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10. Legalization
and Decriminalisation - the arguments over Marijuana
What
sort of society do we want? -
Dangers of fatalism and pragmatism -
The problem of consistency -
Argument of naturalness -
Drugs and the law - current UK situation -
Legalisation by the back door -
The case for and against formal Legalization -
The case against legalization is powerful -
The questions no one wants to answer
The
Truth about Drugs - book on drug addiction and chemical dependency
by Dr Patrick Dixon - published Hodder 1998
Chapters:
Acknowledgements
- Definitions - Introduction
- 1.The Size of the Drugs
Problem - 2.The True
Cost of Addiction - 3.Addicted
to Pleasure - 4.Caffeine,
Alcohol and Tobacco - 5.Marijuana
- 6. Cocaine, Crack and
Heroin - 7.Amphet
amines, LSD, Ecstasy and the Rest - 8.Why
Governments are Scared of Prevention - 9.Treatment
Works - 10.Legislation
and Decriminalization; The Arguments over Marijuana - 11.Conclusions;
What We Must Do - Appendices
Every day the calls for legalisation
of some or all drugs grows louder.The Economist for example believes
the benefits would be enormous: police and customs would have less
to do saving £500m a year, the British prison population would be
cut by 10%, it would reduce, they say, crime and violence, force
drug barons out of business.If licensed sellers were taxed it would
raise £1bn a year.
In many countries such as Britain
it is not strictly illegal to take drugs but only to possess them
or supply drugs to others.This inconsistency is at the heart of
the debate over drug testing. Is it far to take action against people
who are completely sober because ultra-sensitive tests show that
they have used an illegal drug months ago, when an alcoholic gets
away undetected simply because he has not had a drink for sixteen
hours?
We can easily become caught up
in heated arguments over the rights and wrongs of laws on Marijuana
and lose sight of the bigger issues.I remember some years ago working
at a hospital in the Transkei, South Africa in a Xhosa tribal area.
Marijuana use in remote rural areas was widespread.
It was effectively legal in that
there was no policing of the situation and there was a cultural
tolerance.However the result was that many men in particular were
wiped out for long periods, incapable of sustained work.Happy perhaps,
but unable to contribute to the welfare of the community.
What sort of society do you want?
There are dangers both in fatalism
and pragmatism.Fatalism says that everyone will want to take drugs
anyway, the battle is lost, just go with the flow.Pragmatism says
it may not be desirable to legalise Marijuana and possibly other
drugs, but it deals practically with a number of problems.
We cannot sort out a rational
approach to dope until society's attitudes to alcohol and tobacco
are re-examined. If tobacco was being developed today as a new consumer
product, it would never be given a product licence.Knowing what
we know today, tobacco companies would be hounded into the ground
as immoral profiteers who deserved public damnation.The biggest
weapon in the tobacco company armoury is history: the fact that
millions of people have smoked as a smart way of life for over a
hundred years.
Every 1950s film, every war movie
from the 1940s, every authentic reconstruction of a 1930s drama
requires cigarettes as props:long ones, short ones, smelly ones,
mild ones, with filters, without filters or sucked on the end of
long elegant holders.To renounce tobacco en masse is to spit on
our past, turning our backs in contempt on an era for whom a daily
courtesy was to offer a light.
If this is so for tobacco then
it is a thousand times more so for alcohol.Thirty years ago teetotalism
was treated as a joke by a large section of society.A sign of being
a man was being able to "hold your drink", to drink heavily without
losing the ability to conduct a normal conversation or be outwardly
affected in any other untoward way.Today a sign of greatness in
many circles is still, for men, having a head for alcohol.Attitudes
have changed and saying no to alcohol is more acceptable but the
cultural memory still lives, whether in the gin and tonic brigade
or the beer drinkers down at the local pub.
As attitudes have begun to turn
against tobacco and become more tolerant of the low or no drinker,
they have warmed to legalisation of Marijuana- 35%in favour in Britain
compared to 17% in 1989.But that is an average across the generations.
66% of people under 25 years old want Marijuana legalised.
Almost all drugs
naturally occurring and so, an argument goes, people should be allowed
to consume them in a process no more unnatural than drinking tea.
