REGULATE ILLICIT DRUG INDUSTRY

ROLLING Stone Keith Richards has been accused of sending the wrong message
over illicit drug use. Just what is the right message?

It is common knowledge that drugs, prescription or otherwise are capable of
both benefit and harm. However, unlike regulated drugs susch as aspirin,
alcohol and tobacco, illicit drugs have the additional overhead of
prohibition. According to your article, (We're drinking less, 20/2), we're
finally making progress in reducing alcohol and tobacco consumption and harm
but illicit drug use is as popular as ever. Shock, horror - is prohibition
not working?

In addition to the social and health consequences of illicit drugs
themselves, prohibition enables criminal profiteering, empowers drug dealers
and organised crime, results in adulterated and impure products with no
quality control or consistency, entangles otherwise law-abiding citizens in
the criminal justice system, corrupts law enforcement and actually increases
the harm to society and the end user.

Unforunately, prohibition and the war on drugs has had little or no success
in acheieving its apparent aims - substantially reducing illicit drug use
and harm, dismantling and discouraging organised crime syndicates and
reducing our children's exposure and susceptibility to substance abuse.

Prohibition is a counter-productive and illogical policy based on a dubious
moral crusade that irrefutably does not work. If criticising the problems
caused by prohibition itself is the wrong message, does this mean
maintaining and subsidising this illicit industry, directing users to
unreliable and dangerous distributors of impure drugs of unknown quality and
ignorantly attributing the harms of prohibition to the drugs themselves is
the right message?

Prohibition is not halting the flow, at best it has shaped the market into a
veritable cash cow for the wrong people. It is a thin layer of window
dressing to appease the ignorant. We are not winning and we never will -
the war was over before it began. Prohibition does not work - we must
regulate and tax this illicit industry to make any progress in controlling
consumption and reducing abuse.

NIALL YOUNG

Mt Lawley