DRUG LAWS FOSTER CRIME, DEATH

The dam burst last weekend. There had been cracks in the concrete of
consensus and growing trickles of dissent for some time, but suddenly
the issue of legalizing the use of marijuana is on the table in a
major country and an English speaking one, at that.

In Spain, Italy, Portugal and Switzerland, it is already practically
impossible to get arrested for buying or using "soft drugs." In the
Netherlands, users may buy up to 5 grams of marijuana or hashish for
private use at 1,500 licensed "coffee shops," and they are opening two
drive-through outlets in the border town of Venlo to cater to German
purchasers. Even in Canada, Conservative leader and former Prime
Minister Joe Clark is openly calling for the decriminalization of pot.
But that is still far short of what Sir David Ramsbotham, the outgoing
chief inspector of prisons, suggested in Britain.

"The more I look at what's happening, the more I can see the logic of
legalizing drugs because the misery that is caused by the people who
are making criminal profit is so appalling and the sums are so great
that are being made illegally. I think there is merit in legalizing
and prescribing so people don't have to go and find an illegal way of
doing it," he said.

You will note that he said "drugs," not just marijuana, and that he
talked of "legalizing and prescribing," not just "decriminalizing."

Most British politicians are afraid to go that far in public yet, but
over the past week former Home Secretaries Lord Jenkins and Lord Baker
and outgoing British "drugs czar" Keith Hellawell have all called for
a debate on decriminalizing so-called "soft drugs." And the new home
secretary, David Blunkett, has given his support to an experiment in
the south London district of Brixton, where police will simply caution
people found with marijuana. No trial, no criminal record.

Others, like Mo Mowlam, until recently the Cabinet Office minister
responsible for the Labor government's drug policy, and Peter Lilley,
former social security minister and Conservative deputy leader, are
now going further.

"It strikes me as totally irrational to decriminalize cannabis without
looking at the sale of it," said Mowlam. "It would be an absurdity to
have criminals controlling the market of a substance people can use
legally."

Lilley began by quoting a recent study in the respected medical
journal the Lancet which concluded that "moderate indulgence in
cannabis has little ill effect on health, and decisions to ban or to
legalize cannabis should be based on other considerations." For
Lilley, banning marijuana is indefensible and unenforceable in a
country where far more harmful drugs like alcohol and tobacco are
legal -- and he went the distance in accepting the implications of
legalization.

Magistrates should issue licenses to shops for the sale of limited
amounts of pot to people over 18, Lilley said. Like tobacco, it would
be taxed and carry a health warning -- and the tax yield on an
estimated annual British consumption of 1,500 tons of cannabis a year
has been calculated at about $23 billion if the pot were produced and
marketed the same way as tobacco, enough to cut the standard rate of
British taxes by 5 percent.

That is a pipe dream, of course. Many people would grow their own, and
given the pre-existing black market, too high a rate of taxation would
simply push consumers back into the hands of the private dealers.

Most experts think the highest practical rate of taxation would be
around $3 to $4 per gram (against a production cost of around 75
cents), which would yield a mere $7 billion or $8 billion a year in
extra tax revenue. But it would also cut law enforcement costs -- and
it would keep ordinary marijuana users out of contact with "hard drug"
dealers.

As Lilley pointed out, "By making cannabis illegal, it is only
available through illegal sources, which are the same channels that
handle hard drugs. So we are forcing cannabis users into the arms of
hard drugs pushers."

When senior Conservative politicians start talking like that, you know
the wind has changed, and British polls support it. Opposition to
legalizing cannabis has dropped from 66 percent to only 51 percent in
the past five years, and naysayers are overwhelmingly in the older age
groups.

It is a welcome outbreak of sanity, and even mere decriminalization in
a major English-speaking country would have a profound effect on the
debate in the United States, the heart and soul of the prohibitionist
movement. But actual legalization of marijuana in Britain is unlikely
because the U.S. government strong-armed all its allies into signing
three international conventions in the 1970s and 1980s that define
marijuana as a dangerous drug.

To break out of those treaties would involve a larger effort of
political will than any government with many other items on its agenda
(like persuading the United States to ratify the Kyoto accord on
climate change and to honor the ABM treaty) would be willing to
undertake. So millions of Britons may benefit from the
decriminalization of marijuana, but the potentially large social and
tax benefits of outright legalization are likely to be lost.

The bigger problem, however, is that even most British advocates of
decriminalization or legalization are too ignorant or too timid to
extend the same argument to "hard drugs" like heroin and cocaine --
the kind that lead you into a life of crime and destroy your body and
mind, if you believe the drug warriors. Indeed, the whole policing
experiment in Brixton which is the entering wedge for decriminalizing
marijuana in Britain is being justified as a way of freeing up scarce
police resources to tackle the problem of "hard drugs".

