AN IRISHMAN'S DIARY

The recent public execution of four men and a woman on drugs offences in
Tehran might remind us that, for all their differences, the US and Iran
have a common enthusiasm for using capital punishment as an instrument of
social policy, and a shared determination to wipe out consensual drugs use.
The death rows of each country are full, and the US's domestic and foreign
policy agendas are dedicated to crushing illegal narcotics trade. Those are
two things they have in common; the third is that they will fail.

The day will inevitably come when the world will regard its present
persecution of drugs-users as a barbarity, and as incomprehensible as
foot-binding, female circumcision and criminalising homosexuality. But to
those responsible for enforcement, at the time such laws probably seemed
absolutely essential to the maintenance of civilisation, and were no
doubted justified by the sort of unthinking cant uttered today by today's
anti-drugs czars .

Graven Images

The war against narcotics is as baseless as the war against graven images
in Afghanistan, and is similarly based on mumbo-jumbo religion, in this
case initially devised by US Christian missionaries in China. They thought
that the first step to Christianising the native Chinese would be to woo
them off opium. Drugs-taking was in fact commonplace all over the world,
and had been for centuries. As this column discussed recently, we now know
that Shakespeare took both cocaine and marijuana; and he is unlikely to
have been alone in his habits. What drugs did Marlowe, that frequenter of
whores and lowly taverns take? Did Ben Jonson have an attack of the weed
inspired munchies when he spoke hungrily of mullets soused in high-country
wines, of supping pheasant eggs, of cockles boiled in silver shells, and
shrimps swimming in a butter made from of dolphin's milk, whose cream is
like opals?

Merely because something is not mentioned in literature of the time does
not mean it didn't occur. A social taboo which prevents public discussion
of a practice might actually merely conceal a widespread indulgence in it.
A Chinese scholar examining Jane Austen might be reasonably certain that
female sexuality for the purposes of pleasure alone was entirely absent in
Georgian England. Yet with what we know from other sources, we can in fact
descry the flash of thigh, the bared bosom, the stifled cry from beneath
the covers of the staidest of her chapters.

Equally, we can gather nothing about drugs-taking from Jane Austen, but the
opposite is true from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, almost her precise
contemporary. He penned the most perfect anthem to hallucinogenia, Kubla
Khan, at about the same time (1816) as Jane Austen was musing in Emma: "One
half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other." Quite so.
And narcolepsy is one such pleasure. Might the Indiamen which supplied the
great houses of England with their riches, tea and spices, not have
supplied them also with drugs?

British Empire

Laudanum and cocaine were widely consumed in Britain in the 19th century,
yet far from Britain degenerating, it managed to capture and consolidate
the largest non-contiguous empire the world has ever seen, meanwhile
transforming itself from an agricultural island to the first ever
industrial nation. The use of narcotics throughout this time was perfectly
lawful - as Sherlock Holmes might have testified - and whatever damage it
did probably did not compare with the destruction wrought by poor drains,
VD and foul air.

But then the insanity of prohibitionism, inspired by missionaries newly
returned from China, seized the US during the first years of the last
century and began the worldwide taboo against narcotics usage. After the
Great War, the US government insisted that codicils be appended to the
Treaty of Versailles enjoining signatory states to prohibit drugs. From
those tiny appendices have grown the vast and noxious state apparatus which
criminalises millions of people for private consensual deeds across Europe
and the Americas; and to no all avail.

Look at the evidence. Drugs-taking is so commonplace in Britain that the
army there no longer dismisses soldiers if they fail blood tests; yet the
British are even helping the Iranian drugs-squads by supplying them with
night sights, Land Rovers and body armour. Possession of an ounce of heroin
in Iran carries the death penalty, with some 200 such executions last year;
yet even the Tehran government admits that 2 million Iranians regularly use
drugs. The actual figure is probably far higher.

Death Penalty

It's simple. Taken as a whole, the death penalty does not deter. Countries
with the death penalty have higher crime rates than ones without it, no
doubt because of the socially contaminant effect of judicial murder. Nor
does non-homicidal law enforcement stop people taking drugs, because when
the law and its enforcement are seen to be non-consensual, purposeless and
authoritarian, people will violate it simply because it exists, even at the
risk of profession and liberty. It is the triumph of the most fundamental
human instinct: the FU principle.

Crass, busybody illiberalism brings together Iran, the EU and the US in
common accord; and that accord will not be victorious. You cannot compel
the great mass of humans to change their behaviour if they don't see
personal or civic virtue in doing so. The history of 20th century has
taught that. As cranes hoist the kicking bodies of another five drugs-users
for slow execution in Tehran, it is a lesson that the governments of the
world still refuse to accept. One day, inevitably, they will have to: and
finally FU will triumph over US and EU. Roll on the day.