Pubdate: Sat, 23 May 2015
Source: Age, The (Australia)
Copyright: 2015 The Age Company Ltd
Contact:  http://www.theage.com.au/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/5

THE LONG-RUNNING WAR ON DRUGS HAS FAILED: WE NEED TO LEGALISE

Michael Coulter The war on drugs has filled our jails, enriched the
worst among us, wasted police resources and blotted up millions of
dollars that could have been far better spent.

'Are we in the grip of an ice epidemic? No. Are all ice users violent
monsters? Certainly not.' 'Are we in the grip of an ice epidemic? No.
Are all ice users violent monsters? Certainly not.' It would be nice
to say that the war on drugs had achieved nothing. The truth is far
worse.

The truth is the war on drugs has filled our jails, enriched the worst
among us, wasted scarce police resources and blotted up millions of
dollars that could have been far better spent. It has been an
unmitigated disaster and it needs to stop.

This is a truth that those charged with persecuting the war are coming
to understand. The head of Australia's new ice taskforce, former
Victorian police chief commissioner Ken Lay, has acknowledged that
"for the last 10 years we've been trying to arrest our way out of this
and we haven't succeeded so we need to look to other solutions". The
US-based group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, meanwhile, claims
100,000 members worldwide, 5000 of whom are former or serving police.
In its mission statement it argues that "history has shown that drug
prohibition reduces neither use nor abuse".

But if many now argue that drugs should be treated as a health problem
rather than a law enforcement one, few are prepared to take the next
step and call for full legalisation. It's a debate we desperately need
to have, because prohibition has had its day.

The criminalisation of drug use is a recent phenomenon, and for good
reason: there is nothing inherently wrong with the act of altering
your own consciousness. Morally, ethically and philosophically, there
is no difference between beer and heroin. Drug use may be distasteful,
is clearly risky to mental and physical health, and is often
unproductive. But those labels could be applied to a host of everyday
activities, even ones not involving alcohol or tobacco.

Drugs aren't good for you, but they are nowhere near as bad as some
would have you believe. Most users will not become addicted, nor will
they suffer long-term damage. Even ice, the bogey du jour, isn't a
guaranteed portal to hell. Australian Drug Foundation statistics show
7 per cent of Australians have used it, but only 2 per cent did so in
the past year. That's a lot of people who bought the ticket but didn't
take the ride.

There is a body of thought, led by Columbia University neuroscientist
Carl Hart, that drugs themselves contribute only partially to
addiction a=C2=80" that misery, poverty and lack of alternative routes to

happiness are equally to blame. It is no coincidence that ice is a
bigger problem in depressed rural areas than the affluent inner cities.

And it is those who do become addicted who stand to gain the most from
a rational approach. Money now used to fight crime could be spent on
treatment: studies estimate that a dollar spent on policing drugs
returns $2 to the community, whereas each dollar spent on treatment
returns $7. Moreover, cheaper, cleaner, reliably available drugs would
eliminate the need to cheat and steal to fund a habit: an Australian
Institute of Criminology study found nearly half the heroin users in
our jails were there for crimes committed to raise money, while the
figure for amphetamines was about one-third.

The greatest benefit of legalisation, though, would be to kick out the
prop that supports organised crime. By artificially restricting the
supply of recreational drugs, we have made them enormously profitable
for those bold and violent enough to deal in them. The illicit drug
market in Australia alone is worth an estimated $17 billion a year.
Globally the figure is in the trillions. The consequences of that are
all around, from Melbourne's gangland wars to the killing of Myuran
Sukumaran and Andrew Chan to the continuously unfolding tragedy in
Mexico.

In 2009 economist Tim Moore calculated the direct cost of prohibition
in Australia was $2.7 billion, the vast majority of which was spent on
law enforcement and incarceration. By contrast, the demonstrably
effective national anti-tobacco strategy had a budget of $61 million
from 2009-13. Despite tobacco being cheap, freely available and highly
addictive, smoking is in decline. Education works, prohibition doesn't.

Compare the billions spent on the impossible task of fighting a global
criminal conspiracy to the money that could be raised from a properly
regulated industry. Alcohol taxes raise upwards of $7 billion a year,
but in the case of illicit drugs we pay huge sums to line the pockets
of criminals.

The point is not that we can't stop people using drugs, but that we
should never have tried to. Doing so was a huge, expensive mistake,
and the time to start fixing it is now.
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MAP posted-by: Matt