Sunday Thinkpiece: the war on drugs

The war on drugs is over, and we were on the losing side. Let us now put aside our weapons, and work out how to manage what will be an uneasy peace.

For a long time there had been talk of drugs, but mainly among the well-to-do, including several members of the Royal Family in the last century. Sherlock Holmes was of course a cocaine addict. But I suppose the war on drugs really started in the 1960s.

Now, half a century later, there are drugs in our prisons, drugs in our schools, drugs on our council estates and drugs on the street being sold to children. Who better to sell them to? Perhaps pushers are the only people investing in our children. ‘Give me a child when he is seven..’ to misquote St Francis Xavier, ‘and I will give you the lifelong addict’.

In America, the war on drugs has cost $1 trillion, that’s a million dollars a million times over, and they are no further forward than we are.

So what, if anything, are we to do? It is obvious that drug use has been increasing, not even staying the same, while we chuck money and the time of the police, courts and prison service into a bottomless pit.

For me, a turning point in my thinking was the passing of the Suicide Act in 1961, making suicide legal. For the first time our bodies were our own. It is why I think the car seatbelts law is wrong: it is perfectly ridiculous that I should be allowed to slit my throat with a carving knife and yet not by going through the windscreen of a car (before you complain, I don’t say it is wrong to wear a seatbelt, just that it is wrong to be made a criminal if you don’t).

For this reason, and the stupidity of fighting a war we can never win, I think drug taking should be legalised. Discouraged, of course, but decriminalised. An addict’s body is his own, not the State’s.

What would be the effect? Most people point to the Netherlands, where pot smoking is allowed in ‘coffee shops’. What is good about it is that the purchase of marijuana is taken out of the hands of the street pusher, who would normally groom a child from marijuana to heroin. Where, however, it is a bad example is that the coffee shops have to buy the weed from the black market, maintaining the criminal connection. Drug use is rising, as are incidences of drug-based gang violence.

A better example is Portugal, where until the turn of the century an astonishing 1% of the population – that’s 100,000 out of ten million – were addicted to illegal drugs. The problem was quite out of control. In 2000, however, a new law decriminalised possession of drugs for personal use. Drugs are still technically illegal, but users are sent for treatment, not to the courts. Essentially the drug problem has been turned from one of criminality to one of public health.

What happened?

There were small increases in illicit drug use among adults, but decreases for adolescents and problem users, such as drug addicts and prisoners.

Drug-related court cases dropped 66 percent.

Drug-related HIV cases dropped 75 percent. In 2002, 49 percent of people with AIDS were addicts; by 2008 that number had fallen to 28 percent.

The number of regular users held steady at less than 3 percent of the population for marijuana and less than 0.3 percent for heroin and cocaine: decriminalisation brought no surge in drug use. The number of people treated for drug addiction rose 20 percent from 2001 to 2008.
(figures courtesy of Associated Press)

Worldwide, some 93 countries offer alternatives to prison for drug use, mainly needle exchanges and the like. The Portuguese go further: their system is not perfect – aspects of the forced treatment leave something to be desired by libertarians – but they have taken a bold step towards doing something sensible: fighting a different war, one they might just win.

The rest of us should follow them.

It could happen to anyone

The cyclist, Alberto Contador, found to have the banned substance clenbuterol in his system, has said that it came from contaminated food.

Have you eaten contaminated food? Containing performance enhancing drugs?  Good Lord, have I?

If my friends report me hurtling round the Umbrian hills on a bicycle, you will know the answer.

The silly war on drugs

Sir Ian Gilmore, the outgoing president of the Royal College of Surgeons, has publicised a report in favour of the decriminalisation of the personal use of drugs. Gilmore is not a nutcase, and nor is his co-author Nicholas Green, a barrister.

I think the first thing to be said about this is that we have lost the war on drugs. Cannabis is increasingly used by quite young children. In many of our housing estates heroin and crack dealers walk unmolested by the authorities. The middle classes, among whom cocaine use is increasing, are scarcely an example. Every month a new drug is invented, classified by the authorities and nothing done to stop its use. We can’t carry on like this, as Mr Cameron famously said. The thing is, what are we going to do?

The option of an increased police involvement and a crack down (if you’ll excuse the pun) no longer seems to exist. We can’t afford it, we haven’t the prison space, and society won’t tolerate the massive assault on its civil liberties such an operation would imply. Nor is it likely to work.

Since 1961 it has been legal to kill yourself in the UK. That is to say I am allowed to buy a knife and slit my throat (yes there are medical and police resources required here, too), jump off Beachy Head, drive my car into a wall. I can also damage and kill myself through obesity, cigarettes, and alcohol. For all these, if I am still alive at the end, I am treated free of charge by the NHS.

So it must be with drugs. If someone wants to take them that is their lifestyle choice (the Government has, I believe, a duty to warn the public of the dangers as long as this is a serious cost to the NHS). Let’s free up the prisons, free up the police and concentrate our diminished resources on treatment. Portugal decriminalised personal drug use ten years ago and consumption has gone down, not up, as addicts come out into the open and are treated.

The war on drugs is not a moral crusade: heroin is not inherently worse than alcohol. Let’s have some clear thinking for a change and debate Sir Ian’s proposals sensibly.

Mephedrone

The newspapers are full of the sad story of two teenagers who died after taking mephedrone, also known as meow meow. They had mixed it with alcohol and other drugs.

The knee jerk reaction is to ban it, and the Sun, of course, speaks out boldly.

Mephedrone is legal, but not for human consumption. It is available on the internet, as plant food.

A part of the problem here is our dependency on the state. Many people have assumed that if it is legal it must be harmless: they have abrogated their normal decision making to the government apparat. Yet I once heard that someone had died drinking Worcestershire Sauce. It is legal to buy a kitchen knife but you will die if you stab it in your throat; legal to use the railway but you will die if you fall under a train.

If mephedrone is banned, something else will take its place. And that might be considerably more dangerous.

This is not a problem which will go away just by passing laws.