Crack widening in drug-prohibitionists' armour
'IT'S MOVING FURTHER towards decriminalisation than any other country in the world,' warned Keith Hellawell, the ex-policeman who was the British anti-drugs tsar until the Labour government belatedly realised that his job was as ridiculous as his title.
He was responding to British Home Secretary David Blunkett's announcement last Wednesday that being caught with cannabis will in future be treated no more seriously than illegally possessing other controlled drugs such as sleeping pills and steroids. He was technically wrong, but in terms of its political impact he was right.
Mr Hellawell was technically wrong because Britain is not leading the parade of European nations which have broken away from the prohibitionist US approach. Even after Mr Blunkett's changes, Britain will lag behind European nations such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal in its laws on recreational drug use. But he was right because Britain is (a) still more or less a great power, and (b) speaks English.
The main engine of the 'war on drugs' is the US, which managed to enshrine its prohibitionist views in international law during the Cold War by a series of treaties that make it impossible for national legislatures to legalise the commonly used recreational drugs. All that other countries can do without Washington's agreement is to 'decriminalise' the possession and use of at least some of the banned drugs.
Numbers of smaller European countries have already decriminalised various drugs, but what the Portuguese or the Dutch do will never have an impact in the United States. Britain is one of the very few countries whose example will ever be seen as relevant in the country that is the real home of the 'drug war'.
Britain's decriminalisation of cannabis, and even more importantly its partial return to the old policy of prescribing free heroin for addicts on the National Health Service, could finally open the door to a real debate in the US.
The actual changes in UK law are rather timid. In future, British police will generally confiscate cannabis and issue warnings to users, rather than arresting them, but 'disturb public order' by blowing cannabis smoke in a policeman's face and you are in jail. Moreover, only a small fraction of Britain's 200,000 heroin users will get free prescriptions. Nevertheless, this is by far the biggest crack that has yet appeared in the prohibitionist dam.
Until the late 19th century, all kinds of recreational drugs were legal throughout the Western world. Florence Nightingale used opium, Queen Victoria used cannabis and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writes in a matter-of-fact way about Sherlock Holmes injecting drugs with a syringe.
Then came the Women's Christian Temperance Union, most powerful in the deeply religious United States, which succeeded in banning one drug after another - mainly on the grounds that they were associated principally with Chinese, blacks and other racially 'inferior' groups. By the early 20th century only the mainstream Western drugs, alcohol and tobacco, were still legal in the US.
For almost two decades, in the 1920s and 1930s, the union even succeeded in prohibiting alcohol in the United States. Organised crime expanded tenfold to meet the opportunity created by this newly illegal demand for alcohol. Al Capone was just as much the result of alcohol prohibition as Pablo Escobar in Colombia was of America's 'war on drugs'. However, eventually there was a retreat to sanity in the case of alcohol.
There will eventually be a return to sanity on 'drugs', too, but Britain's decriminalisation of cannabis is only a tentative first step.
The 'war on drugs' is one of the most spectacularly counter-productive activities humans have ever engaged in. 'We have turned the corner on drug addiction,' said then-president Richard Nixon in 1973. Predictions of imminent victory have continued to be issued at frequent intervals, but the quality of the drugs gets better and the street price continues to drop. As any free marketeer should understand, making drugs illegal creates enormous profit margins and huge incentives to expand the market by pyramid selling. When cocaine was still legal, annual global production was 10 tonnes. Now it is 700 tonnes.
Drug prohibition greatly increases the number of users, fills jails with harmless people, channels vast sums into the hands of the wicked people who work to expand the black market, and causes a huge wave of petty crimes. It is estimated between half and two-thirds of muggings and property crimes in Britain and the US are committed by cocaine and heroin addicts desperate to find the inflated sums needed to satisfy their habit.
Decriminalising cannabis only nibbles at the fringes of this problem, for cannabis users are overwhelmingly neither addicts nor criminals. The more significant part of Mr Blunkett's initiative is his willingness to revive the old policy of prescribing heroin to addicts [compared to the 200,000 addicts in Britain, there were only about 500 when that policy was dropped at Washington's behest in 1963]. He is only willing to let a small proportion of them have it on prescription for now, but many of the rest will also be back on prescription sooner or later.
It will be many years yet before mainstream US politicians gain the courage to take on the prohibitionist lobby directly, but the external environment is changing.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based journalist
