SILENCE ON THE REAL DANGER OF DRUGS IS A SHAMEFUL ACT

It's time the hypocrisy and misinformation over "soft" drugs was
attacked, according to a senior lecturer in English at the University
of Otago, Dr JOHN DOLAN.

WE WOULD all like to believe that our laws are based on reason. In the
case of the laws prohibiting some drugs while allowing others, we'd
like to think that the laws are based on the danger-level of different
drugs; that the legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco, are not as dangerous
as the illegal drugs like marijuana or the opiates. But there is
actually no logic, nothing but historical accident, behind our drug
laws. The legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco, are among the most
dangerous. You can see this for yourself, if you read your Otago Daily
Times carefully.

In the ODT for Wednesday, April 12, is a story which makes the point
clearly: according to Health Minister Annette King, the illegal drug
cannabis was responsible for one death for the years 1994 to 1996. In
that same period, the legal drug alcohol was directly responsible for
419 deaths and implicated in another 509. That's a thousand people
dead from the legal drug, as opposed to one dead from the illegal one.

But the other illegal drugs really are worse than alcohol and tobacco,
aren't they? After all, cannabis is often considered the exception,
the "soft" drug. Even those who favour legalising it would never dream
of lifting the ban on "hard" drugs like heroin. Heroin, we all know,
is a terrible, lethal, addictive drug, the worst of all.

As a matter of fact, that's another lie. A big lie. In fact, heroin
and the other opiates are, in themselves, much less harmful than the
legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco. Addictive? The legal drug tobacco is
10 times as addictive as heroin. Lethal? As Dr Gwynne Dyer pointed out
in an ODT article on April 10, " . . . pure heroin, consumed regularly
in moderate quantities, has no known health costs". This fact is so
stunning that it bears repeating: using pure heroin in moderate doses
will not do you any harm whatsoever.

Of course, if you make something illegal, you can manage to make it
unsafe.

By banning heroin, handing it over to gangsters who cut it with
poisons and sell it to desperate people who share dirty needles, we
have managed to make it very dangerous indeed, despite the fact the
drug itself is harmless and pleasant. But only the poor use needles or
inject dirty street drugs.

Heroin users who are rich enough to have access to clean, legal
prescription opiates live long, healthy lives. Most of the Hollywood
celebrities you know spend a good deal of their lives enjoying the
blissful effects of percodan, demerol and other prescription opiates;
they just keep quiet about it.

All the horrors we attribute to the opiates are the result of
prohibition, not the drugs themselves. Any drug can be made evil and
dangerous - simply ban it.

If caffeine were made illegal tomorrow (and the idea has been proposed
more than once), we would soon have gangsters selling "baggies" of
alleged "coffee" cut with everything from rat poison to Sudafed.
Coffee overdose cases would fill the A and Es; prices would go up so
wildly that coffee-addicts would soon begin to steal to support their
habit; and users would begin injecting highly concentrated caffeine to
get more bang for their buck, in the process passing on all sorts of
needle-borne diseases.

As Dr Dyer said in his article, in the long run "such manifest
insanity cannot prevail". But there is a lot of momentum behind this
madness and it could well go on for years, destroying harmless people
in the service of a silly prejudice, unless our doctors and scientists
find the courage to speak out against it.

They know quite well the whole idea is silly, and often say so - in
private, among friends. In public, they keep silent and let the cops
and the courts put more people each day through the meatgrinder of the
drug laws.

After all, it is only the bogans, the crop-headed, tattooed losers,
whose names show up in the Dunedin court calendar - marked for life,
sacked or refused employment because they quite sensibly prefer joints
to gin-and-tonics.

Not that they're the only people who use drugs. Most New Zealanders
under 50 have used an illegal drug at least once. If you want to see
what's really wrong with the drug laws, get your friends together and
ask how many have committed real crimes, like rape, murder or
burglary. Absolutely no-one will admit to such terrible things.

Now ask how many have taken an illegal drug at least once. If your
friends are under the age of 50, almost every one of them will admit,
without shame, having done so. But they will admit this in private,
and clam up in public.

Every day we keep silent, the cops and courts go on smashing harmless
people's lives: every time some harmless kid gets to start life with a
criminal conviction because he forgot the joint he left under the
driver's seat; every time your flat gets broken into because some
stoner needs to pay a gangster's price or get his legs broken; every
time desperate IV users give each other hepatitis C because they're
too paranoid to go for new needles; every time a girl who just likes
to lie in bed blissing out on poppies becomes a prostitute because
prohibition means 20c worth of homebake costs her $300.

Silence, when so many lives are being ruined in the name of a stupid
prejudice, is a cowardly and shameful act. I challenge Dunedin's
doctors and medical researchers to break the silence by answering
these two questions:

* Are the legal drugs alcohol and tobacco less toxic than the illegal
drug marijuana?

* Which would be more dangerous to one's health: smoking a pack of
cigarettes a day or taking a legally-produced, prescription opiate
each day?

Maybe if enough "respectable" people speak up, the meatgrinder can be
stopped before it destroys more lives.