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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Comment: Liam Clarke: All-out drugs ban will be as disastrous as prohibition Liam Clarke The Sunday Times Sunday 07 Mar 2004 Imagine that cannabis and ecstasy had been the main social drugs for 3,000 years when, out of the blue, a research chemist came up with alcohol and looked for a marketing grant for fine wines and malt whiskey. On the plus side, the new products would promote conviviality, develop the palate, help people escape their inhibitions and put a certain zing into life, the chemist would say. Economically they would have huge export potential and generate tax revenue. On the minus side, alcohol products would be addictive, damage the liver and heart, be associated with domestic violence and road deaths, and cause headaches and nausea after excess use, the chemist would admit. The outcome is obvious. Nobody in their right mind would think of licensing alcohol for use if we were not already stuck with it. Yet society does use alcohol and survives the experience. We minimise the adverse effects by banning sales to the young, by licensing the premises where it can be consumed. We tax it highly and we ban its use in public places or before driving. Should regulation and taxation not be the approach with all drugs once they are widely used in a society? Outlawing drugs may keep them out of society for some years, but once they become established the problem is how best to reduce their ill effects. Horror at the social evils of alcohol, the sense that the damage inflicted by widespread alcohol consumption outweighed any benefits it conferred, led to prohibition in America in the 1930s. The sale of drink was completely banned in an ambitious social experiment aimed at moral improvement. The result was bathtub gin which blinded many, a rise in alcohol consumption, and the establishment of organised crime on a business scale throughout the continent. The policy had to be abandoned. Prohibition left an organised crime distribution infrastructure that was then used to funnel heroin, cocaine and other illegal drugs into the country. The policy was a disaster, as is any attempt to prohibit an activity which is popular with a large section of the population. The whole episode was corrupting in the most profound sense of the word. The same sort of corruption is being introduced into Ireland today by the blanket prohibition on popular drugs. There is an established market for several drugs that are currently illegal and that it is being supplied by criminals who are growing rich and powerful. In the case of addictive drugs, of which heroin is the main one consumed on this island, the young are ruthlessly targeted and customers are forced into prostitution and theft to pay for their habits. Drugs such as heroin and ecstasy are manufactured in underground laboratories, the equivalent of gin from bathtubs. There is no control on purity or strength and this can result in overdose and death. All these evils flow from the fact that these drugs are illegal. The ill effects that are intrinsic to the drug come on top of that. Nobody can argue that drugs are harmless. By definition, drugs are not nutrients. They are taken to alter mood and to escape from reality. This is not, in itself, a good thing. Beyond that specific drugs have individual side effects. But, as in the case of alcohol, listing them can give an exaggerated sense of the social damage they cause. Many people stop using drink or regulate their intake when it becomes a problem. Some drink when they are young but stop later when their constitutions become less robust. Most people would be better off if they never drank at all, but alcohol does not dominate the lives of most drinkers and comparatively few of us die in the gutter clutching a bottle of meths. The same is true of other drugs. In the 19th century opium, the basis of heroin, was available in all chemists shops in the form of laudanum. It was sold as a painkiller but many took it for pleasure. Some, like Bramwell Bronte, the brother of the Bronte sisters, were ruined by it. Others, like the poet Coleridge or the novelist Wilkie Collins, became addicted but lived successful lives and found that it inspired their writing. Overall it may have been better if there was no laudanum but society survived and some addicts managed to function despite being hooked. The supply they had was legal, affordable and of known strength and purity. It may have caused them personal problems but if they had been buying the drug today on the black market, and shooting up with shared needles, what would their fate have been? Drug use often turns out to be a passing fad. The use of hard drugs can be fatal, generally due to accidental overdose or infection from dirty needles. But most addicts will, after great distress, kick the habit if they survive long enough. The emphasis in drugs policy should be on avoiding these needless deaths. This means legalising established drugs, accompanied by a health education programme and rigorous quality control. There should be health warnings, taxes, no advertising of any kind, heavy penalties for selling to the young, restrictions on where drugs are taken. For the most dangerous drugs, there should be very few outlets and supply should be limited to a given amount per person. But in the end it should be possible for people to take a drug that has already become established in society without turning to crime or criminals. The toughest restrictions are only necessary for drugs where there is the possibility of overdose, life-long addiction or sudden death. Other substances do not carry these dangers and, while they are not harmless, they need not be so heavily regulated. It should be recognised, for instance, that you meet very few 50-year-olds who smoke pot. Yet when I was at university in the early 1970s, nearly everyone did so. It was a phase, it was a bit of a giggle, but most people grew out of it. Habits like drinking and smoking were harder to shake. Cannabis may have made my contemporaries miss lectures and underperform, but the worst long-term effect of which I am aware befell one mature student who got caught receiving a package of cannabis posted to him by a friend in England. They both got criminal records. Ecstasy seems to be a similar fad nowadays. An Irish Times survey last year found that most people grow out of it when their disco days are over. The emphasis should surely be on discouraging ecstasy use by pointing out the health risks and, where people are determined to consume it, creating a system that will protect them from harm for the few years that they do. That is not to argue that any drug is entirely harmless or is a good thing. It is to argue that many drugs are consumed in our society and that we have to deal with that fact in a joined-up and mature way. The current policy on drugs is a mixture of denial, wishful thinking and empire building. The drugs squads, the government-appointed drugs tsars and the criminals who fight for the profits of narcotics all have a common interest in prohibition. Crime is, by its nature, very conservative. It supports the status quo but tries to cheat the system. Legalising drugs pulls the rug out from under it. Every month we hear that cannabis or ecstasy "with a street value" of hundreds of thousands of pounds has been seized. Yet, even as this happens, the visible wealth of drugs dealers increases. In deprived areas they are the role models for young men. The truth is that the cash figures for seizures are entirely spurious. The street value given by police is several times higher than the price paid by the dealers when they buy them. The profits are such that they can take these losses without any difficulty and the drugs supply is not disrupted by the "massive seizures" on which police careers are built. It suits the criminals, the police, and the moral majority to handle things like this. Drugs are damaging, a social evil and appeal to human weaknesses which are common if not universal. The correct response to damage is to limit it, just as the correct response to weakness must be compassion.
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