Failing war on drugs has created an army of criminal monsters

YOU don’t usually think of the Times of London as a source of subversive material, but in July 1967 it carried a most unusual full-page advertisement that exposed the absurdity of establishment thinking on drugs, then and now.

Signed by luminaries ranging from the Beatles (who paid for the ad) to maverick Tory MPs and trendy Anglican bishops, it proclaimed “The Law against Marijuana is Immoral in Principle and Unworkable in Practice”.

It opened with a quotation from Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century Dutch philosopher, which still made plenty of sense 300 years later, and still makes sense today. It has the kind of hard clarity you won’t get from our ducking-and-diving politicians today. Too much common sense, not enough populism, too many colours nailed firmly to the mast. I won’t detain you with all of it, but these lines should give a taste of its bracing tone:

“All laws which can be violated without doing anyone any injury are laughed at… men of leisure are never deficient in the ingenuity needed to enable them to outwit laws framed to regulate things which cannot be entirely forbidden. He who tries to determine everything by law will foment crime rather than lessen it.”

I can’t remember how my friends and I came across a copy of the paper, but we did, and we pinned it up on our fifth-year classroom wall that autumn. It is a tribute to our open-minded teachers that it stayed there for a month, and provoked a lot of earnest discussion.

None of us had smoked a joint at the time. But we had listened to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band every day over the previous magical summer. So we were dreaming of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, missionaries for the hippie revolution before we had partaken of a single one of its sacraments. Over the next few years I saw enough of illegal drugs close-up to know that they can often be pleasurable, and occasionally even a stairway to something very like heaven.

And I also found out that a single bad drug experience can be a trapdoor that hurls you into hells even the Redemptorists never imagined. And that some people never find the exit. In retrospect, those were days of innocence in the Irish drug culture. Your dealer was a friend who brought an ounce of hash back from a hitch-hiking holiday in Morocco, or a dozen tabs of mescaline back from a rock festival in New England. And gave most of it away for free. Apart from alcohol and tobacco, addictive drugs were still as rare as honest politicians. I was lucky enough to make red wine my drug of choice for life, just before the streets of Dublin were flooded with guns, heroin and dirty money in equal and terrible measures.

So if some young adult were rash enough to ask me my advice today, I would suggest that they treat all drugs, legal or not, with great caution. That the pleasures are very rarely worth the pain that usually follows. That LSD and its analogues are the most powerful, and therefore the most dangerous, mind-altering substances known to us and to our ancestors. That those cultures that use them for spiritual purposes only do so after strenuous preparation.

I would remind them that the psychiatrists who advocated their universal use in the 1960s did not experiment with them until they had a lifetime to prepare themselves for that plunge into the cosmic maelstrom.

I might suggest that they would get a more meaningful, toxin-free high from hiking to the top of Lugnaquilla, or kayaking the Shannon. But then, there are serious risks attached to those activities as well. Lastly, since illegal drugs can only be obtained by financing violent criminal mafias, I would also remind them that every purchase comes with a little blood seeping through the packaging.

And then I would tell them that, like all adults, they have to make up their own minds. Which rather brings me back to Spinoza. I no longer think that the Beatles and their fellow signatories were right to enlist his arguments on the assumption that marijuana does no injury to anyone. That was Sixties fuzzy thinking, and it is clearly not the case. But if there is one thing we should have learned from the last 40 years, it is that the cure we have attempted to impose on the drug problem — prohibition — is much worse than the disease, terrible as that can be.

It is abundantly clear that the ban has not worked: drug-taking falls among the kinds of activity that cannot, as the philosopher wrote, be “entirely forbidden”. That is bad enough, because it makes the law an ass, and that is not good for any society. For every young person who might be deterred by the legal penalties attaching to a toke, a snort or a shot, a dozen more are attracted to the romance of rebellion, the lure of living briefly and apparently harmlessly outside the law. People who don’t know that simple fact about youthful humanity are not fit to be making laws, or enforcing them.

But the worst of it is that the attempt to forbid their use does indeed “foment crime rather than lessen it”. The disastrous consequences of the prohibition of alcohol in the US in the 1920s should have made that blindingly obvious, once and for all. A puritanical urge to interfere in private lives probably failed to persuade a single drunk to become a sober citizen. But it enriched criminal gangs, corrupt cops and politicians, and created mafias that still thrive today, selling coke instead of bourbon.

And yet we have spent the 20th century banning one substance after another, and creating new monsters with every well-intentioned addition to the list. But now it is not just a few American cities that see citizen security collapse before waves of gang crime. Now entire countries fall under gun law — Colombia, Afghanistan, most of Mexico. Illegal drugs offer fabulous profits to the most ruthless — or entrepreneurial — members of very poor communities, otherwise condemned to remain in poverty by our dysfunctional global and national economic systems. It works in Guadalajara, and it works in Gurranabraher. Every decent cop in the frontline of the drug wars knows this is true. And over the last decade increasing numbers of their bosses have bravely spoken up for decriminalisation of drugs, but hardly anyone in politics has the guts to listen.

This is a problem that no country can solve on its own because, as recent Dutch experience tends to show, legalisation in one state may only make things worse, as the traffickers will simply use it as a safe haven from the war elsewhere. It is very hard to be optimistic about any international initiative in the present climate. Perhaps it will take the complete collapse of a stable state, like Mexico, before the world wakes up to the folly of creating global markets for criminal gangs.

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