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Decriminalisation doesn't mean surrender in war on drugs Peter Wilby Sydney Morning Herald Friday 03 Jun 2011 As Bennett prepared for a new phase in the "war on drugs", launched by Richard Nixon 18 years earlier - more police, harsher penalties, more jails, more military action overseas - Friedman wrote that "the very measures you favour are a major source of the evils you deplore". He pointed out how illegality made the drugs industry more - not less - lucrative, how crime had flourished during alcohol prohibition in the 1930s and would flourish more under Bennett's plans, and how crack cocaine might never have been invented had it not been for the drugs war. Friedman was a firm supporter of decriminalising drugs, and regulating them as alcohol and tobacco are regulated. But however much governments listened to him on economics, they always ignored him on drugs. Many politicians, both of the left and of the right, have accepted the arguments for legalising drugs - but only before or after being in office. The signatories to a report launched in New York on Thursday declaring that "the global war on drugs has failed" and that "the criminalisation, marginalisation and stigmatisation" of drug users should end, could hardly be more impressive. They include former presidents of Brazil, Switzerland and Colombia, a former UN secretary-general and a former US secretary of state. But the only current office holder is the Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, who has other things on his mind just now. Other current leaders may be thought sympathetic. The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, said that the "war on drugs … has been tried and we all know it does not work". The US President, Barack Obama, called it "an utter failure". But they said those things in 2002 and 2004 respectively, long before they got close to political power. The arguments for legalisation are overwhelming. They do not rest on approval of drugs, or ignorance of their harms, or any wish to see their consumption increase. They are based on the argument that regulation would be less harmful to drug users, less damaging to society and less expensive to taxpayers than prohibition. Nobody disputes the dangers of drugs, only the best ways of controlling them. All drugs become more dangerous when banned. First, because consumers have no protection from adulteration and often have no idea of the strength and quality of what they are buying. And second, because vendors favour more concentrated forms that are less bulky and easier to transport and hide. Opium, smoked through a pipe, generates, as poets recorded, a drowsy numbness. Converted into pure heroin, a less bulky and more concentrated version, it does far greater harm, and is more addictive. During alcohol prohibition in the US, consumption of beer fell 70 per cent while consumption of wine and spirits soared. Illegal drugs are also dangerous to those who never touch them. A drug habit is expensive and addicts turn to crime to finance it. The war on drugs, then, is an expensive failure, an extended charge of the Light Brigade. UN figures quoted in the report suggest that in the past decade annual global consumption of opiates is up by 34 per cent, cocaine by 27 per cent, and cannabis by 8.5 per cent. The British lobby group Transform Drugs Policy says the legalisation of cocaine and heroin would deliver a net annual saving of £4.6 billion ($7 billion), excluding any revenue from taxing these drugs as we tax alcohol and tobacco, even if use of the drugs were to double. Ten years after it became the first European country to decriminalise the use and possession of all illicit drugs, Portugal has experienced only a slight increase in drug consumption, and a decline in heroin. The arguments over drugs are done and dusted. Any independent body that looks at the evidence comes to similar conclusions. So why do political leaders refuse to countenance more than minor tinkering with the law? One answer, as Steve Rolls, senior policy analyst at Transform Drugs Policy, puts it, is that drugs have been presented as an existential threat and the war against them almost as a religious crusade. And history does not look kindly on those who lose wars. But it goes even deeper than that. Control of drugs is deeply embedded in the DNA of modern government. The criminalisation of drug use, in the west at least, is almost entirely a 20th-century development. Laudanum, a tincture of opium, was in common use in Victorian England and Coca-Cola, invented in 1886, contained cocaine until 1903. No US state banned cannabis until 1915 and it remained legal in England until the 1920s, as did heroin and cocaine. Asian countries now have some of the harshest anti-drug laws. For most of the world, though, the time has come for political leaders to screw up their courage and rethink their policies. It surely cannot be beyond their spin doctors to present a switch to regulation not as a surrender but as a new phase in the drugs war. It is hard to think of anything that would do more to relieve death, destruction and human misery. Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/decriminalisation-doesnt-mean-surrender-in-war-on-drugs-20110603-1fkiz.html#ixzz1OGTIkNB3
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