LEGALISE DRUGS, BUT TAX THEM TOO

It's Time That We Took Cannabis, Heroin And Ecstasy Out Of The Hands Of The
Criminals

Irving Welsh and Danny Boyle got it all wrong.

Most junkies, pace Welsh's novel and Boyle's film Trainspotting, are
crashing bores.

Some of the most soul destroying afternoons and evenings of my life were
spent in the company of druggies.

Far from the smack-chic of Renton, Sick Boy and Spud, Trainspotting's
anti-heroes, the wasted days in dingy basements off Dublin's North Circular
Road or that flat-cum-latrine in Belfast's Holy Land with blowheads, acid
trippers and E'd-up-clubbers induced nothing but mind-numbing boredom.

Watching friends skin up the first spliff or dab the LSD-soaked tab onto
their tongue filled me with dread and tedium; the sign to make my excuses
and leave before the verbal diarrhoea started flowing. There were of course
more sombre consequences. At least two close friends died indirectly due to
heroin; the lives of others were devastated.

Yet while the drug sub-culture still fills me in equal parts with disgust
and ennui there seems no logic to prolonging what is arguably the most
futile conflict in human history: the so-called war against drugs.

This war, equivalent to fighting a thousand Vietnams, can never be won.
Even the United States, with its superpower monopoly and infinite military
resources, has failed to stem the narcotics flood.

Dictatorships, whether of the Islamic fundamentalist variety as in Saudi
Arabia or the Leninist-capitalist model in China, have employed brutal
methods to suppress drugs, respectively beheading or blowing the brains out
of alleged dealers. The latter means of dispatching drug peddlers is also
used by the IRA.

But neither the Saudi and Chinese cliques nor the Provos can put an end to
the production or consumption of drugs.

That is because since the time of the ancient Greeks (possibly even before)
the iron laws of economics have operated: a permanent demand creating an
inevitable supply.

And dealers are prepared to continue risking their lives on the streets of
Belfast, Beijing and Riyadh to meet that demand.

Prohibition, as the Americans found with alcohol in the 1920s and 1930s, is
counter-productive and only gives rise to a vast criminal sub-culture. The
monopolisation of supply in criminals' hands hikes up the price of drugs to
the point where consumers can only feed their habit through larceny or
prostitution, thus further fuelling crime.

Meanwhile, families are ripped apart and lives shattered through the
fermentation, advertising and distribution of the most popular legal drug
in Ireland - alcohol.

How many young men for instance will end up in the casualty wings of Irish
hospitals this weekend due to obscene bouts of boozing?

What are the odds of someone getting mowed down on an Irish road by a
drunken driver?

The answer to both questions is obvious and yet we persist in glamourising
drink while demonizing drugs.

Earlier this month I felt like I was experiencing the effects of some
hallucinogenic substance when I cheered for a Tory. Peter Lilley, the
former Conservative Minister, had come publicly out in favour of
de-criminalizing cannabis.

Was this a trip or some strange new form of reality: New Labour as New
Puritans, the Tories as twenty-first-century Cavaliers?

Although Lilley should have gone further and called for the
decriminalization of all drugs, at least he was brave enough to inject some
realism into an otherwise sterile debate.

In contrast there are no voices in the Dail echoing Lilley's call despite
the dreadful drugs epidemic infecting Irish society.

No one, it seems, in Leinster House or the capital's opinion-forming salons
(except Kevin Myers) has the guts to follow Lilley's lead.

Legalisation of course contains inherent dangers.

The sale of narcotics should be regulated but definitely not controlled by
the state.

The prospect of the state selling drugs to consumers brings to mind Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World, where the regime kept the masses docile by doling
out Soma. Nor should legalisation imply hedonistic license.

The minimum age should range from between 16 for soft drugs and 18 for
harder substances; those who sell to children must suffer the maximum
penalties.

There are pitfalls over price fixing.

An exorbitantly taxed product will result in what has already happened with
tobacco in Ireland, where the paramilitaries have flooded the market with
cheaper illegal foreign cigarettes.

None of this is to suggest a solution to the drugs problem because there is
no solution, only the pragmatic management of it. A reasonable tax on
narcotics can help fund education programmes aimed at reducing demand for
drugs. Furthermore, decriminalization would wipe out far more effectively
than the Criminal Assets Bureau the profits earned by loathsome beings,
such as John Gilligan, who control supply.

With apologies to The Verve: the drugs don't work but the ban on them just
makes us all worse.