Idiotic ‘war’ strategy is only playing into the hands of the drug barons

SURELY the worst kind of stupidity is the failure to learn from mistakes. Yet we persist in making the same ones. Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity was “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.

The Global Illicit Drug Markets Report 1998 to 2007 was highlighted during the week. It concluded that the war on drugs has not reduced production, trafficking, availability or the use of illicit drugs. This huge study was conducted on behalf of the European Commission.

While the use of illicit drugs has not gone down, the price of those drugs has fallen between 10% and 30% in western Europe. This is a sure indication that the availability of those drugs is greater than ever, despite more severe penalties.

Western society is clearly losing the fight against illicit drugs. “There is no evidence that drugs have become more difficult to obtain,” the report concluded. “Cannabis use has become a ‘normal’ part of young people’s lives in many western countries.” The report suggested that up to half of the people born after 1980 have at least tried cannabis.

The cost of living may have rocketed during the decade up to the beginning of last year, but the cost of drugs came down. Of the 31 countries surveyed, there were only two where cannabis was cheaper than Ireland — Mexico, which is one of the main producers, and Portugal.

Only a fool would suggest the Americans are winning the war on drugs and only a bigger fool would advocate that we should emulate their tactics, but this is exactly what we have been doing.

“The United States has had the same kind of drug problems for the past quarter of a century,” I wrote here in one of my first columns in April 1995. “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 to adopt methods that have failed so dismally elsewhere. If our leaders persist in making the same mistakes they will deserve nothing but contempt.”

Things here are even worse now and the recent report concluded that the more severe penalties are not improving matters. Would things be better if they made possession of cannabis punishable by long prison terms? I sincerely doubt it.

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

Some months after the release of that survey 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.

It was an enormous waste of resources. Shortly afterwards the US Supreme Court ruled the Texas drug law unconstitutional after a Houston court sentenced a black man to 35 years in jail for possession of less than an ounce of the marijuana for personal use. The punishment was grossly disproportionate to the crime.

In a series of radio interviews in this country in 2006, Gerry Cameron, a former American police chief with 17 years’ experience in drug enforcement, described the current war on drugs a complete failure.

“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. Approximately little over half of that will be for marijuana and approximately 80% of that will be charged with simple possession.”

Tremendous police resources are being diverted into putting people in jail who have never done a violent act towards anybody or their property.

People have not been facing up to the reality of the drug problem. A great many people deplore drugs while they are standing with a drink or a cigarette. They clearly do not realise that tobacco and alcohol are both much more harmful drugs than cannabis, which is “a rather benign substance by comparison,” according to Cameron. Hence cannabis and narcotics should be treated differently.

Nobody with even a modicum of intelligence would now suggest the sale of alcohol and tobacco should be banned. They tried alcohol prohibition in the US and they ended up generating much the same problems that are now being generated with the war on drugs. We have violence in the streets, drive-by shootings and gang warfare in our cities, and it has already spread to provincial towns. We have developed all the sordid aspects of life associated with the golden era of the American gangster during prohibition.

When the sale of alcohol was again legalised in the USA in the 1930s, the social decay that some predicted never happened. Prohibition on other drugs has proved just as disastrous in fostering dangerous criminal activity.

The recent report concluded that the current drug prohibition has inflicted “substantial harm” by creating lucrative black markets and worsening levels of violence. “We have continued to do the same thing,” Cameron argued in 2006. “I believe that 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 the whole drug supply into the country tomorrow, have people considered what would likely happen? Drug addicts would go frantic to get what drugs were still available within the country. The price would soar and addicts would become desperate and would feel compelled to steal more. More innocent people than ever would become vulnerable to these desperate people.

A REAL remedy would be to take the profit out of drugs and get the addicts out of the clutches of the pushers both by recognising that addicts are ill and by providing them with the necessary drug under controlled conditions, just as a diabetic is allowed to buy insulin.

A diabetic becomes addicted to insulin, which he or she gets on prescription. Addicts of other drugs should be permitted to purchase those drugs on prescription from authorised outlets.

Since addicts would be legally able to get their drugs cheaper, this would knock the dealers out of business because they could not sell them at extortionist prices. It would also eliminate the monetary incentive for drug dealers to get anybody hooked on drugs.

Millions of euro change hands in the illegal drug trade and this will inevitably lead to the corruption of our law enforcement. There are bad eggs in every walk of life. We know of the massive garda corruption in Donegal and the Morris tribunal has concluded that the problems are not limited to there.

Yet we are inviting corruption by blissfully persisting with an idiotic drug strategy.

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