CHOOSE YOUR POISON

Heroin Century

By Tom Carnwath and Ian Smith

Routledge; 240 pages; $90 and £45 (hardback); $22.95 and £14.99 (paperback)

Legalize This! The Case for Decriminalizing Drugs

By Douglas Husak

Verso; 197 pages; $18 and £12

"THE abuse of tea has taken on the characteristics of a plague" it is not
only confined to men, but has even spread to women and children. The
situation is becoming very dangerous. Tea abuse...takes the form of an
imperious and irresistible craving." Thus a Tunisian physician, horrified by
the effects of tea when it first arrived in his country in the 1930s. Thus,
does society's view of what constitutes a dangerous drug depend on fashion,
familiarity and the way the drug is used.

Will the hysteria about heroin one day seem equally quaint? Tom Carnwath, a
senior doctor working with drug users, and Ian Smith, a former heroin user
turned social worker, certainly think so. In their level-headed, informative
and witty book, they point out that opium was seen until a century ago as a
huge benefit. Like aspirin, it cured many ills with mild side-effects.
Indeed, by coincidence, both heroin and aspirin were isolated within a
fortnight of each other in 1897 by the same team of German researchers"who
thought heroin the more medically useful product.

Today, say the authors, heroin remains "a medicine without superior". But,
thanks to the international war on drugs, the "God-given benefits of the
poppy", once accessible to the poorest sufferer, are now unavailable in most
countries even to those suffering the pain of terminal cancer.

And why? The war on heroin is based on a view of the drug as misguided as
the Tunisian physician's view of tea, argue the authors. Most heroin users
are occasional, and most of the rest survive for long periods on regular
doses. There is, they insist, no evidence that heroin taken in these ways
shortens lives or threatens health. It is mainly the aggressive behaviour of
junkies, a minority of users, that gives heroin its demonic reputation.
Moreover, as heroin becomes an increasingly middle-class drug, more and more
people will discover that the popular hysteria is baseless.

The authors can be too accepting: their figures for the world drug trade are
probably far too high. But their book, which should be read by every
politician, parent and physician, is full of common sense. Only the
conclusion seems over-optimistic: they predict that, as heroin moves
upmarket, it will be legalised relatively soon. Their optimism may reflect
the fact that they are British, and Britain has recently begun to adopt a
saner approach to drugs.

But international policy on drugs is dictated by the United States, and for
a taste of American attitudes, turn to Douglas Husak, a philosopher who is
infuriated by his country's draconian drug laws. The sheer scale of
incarceration of drug users "makes prohibition the worst injustice
perpetrated by our system of criminal law in the 20th century," he argues.
The figures bear out his horror: nearly one prisoner in four in America is
locked up for a non-violent drug offence, and drug crimes now often receive
harsher punishments than violent assaults, rapes or murders.

Such disproportion rightly infuriates Mr Husak. Step by step, he destroys
many of the arguments used by the law's defenders. Sometimes, demolition is
easy, as in the case of William Bennett, America's first drug tsar, who
said: "The simple fact is that drug use is wrong. And the moral argument, in
the end, is the most compelling argument." Even if moral truths were simple
and we could all agree on them, it is a glaring non sequitur to insist that
immorality should therefore be criminalised.

Mr Husak's destruction job is elegantly argued and philosophically informed.
Will common sense win? Will drugs one day be as available as tea? Mr Husak
reminds us of Senator Morris Sheppard's jut-jawed prediction, three years
before prohibition's repeal, that the re- legalisation of alcohol sales was
as likely as a humming bird's flying to the planet Mars "with the Washington
Monument tied to its tail."