PROHIBITION SHOULD BE BANNED

The Present Attitude Towards Drug Use Does Little For Users And Everything
For Criminals

Since the days of Adam and Eve, forbidden fruit has lost little of its
power to tempt. There is a great deal of historical evidence to suggest
that prohibition is counterproductive and may actually stimulate the
consumption of the banned goods. In 1675, Charles II forbade by
proclamation the sale of tea, coffee, chocolate and sherbet from private
houses. His aim was to discourage sedition. In Scotland, the pulpit
denounced tea-drinking as frivolous and ungodly. A consequence of such
fiats was that tea became the national drink.

In the Twenties, US Prohibition stimulated the production and consumption
of booze and gave gangsterism a massive financial injection. Less
malignantly it spawned the jazz age. In our own times, we have seen the
massive failure of drug interdiction. It has corrupted police forces across
the world and given violent gangs a route to wealth. It has spawned
demented policies like Plan Colombia. Drugs, or the addict's need for them,
more often than not lie behind crimes like robbery and assault.

It is more than 20 years since responsible voices began to question drug
interdiction but were unable to make any impression on our political
leaders. Even the libertarian Right, when it advanced to positions of
influence during the Thatcher years, backed off. I interviewed Michael
Forsyth at the end of the Eighties when he was Scottish Health Minister and
I recall his embarrassment when he was asked about decriminalisation, an
issue which at the time had been raised by the Lancet, the Economist and
the New York Times (and, in its modest way, the Glasgow Herald).

Politicians were frightened by popular sentiment, in particular by powerful
parental fears that decriminalisation would send the wrong signals to young
people at the point where they were most vulnerable to the siren songs of
the pedlars. Yet all the evidence is that interdiction has been a most
efficient recruiting sergeant for the dealer. Drugs seem pervasive in
schools and are the scourge of every Scottish town from Wick to Stranraer.

As James McIntosh and Neil McKeganey, of the Centre for Drug Misuse
Research at Glasgow University, noted in their report Beating the Dragon
(Prentice Hall), public policy has been primarily concerned more with
prohibition and prevention than with treatment. It seeks by propaganda and
education to prevent people using drugs in the first place. Then it stands
back and waits for a drug problem to develop before intervening again.
This, say the authors, is 'unwise' and even 'foolhardy'.

There have been very few attempts to influence drug-users' behaviour at an
early stage of the addictive process, in particular at the moment when the
fateful transition to injecting is made. In a Faustian perversion of the
Sacrament of Extreme Unction, the injecting drug addict will ready the
novice for nemesis, preparing the needles and showing him or her how and
where to inject. The criminal status of addiction contributes to the
damaging delay in confronting the problem in its early stages.

The drug subculture which McIntosh and McKeganey deal with is, of course,
closely linked to deprivation or social incompetence. Their book is an
analysis of the process by which addicts may recover. First, they must want
to give up drugs so that they can recover their personality or, as it might
have been put in another age, regain their soul. Second, they must cast
aside a whole network of companions in addiction. The road to recovery can
be dauntingly lonely.

But beyond the subculture, the recreational use of drugs, without the
direst consequences of addiction, now seems prevalent among all classes. I
don't think I have ever been to an Islington dinner party but am told that
if I did I should routinely be offered drugs. Since interdiction has so
signally failed, there is no logical objection to regulating the supply of
drugs, ensuring their quality and taxing their sale. And we should return,
too, to the older and more enlightened policy of treating addiction as a
medical condition. The only objection to such a policy is that it might be
taken as an official imprimatur of drug abuse. But that simply calls for
skilful management.

What, I hear you say, about drink? It is all around us. It is cheap,
plentiful and of excellent quality. We celebrate it almost as a badge of
civilisation. Our Exchequer grows fat on the taxes and duties, even though
the Treasury's greed has sent white van man on innumerable trips to Calais
and other ports where duties are lighter.

And it is, of course, true that drink is often a scourge. It feeds domestic
violence. It causes or contributes to many diseases. Indeed, they used to
say there was a 'Tennants' Ward' in Glasgow Royal Infirmary, named after
the celebrated local beer.

I have never touched drugs, in the general meaning of the sense, and gave
up cigarettes a score of years ago, fortified by the realisation, one
spring morning, that I hadn't smelt new mown grass since taking up the weed
at the age of 17. If I really wanted to do my head in I should make one
last effort to understand Russell's Paradox, a proposition which
intoxicates only higher mathematicians. But I would not like to have been
without alcohol during my march through life. It has been the source of
much merriment. It has stimulated ideas and argument and its glow has shone
on many friendships. I like to fancy that I have stayed on the right side
of addiction, though such a claim may smack of piety, breaking the Earl of
Chesterfield's dictum that if you are by any chance wiser than other people
'you should not tell them so'.

For others, for temperamental or even genetic reasons, moderation is
unachievable and abstinence the only possible course. Drugs are just one of
the dangers lurking in the thickets of life and they have to be confronted
with all the rest.