Pubdate: Fri, 31 Oct 2014
Source: Daily Telegraph (UK)
Copyright: 2014 Telegraph Media Group Limited
Contact: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/114
Author: Tom Chivers
Page: 29
WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DECRIMINALISE DRUGS
You'd Expect Drug Use to Go Up - But, Surprisingly, a Major Report
Has Found That Sometimes It Actually Drops.
A man lies on the floor in a squalid bedsit, a rubber rope tied
around one arm, a needle in his hand. The door bursts open and two
armed police officers run in. They take in the scene and swiftly find
a bag of powder. What should they do next? The answer depends on the
country they're in.
The Home Office has published a major report into drug use across
various countries, apparently surprising even itself with the
findings. "We did not in our fact-finding observe any obvious
relationship between the toughness of a country's enforcement against
drug possession, and levels of drug use in that country," the report said.
It is a hugely counter-intuitive finding - common sense suggests that
if the threat of punishment hangs over something, people will be less
willing to do it. But, in the 11 countries studied, that does not
seem to be the case. How strict you are on drug users whether you
punish them as criminals or treat them as patients - does not seem to
have any effect on how many people actually take drugs.
Back to those police officers bursting through the door. In Britain,
according to the law, they ought to lock the man up and charge him
with possession of an illegal substance, which is a criminal offence.
But there are at least two countries in Europe that would take a very
different approach: the Czech Republic and Portugal. Neither would
treat the man as a criminal - and yet the drug situation in the two
countries is very different.
In 2001, Portugal was facing what Ann Fordham, the executive director
of the International Drug Policy Consortium, describes as a public
health crisis. "There was a large number of users of intravenous
drugs, which had brought with it a mini-HIV epidemic," she says. The
country's drug users had the highest levels of HIV in Europe. Huge
amounts of money were being spent on imprisonment of drug users, as
well as health care for the HIV-positive population. "Communities
were seeing the same people go through the criminal justice system
again and again," says Fordham. "There was a sense that they needed
to try something different."
So the country did something almost completely unprecedented: it
removed all criminal penalties for drug use. The police officers
would not be allowed to arrest the man at all. Instead, they would
only be allowed to send him to something called a Commission for the
Dissuasion of Drug Addiction, a panel consisting of a psychologist,
social worker and legal adviser, which reported only to the
department of health. The dissuasion panel had no power to imprison
people; it could only refer users to treatment, and, if someone
turned up before the panel again within six months, it could issue a fine.
There was understandable concern in Portugal that the country would
see an increase in drug use - and it did, of a kind. "It's important
to note that decriminalisation was not followed by a drop in overall
drug use," says Fordham. By 2007, according to the Home Office
report, the percentage of the population who had used cannabis in the
previous year had gone up from 3.25 to 3.6; cocaine, 0.25 to 0.6; and
heroin, 0.3 to 0.5. Not a huge spike, but not irrelevant either.
But, fascinatingly, that was only the beginning. By 2012, the figures
had changed again. Cannabis use in the previous year had dropped to
about 2.7 per cent; cocaine to 0.3; heroin to less than 0.2. Despite
drug users no longer being punished, fewer people were taking drugs
and this was especially true among the young.
Perhaps more importantly, while the number of people taking drugs may
have gone down slightly, the level of problem drug use fell much more
dramatically, says Fordham, "because people were more willing to come
forward and seek treatment". According to research by the European
Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), the number
of people receiving treatment for HIV leapt from 6,000 in 1999 up to
more than 14,000 in 2003. Meanwhile, the number of new cases was
plummeting. According to Dagmar Hedrich, of the EMCDDA, there were
almost 100 new drug-related HIV cases per million people in Portugal
in 2001; by 2012, it was just five. The rate of HIV infection had
dropped by almost 95 per cent in barely a decade.
How much of this is to do with decriminalisation? It's hard to say.
Brendan Hughes, legal analyst at the EMCDDA, says: "The
decriminalisation is a red herring. It's the dissuasion panels that
make Portugal unique." Everywhere else, he says, still puts drug
users under the authority of their equivalent of the Home Office or
the Department of Justice; it's only Portugal which hands them over
to the health ministry.
But if Portugal is apparently a success story for liberal drug
policies, the Czech Republic is the opposite, at least on the face of
it. After the fall of communism in 1990, drug laws in the country
became extremely relaxed. "The law became, if you're a drug dealer,
you'll be punished, but if you take them, you're only harming
yourself," says Dr Tomas Zabransky', an epidemiologist at the
University of Prague.
Regulations were slightly toughened in 1999, but still, as in
Portugal, the police have no power to arrest people for drug
possession - or at least possession of an amount that isn't "greater
than small", as the legislation puts it. Anything less than that is
considered a misdemeanour, similar to a parking ticket. But whereas
in 2007 just 11.7 per cent of Portuguese people reported having used
cannabis in their lifetime, the figure is more than twice as high
among Czechs: 27.6 per cent, according to 2012 EMCDDA data. While
there is no real problem with drug tourism in Portugal, Prague has a
reputation as a pill-popping, joint-smoking stag party capital. It
also has high levels of methamphetamine ("crystal meth") abuse.
But, according to Zabransky', there is more to the story in the Czech
Republic than the bald numbers of how many people take drugs. The
country began treating drug users very early, says Zabransky' : "We
had our first drop-in centre in 1991, our first needle exchange in
1992, and now there are six million needles exchanged a year." This
policy, according to Hedrich, is behind the country's extraordinarily
low incidence of HIV among drug users: less than one new case per
year per million people.
In response to the new report, the Home Office issued a statement:
"This Government has absolutely no intention of decriminalising
drugs. Our drugs strategy is working and there is a long-term
downward trend in drug misuse in the UK." They're absolutely right:
drug use has been dropping for years.
And there is no reason to think that decriminalisation will reduce it
further: yes, use has gone down in Portugal, but so it has in many
places. As the Home Office report notes, there is no obvious link
between strict laws and levels of use.
What does seem to be true, however, from the experience of both
Portugal and the Czech Republic and many other places is that
treating drug use as a health problem, rather than a criminal one,
has the effect of reducing the harm that drug use causes: the
addiction, the crime, the disease, not to mention the cost to the
state. "For chronic drug users, drug use is usually the least of
their problems," says Fordham. "They're often homeless, or
unemployed, vulnerable. But drug use exacerbates those problems."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom