LEGALIZING DRUGS LOGICAL

July 14, 2001 Opposition to legalising cannabis in Britain has dropped
from 66% to 51% in the past five years, giving credence to the growing
debate on decriminalising so-called "soft drugs". GWYNNE DYER reports
from London.

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 legalising the use of cannabis (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 five grammes of cannabis or hashish
for private use at 1500 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 decriminalisation of cannabis. But
that is still far short of what Sir David Ramsbotham, the outgoing
Chief Inspector of Prisons, suggested last Sunday in Britain.

"The more I look at what's happening, the more I can see the logic of
legalising 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 legalising
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 cannabis, and that he
talked of "legalising and prescribing", not just decriminalising. 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
others have all called for a debate on decriminalising so-called "soft
drugs".

And the new Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has given his support to a
local experiment in the south London district of Brixton where police
will simply caution people found with cannabis. No trial, no criminal
record.

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

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

Peter 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
legalise cannabis should be based on other considerations." For Mr
Lilley, banning cannabis 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
legalisation.

Magistrates should issue licences to local shops for the sale of
limited amounts of cannabis to people over 18, he said. Like tobacco,
it would be taxed and carry a health warning, and the tax yield on an
estimated annual British consumption of 1500 tonnes of cannabis a year
has been calculated about $US23 billion if the cannabis were produced
and marketed in exactly the same way as tobacco, enough to cut the
standard rate of British taxes by 5%.

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 on
cannabis would simply push consumers back into the hands of the
private dealers. Most experts think the highest practical rate of
taxation would be around $US3-$US4 per gram (against a production cost
of around $US0.75), which would yield a mere $US7 billion-$US8 billion
a year in extra tax revenue. But it would also cut law enforcement
costs and it would keep ordinary cannabis users out of contact with
"hard drug" dealers.

As Mr 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 opinion polls support it. Opposition
to legalising cannabis has dropped from 66% to only 51% in the past
five years, and the nay-sayers are overwhelmingly in the older age-groups.

It is a welcome outbreak of sanity, and even mere decriminalisation 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 legalisation of cannabis in Britain is unlikely
because the US government strong-armed all its allies into signing
three international conventions in the 1970s and 1980s that define
cannabis 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 US to ratify the Kyoto accord on climate change
and to honour the ABM treaty) would be willing to undertake. So
millions of individual Britons may benefit from the decriminalisation
of cannabis and an end to harassment, but the potentially large social
and tax benefits of outright legalisation are likely to be lost.

The bigger problem, however, is that even most British advocates of
decriminalisation or legalisation 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 decriminalising
cannabis 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 organised crime, bringing
the law into disrespect, and criminalising 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 $US450 billion a year, or 8% 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 US, 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 lifespan 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 $US1000 a
week or more. Yet heroin addiction, before it was demonised 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
US 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 US 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 only support their habit 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
stabilise their lives. But then CBS television did a report on the
project, infuriating the US 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 on to
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, and 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 legalisation of all drugs.

"Decriminalisation . . . 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 legalisation 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 realise that it is
a leftover from the war on alcohol launched by prohibitionists in the
US just after World War 1. Alcohol prohibition was eventually
abandoned (though only after creating the conditions for the emergence
of large-scale organised crime in the US), 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."