REGULATE, DON'T BAN DRUGS - EXPERT

Val Aldridge meets a drugs expert who hates cannabis, yet who has a
compelling argument for why recreational drugs should be regulated, not
prohibited.

Recreational drug use is here to stay and we need to get our heads around
this and stop thinking about prohibiting drugs. Regulation and education is
what is needed, not prohibition, says Peter Cohen, sociologist and
associate professor at the Centre for Drug Research at the University of
Amsterdam, as he eschews a cup of coffee for a glass of sparkling mineral
water.

Prohibition never worked with alcohol, he says, neither will it work with
drugs.

Dr Cohen, an international drug expert who "hates cannabis" (he says he
belongs to that group which years ago, had fun using it and then left it
behind) is careful about his coffee intake, and says his drug of choice is
alcohol ("I love New Zealand wines"). And no, he doesn't smoke tobacco.

It's perhaps an unspoken nod to his research which he says demonstrates
that drugs, of all sorts, are part of everyday life and, for most users,
can be controlled.

Dr Cohen was in New Zealand at the invitation of the Coalition for Cannabis
Law Reform to make a submission to the health select committee's cannabis
inquiry.

He says: "For the bulk of drug users -- and this is what I learned in my
research into amphetamine, cocaine and cannabis -- use is within our normal
integrated lifestyle and I didn't know that when I started this research .
. . how much it is like integrated alcohol use."

Dr Cohen, 60, has spent 20 years researching drug use, the careers of drug
users, the drug policies and histories of a number of countries and the
methodology of drug use research.

He is an adviser to the Dutch Government for the design and development of
the European monitoring centre for drugs and drug addiction in the European
Union and was an adviser to the World Health Organisation global cocaine
project.

He says that whatever politicians might think, whether they favour
prohibition or legalisation, drug policy will not keep people off drugs.
It's a message that politicians will find difficult to swallow, he says,
"because they think what they say has an influence in people's drug use".

And that, he says, is as naive as it is ridiculous.

Prohibition thinking clouds the truth about real drug use and "forces us to
amplify our frightening images even more". Drug policy, in the end, has
little effect. Research has shown that what are relevant are a society's
cultural factors, economic factors, fashions and levels of urbanisation.
These are what determine the proportion of the population that will use drugs.

He says there is no country that has stopped the normalisation of drug use
among its population. Drugs that were meant to be kept out of society have
more or less captured the cultural imagination and come in, despite
prohibition.

"My focus is, don't go on trying to do the impossible. Try to regulate the
use of drugs as we have done with alcohol."

He says many countries did not follow the United States example of trying
to prohibit alcohol. "Wisely so. Instead, they put quality controls on age
limits, access, opening hours of pubs . . . there are all sorts of
regulations around alcohol. That doesn't mean alcohol isn't sometimes a
disturbing factor in our lives . . . but then so is marriage."

Prohibition, he says, was an American invention and was a catastrophe. It
didn't work and was discontinued for alcohol, yet it was retained for all
other drugs.

America, he says, "is the Taleban of prohibition; the fundamentalists of
drug prohibition". And it was as a result of severe American pressure that
the global treaties on drugs evolved. But he says the treaties are
toothless, used as an excuse not to progress in drug reform and neglected
when they don't suit a country's interests.

Dr Cohen believes the world is gradually turning its back on prohibition.
Europe, he says, is clearly going the other way. Germany, France and now
Britain are easing drug laws.

He says his interest in drug research arose out of studying how societies,
during their historical cultural development, create and construct problems.

Today's "problem", says Dr Cohen, is recreational drug use. In the past it
has been the problems of religion, homosexuality, alcohol, each of which
has been dealt with. Now, he says, Western man is slowly deconstructing the
drug problem just as in most countries it has deconstructed the
homosexuality problem, taking it out of penal law and bringing it into the
range of human freedoms.

The same has been done with religion: "Religious freedom is a very young
freedom in Europe. Before the 19th century there were state religions where
you were killed if you did not profess, or in later history, you didn't get
the good jobs."

People tend to be educated into a series of assumptions and quasi-knowledge
about drugs which are wrong, he says. In fact, most people will use some
sort of drug within their dominant lifestyles.

He says it is a myth to think that cocaine or cannabis or amphetamines
cannot be controlled by users.

Two long studies of cocaine users -- in 1985 and 1991, and a big study of
cannabis users -- showed that use only continued for a certain period.

The average age in The Netherlands of a cannabis user is from 19 (from 24
for cocaine) to 35. During this period there are times of lighter use,
heavy use and also abstinence. The same is true of alcohol.

There will always be those who over-use drugs, just like those who
over-reach themselves in sport and ruin their bodies.

"There is always this irrational aspect but we can regulate the bulk of
human behaviour into nice lanes," he says.

Truthful education about drugs and their risks is a much more productive
approach than prohibition, he says.

So which country has got it right? None, in his view. Not Sweden or
Australia and certainly not The Netherlands. He calls Dutch policy
schizophrenic because it only decriminalised demand "but the supply was not
decriminalised so the wholesale production and importation of marijuana is
still a criminal offence. If you allow the population access to drugs, then
allow people to trade it."