Pubdate: Mon, 03 Nov 2014
Source: Mercury, The (Australia)
Copyright: 2014 Davies Brothers Ltd
Contact:  http://www.themercury.com.au/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/193
Author: Greg Barns
Note: Greg Barns is a Hobart-based human rights lawyer.

TRUE HORROR STORY IS DRUG PROHIBITION, NOT GROWING ICE ADDICTION

POLITICIANS love to whip up a crisis. It's all part of the 24/7 news 
cycle that is eroding the capacity for rational dialogue in our democracy.

And the latest "crisis" is ice. According to Tasmanian Green MP Cassy 
O'Connor, ice - a methamphetamine also known as crystal meth - 
"threatens to destroy multiple generations in single families".

"Where's the acknowledgment that a crisis exists? Where's the 
commitment to responding effectively, with the necessary 
reprioritised resources to save a generation of Tasmanians from being 
laid to waste by ice?" Ms O'Connor fumed in an October 21 media release.

Calm down! There is no crisis, there is no pandemic of ice in Tasmania.

According to data by the University of Tasmania's Professor Raimondo 
Bruno and his team, the number of Tasmanian drug users who have taken 
ice within six months this year is about 54 per cent. It was just 
short of that number eight years ago.

In 2010, drug users in Hobart reported taking ice around six days in 
any six-month period and that figure is the same in 2014.

The data collected by Prof Bruno is significant because it comes from 
users. If there is an epidemic brewing this is the first place you find it.

Tasmania's experience is mirrored across Australia.

Prof Paul Dietze, of the prestigious Burnet Institute in Melbourne, 
recently said: "The perception of an ice epidemic is being driven by 
the experience of harms people are seeing. What we are arguing is 
that this is probably due to the changes in purity, not an increase in users."

There is also another misconception about ice - that is, if you touch 
it your life is ruined. Having acted for many ice users over the 
years as a barrister, I know that people can move off ice as they do 
other drugs. Drug use does not equal addiction in all cases.

Ice can cause serious harm, but then so can alcohol and tobacco. But 
the adverse impact of ice has been exaggerated. Looking at research 
on cognitive deficits allegedly caused by ice use, Carl Hart and 
colleagues from Columbia University concluded in 2011 that "in 
general, the data on acute effects show that methamphetamine improves 
cognitive performance in selected domains - that is visuospatial 
perception, attention and inhibition. Regarding long-term effects on 
cognitive performance and brain-imaging measures, statistically 
significant differences between methamphetamine users and control 
participants have been observed on a minority of measures," they 
argued in a paper published in Neuropsychopharmacology.

If politicians and policymakers were seriously interested in reducing 
the consumption of ice in our community they would end the reason for 
it existing in the first place - prohibition.

The 40-plus years of the US-led, trillion-dollar global effort to 
eradicate illicit drugs has been a disaster. We have globally reduced 
poverty and the incidence of some once rampant diseases, but when it 
comes to drugs there is simply nothing to show for it.

Ice is a product of the policy of prohibition. Matthew Feeney, of the 
Adam Smith Institute, a think tank in the UK, and Mark Thornton, of 
the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a US think tank, have described why 
this is the case. Thornton argues that ice is a "poor man's cocaine".

"During cocaine's heyday, meth was nearly extinct on the illegal 
market," he said.

But when US president Ronald Reagan began ramping up penalties for 
drug supply and use this "was effective in raising prices for illegal 
drugs by imposing greater risks and thus higher costs on production, 
distribution and consumption. The initial shock of the war on drugs 
sent black-market entrepreneurs back to the drawing board; they 
needed to reduce their risk and their costs. What they came back with 
included highly potent marijuana, crack cocaine and crystal meth."

And as Feeney notes, none of this should come as a surprise if you 
understand economic behaviour.

"The prohibition of a substance does not eliminate demand, it only 
changes the nature of the market. During the prohibition of alcohol 
in the US, moonshine became a substitute for previously legal 
alcohol. Although having the same desired effect of alcohol before 
prohibition, moonshine contained higher levels of toxins and was 
regarded as more dangerous than previously available alcohol."

So if policymakers want to reduce ice manufacture and supply then 
legalise all drugs and regulate supply according to potency. In a 
well-regulated market the high risk and highly harmful product is 
generally eradicated.

After the US ended its obsession with trying to rid the nation of 
alcohol, moonshine was replaced by potent but relatively safe liquors 
that were manufactured in a regulated market.

Prohibition of drugs leads to ice.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom