Pubdate: Sun, 13 Sep 2009
Source: Observer, The (UK)
Copyright: 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited
Contact:  http://www.observer.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/315
Author: John Gray
Note: John Gray's latest book is Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings 
(Allen Lane/Penguin Books).
Alert: Prohibition's Failed - Time For A New Drugs Policy 
www.mapinc.org/alert/0413.html

THE CASE FOR LEGALISING ALL DRUGS IS UNANSWERABLE

The Extreme Profits to Be Made From Narcotics - a Direct Result of 
Prohibition - Fuel War and Terrorism. Legalisation Is Urgent

The war on drugs is a failed policy that has injured far more people 
than it has protected. Around 14,000 people have died in Mexico's 
drug wars since the end of 2006, more than 1,000 of them in the first 
three months of this year. Beyond the overflowing morgues in Mexican 
border towns, there are uncounted numbers who have been maimed, 
traumatised or displaced. From Liverpool to Moscow, Tokyo to Detroit, 
a punitive regime of prohibition has turned streets into 
battlefields, while drug use has remained embedded in the way we 
live. The anti-drug crusade will go down as among the greatest 
follies of modern times.

A decade or so ago, it could be argued that the evidence was not yet 
in on drugs. No one has ever believed illegal drug use could be 
eliminated, but there was a defensible view that prohibition could 
prevent more harm than it caused. Drug use is not a private act 
without consequences for others; even when legal, it incurs medical 
and other costs to society. A society that adopted an attitude of 
laissez-faire towards the drug habits of its citizens could find 
itself with higher numbers of users. There could be a risk of social 
abandonment, with those in poor communities being left to their fates.

These dangers have not disappeared, but the fact is that the costs of 
drug prohibition now far outweigh any possible benefits the policy 
may bring. It is time for a radical shift in policy. Full-scale 
legalisation, with the state intervening chiefly to regulate quality 
and provide education on the risks of drug use and care for those who 
have problems with the drugs they use, should now shape the agenda of 
drug law reform.

In rich societies like Britain, the US and continental Europe, the 
drug war has inflicted multiple harms. Since the inevitable result is 
to raise the price of a serious drug habit beyond what many can 
afford, penalising use drives otherwise law-abiding people into the 
criminal economy. As well as criminalising users, prohibition exposes 
them to major health risks. Illegal drugs can't easily be tested for 
quality and toxicity and overdosing are constant risks. Where the 
drugs are injected, there is the danger of hepatitis and HIV being 
transmitted. Again, criminalising some drugs while allowing a free 
market in others distracts attention from those that are legal and 
harmful, such as alcohol.

While it is certainly possible that legalisation could see more 
people take drugs, a drug user's life would be much safer and 
healthier than at present. There is no room for speculation here, for 
we know that a great many users lived highly productive lives before 
drugs were banned. Until the First World War, when they were 
introduced under the banner of national security, there were few 
controls on drugs in the UK or America. Cocaine, morphine and heroin 
could be bought at the local chemist. Many were users, including 
William Gladstone, who liked to take a drop of laudanum (an alcoholic 
tincture of opium) in his coffee before making speeches. Some users 
had problems, but none had to contend with the inflated prices, 
health risks and threat of jail faced by users today.

Though politicians like to pretend they embody a moral consensus, 
there is none on the morality of drug use. Barack Obama has admitted 
to taking cocaine, while David Cameron refuses to answer the 
question. Neither has suffered any significant political fall-out. 
Everyone knows drug use was commonplace in the generation from which 
these politicians come and no one is fussed. What is more bothersome 
is that the tacit admission by these leaders that drug use is a 
normal part of life goes with unwavering support for the failed 
policy of prohibition.

Producing and distributing illegal drugs is a highly organised 
business, whose effects are felt throughout society. The extreme 
profits that are reaped corrupt institutions and wreck lives. Dealing 
drugs can seem a glamorous career to young people in desolate inner 
cities, even as it socialises them into a gang culture in which 
violence is normal. The Hobbesian environment of anarchic street 
gangs, crooked politicians and put-upon, occasionally corrupt cops 
portrayed in The Wire may not be immediately recognisable in most 
European countries. But it is not all that far away.

It is in the world's poorer societies that drug prohibition is having 
its most catastrophic effects. Mexico is only one of several Latin 
American countries where the anti-drug crusade has escalated into 
something like low-intensity warfare, while elsewhere in the world 
some states have been more or less wholly captured by drug money. 
Narco-states are one of the drug war's worst side-effects, with small 
countries like Guinea-Bissau in West Africa being hijacked (as Ed 
Vulliamy and Grant Ferrett reported in these pages in March of last 
year) to serve as distribution points for Latin American cocaine. 
Narco-capitalism is one of the less advertised features of 
globalisation, but it may well emerge strengthened from the recent 
dislocation in global markets.

Not only in Afghanistan but throughout the world, the extreme profits 
of the drug trade have a well-documented role in funding terrorist 
networks and so threaten advanced countries. No doubt terrorism will 
remain a threat whatever drug regime is in place, but the collapse in 
prices that would follow legalisation would make a big dent in the 
resources it can command. It is hard to see how the countries where 
most drug users live can be secure while counter-terrorist operations 
are mixed up with the ritual combat of the anti-drugs crusade.

What is required is not a libertarian utopia in which the state 
retreats from any concern about personal conduct, but a coolly 
utilitarian assessment of the costs and benefits of different methods 
of intervention. The scale of the problem suggests that 
decriminalising personal use is not enough. The whole chain of 
production and distribution needs to be brought out of the shadows 
and regulated. Different drugs may need different types of regulation 
and legalisation may work best if it operated somewhat differently in 
different countries. At this point, these details are not of 
overriding importance.

The urgent need is for a shift in thinking. There are hopeful signs 
of this happening in some of the emerging countries, such as 
Argentina, Mexico and Brazil (whose former president Fernando 
Henrique Cardoso last week argued forcefully in this newspaper that 
the war on drugs has failed). There is no reason why these countries, 
which bear much of the brunt of the drug wars, should wait for an 
outbreak of reason among politicians in rich countries. They should 
abandon prohibition as soon as they can.

It remains the case that without a change of mind in the leaders of 
rich countries, above all in the United States, the futile global 
crusade will continue. The likelihood that the American political 
classes will call a halt any time soon must be close to zero. Yet it 
is pleasant to dream that President Obama, in the midst of all the 
other dilemmas he is facing, may one day ask himself whether America 
or the world can any longer afford the absurd war on drugs.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake