THE SECRET OF WORLDWIDE DRUG PROHIBITION

[ continued from part 1 ]

The Place of Harm Reduction Within Drug Prohibition

Since the early 1980s, harm-reduction workers and activists in Europe and
increasingly throughout the world have sought to provide drug users and
addicts with a range of services aimed at reducing the harmful effects of
drug use. In the United States, conservative pundits and liberal
journalists have accused harm-reduction advocates of being "drug
legalizers" in disguise, but in most other countries many prominent
politicians, public-health professionals, and police officials who are
strong defenders of drug prohibition also have supported harm-reduction
programs as practical public-health policies (Heather et al. 1993). Even
the UN agencies that supervise worldwide drug prohibition have come to
recognize the public-health benefits of harm-reduction services within
current drug prohibition regimes (INCB 2000, 59D 60).

A better understanding of the varieties and scope of worldwide drug
prohibition helps us to see better the place of the "harm-reduction
movement" within the history of drug prohibition. I suggest that harm
reduction is a movement within drug prohibition that shifts drug polices
from the criminalized and punitive end to the more decriminalized and
openly regulated end of the drug policy continuum. Harm reduction is the
name of the movement within drug prohibition that in effect (though not
always in intent) moves drug policies away from punishment, coercion, and
repression and toward tolerance, regulation, and public health. Harm
reduction is not inherently an enemy of drug prohibition. However, in the
course of pursuing public-health goals, harm reduction necessarily seeks to
reduce the criminalized and punitive character of U. S. - style drug
prohibition (Heather et al. 1993; Reinarman and Levine 1997).

Consider the many programs identified as part of harm reduction: needle
exchange and distribution, methadone maintenance, injection rooms, heroin
clinics, medical use of marijuana by cancer and AIDS patients, truthful
drug education aimed at users, drug-testing services at raves, and so on.
Harm-reduction programs have pursued all these ways to increase public
health and to help users reduce the harms of drug use. In order to carry
out their stated objectives, these programs have often required laws,
policies, or funding that reduce the harshness of drug prohibition. The
reforms seek to reduce the punitive character of drug prohibition without
necessarily challenging drug prohibition itself.

Harm-reduction advocates' stance toward drug prohibition is exactly the
same as their stance toward drug use. Harm reduction seeks to reduce the
harmful effects of drug use without requiring users to be drug free. It
also seeks to reduce the harmful effects of drug prohibition without
requiring governments to be prohibition free.

Harm-reduction organizations say to drug users: "We are not asking you to
give up drug use; we just ask you to do some things (such as using clean
syringes) to reduce the harmfulness of drug use (including the spread of
AIDS) to you and the people close to you." In precisely the same way, these
organizations say to governments: "We are not asking you to give up drug
prohibition; we just ask you to do some things (such as making clean
syringes and methadone available) to reduce the harmfulness of drug
prohibition."

Harm reduction offers a radically tolerant and pragmatic approach to both
drug use and drug prohibition. It assumes that neither is going away soon
and suggests therefore that reasonable and responsible people try to
persuade both those who use drugs and those who use drug prohibition to
minimize the harms that their activities produce.

The Critics of Global Drug Prohibition

U. S. federal drug prohibition began in 1920 as a subset of U. S. federal
alcohol prohibition. U. S. alcohol prohibition lasted as national policy
for only fourteen years. U. S. drug prohibition, however, quickly became
far more acceptable than alcohol prohibition ever was, and it has now
lasted more than eighty years, growing ever larger, more criminalized, and
more powerful.

In many countries, increasing numbers of knowledgeable people - physicians,
attorneys, judges, journalists, scientists, public-health officials,
teachers, religious leaders, social workers, drug users, and drug addicts -
now openly criticize the more extreme, punitive, and criminalized forms of
drug prohibition. Harm reduction is a major part of that critical
tradition. Indeed, harm reduction is the first popular, international
movement to challenge drug demonization and the more criminalized forms of
drug prohibition (Reinarman and Levine 1997).

As even the defenders of criminalized drug prohibition recognize, the drug
policy reformers have changed the debate. On August 20 and 21, 2001,
Canada's major newspaper, the Toronto Globe, urged the country to
"Decriminalize all - yes, all - personal drug use, henceforth to be
regarded primarily as a health issue rather than as a crime." Just before
that, on July 26, The Economist - the respected, conservative, British
business magazine - devoted a special issue to a well-informed discussion
of drug policy reform. It called for drug decriminalization, further
expansion of harm-reduction policies such as methadone and heroin
maintenance, and consideration of open distribution of cannabis. It also
reported that U. S. government antidrug publications "are full of patently
false claims" and that U. S. drug policy "has proved a dismal rerun of
America's attempt, in 1920 - 33, to prohibit the sale of alcohol." Since
then, with the support of both Labour and Tory Parties, the British
government has begun reforming its drug policies. Canada, too, is
courageously moving away from U. S. - style punitive drug policies.
However, all of this activity is fairly recent.

