Pubdate: Mon, 10 Jan 2005
Source: Herald, The (UK)
Column: The TV Week
Copyright: 2005 The Herald
Contact:  http://www.theherald.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/189
Author: Ian Bell

WHOSE WAR IS IT ANYWAY?

The "war on drugs" has been going on for most of my life. This is not
my definition of a successful sort of war, or of even an
intellectually respectable war. As Doctor Russell Newcombe of
Liverpool's John Moores University remarked during Drugland (BBC2,
Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday), if you pursue a policy for four
decades "only to show that the problem got worse every year" you might
want to trade your policy in for a new one.

Not a bit of it. The drug trade is worth UKP8bn a year in the United
Kingdom alone, and therefore finances a great many otherwise
"legitimate" businesses. There are estimated to be five million
regular users of narcotics in the country, and no fewer than 20,000
dealers serving London, far less every seaside town, housing scheme
and country village on the map. Across Britain, according to Newcombe,
half a million people are involved in the sale of drugs.

Yet is prohibition discredited?

One aspect of this perennial farce that went almost unremarked in a
fine piece of investigative journalism, was the extent to which the
crusade against drug use has become a political shibboleth. No
politician truly believes that the "war" has achieved anything, yet
no-one in government would dare to be "soft", which is to say
sensible, in dealing with the issue. The professor spoke, briefly, of
the numerous coppers and legislators who admit privately that
legalisation may be the only answer. Those same people, he said,
return to the approved mantra whenever the cameras are turned on.

It is as though drugs have acquired an aura of unique evil. Ninety
five per cent of drug use is classified as "recreational". In other
words, it involves little risk of serious addiction or
life-threatening overdoses. Equally, the sheer extent of drug use,
having quadrupled over the past decade - four million cannabis
smokers; one million cocaine users - of itself refutes the notion that
lightweight narcotics lead inevitably to crack and heroin.

But while we tut over alcohol and frown over tobacco - both proven yet
legal killers - the business executive with his line of Charlie or the
teenager with his spliff are held to represent a menace to society
itself.

Drugland's central purpose was simply to prove how ubiquitous drugs
have become. Its first episode tracked the trade in London where, as
Newcombe noted, many among the professional middle class use cocaine
"like a double espresso, to give themselves a little boost". This is
the city of Dial-a-Gramme and door-to-door delivery, where the quality
of customer service to leafy suburbs or Chelsea flats can make or
break a dealer's business, where coke is "part of the landscape now".
It is no different in kind, as it happens, from the trade in Edinburgh
or Glasgow, where you can also order marching powder as easily as
pizza, but the scale of the metropolitan phenomenon beggars belief.

One counsellor called it an epidemic.

That was not clear, however, from Drugland's dispassionate
reporting.

The people who acquire problems with their habits, it seems, are
generally people with problematic personalities, people like Georgie.
Clearly, she was a gel from an affluent background. Equally clearly,
she took no moral position where the habits of others were concerned.

Given an ability to exercise self-restraint, she would still be doing
coke. Her moment of truth came, nevertheless, when she realised that
she could not stop, that one line of powder would always lead to
another, and another still. One anonymous City type said, blithely: "I
take drugs in the same way that people smoke a cigar after a nice
meal." Georgie lacked his luck. She was like Paul, another thrusting
City executive who had once worked all day, made a lot of money and
stuck most of it up his nose. "It's not even a particularly enjoyable
experience," he said, with the wistful air of one reformed.

He was talking, as it happened, of being alone and "completely
paranoid".

For all that, Paul and Georgie were in the minority.

In a country obsessed with the feral behaviour of binge drinkers, it
should long ago have been obvious that, if drugs constitute a serious
problem, five million users would have shown up on the radar long ago.
Patently, this isn't the case. "Montana," a small-time dealer making
UKP1500 a week with his door-to-door service, spoke of all the "doctors,
lawyers, and City types" who called on his services.

He was delivering to "some of the most famous addresses in London".
Social breakdown had yet to ensue. Montana would not accept that he
might be the source of anyone's problems. In his trade, there is no
need, these days, to push drugs, such is the demand.

As Newcombe meanwhile argued, the biggest problem for a dealer is
staying away from his own product, not the law or moral dilemmas. So
did Montana have qualms? "Bollocks," said the disguised silhouette of
a chubby little bloke. "Personal responsibility. Why am I responsible
for your -ups in your life?"

Drugland's second and third episodes looked a little harder at this
embodiment of laissez faire capitalist attitudes.

Snorting coke without culpability after a Hampstead dinner party is
one thing; crack and smack on the housing schemes of greater
Manchester may be quite another.

As reporter Sarah O'Connell discovered, the trade loses whatever
glamour it might have possessed when poverty, crime and violence
combine. Her report had undoubted force.

In such circumstances, indeed, drugs begin to resemble the cheap gin
that cut a swathe through the British working class in the nineteenth
century.

Watching some grim footage you wondered, despite it all, if society
isn't looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

Would legalised drugs have the same effects on the poor? If the trade
is parasitical, feeding on the vulnerable, what would happen if you
deprived the criminals of their meal tickets and their motive for turf
wars and gun crime?

The final programme, concentrating on the island of Ibiza, seemed to
suggest that illegality was itself the real drugs problem. "Sure, we
will win this war," said the chief of police with a bright smile and
no conviction whatever.

The truth revealed by undercover filming, old news to Europe's
clubbers, is that the resort is awash with every intoxicant you care
to name. The Spanish police are lenient towards possession for
personal use; punitive towards dealers; but they rarely catch sight of
the big traffickers. Ibiza has become a honey-pot for the continent's
recreational users, and horribly tawdry into the bargain.

But how would it seem, you wondered, if it was not involved in "this
war"? Whose war is it, in any case? Why does the use and abuse of
narcotics propel a moral crusade when humanity's taste for getting out
of its collective skull is as old as the species, when hashish is
demonstrably less harmful than alcohol, when the failure of
prohibition in the eternal business of human desire is beyond argument?

Journalism, TV journalism least of all, does not often promote
rational ethical debate, but Drugland left you to ponder a final dilemma.

Could it be possible that the fruitless war on drugs is actually more
damaging to society than any drug ever devised?
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake