We are losing the war on drugs and policy should be stood on its head

DURING a series of radio interviews this week, Gerry Cameron, a former American police chief, described the current war on drugs as a complete failure.

He knows what he is talking about, having spent 17 years in drug enforcement.

“We’ll spend $69 billion in the United States this year,” he said. “We’ll arrest over a million and a half people for drugs this year in the United States. Little over half of that will be for marijuana and approximately 80% of that will be charged with simple possession. We’ve got tremendous police resources being diverted to put people in the penitentiary that have never done a violent act towards any person or their property.”

While I was at university in Texas from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s the penalty for possession of any amount of marijuana — or cannabis as it is more commonly called here — was a jail sentence of from two years to life. Yet a survey conducted at the university found that 80% of the senior class smoked marijuana.

Some months later there was a sensation when 95 federal agents dropped out of the university. They had been brought in undercover to investigate the drug scene in the guise of students. This was an enormous waste of resources, as well as a disturbing police intrusion into university life, but otherwise the whole thing seemed to make no difference at all.

After a Houston court sentenced a black man to 35 years in jail for possession of less than an ounce of the drug for personal use, the US Supreme Court ruled that the Texas law permitting such jail sentences for possession of marijuana was unconstitutional. President Richard Nixon had already launched his war on drugs by then. More than 35 years later, after three trillion dollars have been wasted, there are more people than ever dabbling in drugs in the US, but the level of addiction has remained essentially the same — 1.3% — since 1914.

Only a fool would say the Americans are winning the war on drugs, or that we should emulate them, but that is exactly what we have been doing. One of the first columns I wrote here — on April 5, 1995 — was on the drug scene: “The United States has had the same kind of drug problems for the past quarter of a century,” I wrote then. “It has spent billions of dollars on drug enforcement, but this has just been throwing good money after bad. Things are as bad now as they have ever been.

“We do not have that kind of money, but even if we did, it is pointless adopting methods that have failed so dismally elsewhere. If our leaders persist in making the same mistakes they will deserve nothing but contempt.”

All of the major parties in the Dáil have been in power since then.

Cameron explained on RTÉ last Sunday: “Every time we arrest someone and drive up the price of drugs, we drive up the incentive for someone else to get involved with it, and we have done this over and over in the United States for 40 years. I can’t see anything that has been accomplished.” He added: “What is amazing is that we have continued to do the same thing. And I believe this is because we have created a symbiotic relationship between the dealers and the bureaucracy. The dealers need us in the police to keep their competition down and their profits up, and the bureaucracy needs the drug traffickers to have a reason to exist.”

If we were able to cut off the entire drug supply into the country tomorrow, have people considered what would be likely happen? Addicts would go frantic to get what drugs were still available within the country. The price would soar, and addicts would become desperate and steal more. More innocent people would become vulnerable to these desperate people.

We have not been facing up to the reality of drugs. A great many people do not realise that tobacco and alcohol are drugs also and, as Cameron noted, cannabis is “a rather benign substance” compared with alcohol. “We tried alcohol prohibition in the United States and we got all of the benefits that we are getting from the war on drugs,” he said. Cameron, a former US chief of police, said along with “violence in the streets, gang wars, drive-by shootings” the US had all the other things associated with the golden era of the American gangster during prohibition.

WHEN the prohibition on the sale of alcohol was removed, the social decay that some predicted never happened. Prohibition of other drugs has proved just as disastrous in fostering dangerous criminal activity. We now have organised crime, drive-by shootings and gang warfare in Dublin, Cork and Limerick. Selling drugs over the counter in pharmacies would certainly be preferable to what is going on at the moment.

There is a case for legalising cannabis because it is less harmful than alcohol, but it would be dangerous to permit the open sale of heroin, cocaine and the like.

But what we should do is put the dealers and drug barons out of business by dealing with addiction as an illness. A diabetic becomes addicted to insulin, which he gets from a pharmacy on prescription.

Addicts of other drugs should be permitted to purchase them on prescription from authorised outlets. This would knock the dealers out of business because they could not sell their drugs at extortionist prices. This would eliminate the monetary incentive for drug dealers to get anybody hooked on drugs as addicts would be able, legally, to get them cheaper.

We have been using discredited and ineffective methods that have been failing for more than 40 years, and it is time we adopted a new approach rather than facilitating the likes of John Gilligan to make millions. They, in turn, have been corrupting our institutions.

In another column on June 17, 1998, I wrote: “The gardaí has a virtually unblemished record, except for the scandal involving Garda John O’Neill who was jailed recently for corruption after he pleaded guilty to accepting bribes of more than £16,000. His conviction was described as a severe embarrassment to the gardaí, but his assertion that two gardaí in one station were involved in the importation of over £3m worth of heroin should be even more worrying.

“There have been major police scandals in recent years in Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States. Why should we be any different? There are literally millions of pounds changing hands in the illegal drug trade and people should not be reassured by virtue of the fact that only one garda has ever been prosecuted for corruption. There are bad eggs in every walk of life. Think of the number of horrific cases involving the clergy recently. Yet there has been practically no corruption involving gardaí. Are we particularly lucky, or should we be really worried?”

Of course, when I wrote that more than eight years ago, it was my belief that we should be really worried. Now we know of the massive garda corruption in Donegal, and the Morris tribunal has concluded that the problems are not limited to there.

Using tried and tested tactics that have failed so dramatically is a cause of, not the answer to, our problems.