|
Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
|
|
UK: Comment: Injecting some sense
John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of The Guardian
Tuesday 10 Jul 2001 Millions of people want to use drugs and prohibition will not stop them Peter Lilley's call for the legalisation of cannabis is a welcome sign of sanity in the political classes. The former deputy Tory leader is right to argue that current policy is unenforcable and indefensible. When drug use is commonplace and widely seen as normal it makes no sense to prohibit it. The result can only be to make criminals of otherwise perfectly ordinary people. But this argument does not apply only - or even chiefly - to cannabis. It has still greater force applied to hard drugs, where the consequences of prohibition include serious dangers to public health. The reality that politicians of all parties still refuse to recognise is that criminalising hard drugs has been a disaster. Legalising cannabis would be a sensible step, but what is more urgently required is a fundamental overhaul of the prohibitionist policies on drugs such as heroin and cocaine that successive British governments have imported from the United States. The US is the world's largest market for illegal drugs. Decades of prohibitionism have done nothing to quench the insatiable American demand for an instant high. Around half a million people, a disproportionate number of them black, are currently behind bars for drug offences. Outside the US, America's puritan war on drugs has led to military intervention in a number of countries, including Colombia, where - as Sir Keith Morris, former British ambassador there, said last week - it has aggravated a cruel conflict without reducing the supply of drugs or curbing the demand for them in the US. When I last wrote on this subject in the Guardian six years ago, I argued that there was an unanswerable case for comprehensive drug legalisation in the US. For Britain, however, I took what is now a standard liberal view - that soft drugs should be decriminalised while the police effort against traffickers in hard drugs should be intensified. I think so no longer. Today, hard drug use in Britain is at pandemic levels. Since 1971, when a long-standing enlightened policy of treating addiction as a medical problem was abandoned and the current punitive regime installed, the number of heroin users has risen a thousand-fold, and they are currently the youngest in Europe. Moreover, British heroin users are at quite exceptional medical risk - and not only from HIV, which is often transmitted by sharing needles. As Nick Davies highlighted in his Guardian investigation, there are around 300,000 people suffering from hepatitis C in this country, most of them current or former drug users. Hepatitis C is a life- threatening condition, and it is highly infectious. Yet there is no systematic programme for treatment or prevention of the disease, or for monitoring its spread. Because the government insists on treating hard drug use as a criminal rather than a social or medical issue, a major threat to public health is not being addressed. David Blunkett has reacted cautiously but constructively to Mr Lilley's proposal, and it is to be hoped that his response augurs a more rational stance to the drugs question on the part of the government. But - despite the plea for legalisation made over the weekend by Sir David Ramsbotham, outgoing chief inspector of prisons, which is echoed in private by a number of senior police officers - there is no prospect of the government undertaking the radical overhaul of drugs that is now urgently needed. It is not just a craven fear of the rightwing press that holds it back - sections of the rightwing press have, after all, joined with liberal papers in questioning the current drugs regime - but also the belief that the argument for drug legalisation depends on the half-baked libertarian notion that people should be free to go to hell in their own way. This is a serious intellectual muddle. Quite to the contrary, the case for legalisation is based on the fact that using drugs has an enormous and sometimes devastating impact on other people. This is as true of legal drugs, such as alcohol, as it is of cannabis, heroin or cocaine. But the social effects of drug use are hugely magnified and worsened when it is illegal. It is not only that organised crime is strengthened, as it reaps the benefits of a stupendously profitable black market. Current policies are creating a growing underclass, which is medically, legally and economically vulnerable in the highest degree. Even clear- thinking authoritarians - if there are any in the government - must accept that outlawing drugs is wreaking havoc on public health and social cohesion. The case for legalising hard drugs does not rely on ultra-liberal ideas about individual freedom. But there is a peculiar absurdity in denying people the freedom to use drugs while encouraging them to take risky choices in practically every other area of their lives. No doubt rightly, the government is constantly urging us to become more entrepreneurial. It advises us to save for our old age by investing in volatile stock markets. It never ceases reminding those of us who are worried about environmental dangers that risks are present in everything we do. It presides over a society in which personal choice is the supreme value and risk-taking has become an essential ingredient of the good life. Where drugs are concerned, however, it actively prevents people from making a reasonable assessment of the risks they are taking. Whatever the inherent dangers of any drug, an extra level of risk is added when users have no reliable knowledge of the quality of the drug they are consuming. Decriminalisation - a policy of not prosecuting the end-users of drugs while continuing to target their sources - would not solve this problem. Turning a blind eye on users - as is being done in regard to cannabis in Brixton in an experimental scheme which makes long-established police practice in south London official - leaves production and distribution in the hands of criminals. Only legalising the most widely used drugs, subjecting them to strict quality assessment and making them available through controlled outlets, will allow people to make intelligent choices. The most odious tyrannies are those that seek to impose unreal values on society. Drugs policy has become such a tyranny. The hard truth is that millions of people want the freedom to use drugs, and no policy of prohibition is going to stop them. Isn't it time government accepted this fact, and allowed them to use drugs more safely and at less risk to others? • John Gray is professor of European thought at the London School of Economics j.gray@lse.ac.uk
After you have finished reading this article you can click here to go back.
|
This page was created by the Cannabis Campaigners' Guide.
Feel free to link to this page!