London Times Calls For A
Royal Commission For "A fresh line on drugs"
– Major Defection From Prohibitionism!
April 17, 1998(Ed. note: The Labor
government’s refusal even to consider any change even in the cannabis laws is now
being hit from the Establishment right. Remember that The London Times is owned by Rupert
Murdoch.)
See
UK "Justice"
Minister Straw’s Rejection of Fact Finding Cannabis Commission Based On Errors of
Fact
and
"Mandatory
Drug Testing May Have Perverse Effect"
- Discouraging Cannabis; Encouraging Hard Drugs. - London Times
and
London
Times Reports Sympathetically About Medical Marijuana User – Leaves Government
Sounding Cruel
From The London Times
letters@the-times.co.uk
April 16, 1998
OPINION
A fresh line on drugs
The Government should appoint a royal commission to examine the
nature of Britain’s drug problem and make recommendations. The "war"
against drugs may or may not be being lost; there is disagreement even about that, but
this is certainly one of the classic cases for a commission. A great social evil is
destroying the lives of many young people; there is no consensus on the factual basis of
the spread of this contagion, or on the medical dangers of particular drugs; there is
certainly no consensus on the best way to deal with the problem. Without an authoritative
examination of the evidence, policy recommendations can only be speculative opinions.
The news from the front is bad. On Tuesday Customs and Excise announced that heroin
seizures in 1997 had increased by 135 per cent against the previous year; there has been a
steady rise in heroin seizures both by Customs and police for most of the 1990s. This is
the best guide we have to the level of importation and abuse. It cannot be a precise one,
but it seems certain that heroin use has been rising rapidly. There are stories of heroin
dealers targeting the young with free samples and so on; the evidence for this is less
certain, but it seems only too likely to be true.
See
UK Drug Tsar
Blames Cannabis Campaign As Heroin Floods Market; Marijuana Seizures 15 Times That
of Hard Drugs
There has also been a large increase in seizures of cocaine and synthetic drugs; the
cocaine seizures are up by about 80 per cent. The recently appointed "drugs
tsar" Keith Hellawell says that "the overall use of illicit drugs has
plateaued"; this more optimistic view seems to be true only of
cannabis, where the seizures, though huge, were only slightly up on the previous year.
Paul Flynn, the Labour MP who is the vice-chairman of the Drugs Misuse Group in the
Commons, says that the seizure figures show the "abject failure" of the present
policies on drugs, and points to the tripling of deaths from heroin over the past three
years.
(Ed. note: Flynn led the Cannabis Campaign March in London
and
See
Labour
Parliament Member Urges Home Secretary to Visit Holland and "Go Dutch" on
Cannabis Policy))
One of the benefits of a royal commission should be that such an inquiry would
distinguish properly between the different drugs. The attraction of these illegal drugs,
and of many legal drugs as well, is that they give people a high. The drawback is that
they present health risks or reduce social competence. No two drugs have the same effect
on the mood, and no two drugs present an identical risk to health. For instance, nicotine
is an admirable drug in terms of mood alteration - it gives a mild lift - and of social
competence. Cigarette smokers can actually concentrate better on their work. Unfortunately
it is highly addictive and has lethal long-term effects on health.
One lobby, which has been led by The Independent, wants to take cannabis out of
the illegal group and put it with caffeine, alcohol and nicotine. It is not possible to
know whether this lobby is justified without better information about the long-term
effects on health of using cannabis. Some doctors believe that substantial long-term use
damages the brain, but this is exactly the sort of issue a royal commission could examine
in detail.
See Letter From Rosie Boycott The Editor Of The Independent – Founder Of
"Decriminalise Cannabis Campaign"
There are claims made for the drug policies of The Netherlands where the
decriminalisation of cannabis is said to have reduced the use of hard drugs. Undoubtedly
one of the dangers of including relatively mild drugs in the illegal group is that users
of these drugs are introduced to suppliers who are criminals. If, by decriminalising
cannabis, one could separate the large number of cannabis users from the much more
dangerous hard drugs culture, that would plainly be a gain. Whatever its medical effects,
there are hundreds of thousands of people who have used cannabis, if only in their student
days, and now hold down responsible jobs. A royal commission could examine the experience
of The Netherlands in an impartial way.
