crime, bringing the law into disrespect, and criminalizing millions of harmless addicts, are simply unthinkable. So how can so many intelligent, well-educated people miss the analogy?

By making heroin and cocaine illegal, around $450 billion a year, or 8 percent of world trade, has been handed over to professional criminals -- now rich enough to subvert entire countries.

About a quarter of the enormous U.S. prison population, half a million people, are there for drug offenses, and at least as many are there for other crimes committed to pay for their habit.

For heroin addicts who don't go to jail, average life span on the street is just over 10 years -- not because of the drugs, but because of the desperate lifestyle, the contaminated drugs, and the disease-bearing needles that come with the black market.

Then there is the collateral damage of all the crimes committed by addicts desperately trying to support a habit that, at the grossly inflated prices made possible by the black market, can cost a $1,000 a week or more. Yet heroin addiction, before it was demonized by American lawmakers, was an undesirable but relatively low-cost affliction that had no adverse health consequences and victims were free to lead a normal and productive life.

That's how it used to be in Britain. Only two years after the U.S. congress, fresh from banning alcohol under the Volstead Act, imposed prohibition on the heroin family of drugs in 1924, the Rolleston committee in Britain concluded that non-medical heroin use was a problem needing help, not a crime needing punishment. So Britain adopted the policy of providing heroin on prescription to registered addicts -- and over the next 40 years, the number of addicts in Britain scarcely grew at all.

Then in 1971, largely in response to intense U.S. pressure to fall in with American plans for global prohibition, British doctors were forbidden to prescribe heroin to addicts -- leading to the black market. Since 1971, the number of heroin addicts in Britain has grown from fewer than 500 to around 500,000.

Since the heroin group of drugs do no long-term harm to the system if taken in pure form, this would have been an unfortunate but not tragic result -- except that this is a black market, which charges them such a huge mark-up that they can only support their habit by crime. It also provides them with a highly adulterated product of unknown strength, often mixed with lethal substances. So they spend a lot of time in jail, and die young.

As late as the 1990s one British doctor in Liverpool, John Marks, was allowed to go on prescribing heroin to his addicted patients under a special Home Office license as an experiment. In the 10 years of the project none died, their arrest rate for property crimes dropped to close to the average for the area, and most managed to find jobs and stabilize their lives.

But then CBS television reported on the project, infuriating the U.S. drug warriors so much that pressure from the American embassy in London forced the British government to shut the project down. Dr Marks's former patients were driven back onto the black market, and over the next two years 41 of them died.

It is not a war on drugs but on drug users, especially those from underprivileged groups, driven by ignorance and waged with lies. It kills the addicts, it creates huge criminal empires, and it undermines whole societies. Every year thousands defect from the futile struggle to "stamp out" drugs. One is Sir Keith Morris, British ambassador to Colombia in 1990-1994. Initially a strong supporter of the "war on drugs", after seeing what it has done to Colombia he now advocates legalization of all drugs.

The "drug war" propaganda is so insistent and so brazen in its falsehoods that fundamental criticism of the whole rationale for prohibition is rarely heard. Fewer realize that it is a leftover from the war on alcohol launched by prohibitionists in the U.S. just after World War I.

Alcohol prohibition was eventually abandoned, though only after creating the conditions for large scale organized crime in the U.S. Doubtless drug prohibition will end too one day, after the scale of the damage has become impossible to ignore or deny. Meanwhile, the industry created to wage it will trundle on blindly, wasting money, ruining lives, and wrecking whole countries.