Society pays high price for myths surrounding the ‘war on drugs’

Our attitudes to drug taking have changed so much that we now criminalise addicts and society has to bear all the associated costs, writes Terry Prone

HE WAS a legendary GP, back in the day. Nothing he couldn’t do. He could and did deliver babies in an emergency. He sewed up cut heads so elegantly, the scars were minor. He put dislocated limbs back into place. He was a master diagnostician.

He would send patients to consultants with a scribbled note, and multiple tests would reveal his diagnosis was spot on, even if the condition or ailment was rare.

He was constantly available, arriving in the middle of the night as dapper as in daytime, his shoes polished to a stellar shine.

He was firmly gentle, and for forty years, he was the mainstay of the suburb in which he practiced. For those forty years, he was also a drug addict, injecting himself with morphine every day.

If you had told any of his patients that they were being cared for by a drug addict, they would have divided evenly into those who would be infuriated that you would insult such a wonderful man and those who would laugh at the very idea. Sure you only had to look at him and listen to him to know he wasn’t an addict.

They would have had a point. We all know what an addict looks like. They’re grey. Grey all over. Grey in the face. Grey in the clothes. Skinny grey.

Soft shapeless drapey clothes on them in shades of grey with hoodies turning them into faceless Banksy updates of the emaciated statues on the Liffey Quays, commemorating the famine. But not evocative of the helpless sympathy the statues of the starving evoke. Not a chance.

We can spot addicts on sight, and we know all about them. They caused their addiction themselves, not like the poor Famine victims who did nothing to cause their starvation. They lack all self-respect, those addicts. Idle underachievers who can’t stir their stumps to get an education or a job and just take money from the state to sit on their arses shooting up. And the way they do it.

You heard the person on the radio describing the addict she saw in a main street, injecting drugs into her groin? They’ll shoot up anywhere and just throw their syringes where a child could pick them up and get HIV from them.

Don’t care about anybody except themselves and their fix. If you set up a methodone clinic, they ruin the area and they keep the methadone in their mouth and go out and sell it.

Plus, we know addicts are violent and dangerous. Down the country, robberies may be done by other groups, but in the suburbs, if your house is broken into, you’d be pretty sure it’s an addict.

They invade your home and they change how you feel about your own safety because they’ve got themselves into a vicious circle they don’t want to get out of. Useless. Vicious. All alike. No, all the same.

The odd thing is that drug addicts weren’t always like this. Certainly not in Britain in the sixties. The drugs were present and available. Available? They were omnipresent. Ubiquitous. Boutiques in Soho reeked of half-smoked hashh and the gutters at the pavements were filled with the scrunched remains of reefers.

Because they were ubiquitous and - at the time - without shame, most teenagers and early twenty-year-olds who got an offer tried at least one of them. Cocaine was the most virtuous of the lot.

I still have, somewhere, a Pan paperback devoted to the cleanness and general excellence of cocaine. That paperback was passed from hand to hand by cocaine evangelisers.

Now, of the drug users from that time, a percentage became addicted. A small percentage, as is always the case with drug use.

The majority of those who experiment with drugs, like the majority of those who experiment with alcohol, do not turn into hooked junkies or alcoholics. Some of them don’t like the effect at all and never try them again.

Some of them - probably the majority - become recreational drug users. They sniff or smoke or use on one or two days a week and enjoy it no end.

The drug users in Britain in the middle of the last century who DID become addicted were largely invisible, because Britain back then had an option that no longer exists. If you were prepared to face up to your addiction, and if your doctor diagnosed you as an addict, you were recognised as having a disease.

You could attend a recognised heroin clinic, for example, in the morning and evening, get your injection, and do your day’s work. Nobody was entitled to know, and because you had a job and worked hard, you didn’t need to go out on the street and mug little old ladies.

You were a functioning addict whose general health - if you took heroin - was better than if you were a weekend drinker of a couple of bottles of wine. You were not going to get a virus like HIV because the needles used to deliver your perfectly legal fix twice a day were sterilised.

Britain took the pragmatic view that any population will have a percentage of diabetics and asthmatics and epileptics, and a similar but different percentage of drug addicts, and that, no matter which condition you owned, you should be treated appropriately.

If I remember rightly, an addict had to go through therapy to try to get off their drug, but if that failed, treatment through delivery of the drug kicked in. The doctor was supplied with properly calibrated drugs, eliminating accidental overdoses. No drug-dealing gangs using AK47s on each other and on passersby, no criminality. Cool and groovy.

Then came the ‘War on Drugs’, with all of its associated mythology. Although I never took even a single puff at a spliff, despite persuasive offers, out of whose pockets on any given day would fall those little packets of Rizzla roach-wrapping papers, I would see, passing in front of me, the contradictions to each of those myths.

Myth 1. Marijuana is a gateway drug. Only the way instant coffee is a gateway to ground coffee. Myth 2. One hit of heroin and you’re an immediate addict. Naming no names, I’m here to tell you of lots of my peers, now port-drinking pillars of the establishment, who took several more than one hit and look at them now. Myth 3.

Drugs reach out indiscriminately to hook people. Au contraire. The majority of people who become addicted do so because drugs soothe the pain or fill the emptiness of an already tough life. Myth 4. Having a drink is good, drug-taking is bad. Tell that to the folk I’ve seen die of cirrhosis and other alcohol caused disease - multiples of those who die from drugs.

We are now realising that the War on Drugs is lost, but we have so bought into the mythology that we are taking only timorous half-steps towards the possibility of clean drugs sold, like cigarettes, in unattractive packages in controlled shops, removing criminality and its costs and hopefully removing the trailing twentieth century stereotype of the evil addict.