See Go Dutch!
Other drugs have different effects. Ecstasy can lead to sudden death; LSD can produce
bizarre and sometimes dangerous hallucinations, and can be followed by recurrent incidents
of a schizoid character; cocaine and heroin are both major and damaging drugs of
addiction. Yet even in these cases, there is an argument for trying
to take them back out of the hands of criminals, and treating addiction primarily as a
medical problem.
The drugs business is enormously profitable, and it is profitable because it is
illegal. If cocaine or heroin were ordinary refined agricultural products, sold in the
open market, they would be extremely cheap, as cheap as any other processed plants. If
they were cheap, no criminal fortunes could be made from selling them, and no one would
have a motive to seduce children into addiction. Some people would still become addicts,
simply because the product was inexpensive and available, like laudanum (Ed. note:
Tincture of opium; Ironically, the name is from the Latin meaning "praised.") in
the 19th century. We cannot tell whether this state of affairs would produce
more or fewer addicts; it would, however, remove the criminal profit, and not drive people
to crime to pay for their habit.
The average heroin addict is said to steal goods worth more than £40,000 every year.
Some police officers, who deal with these drug-related crimes, believe that universal drug
decriminalisation would both remove the profit of dealing and remove the pressure to
commit crimes to pay for drugs. These arguments should be examined with an open mind.
Hard drugs are now available throughout the industrialised world; the only countries
where they are not almost universally available seem to be those too poor to pay for them.
In Boston it is easier for a college student to buy drugs than alcohol; the laws
restricting drugs are flouted, those forbidding the sale of alcohol to people under 21 are
successfully enforced.
A few weeks ago I was reading the local paper in Somerset; it reported a crack cocaine
case in Midsomer Norton. If one can buy crack in Midsomer Norton, one can buy it almost
anywhere in Britain.
One of the side-effects of the global drug business is that it produces a complex of
corruption, ranging from the petty corruption of local policemen, through the corruption
of banking by money-laundering, to the wholesale corruption of ministers and governments
in some countries. As with the experiment of prohibition of alcohol in the United States,
the prohibition of drugs naturally leads to the creation of criminal empires. Sixty-five years after the United States repealed prohibition, these
organised crime networks still exist and flourish. Once they have been brought into
existence by huge criminal profits, they are extremely difficult to get rid of.
The main concern for the Government must be the protection of the young. The drugs culture is no respecter of social class; it is to be found in
prosperous suburbs as well as in inner-city estates. But the opportunities for the
drug culture to expand are greatest where there are few jobs and strong local gangs. Some
estates in Manchester seem to be under the virtual control of these drug gangs. Strong
policing and heavy sentences have been tried in the United States to break these gangs; as
a result there are 400,000 Americans, mostly young and mostly black or Hispanic, in prison
on drugs offences. They have often been sentenced to very long terms. That is proportionately more people than are in prison for all offences
in Britain. Tough law enforcement may be necessary, but is not an answer.
Indeed the United States is an example of how not to deal with drugs. The problem
has to be tackled in social, medical and educational terms, as well as in terms of law
enforcement. The Americans have put too much pressure on other nations to imitate their
over-simple pattern of response.
Many people fear that any inquiry would in some way weaken the drive against drugs. Yet
Britain’s policy is not working, and it is hard to see how a state of ignorance can
help to make it work. The present policy is not protecting the young; it is not destroying
the criminal network; it has not prevented drugs becoming universally available in
Britain. In any social disaster on this scale, the natural course is to review the
evidence, listen to the arguments, establish the options and suggest which might work
best. That would be rational government. We cannot simply go on sending each generation of
children over the top to take their chance of having their lives ruined and of being
turned into criminals.
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