Pubdate: Sun, 08 Nov 2015
Source: Sunday Herald, The (UK)
Copyright: 2015 Sunday Herald
Contact:  http://www.sundayherald.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/873
Author: Ian Bell

HOW TO WIN THE WAR ON DRUGS? LEGALISE THEM

Amid a fragrant haze of hypocrisy, the line is that there will be no 
change, funding cuts aside, in UK drugs strategy. Meanwhile, police 
forces the length of these islands are improvising policies of their own

IT could be a pub quiz question. What do Armenia and Argentina have 
in common? The Czech Republic and Chile? Paraguay and Poland? The 
answer isn't football. Each has decided, in some fashion, that if you 
just say no to drugs, you say nothing useful at all. Depending on the 
definitions used, there are between 25 and 30 such countries. Their 
laws, methods, aims and ambitions vary. Some have legalised drugs. 
Some have "re-legalised". A few never got around to prohibition to 
begin with. Most have experimented - for personal use, you understand 
- - with a gateway policy, decriminalisation.

Last week, the Republic of Ireland decided, in effect, that what's 
good enough for Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Estonia, the Netherlands 
and others might help with its own liberation from the half-century 
of failure we still call, without irony, the war on drugs. With a 
leaked report suggesting that the UN Office on Drugs and Crime 
(UNODC) is on the brink of advocating decriminalisation, Ireland 
joins a growing consensus.

Britain doesn't want to hear about that. Or rather, the Conservative 
Government doesn't want to hear the accusation "soft on drugs" from 
its press sponsors. Amid a fragrant haze of hypocrisy, the line is 
that there will be no change, funding cuts aside, in UK drugs 
strategy. Meanwhile, police forces the length of these islands are 
improvising policies of their own.

In Ireland, some serious thinking has been going on. The result, if 
carried through, will be the decriminalisation of drugs in "personal 
use" quantities combined with the introduction of injection 
("consumption") rooms. Narcotics will remain illegal, but in future 
or such is the hope  no-one will be treated as a criminal because of 
an addiction or a problematic habit. The Irish are making a 
fundamental distinction.

Officially, Britain remains tough on drugs. Unofficially, an ad hoc 
pragmatism guides enforcement. A fall of close to a third in cannabis 
possession offences in England and Wales between 2011-12 and 2014-15 
has not happened because dope has lost its allure. With budgets cut 
to ribbons, police forces have concluded they have better things to 
do than harass cannabis users.

There are worse principles a government could apply. In a speech at 
Drug laws are being liberalised throughout the world as addiction is 
increasingly being viewed as a health issue the London School of 
Economics last Monday, Aodhan O Riordain, the Irish minister 
responsible for drugs strategy, maintained that a "cultural shift" is 
required. Addiction should be regarded as a health issue, he argued, 
both for the sake of individuals and for the benefit of law 
enforcement. Time and money spent hunting addicts could be better 
used against a criminal trade.

O Riordain advocates decriminalisation, not legalisation. He is not 
alone in that, though at the LSE he failed to explain his logic. 
Portugal's experience over the last 14 years is the Irish minister's 
inspiration, as it is for many reluctant conscripts in the war on 
drugs, but a conspicuous Iberian success remains only half an answer 
to a complicated question.

With Europe's highest HIV infection rate among injecting drugs users, 
Portugal faced an undoubted crisis at the turn of the century. 
Desperate, it decided that drug use or possession should remain 
offences, but not criminal offences. The money spent on treatment and 
prevention was doubled. The police meanwhile began to ignore mere 
marijuana use. And the HIV rate started to fall.

It has not been plain sailing since. According to some studies, hard 
drug use has increased. More people have sought treatment, perhaps as 
a result, but the number of drug-related deaths has declined. 
Pressure on courts has eased, meanwhile, and the street price of 
drugs has fallen. Adolescent use seems to be waning, but with the 
police still seizing several tonnes of cocaine each year, the effect 
of reform on organised crime has been hard to measure.

That, though, is an aspect of decriminalisation too often overlooked. 
On its own, without a wider health policy or O Riordain's 
"person-centred" strategy, it does not "solve" a narcotics problem. 
It spares individuals some brutal consequences  prison, stigma, 
unemployment, existence without treatment or medical care  that are 
legacies of the unending war. But decriminalisation alone is not enough.

It counts as a start, nevertheless, and that is more than Britain has 
managed. Last October, the Home Office caused strife within the 
coalition by publishing a report, Drugs: International Comparators, 
that looked at the experience of Portugal and a dozen other 
countries. To the dismay of Tories, the survey said there was "no 
apparent correlation" between tough laws and the level of drug use. 
While decriminalisation would not curb use, there were "indications 
that decriminalisation can reduce the burden on criminal justice systems".

Who'd have thought? In the ensuing battle, the LibDem Norman Lamb 
resigned as a Home Office minister while policy - "this government 
has absolutely no intention of decriminalising drugs" - was firmed.

Why decriminalise? For an Irish recreational user, far less an 
addict, the question is superfluous. Nevertheless, O Riordain, like 
his peers around the world, has taken a first step and refused the 
second. As the Home Office report suggested, decriminalisation has 
little effect on use. People go on buying their stuff and enriching 
some of the nastiest people on the planet. A few more police go to 
work hunting traffickers. Users are no longer persecuted. Mafias remain.

In 2006, the Italian journalist Roberto Saviano published Gomorrah, 
an expose, in the proper sense, of the Neapolitan Camorra crime gang. 
He has been forced to live in secret since. Nevertheless, this summer 
he published Zero Zero Zero, a title derived from a traffickers' joke 
name for pure cocaine. The book is horrifying, but not just for the 
routine, fantastical violence. In Saviano's account, the cartels' 
trade has corrupted the world.

UNODC will mention "vast sums" that "compromise" economies, buy 
politicians and rig elections. Saviano will tell you that drugs money 
courses through the world's financial systems, that it touches all of 
us, and that it alone kept banking afloat in parts of the Americas 
during the great crash. He calls it narco-capitalism. This journalist 
has dedicated his life to opposing the mafias. But in the last pages 
of Zero Zero Zero he writes: "As terrible as it may seem, total 
legalisation may be the only answer. A horrendous response, horrible 
perhaps, agonising. But the only one that can stop everything."

That strikes me as true. By one calculation, the United States alone 
had spent $150 billion on the drugs war by 2010. Any victories? Or 
just the news that Barack Obama has been commuting sentences on 
dozens of hapless souls locked away for life because of recreational 
use? According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, as of September 26, 
48.4 per cent of the entire US inmate population - 93,821 individuals 
- - had been locked up for drug offences. Some war; some victory.

So legalise the lot. Those who want to use drugs will go on using 
drugs. In a country with common sense, like Ireland, they might get 
the help they need. But Saviano is right. Only one thing will put the 
traffickers out of business and end this hopeless war.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom