STAMP OUT DRUGS: A FUTILE CAMPAIGN?

LONDON (JP): The dam burst last weekend. There had been cracks in the
consensus and growing trickles of dissent, but suddenly the issue of
legalizing the use of marijuana (cannabis) is in a major country -- and an
English-speaking one, at that.

In Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland it is practically impossible to
get arrested for buying or using "soft drugs". In the Netherlands, users
may buy up to five grams of cannabis 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 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
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.

He said "drugs", not just "cannabis"; "legalizing and prescribing", not
just "decriminalizing". Over the past week former Home Secretaries Lord
Jenkins and Lord Baker and outgoing British "drugs tsar" Keith Hellawell
have called for a debate on decriminalizing "soft drugs". And the new Home
Secretary, David Blunkett, has supported a local experiment in the south
London district of Brixton where police will simply caution people found
with cannabis. No trial, no criminal record.

Peter Lilley, former minister for social security and Conservative deputy
leader, has quoted 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 cannabis is
indefensible and unenforceable in a country where far more harmful drugs
like alcohol and tobacco are legal.

Magistrates should issue licenses to local shops for the sale of limited
amounts of cannabis 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 US$23 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 percent.

Of course many people would grow their own, and given the black market, too
high a rate of taxation on cannabis would simply push consumers back to
private dealers. Most experts think the highest practical rate of taxation
would be $3-$4 per gram (against a production cost of around $0.75), which
would yield a mere $7billion to $8 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.

In Britain, polls show that opposition to legalizing cannabis has dropped
from 66 percent to only 51 percent in the past five years, and nay-sayers
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 cannabis 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 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 would be
willing to undertake. So millions of Britons may benefit from the
decriminalization of cannabis, 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 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. But nobody in their right minds would consider making
cigarettes illegal.

The consequences of banning tobacco, in terms of creating a huge black
market, expanding 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 8
percent of world trade, has been handed over to professional criminals --
now rich enough to subvert entire countries.

About a quarter of the enormous U.S. prison population, half a million
people, are there for drug offenses, 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, 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 $1,000 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 victims were free to lead a normal and productive life.

That's how it used to be in Britain. 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 -- leading to the black market. 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, John Marks, was
allowed to go on prescribing heroin to his addicted patients under a
special Home Office license 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 reported 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 but on drug users, especially those from
underprivileged groups, driven by ignorance and waged with lies. It kills
the addicts, it creates huge criminal empires, and it undermines whole
societies. Every year thousands defect from the futile struggle to "stamp
out" drugs. One is Sir Keith Morris, British ambassador to Colombia in
1990-1994. Initially a strong supporter of the "war on drugs", after seeing
what it has done to Colombia he now advocates legalization of all drugs.

The "drug war" propaganda is so insistent and so brazen in its falsehoods
that fundamental criticism of the whole rationale for prohibition is rarely
heard. Fewer realize that it is a leftover from the war on alcohol launched
by prohibitionists in the U.S. just after World War I.

Alcohol prohibition was eventually abandoned, though only after creating
the conditions for large scale organized crime in the U.S. Doubtless drug
prohibition will end too one day, after the scale of the damage has become
impossible to ignore or deny. Meanwhile, the industry created to wage it
will trundle on blindly, wasting money, ruining lives, and wrecking whole
countries.