For much of its history, global drug prohibition has had very few critics.
Even today, despite the impressive growth of the harm-reduction movement
and of drug policy reform activities in many countries, the regime of
worldwide drug prohibition still has very few explicit opponents.

One reason for the lack of organized opposition to global drug prohibition
is that very few people actually know that it exists. In effect, global
drug prohibition has operated for many years as a kind of official secret.
Its existence was on a "need to know basis," and most people, it seems, did
not need to know. Hence, for most of its history, drug prohibition rarely
has been called by that name. This nonuse of the phrase drug prohibition
has occurred even though (and perhaps because) alcohol prohibition was
always called prohibition, especially by the people in favor of it.
Some-times this prohibition on the use of the phrase drug prohibition has
been enforced by prominent publications and government agencies as they
tell contributors and grant recipients that they may not use the term.

Because hardly anybody knows that global drug prohibition exists, hardly
anybody opposes it. Furthermore, even fewer people currently understand
that by ending or even modifying the Single Convention of 1961, the
question of national drug policy can be returned to individual countries
and then to local governments to do with as they wished. Defenders of
global drug prohibition like to evoke an international conspiracy of what
they call "drug legalizers," but nobody thus far has tried to launch even a
half-baked international campaign with slogans such as "Repeal the Single
Convention" or "End Global Drug Prohibition."

Yet it may well be that the Single Convention stands in much the same
relationship to worldwide drug prohibition that the Eighteenth Amendment to
the Constitution and the Volstead Act stood in relation to U. S alcohol
prohibition. Once the Eighteenth Amendment was gone, state and local
governments were free to create alcohol policy at the local level. Once the
Single Convention is gone or even modified, national governments around the
world will be free (or freer) to create drug laws and policies geared to
their own condition - including prohibition if they should so desire.

In recent years, critics of criminalized drug policies in a number of
countries have been discovering, much to their surprise, what I have been
saying here: that no nation in the world currently has the effective power
to withdraw from global drug prohibition. Because of the international
treaties and the economic and political sanctions that bind nations to the
treaties, many nations (and many more regional or local governments)
independently are reforming their drug prohibition laws and making them
less criminalized. At present, however, no country in the world formally
can end its national prohibition regime without facing massive economic and
political retribution.

In recent years, drug warriors around the world also have been discovering,
much to their chagrin, that they, too, are facing their own intractable
Durkheimian social facts. Most alarming to them, they find that they cannot
make the hundreds of millions of cannabis users in the world stop using the
drug. They are discovering as well that they cannot make the critics of
criminalized drug prohibition go away. In INCB reports and in other
publications, the most knowledgeable defenders of drug prohibition warn
every year of the increasing growth of marijuana cultivation and use on
every continent and of the increasing legitimacy given to the critics of
drug prohibition. These defenders of global drug prohibition recognize that
the advocates of decriminalized drug prohibition - and the political,
economic, and cultural forces driving that opposition - are growing
stronger all the time (see, for example, INCB 2000).

The Future of Global Drug Prohibition

Global drug prohibition is in crisis. The fact that it is at long last
becoming visible is one symptom of that crisis. In the long run, the more
criminalized and punitive forms of drug prohibition almost certainly are
doomed. In the short run, the ever-growing drug-law and drug-policy reform
movements make it likely that criminalized drug prohibition will find
itself confronted with new opponents. (This prediction is already becoming
a reality in Switzerland, Australia, Germany, Portugal, Canada, the
Nether-lands, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, and other
counties.)

In the twentieth century, for specific practical and ideological reasons,
the nations of the world constructed a global system of drug prohibition.
In the twenty-first century, because of the spread of democracy, trade, and
information and for other practical and ideological reasons, the peoples of
the world will likely dismantle and end worldwide drug prohibition.

It is important to understand that this process of dismantling global drug
prohibition will not end local drug prohibition. The end of global drug
prohibition will not (and cannot) be the end of all national drug
prohibition. Advocating the end of worldwide drug prohibition is not the
same as advocating worldwide drug legalization.

Long after the demise of the UN's Single Convention, communities, regions,
and some democratic nations will choose to retain forms of drug
prohibition. Many places in the world will also continue to support
vigorous antidrug crusades.

However, as accurate information about drug effects and alternative drug
policies becomes more widespread, increasing numbers of countries,
especially democratic ones, will likely choose not to retain full-scale
criminalized drug prohibition. Most places eventually will develop their
own varied local forms of regulated personal cultivation and use of the
once-prohibited plants and substances. Many places also eventually will
allow some forms of commercial production and sale - of cannabis, first of
all and above all, because it is by far the most widely grown, traded,
sold, and used illegal drug in the world.

These changes will take time. Prohibitionists and drug warriors in every
country will fight tenaciously to maintain their local regimes, and
enormous power will be employed to prevent the Single Convention of 1961
and its related treaties from being repealed or even modified. As a result,
in coming years, all around the world there will be even greater public
discussion and debate about drug prohibition, about criminalized drug
policies, and about the worldwide movement within drug prohibition to
decriminalize the possession and use of cannabis, cocaine, heroin, and
other substances.

As part of that process of conversation and debate, many more people will
discover - often with considerable astonishment - that they have lived for
decades within a regime of worldwide drug prohibition. That growing
understanding will itself push worldwide drug prohibition closer to its
end. Here in the twenty-first century, it may turn out that the most
powerful force holding global drug prohibition in place is the secret of
its existence.

Appendix: Research about Global Drug Prohibition

Because of the near invisibility of global drug prohibition, the field of
what might be termed drug prohibition studies does not really exist as an
organized entity or even as a coherent literature. The term global drug
prohibition was first used by Ethan Nadelmann in 1990 in his path-breaking
article "Global Prohibition Regimes: The Evolution of Norms in
International Society." The best study of the development of global drug
prohibition is David Bewley-Taylor's The United States and International
Drug Control, 1907 - 1997 (1999).

Also see William McAllister's fine recent book Drug Diplomacy in the
Twentieth Century: An International History (1999) and the classic
Gentlemen's Club by Bruun, Pan, and Rexed (1975).

Nearly every country on every continent is a signatory to one of the main
UN antidrug treaties, and most are signatories to two or more. A small
number of countries had not signed by 2000, but all had drug policies in
accord with (or more criminalized than) the treaty requirements; most were
also signatories to other local antidrug treaties.

Peter Andreas of Harvard University's Center for International Affairs has
summarized well why thus far no country has been able to withdraw
politically from global drug prohibition:

Open defection from the drug prohibition regime would . . . have severe
consequences: it would place the defecting country in the category of a
pariah "narcostate," generate material repercussions in the form of
economic sanctions and aid cutoffs, and damage the country's moral standing
in the international community.

Even if their control efforts have a limited impact on the drug trade,
leaders across the globe repeatedly pledge their commitment to the battle
against drugs. Regardless of whether they are "true believers" or simply
trying to pacify international critics, for drug-exporting countries to
openly defect by officially advocating drug legalization would be
unthinkable, not only because it would draw the wrath off the United States
but also because their advocation would be universally condemned and would
openly violate their pledge to uphold UN-based antidrug treaties. (1999,
127 - 28)

As a result, no country in the world, whether UN treaty signatory or not,
stands outside of the regime of global prohibition. Consider how different
this situation is from the situation in the 1920s, when the United States
was virtually alone in trying to defend and expand national and
constitutional alcohol prohibition. Drug prohibition dwarfs alcohol
prohibition in its scope and power.

The UN agency that imagined worldwide drug prohibition and the Single
Convention - meaning one single drug prohibition law for the whole world -
and then put it into effect is the INCB. The INCB recently has put many of
its historic documents on the World Wide Web. The INCB yearly reports, the
text of the Single Convention and of other treaties, commentary on the
various UN treaties, an index to national narcotic laws, and many other
such publications can be found at http://www.incb.org , and at
http://www.undcp.org/news_and_publications.html.
Of special interest is the INCB's own periodical, Bulletin on Narcotics,
from the first issue in 1949 to 1999
( http://www.undcp.org/odccp/bulletin_on_narcotics.html ). Anyone with access to
the Internet now can learn about the making of the Single Convention and
the spread of global drug prohibition from the people who created it and
who to this day celebrate its successes and warn about its weaknesses.

A number of other Web sites have valuable information:

The Center for Drug Research at the University of Amsterdam (CEDRO):
http://www.cedro-uva.org/

The U. S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA): http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/

The Schaffer Library of Drug Policy Research - a treasure trove of
material, including historical documents and whole books:
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/index.htm and
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/History/HISTORY.HTM

The Drug Text country pages with some information about the legal policies
in various countries: http://www.drugtext.org/count/default.htm

Drug Policy Alliance/ Lindesmith Center Library and its large collection of
material on drug policy: http://www.lindesmith.org/library/subject.html

References

Andreas, Peter. 1999. When Policies Collide: Market Reform, Market
Prohibition, and the Narcotization of the Mexican Economy. In The Global
Economy and State Power, edited by Richard Friman and Peter Andreas, 125 -
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Baum, Dan. 1996. Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of
Failure. New York: Little Brown.

Bewley-Taylor, David. 1999. The United States and International Drug
Control, 1907D 1997. London and New York: Wellington House.

Blocker, Jack S. 1989. American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform.
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Bruun, Kettil, Lynn Pan, and Ingmar Rexed. 1975. The Gentlemen's Club:
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Christie, Nils. 1994. Crime Control as Industry. 2d ed. New York: Routledge.

Cockburn, Andrew, and Jeffrey St. Clair. 1998. Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs,
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Duke, Steven B., and Albert C. Gross. 1993. America's Longest War:
Rethinking Our Tragic Crusade Against Drugs. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Epstein, Edward Jay. 1977. Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in
America. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Gray, Mike. 1998. Drug Crazy: How We Got into This Mess and How We Can Get
Out. New York: Random House.

Heather, Nick, Alex Wodak, Ethan Nadelmann, and Pat O'Hare. 1993.
Psychoactive Drugs and Harm Reduction: From Faith to Science. London: Whurr.

International Narcotics Control Board (INCB). 2000. Report of the
International Narcotics Control Board for 2000. New York: United Nations.
Also available at: http://www.incb.org/e/ind_ar.htm

King, Rufus. 1972. The Drug Hang-Up: America's Fifty-Year Folly.
Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas.

Kyvig, David E. 1979. Repealing National Prohibition. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.

Levine, Harry G. 1984. The Alcohol Problem in America:
From Temperance to Prohibition. British Journal of Addiction (centenary
issue) 79: 109 - 19.

- -. 1985. The Birth of American Alcohol Control: Prohibition, the Power
Elite, and the Problem of Lawlessness. Contemporary Drug Problems (special
issue on alcohol control policy) (spring): 63 - 115.

Levine, Harry G., and Craig Reinarman. 1993. From Prohibition to
Regulation: Lessons from American Alcohol Policy for Drug Policy. In
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McAllister, William. 1999. Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: An
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Nadelmann, Ethan. 1990. Global Prohibition Regimes: The Evolution of Norms
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Acknowledgments: I dedicate this article to the memory of Kettil Bruun and
to Nils Christie. Years ago, these social scientists argued that "drugs"
had become a very useful ideological and political enemy in Sweden, Norway,
and Finland. They courageously called for a fundamental reconsideration of
Nordic drug policy. To Kettil's spirit, which lives on within many people,
and to Nils, who continues to say what is right and true, I give thanks for
showing the way. Nils's most recent book, Crime Control as an Industry
(1994), is a devastating portrait of America's prison system in comparative
context.

This article is a revised version of a paper forthcoming in the
International Journal of Drug Policy. The central arguments were first
presented at the International Harm Reduction Association meetings in Paris
in 1997.

This article is a collective product. It summarizes ideas and findings
learned from people in many countries over many years. I particularly wish
to thank Patrick O'Hare, Ernest Drucker, Peter Cohen, Freek Polak, Lynn
Zimmer, John Morgan, Ethan Nadelman, Sheigla Murphy, Marsha Rosenbaum, Alex
Wodak, Ira Glasser, Loren Siegel, Troy Duster, Kevin Zeese, Arnold Trebach,
Eric Sterling, Keith Stroup, Lester Grinspoon, Robert Newman, Tom Haines,
Polly Cleveland, David Bewley-Taylor, Peter Webster, Henner Hess, Lorenz
Bollenger, Sebastian Scheerer, Daniel Hood, Robin Room, Ron Roizen, and
Joseph Gusfield. All have been doing "drug prohibition studies" for a long
time. Finally, I wish to thank Craig Reinarman. Most of the central
arguments presented here were taken directly from him or born in continuous
conversation with him. See our book Crack in America: Demon Drugs and
Social Justice (1997), chaps. 1, 2, 15, 16, and 17. It contains a longer
discussion of drug demonization and of the uses of and political support
for punitive drug prohibition.