Pubdate: Sun, 24 Dec 2006 Source: Sunday Business Post (Ireland) Copyright: 2006 The Sunday Business Post Contact: http://www.sbpost.ie/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/577 Author: Tom McGurk Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization) RADICAL RETHINK NEEDED TO TACKLE DRUGS CRISIS I suppose you could describe them as entrepreneurs of a sort: the General, the Viper, the Monk et al. And last week, we said goodbye to 'Marlo' Hyland. All their career paths are similar: general nobodies who start in petty crime and then rise rapidly to prominence, thanks to their ability to dominate the illegal drugs market. There is a brief flowering of cash, killings and general mayhem, and many end up blown away by their associates or rivals. Their careers are mercifully short: the tide of misery that washes them up so quickly washes them away again. But it seems that they must have some sort of appeal, some sort of folk hero status. By all accounts, the crowd that turned out for Hyland's funeral in Dublin last week was massive. These Celtic Tiger gangsters also seem to have learned something from the paramilitaries: the ostentatious funeral, the huge police presence. Overall, it is a display of defiance, a rare opportunity for visibility for their "cause", whatever it may be. Come to think of it, can you imagine what those hundreds who turned up at Hyland's funeral might say to explain their presence: "I knew his granny"; "He's a neighbour's child"; "Just came for a gawk." When you study the crowd, it provides a rare opportunity to see who exactly these young men are who now terrorise our society. Young males, heads shaven, expensively dressed, all cocks of the walk. They strut around on the day like some sort of aristocracy of warriors and, presumably, they are at war with us. And what are we to do with them? Once upon a time, gangsters amassed their loot and then headed off for sunnier, less extraditable climes. They robbed, defrauded and ran prostitution and protection rackets. But overall, few innocents were injured, and their reigns were brief, as informers eventually coughed them up to the police. Our modern gangsters are entirely different. These people are a serious threat to society, not because they are any different to the long run of criminals, but because their trade is drugs. In their wake, they leave thousands of hopelessly addicted victims, their lives potentially ruined. Even worse, they have created a thriving and impressive market and, irrespective of how spectacular and short their own lives are, their market survives them. No sooner is one major player - as they call them - laid to rest with another expensive funeral than there is another to step into his shoes. The market they create is only the beginning of the crisis. Vast sums of money are being made - which, only a generation on from the start of this phenomenon in the 1980s, is now threatening to create an alternative, organised criminal economy. As with the Mafia in Italy and the US, sooner or later vast amounts of cash will be laundered into the legal economy.At that point, organised crime can disappear behind legalised structures and the task of dealing with them multiplies in its complexity. But what is most worrying of all about this crisis - not only here, but internationally - is that the strategy involving the "criminalisation" of drugs is failing. Despite more and more police, more and more laws and more and more international cooperation, we are merely keeping the lid on the worldwide crisis. In short, the accepted approach of criminalising the drug crisis within our liberal democratic framework has not worked. Certainly, the survival rates of the major players are low, but they are merely bit-part players in the whole crisis; the market simply continues to expand. Despite over 60 years of this approach, drug use across the world - and particularly in western societies - continues to grow. The latest surveys here in Ireland show that its consumers are getting younger and younger, and that it has become a nationwide phenomenon. Remarkably, for example, every village and town in Ireland now has its drug dealers. What was once a metropolitan phenomenon has spread everywhere. Apart from the damage it does to individuals, it is also principally responsible for most criminal offences. The majority of robberies, burglaries, muggings and murders in our society are linked to drugs. Every day, thousands of addicts wake up in desperate need of cash and then go out and get it, wherever and however. Is it not time, then, for a rethink of how to deal with this crisis, since the current methods we are using are simply unable to cope? One argument being advanced is that the greatest harm being done by the illegal drug trade is actually not to the unfortunate individuals caught up in it, but to wider society as a whole. The social and economic costs are huge and spiralling. When one adds up the size of the black economy it creates, the price it exacts for crime, policing and prisons and, most importantly of all, the empowerment the illegal trade gives to criminals in their war on society, perhaps the rules really have to be totally changed. Perhaps society has to act for the general good. The argument goes that, were the criminalisation of drugs to end, the entire international illegal drug economy would end. Were the state to legalise these drugs and supply them, then, at a stroke, a vast web of crime, the huge costs of policing and the trillion-dollar illicit trade would be wiped out. In this scenario, drug users would be left in no doubt as to the physical consequences of drug use but if they persisted, they could acquire their supplies legally. Of course, the scenario is high-risk, but, while one might be left with a large number of addicts, would it be much larger than the current number? Besides, the vast criminal subtext to the illegal drug trade and the size of its criminal economy would disappear. A slightly different approach is that registered addicts could be supplied by the state to end their need to commit crime. In the beginning, this controversial notion was dismissed as madness, but as the failure of the present approach becomes more and more evident, it is beginning to attract some attention. Of course, it puts the wider good of society above the fate of the individual, but isn't it time that we examined approaches that are not just about enhancing the currently failed strategy? We can go pouring resources and rhetoric about the failure of politicians or police or whoever into the argument, but where has it made any long-term viable difference to what is now increasingly menacing our society? - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake