WAR WITHOUT HOPE OR HEROES

Joyce McMillan says the law on illegal drugs is unrealistic and
ineffectual, but where are the politicians with the courage to begin
campaigning for reform?

There's a particular kind of laugh that rises from Scottish theatre
audiences at the mention of illegal drugs, and the practices involved in
taking them. It's a nervous, knowing, self-conscious kind of laugh, born
out of fear of seeming naive; that is, of being taken for the kind of wimp
who does not break the law on drugs, and does not mix with people who do.

It's a laugh, in other words, that speaks volumes about the failure of our
present law on drugs to command real public respect; and about the
insidious role that failure has played over a generation, in making a
degree of criminality and contempt for the law seem not only normal but
'cool".

This week, in Renfrew, the present Scottish system for dealing with illegal
drugs and those who use them recorded its latest tragic failure, when a
19-year-old boy, Brian Gibb, with a history of heroin addiction, was found
dead in his flat. His death brought the 1998 drug-related death toll in
Strathclyde to 51, a figure which already equals the total for the whole of
1997. And although it's easy to understand the feelings of the Scottish
Office minister, Henry McLeish, who yesterday felt obliged to react to
Brian Gibbs death with the usual string of western government cliches about
"stepping up the war on drugs", nothing could be clearer than that this
outworn 'war" metaphor has had its day, in the matter of drugs policy; if
only because the attitudes that go with it have proved so ineffective, and
at worst counter-productive, in actually reducing drug abuse in western
societies.

To begin with, it is very difficult for anyone - and particularly for young
people - to accord much respect to an official approach which divides drugs
into "legal" and "illegal" on such an arbitrary basis, and then proceeds to
treat one category as an acceptable part of our "way of life", and the
other as a cross between the Red Peril and a flesh-eating virus. It is
always worth remembering, after all, that the two most powerful and
dangerous drugs in our society are the legal ones, nicotine and alcohol.
Cigarette smoking is fiercely addictive, and kills at a rate equivalent to
a jumbo jet crashing with no survivors in the UK every day; alcohol has
such drastic mood-altering effects that it is implicated in a majority of
violent crimes committed in this country.

In other words, either our society believes that mood- altering and
addictive drugs are unacceptable, and should be banned; or it believes that
prohibition is unrealistic, and the best option is to decriminailse and
regulate. What it cannot continue to do, with any hope of credibility, is
to ride both horses at once; and certainly not in such a hysterical,
ill-informed, inconsistent and politically opportunistic way.

Then again, and perhaps even more importantly, our society has to bring
itself to recognise that where people become serious drug abusers, they do
so not primarily because particular drugs are available to them, but
because of some deep need in themselves. Our society is full of happy,
well- adjusted pedple who use alcohol or illegal drugs only occasionally,
and for fun. It's the vulnerable ones who find the temptation too much;
people who are too depressed, too frightened, or too full of a sense of
alienation and rejection, to feel that reality is better than illusion, or
that their own physical and mental health is worth saving. In that sense,
the identification of "drugs" as the "enemy" in the "war on drugs"
represents little more than an excuse to evade the real question behind the
problem of drug abuse; the question of the demand for drugs within our own
societies, and of why so many young people, in particular, want and need to
drink or dope themselves to oblivion.

And beyond that, it goes without saying that to people already in that
state of alienation, the idea of government declaring "war" on the
substances they use is less than meaningless: in fact at worst, the idea
that they have thrown in their lot with a public "enemy" on whom all
right-thinking people are waging "war" can be downright seductive to them.
For the truth about the current illegal status of drugs such as marijuana,
cocaine and heroin is that it has four outstanding impacts, all of them
negative.

First, it discredits a law which everyone knows is widely flouted, even
among the once-respectable middle classes. Second, it gives those drugs a
spurious glamour for the very people who are most vulnerable to the damage
they can do. Third, it puts those people at the mercy of suppliers who
often have no compunction about adulterating the substances they sell,
sometimes with lethal consequences.

And lastly, the continuing illegal status of these drugs has become the
basis of a colossal criminal racket, not only on a national but on a global
scale. As the Americans found out during the prohibition years, the banning
of addictive substances has only one certain consequence: the explosive
growth of a huge, untaxed shadow economy that gradually corrupts every
legitimate institution it touches, from the police force to the banking
system and government itself. The supply of illegal drugs to the cities and
suburbs of the western world is a multi-billion-pound business; and it is
now entirely in the hands of criminal organisations, which control an
increasing and, by some estimates, alarming proporton of capital flows
around the planet. The idea that these powerful operators can somehow be
"defeated" and made to vanish, along with their massive wealth, is a
fantasy; the worst we can do to them is to change the law that has made
illicit drug-running such a cash-cow for them, stop the profiteering now,
and bring their business into a framework of legality.

And why won't it happen? Because no senior politician dares to propose it;
they are all petrified by fear of the popular media, which have decided
that "drugs" - only the illegal ones, of course - are an evil to be
condemned without discussion. But in the end, the tabloid hysteria that
surrounds these issues is often more indicative of a schizoid and shifting
public attitude to the subject - panicky and censorious in theory,
pragmatic and humane in practice - than of serious opposition. This is, in
other words, one of those areas of policy that is crying out for the
attention of politicians with the courage to stop the media-driven
cliche-mongering that currently dominates the debate, and to show some
leadership in beginning to transform thd drug economy of the western world
from the clandestine criminals' paradise it currently is, into a serious
area of public policy-making, debate and regulation. For until someone
finds the nerve to do that, young people like Brian Gibb will continue to
die, amid all the futile rhetoric of "wars" and "crack-downs".

And as for those theatre audiences, they will go on sniggering. Because
they know that in this area above all, the law is truly an ass;
unrealistic, ineffectual, riddled with double standards, and increasingly
fit only to be mocked.

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)