HIGH TIME TO COOK UP FRESH IDEA

THROUGHOUT history, noble experiments of prohibition intended to rid the
world of the "immorality of intemperance" and the "scourge of addiction"
have repeatedly failed.

Our modern version of this folly has left us with overwhelming prison
populations, a criminal industry whose proceeds comprise more than ten per
cent of world trade, general disrespect for law and government, and
increasing use of the prohibited substances by younger and younger people.

It becomes obvious yet again that prohibition, when logically analysed,
does not control drugs nor their use, but is an abandonment of control to
black market forces.

The continued pursuit of prohibitionism today in a manner more fanatic and
pernicious than ever before - the so-called "Drug War" championed by the
United States - is of major consequence to the very future of civilisation.

Yet curiously, a merely realistic stress on the importance of resolving the
problem tends itself to sound like a fanaticism. Talk of legalisation or
repealing prohibition has often placed one amongst the lunatic fringe of
conspiracy theorists and alien abductees. The necessary hypotheses for
rational debate have thus been a little-heard current in the media, and
practically absent in the halls of government. The roots, facilitations and
justifications for prohibition run deep into the fabric of modern
civilisation. For example, there are numerous economic incentives for
promoting prohibition as viable policy: the momentum of cash-flow involved
with interdiction and its agencies, with prison-building, drug-testing,
manufacture of Drug War material, and forfeiture. The situation is a major
obstacle to any change of policy at the international level or in the
leading prohibitionist nations such as the US.

Surely the reasons and mechanisms which allowed drug prohibition to become
the worldwide fiasco it is today are many, and the roots of the
prohibitionist attitude grow strongly from unexamined and obsolete
assumptions and prejudices of our times.

The question today is that as the philosophy of prohibition is finally
exposed as bogus, as its goals are shown to be self-defeating in their
pursuit, as it is revealed as one of the greatest crowd-madnesses of all
time, at what point will the absurdity of our collective folly lead to a
general abandonment of prohibition?

We must finally realise that not only has prohibition failed to deliver the
benefits it promised, but that it is the culprit we will eventually have to
blame for the greater part of the problems we now attribute to the use of
drugs.

So how do we proceed? It is obvious that after many decades of prohibition
it will be no easy task to design and implement such policy. Thus it is
perhaps impossible to say, and risky to recommend, for instance, that this
or that drug simply be "legalised", or that the Government or industry
should undertake to supply any and all drugs that are in demand.

A general and absolute decriminalisation of all drug use and possession
should be instituted, first in the nations already considering policy
reform, and later worldwide, mandated by United Nations and international
agreements.

Much leeway to allow and overlook casual exchange and small-scale sales of
drugs will also be necessary until the issue of manufacture and supply of
drugs is settled. These ideas have already been partly implemented with
some notable success in various countries in Europe.

Decriminalisation is certainly merited and when fully implemented will make
possible for the first time much more accurate research concerning drug
use, its harms and possible benefits. Drug users who are under absolutely
no threat of penalty are obviously much more reliable as research subjects
than those who fear reprisal for their chosen activities.

DRUG policy must be designed so that it recognises inevitabilities
concerning all aspects of drug use, drug production, and supply. So, for
example, it will be pointless to try to prevent people from growing their
own cannabis and distributing it to friends, collecting magic mushrooms, or
buying the occasional ecstasy pill at party.

Whatever the prevailing moral views say about such activities, insofar as
they attempt to interfere with the inevitable, they are useless as guides
for constructing effective policy.

Drug policy must, on the contrary, be pragmatic and attempt to guide the
inevitable toward situations manifesting the least aggregate and individual
harm and most collective benefit to society.

Drug policy may not legitimately have as a goal the minimisation or
attempted overt discouragement of drug use. This may sound drastic, but
when analysed fully, becomes obvious. The great majority of drug use today
already is undertaken responsibly. Yet legal and medical authorities suffer
from a certain illusion concerning the nature of drug use and the general
characteristics of drug users because they uniformly see only the problem
cases.

Thus drug policy must recognise that the use of a given drug will find its
own equilibrium in a society, and this equilibrium will depend on the
balance between risk and benefit that people find in the use of the
substance. Trying to convince people that "government knows best" when it
comes to such personal choices is counter-productive, and anti-democratic.

Government and medical authorities may not transgress the line between
education and coercion, between supplying all possible information
concerning a drug and its use and attempting to use that information as
propaganda designed to narrow the legitimate choices of citizens. Although
such a view will be widely labelled as libertarian, in reality it is merely
pragmatic.

FINALLY, perhaps I may suggest a golden rule for future drug policy. It is
of obvious benefit to society that access to all drugs that present
significant risks to the user should be regulated in one way or another.
Drugs with greater potential for harmful use must be more closely
regulated. How shall we know whether such regulation achieves its goals?
Here is a simple rule of thumb: Every individual drug, according to its
dangers, shall be subject to a regulatory scheme as restrictive as seems
merited, yet not so restrictive as to produce a black market in the substance.

Once a significant illicit trade in a substance appears, we can be sure
that regulatory policy is a failure and bound to contribute to, rather than
minimise the harms of the commerce and use of that substance. The
appearance of the black market will be the litmus test for policy.