Pubdate: Wed, 11 Nov 2009
Source: Independent  (UK)
Copyright: 2009 Independent Newspapers (UK) Ltd.
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Website: http://www.independent.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/209
Author: Johann Hari
Cited: Transform Drug Policy Foundation http://www.tdpf.org.uk/

ACCEPT THE FACTS - AND END THIS FUTILE 'WAR ON DRUGS'

We Are Handing One of Our Biggest Industries Over to Armed, Criminal Gangs

The proponents of the "war on drugs" are well-intentioned people who
believe they are saving people from the nightmare of drug addiction
and making the world safer. But this self-image has turned into a
faith - and like all faiths, it can only be maintained by cultivating
a deliberate blindness to the evidence.

The recent furore about the British government's decision to fire its
chief scientific advisor on drugs, Professor David Nutt, missed the
point. Yes, it is shocking that he was ditched for pointing out the
mathematical truth that taking ecstasy is less dangerous than
horse-riding, and that smoking cannabis is less harmful than drinking
alcohol. But this is how the war on drugs has to be fought. The
unofficial slogan of the prohibitionists for decades has been: The
facts will only undermine the war, so invent some that show how
successful we are, fast.

Look at the United States, the country that pioneered the drug war,
and still uses its military and diplomatic might to demand the rest
of the world cracks down. In 1998, the Office of National Drug
Control Policy was ordered by Congress to stop funding any scientific
research that might give the impression that we should redirect
funding from anti-trafficking busts into medical treatment of
addicts, or that there is any argument to legalise, regulate or
medicalise drug use.

It's Nutt cubed: only tell us what we want to hear. So, to give a
small example, the ONDCP spent $14bn on anti-cannabis adverts aimed
at teenagers, and $43m to find out if the ads worked. They discovered
that kids who saw the ads were more likely afterwards to get stoned,
so the evidence was suppressed, and the ad campaign marched on.

What would happen if we started to build our drugs policy around the
facts, rather than our desire for a fuzzy feeling inside? Prof Nutt
only took baby steps in this direction before he was booted out. He
argued that we should rank drugs by the harm they do, rather than by
the size of the panicked headlines they trigger. Now the row is
fading, it is possible to see how conservative he was. A must-read
new report out this week - "After The War on Drugs: Blueprint for
Regulation", by the Transform Drug Policy Foundation - follows the
facts as far as they will take us. It shows that the rational
solution is to take the drug market back from the unregulated anarchy
of criminal gangs, and transfer it to pharmacists, off-licences, and
doctors who operate in the legal economy. To see why this is
necessary, we have to look at some of the facts our politicians refuse to see:

Fact One

The drug war hands one of our biggest industries to armed criminal
gangs, who unleash terrible violence across the country. When alcohol
was prohibited in the US in the 1920s, it didn't vanish. No: armed
gangsters like Al Capone stepped in and sold it - and they shot
anybody who got in their way. Yet today, Wine Rack does not shoot up
Threshers. Oddbins does not threaten to kill anybody who sees its
staff selling wine. Why? Because it wasn't the booze that caused the
violence; it was the prohibition. Once alcohol was reclaimed for
legal businesses, the dealer-on-dealer violence swiftly stopped.

Where there is a huge profit to be made in a black market - it's
3,000 per cent on drugs today - people will fight and kill to control
it. Arrest a dealer, and you simply trigger a new war for his patch,
with the rest of us caught in the crossfire. In 1986, the Nobel-prize
winning economist, Milton Friedman, calculated that there are 10,000
murders in the US alone every year caused this way. Legalise, and you
bankrupt most organised crime overnight. With their profits in
freefall, the gangsters don't suddenly become cuddly - but the huge
financial incentives to remain a gangster wither fast. It's the drug
war that keeps them in business, and legalisation that shuts them
down. As Friedman said: "Prohibition is the drug dealer's best friend."

