HEROIN HARM AND PROHIBITION

What with events in the Netherlands, and the plague of deaths in Ireland and
Scotland, we seem - albeit inadvertently - to have come up with a solution
to the drugs problem. On the one hand, we make it impossible for drugs users
to tell the difference between heroin which will do the trick and heroin
which will put them on a slab with a label around their toe; and on the
other, we hand over control of the market to that notoriously fickle
species, the drugs baron, who tends to go round bumping off his rivals.
Pretty soon, we have lots of dead bodies, and no drugs problem; is that not
right?

And if you think that's the case, you also probably believe that Newgrange
was built by Martians - not that it matters what you believe. Our policies
towards the use of illegal drugs contain as much sense as plans for a
electron microscope drawn up by a class of five-year-olds in a Montessori
for the bewildered. We know they don't work; and what is more, as the dead
bodies mount, and the circle of human tragedy spreads, we can be sure that a
deliberate and studied stupidity masquerading as policy will continue to
guide our responses to drugs use.

Lethal Heroin

As policy, we have decided that drugs users are to be denied the protection
in law afforded to the consumers of other commodities. It is no more illegal
to sell lethal heroin than it is to sell the normal stuff. In fact the only
protection the heroin user has comes not from the law, but from the
commercially prudent desire of the pusher to keep his (or her) market alive
and injecting. However, even that consideration is diluted if the rule of
law is successful, and the drugs supply diminishes. The net effect of that
triumph for law and order is that the price of heroin goes up, the users
becomes more desperate, and the drugs baron can sell whatever drugs he
likes, no matter how contaminated, because demand outstrips supply to the
point where even an intravenous massacre will not seriously reduce drug
sales.

Thus you get the real triumph of the rigged market: large profits, high
prices, a huge death toll, and some law enforcement officer contemplating
the colossal success of the war against drugs. So everyone, including the
undertakers, but perhaps not the loved ones of the dead junkies (and they
hardly count), is happy. Policy driven to its logical conclusion: i.e.,
utter failure.

This is not a branch of astrophysics in which the only text books have been
written in Tibetan. This is something quite accessible to common sense and
the ineluctable laws of the marketplace. If you criminalise the consumption
of anything for which there is a demand, you create a monopoly for the
criminal underworld, who generally speaking, are more devious, more ruthless
and more imaginative than the salaried state officials opposing them. In
addition to their own cunning and ingenuity, they have the vast guile, the
wit and the resources of those in the marketplace who want the commodity
over which they have been given a monopoly by the state.

Prohibition

No democratic state has ever won such a battle, as the US discovered with
its Prohibition laws against alcohol. Similarly, no society in the world -
free, communist, or Islamic - has been able to eliminate the market for
heroin. Since it is outside the rule of law, that market is the preserve of
the violent and psychopathic; and they have triumphed everywhere. Geneva and
Vancouver, Stockholm and Lyons, London and Cork - every city has its heroin
users, its needle parks, and no society guards its junkies against lethal
drugs.

Why not? Are they not citizens too? Did they forfeit their rights to life,
their protection against contamination and casual homicide, the moment they
became addicts? Did their humanity vanish along with their resistance to
addictive drugs? And what kind of society is it that ruthlessly refuses to
monitor the quality of the drugs they take, which drives up the price of
those drugs by creating a market monopoly for the most unscrupulous villains
in the community, and then - the icing on the cake - hounds those girls who
have turned to prostitution to pay the high prices caused solely by state
interference in the marketplace?

Protection

The issue is not whether or not one approves of drugs. We do anyway. The
very substance used in the Catholic consecration is outlawed in most Muslim
countries (which must still enforce their drugs laws with the executioners'
blade; and even that threat does not end the demand for, and the supply of,
illegal drugs). Alcohol is addictive for many; and not for others. The same
might - or might not - be true of heroin. I do not care; nothing on this
earth would persuade me - or indeed, the vast majority of us - to dabble
with it. But for those who do, the protections and the consumer laws of
civil society should not be withdrawn.

The deaths of the young junkies in Dublin are an abomination, yet the State
seems to feel no shame for its role in the creation of a marketplace
controlled by evil people, the Dunnes, the Mitchells and the Fellonis and
their like, at the expense of the vulnerable, the poor, the marginalised.
This is not through inadvertence, clandestinity or corruption, as were the
great matters before today's tribunals. This is open, stated policy; and it
is the true scandal of Irish life.