Pubdate: Sun, 08 Nov 2015
Source: Sunday Herald, The (UK)
Copyright: 2015 Sunday Herald
Contact: http://www.sundayherald.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/873
Author: Ian Bell
HOW TO WIN THE WAR ON DRUGS? LEGALISE THEM
Amid a fragrant haze of hypocrisy, the line is that there will be no
change, funding cuts aside, in UK drugs strategy. Meanwhile, police
forces the length of these islands are improvising policies of their own
IT could be a pub quiz question. What do Armenia and Argentina have
in common? The Czech Republic and Chile? Paraguay and Poland? The
answer isn't football. Each has decided, in some fashion, that if you
just say no to drugs, you say nothing useful at all. Depending on the
definitions used, there are between 25 and 30 such countries. Their
laws, methods, aims and ambitions vary. Some have legalised drugs.
Some have "re-legalised". A few never got around to prohibition to
begin with. Most have experimented - for personal use, you understand
- - with a gateway policy, decriminalisation.
Last week, the Republic of Ireland decided, in effect, that what's
good enough for Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Estonia, the Netherlands
and others might help with its own liberation from the half-century
of failure we still call, without irony, the war on drugs. With a
leaked report suggesting that the UN Office on Drugs and Crime
(UNODC) is on the brink of advocating decriminalisation, Ireland
joins a growing consensus.
Britain doesn't want to hear about that. Or rather, the Conservative
Government doesn't want to hear the accusation "soft on drugs" from
its press sponsors. Amid a fragrant haze of hypocrisy, the line is
that there will be no change, funding cuts aside, in UK drugs
strategy. Meanwhile, police forces the length of these islands are
improvising policies of their own.
In Ireland, some serious thinking has been going on. The result, if
carried through, will be the decriminalisation of drugs in "personal
use" quantities combined with the introduction of injection
("consumption") rooms. Narcotics will remain illegal, but in future
or such is the hope no-one will be treated as a criminal because of
an addiction or a problematic habit. The Irish are making a
fundamental distinction.
Officially, Britain remains tough on drugs. Unofficially, an ad hoc
pragmatism guides enforcement. A fall of close to a third in cannabis
possession offences in England and Wales between 2011-12 and 2014-15
has not happened because dope has lost its allure. With budgets cut
to ribbons, police forces have concluded they have better things to
do than harass cannabis users.
There are worse principles a government could apply. In a speech at
Drug laws are being liberalised throughout the world as addiction is
increasingly being viewed as a health issue the London School of
Economics last Monday, Aodhan O Riordain, the Irish minister
responsible for drugs strategy, maintained that a "cultural shift" is
required. Addiction should be regarded as a health issue, he argued,
both for the sake of individuals and for the benefit of law
enforcement. Time and money spent hunting addicts could be better
used against a criminal trade.
O Riordain advocates decriminalisation, not legalisation. He is not
alone in that, though at the LSE he failed to explain his logic.
Portugal's experience over the last 14 years is the Irish minister's
inspiration, as it is for many reluctant conscripts in the war on
drugs, but a conspicuous Iberian success remains only half an answer
to a complicated question.
With Europe's highest HIV infection rate among injecting drugs users,
Portugal faced an undoubted crisis at the turn of the century.
Desperate, it decided that drug use or possession should remain
offences, but not criminal offences. The money spent on treatment and
prevention was doubled. The police meanwhile began to ignore mere
marijuana use. And the HIV rate started to fall.
It has not been plain sailing since. According to some studies, hard
drug use has increased. More people have sought treatment, perhaps as
a result, but the number of drug-related deaths has declined.
Pressure on courts has eased, meanwhile, and the street price of
drugs has fallen. Adolescent use seems to be waning, but with the
police still seizing several tonnes of cocaine each year, the effect
of reform on organised crime has been hard to measure.
That, though, is an aspect of decriminalisation too often overlooked.
On its own, without a wider health policy or O Riordain's
"person-centred" strategy, it does not "solve" a narcotics problem.
It spares individuals some brutal consequences prison, stigma,
unemployment, existence without treatment or medical care that are
legacies of the unending war. But decriminalisation alone is not enough.
It counts as a start, nevertheless, and that is more than Britain has
managed. Last October, the Home Office caused strife within the
coalition by publishing a report, Drugs: International Comparators,
that looked at the experience of Portugal and a dozen other
countries. To the dismay of Tories, the survey said there was "no
apparent correlation" between tough laws and the level of drug use.
While decriminalisation would not curb use, there were "indications
that decriminalisation can reduce the burden on criminal justice systems".
Who'd have thought? In the ensuing battle, the LibDem Norman Lamb
resigned as a Home Office minister while policy - "this government
has absolutely no intention of decriminalising drugs" - was firmed.
Why decriminalise? For an Irish recreational user, far less an
addict, the question is superfluous. Nevertheless, O Riordain, like
his peers around the world, has taken a first step and refused the
second. As the Home Office report suggested, decriminalisation has
little effect on use. People go on buying their stuff and enriching
some of the nastiest people on the planet. A few more police go to
work hunting traffickers. Users are no longer persecuted. Mafias remain.
In 2006, the Italian journalist Roberto Saviano published Gomorrah,
an expose, in the proper sense, of the Neapolitan Camorra crime gang.
He has been forced to live in secret since. Nevertheless, this summer
he published Zero Zero Zero, a title derived from a traffickers' joke
name for pure cocaine. The book is horrifying, but not just for the
routine, fantastical violence. In Saviano's account, the cartels'
trade has corrupted the world.
UNODC will mention "vast sums" that "compromise" economies, buy
politicians and rig elections. Saviano will tell you that drugs money
courses through the world's financial systems, that it touches all of
us, and that it alone kept banking afloat in parts of the Americas
during the great crash. He calls it narco-capitalism. This journalist
has dedicated his life to opposing the mafias. But in the last pages
of Zero Zero Zero he writes: "As terrible as it may seem, total
legalisation may be the only answer. A horrendous response, horrible
perhaps, agonising. But the only one that can stop everything."
That strikes me as true. By one calculation, the United States alone
had spent $150 billion on the drugs war by 2010. Any victories? Or
just the news that Barack Obama has been commuting sentences on
dozens of hapless souls locked away for life because of recreational
use? According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, as of September 26,
48.4 per cent of the entire US inmate population - 93,821 individuals
- - had been locked up for drug offences. Some war; some victory.
So legalise the lot. Those who want to use drugs will go on using
drugs. In a country with common sense, like Ireland, they might get
the help they need. But Saviano is right. Only one thing will put the
traffickers out of business and end this hopeless war.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom