Subj: UK: Opinion: War the Enforcer can't win



Date: 27 May 1999



Source: Scotsman, The  (UK)



     

War the Enforcer can't win  



The new drive against drugs will actually do more harm than 

good, says Edward Pearce . A different approach is needed - 

and we could start by legalising soft drugs  

 



IN SEEKING to limit availability, "our aim is to reduce 

access to all drugs amongst young people significantly, and 

to reduce access to all drugs which cause the greatest harm, 

particularly heroin and cocaine, by 25 per cent by 2005 and 

by 50 per cent by 2008".



The words, precise in the way of the silliest undertakings, 

are those of Dr Jack Cunningham, not altogether a bad chap, 

not really the idiot he is making himself here on behalf of 

a collective Cabinet idiocy. But he is proclaiming the Blair 

Government's latest contribution to the profits of drug 

dealing and making, amid the cumulus of futile aspiration, 

one verifiably wrong statement. Heroin and cocaine are not 

the drugs which cause the greatest harm. The nameless 

substances with which heroine and cocaine are frequently cut 

do that. Taken regularly in pure form, heroin and cocaine 

are not liquorice allsorts, but they can actually be lived 

with, attend a steady working career, can matter less than 

excitable politicians think.



And with Mr Blair's mind, Mr Straw's instincts and Dr 

Cunningham's Bittern boom at work, expect the harm caused by 

taking heavy drugs to increase.



The idea underlying yesterday's preposterous statement is 

the seizure of more drugs and their profits to finance what 

are called Drug Action Teams and a Drug Prevention Advisory 

Service, titles in capital letters to speak resonant purpose 

- new Faberge Easter eggs for the "Drugs Czar"! And if 

another drive against drugs - ie more policemen, more 

undercover operations, more false heroics - should in any 

degree succeed, it will be met by an appropriately greater 

adulteration of the drugs sold, and a corresponding increase 

in that "greater harm". Caused, let us add, by fools of 

politicians.



The standard way to handle any shortfall in the turnover of 

shirtbuttons is to increase profit per unit sold. There are 

two ways of doing that with drugs. A higher price multiplies 

petty crime; cutting kills people.



There was a time when homosexual relations were thought 

unspeakably horrific. Decent people flinched in nausea. The 

most compassionate talked of illness rather than crime, but 

policemen were employed to haunt public urinals to hunt for 

smiles and smile back, to engage in part-way complicity and 

to lie their heads off when hauling off the morally deformed 

to social ruin in the courts.



This is what the tabloids now do with any celebrity who can 

be crucified for drug consumption. The accompanying hatreds 

are much the same. "He'll have his hair cut now," cackled a 

group of prostitutes at the manacled Oscar Wilde. Perm any 

three News of the World headlines. The viciousness of virtue 

is quite special. We don't do that any more, and indeed 

homosexuals have grown a bit boring. We don't do it because 

our morality has changed. Sexual variance is seen as 

legitimate.



Let's spell this out so that it can't be misunderstood. The 

time is not far away when our already changing morality will 

have moved quite as far on drugs. We are going to reach 

quite soon a consensus that drugs are a choice the way 

whisky and beer are choices, that addicted involvement is 

not wisdom, but that drug-taking will be the chosen 

recreation of many people and that railing against it is 

pointless.



Only one MP, Paul Flynn of Newport, had the courage on 

Tuesday to offer any resistance to the Enforcer's noisy 

assertion of received standard fallacy. But go back to 

debates about sexual deviancy in the 1940s, read DJ West's 

absurd Pelican book of 1955, and you will see the same 

fixed, unreflective horror, the same statutory intolerance. 

Mr Flynn suggested heretically that soft drugs should be 

legalised. Cannabis at least should be legal the way beer is 

legal. Apart from inducing pacific and inert moods rather 

than belligerence, your unadulterated spliff is on a rough 

metabolic par with your unadulterated pint of Deuchars.



Somebody once tried to prohibit the drinking of beer. Step 

forward the Jack Cunningham of his day, United States 

Congressman Andrew Volstead. The act bearing his name passed 

the American legislature in 1918.



It established 14 festive years of corporate criminality as 

the needs of the market were met by rather obvious looking 

mafiosi in error-of-taste suits, facilitated by systemic 

bribery of the police and local government and, with a 

spiked commodity terrors were added beyond the resources of 

ordinary alcohol. There was a market for beer and whisky 

then which was always going to be met and was accommodated 

through black channels. There is a similar demand for every 

kind of drug today and it is met by the black market.



Consider Sydney Smith's account of Mrs Partington of 

Sidmouth: "In the winter of 1824 there set in a great flood 

upon that town ... Dame Partington who lived upon the beach, 

was seen at the door of her house with mop and patterns, 

trundling her mop, squeezing out the sea-water and 

vigorously pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was 

roused. Mrs Partington's spirit was up; but I need not tell 

you the contest was unequal. The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs 

Partington." Have I quoted that before? It is all politics.



Smith was talking about electoral reform, a grander thing 

than substances. But there is no real difference. Demand is 

demand - for a commodity or forms of government. Any 

minister orating about the war on drugs stands exactly where 

Mrs Partington stood - up to the knees! There exists, not 

perhaps the Atlantic, but a fair-sized sea, and it will beat 

Dr Cunningham.



There are three problems in this field - the harm done to 

users, criminal distribution and the great volume of theft 

committed to meet the criminals' price. Given pure drugs, 

almost certainly the physical harm would decline heavily. 

That can be achieved by opening a legal market and given 

individual financial strictures, prescribing free. The legal 

market will not adulterate cocaine any more than it now 

adulterates TCP, and who steals to go to Boots?



So what should we do now that Blairism in all its argument-

proof prissiness never will? Refusing any longer to do what 

we cannot usefully do, we legalise soft drugs. We expand 

widely on the field experiments of the two Drs Marks who 

have been guiding patients to legally supplied hard drugs, 

to monitor how people will cope who rely on drugs but not on 

criminal suppliers. If, over two years, those tests validate 

the point that life improves with lawful regularity, we 

should proceed to the legalisation of all drugs.