Fact Two

Under prohibition, drug use becomes more hardcore. Before alcohol
prohibition, most Americans drank beer and wine. After prohibition
was introduced, super-strong moonshine became the most popular drink,
as booze rapidly became 150 per cent stronger. Why?

The writer Richard Cowan called it "the iron law of prohibition":
whenever you criminalise a substance, it gets stronger. Because they
are smuggling and stashing a substance, the dealers condense their
product to give the biggest possible kick while taking up the
smallest possible space. It's at work today: it's why dealers
invented crack in the 1980s. The researchers Matthew Robinson and
Renee Scherlen found: "The increased deadly nature of drugs under
prohibition led to 15,000 more deaths in 2000 [in the US alone] than
[if] prohibition had not made drugs more dangerous."

Fact Three

The drug war doesn't reduce drug use - but the alternatives can. Some
people believe these two dark side-effects are a price worth paying
if prohibition stops a significant number of people from picking up
their first bong or needle. It was an understandable enough argument
- until the evidence came in from countries that have experimented
with ending the drug war.

On 1 July 2001, Portugal decriminalised the possession of all drugs,
including heroin and cocaine. You can have and use as much as you
like for your own needs, and if you are caught, the police might
refer you to a rehab programme, but you will never get a criminal
record. (Supplying and selling remains illegal.) The prohibitionists
predicted a catastrophic rise in addiction, and even I - an
instinctive legaliser - was nervous.

Now we know: overall drug use actually fell a little. As a major
study by Glenn Greenwald for The Cato Institute found, among
Portuguese teenagers the fall was fastest: 13-year-olds are four per
cent less likely to use drugs, and 16-year-olds are six per cent less
likely. As the iron law of prohibition predicts, the use of hard
drugs has fallen fastest: heroin use has crashed by nearly 50 per
cent among the young who were not yet addicted. The Portuguese have
switched the billions that used to be spent chasing and jailing
addicts to providing them with prescriptions and rehab. The number of
people in drug treatment is now up by 147 per cent. Almost nobody in
Portugal wants to go back. Indeed, many citizens want to take the
next step: legalise supply too, and break the back of the gangs.

Portugal is no fluke. It turns out that wherever the drug laws are
relaxed, drug use stays the same, or - where spending is switched to
treatment - declines. Between 1972 and 1978, 11 US states
decriminalised marijuana possession. The National Research Council
found that the number of dope-smokers stayed the same. In
Switzerland, a decade ago the government started providing legal
centres where people could safely inject heroin - for free. Burglary
rates fell by 60 per cent, and street homelessness ended. A study by
The Lancet - one of the most respected medical journals in the world
- found that the rate of people becoming new heroin addicts fell by
82 per cent. Why? Heroin addicts didn't need to recruit new addicts
to sell to in order to feed their habit. The pyramid scheme of heroin
addiction was broken.

So the drug war doesn't achieve its goal of reducing addiction. All
it does achieve is horrific gang violence - and in some cases the
cartels gut whole countries like Mexico and Afghanistan. It does
unwittingly press people into using harder and more dangerous drugs.
And it does waste tens of billions of dollars that could really
reduce drug addiction, by spending it on treatment for addicts.

The prohibitionists are therefore left a contradiction between their
message and the facts. They can either change their message, or try
to suppress the facts. Last week, the British Government made its
choice. But how long will this be tenable? The prohibitionists are -
from the best intentions and the highest motives - unleashing a
catastrophe. Human beings have been finding ways to get stoned or
high since we lived in caves. In our attempt to end this natural
impulse, we have created a problem worse than drug use itself.

There is another way. Imagine a country with no drug dealers killing
to protect their patch or terrorising whole estates. Imagine a
country where burglary fell by 60 per cent. Imagine a Britain where
we spent all these billions treating addicts as ill people who need
our help, not hunting them down as criminals who need punishment. We
can be that country. We just have to come down from chasing the
dragon of a drug-free world - and start looking soberly at the facts.

To support the campaign for drug regulation, you can join, volunteer
for or donate to the Transform Drug Policy Foundation at www.tdpf.org.uk