Nobody should use heroin, a highly addictive substance, for fun
(though its slower-acting form, morphine, is universally used for pain
control in medical practice). Nobody should smoke cigarettes either,
since they are even more addictive and a grave health hazard to boot.
But quite apart from the civil rights considerations, nobody in their
right minds would consider making cigarettes illegal.

The consequences of banning tobacco, in terms of creating a huge black
market, expanding the field of operations of organized crime, bringing
the law into disrespect, and criminalizing millions of harmless
addicts, are simply unthinkable. So how can so many intelligent,
well-educated people miss the analogy?

By making heroin and cocaine illegal, around $450 billion a year, or
8percent of world trade, has been handed over to professional
criminals. As a result, they have become rich enough to subvert entire
countries.

About a quarter of the enormous prison population of the United
States, half a million people, are there directly for drug offences,
and at least as many are there for other crimes committed to pay for
their habit.

For heroin addicts who don't go to jail, the average life span on the
street is just over 10 years, not because of the drugs, but because of
the desperate lifestyle, the contaminated drugs, and the
disease-bearing needles that come with the black market.

Then there is the collateral damage of all the crimes committed by
addicts desperately trying to support a habit that, at the grossly
inflated prices made possible by the black market, can cost a $1000 a
week or more. Yet heroin addiction, before it was demonized by
American lawmakers, was an undesirable but relatively low-cost
affliction that had no adverse health consequences and left its
victims free to lead a normal and productive life.

That's how it used to be in Britain, in fact. Only two years after the
U.S. Congress, fresh from banning alcohol under the Volstead Act,
imposed prohibition on the heroin family of drugs in 1924, the
Rolleston committee in Britain concluded that non-medical heroin use
was a problem needing help, not a crime needing punishment. So Britain
adopted the policy of providing heroin on prescription to registered
addicts -- and over the next 40 years, the number of addicts in
Britain scarcely grew at all.

Then in 1971, largely in response to intense U.S. pressure to fall in
with American plans for global prohibition, British doctors were
forbidden to prescribe heroin to addicts, and the black market came
into being. The market then worked its usual magic, relentlessly
expanding the customer base: since 1971, the number of heroin addicts
in Britain has grown from fewer than 500 to around 500,000.

Since the heroin group of drugs do no long-term harm to the system if
taken in pure form, this would have been an unfortunate but not tragic
result, except that this is a black market, which charges them such a
huge mark-up that they can support their habit only by crime. It also
provides them with a highly adulterated product of unknown strength,
often mixed with lethal substances. So they spend a lot of time in
jail, and die young.

As late as the 1990s, one British doctor in Liverpool, Dr John Marks,
was allowed to go on prescribing heroin to his addicted patients under
a special Home Office licence as an experiment. In the 10 years of the
project none died, their arrest rate for property crimes dropped to
close to the average for the area, and most managed to find jobs and
stabilize their lives.

But then CBS television did a report on the project, infuriating the
U.S. drug warriors so much that pressure from the American embassy in
London forced the British government to shut the project down. Dr
Marks's former patients were driven back onto the black market, and
over the next two years 41 of them died.

It is not a war on drugs. It is a war on drug users, especially those
from underprivileged and minority groups, driven by ignorance and fear
and waged with lies. It kills the addicts. It destroys respect for the
law. It creates huge criminal empires. It undermines whole societies.
It's crazy, and every year thousands defect from the futile struggle
to stamp out drugs. One prominent recent defector was Sir Keith
Morris, British ambassador to Colombia in 1990-94.

He began as a strong supporter of the "war on drugs", but after seeing
what it has done to Colombia he had a change of heart and now
advocates outright legalization of all drugs. "Decriminalization . . .
would be an unsatisfactory halfway house, because it would leave the
trade in criminal hands, giving no help at all to the producer
countries, and would not guarantee consumers a safe product or free
them from the pressure of pushers. It has been difficult for me to
advocate legalization because it means saying to those with whom I
worked, and to the relatives of those who died, that this was an
unnecessary war. But the imperative must be to stop the war."

The "drug war" propaganda is so insistent and so brazen in its
falsehoods that most people never even hear a fundamental criticism of
the whole rationale for prohibition, and even fewer realize that it is
a leftover from the war on alcohol launched by prohibitionists in the
U.S. just after the First World War. Alcohol prohibition was
eventually abandoned (though only after creating the conditions for
the emergence of large-scale organized crime in the United States),
and doubtless the drug prohibition will be ended too one day, after
the scale of the damage it is doing has become impossible to ignore or
deny.

In the meantime, the industry created to wage it will trundle on
blindly, wasting money, ruining lives, and wrecking whole countries.
And we can all sing the refrain that was first composed when the
Wickersham Commission, having examined all the evidence that alcohol
prohibition had been a disastrous failure in 1927, declared that it
should continue anyway:

"Prohibition is an awful flop; we like it.

It don't stop what it's meant to stop; we like it.

It's filled the land with vice and crime,

It's left a trail of graft and slime,

It don't prohibit worth a dime;

But nevertheless, we're for it."