The problem is clearly not exploration itself but the personal danger
from psychological or physical dependency and other subtle changes
to health, emotions and mental well being through indulgence.But
is sensation seeking on its own a moral issue?
Alcohol supply reduction, being
legal, is somewhat easier through regulation.
·
Licensing of premises to sell alcohol;
·
Age restrictions on purchases
·
Limited opening hours
·
Heavy taxes to increase price
Research shows that price control
is the most effective route.However this has greatest impact on
those with low income.All control measures have become harder with
European integration, allowing large volumes of low-tax imports
by individuals.The real price of alcohol has fallen while consumption
has soared from 5.7 litres per person a year in 1960 to 9.1 litres
a year in 1992.
Some drugs are already effectively
legalised, that's the fact in practice.Heroin addicts get replacement
therapy free, plus needles and syringes while those using Marijuana
are largely ignored.Its hard to reconcile the reality with some
of the tough anti-drugs rhetoric of government ministers.
As we have seen, almost 90% of
drug offences in the UK are for possession, and 55% of all offenders
are let off with a caution - up from only 13% in 1985.Therefore
one may conclude that because of the way the practice
of law has changed, over the last ten years, the personal possession
of Marijuana has been become accepted as within the law in many parts
of the country.
The watershed came in 1991 when
for the first time cautions became more common than prosecutions.There
has been a nine-fold increase in cautioning in the 10 years to 1995
with a doubling of prosecutions. In 1995, 40,391 were let off with
a caution for possessing Marijuana, while 24,000 were prosecuted.Of
those, half were fined and less than 1,000 were sent to prison.
The proportion fined has dropped
from 48% of offenders in 1985 to 22% in 1995, varying from area
to area. For the commonest offence, unlawful possession, in six
out of ten cases the outcome was just a caution and a quarter were
fined.Import or export offences resulted in 40% going to prison.The
maximum penalty for possession of Marijuana is five years in gaol,
so the spectrum of response is huge.
The British Crime Survey suggested
that in 1993 at least 4 million people in Britain misused a drug
but only 70,000 were cautioned or sentences - less than 2% of offenders.This
means that statistics can be distorted if a new drug or behaviour
pattern leads to higher detection or apprehension rates.
75% of the 7,100 prison sentences
for drug offences in 1995 were for less than two years.
It could also be argued that the
current inconsistencies are very unfair.Depending on who you are,
where you are and who arrests you, you could be let off with a warning
if you are carrying Marijuana, or land up with a criminal record.
The real caution figures are even
more startling, since official records only record formal cautions.
Thousands of others each year are let off with an informal caution
- just a warning.This is different from a formal caution where admission
of guilt leads to arrest and charges but no court case. And of course
the vast majority of drugs offences are unreported because those
in a position to report them were themselves involved.
My own views on the legalisation
question have changed considerably in the writing of this book.I
started with the view that the drugs war was all but lost, that
law was a blunt instrument with which to regulate private behaviour
and that in view of the numbers of users of illegal drugs, we should
at least decriminalise Marijuana.Let us look one by one at the main
arguments in favour or legalisation.
People say that drugs laws create
greater evils than drugs themselves. They say that it would be better
to put all the funds spent on policing drugs laws into education
and treatment.But what would happen in a world where buying Ecstasy
becomes as easy as buying a packet of cigarettes?
People say that young people are
now being placed the wrong side of the law, for no good purpose.
It is true that society is sending out a very stark message about
right and wrong regarding drugs, but is that such a bad thing?
People day that teenagers are
being exposed to dealers and the risk of being persuaded to go up
the ladder towards more dangerous drugs.That is true but will always
be the case so long as some drugs are legalised and others are not.Say
for example that the law is relaxed on Marijuana and Ecstasy - but
what about the tens of thousands using LSD, amphetamines and steroids?
People say that it would be better
to have dope shops on every corner (carefully regulated of course)
so that all those wanting Marijuana can get as much as they like,
whenever they like.But laws strictly limiting sales to over 18s
have completely failed to prevent a free flow of tobacco to almost
all younger teenagers who want to smoke. The biggest suppliers are
irresponsible older brothers, sisters and friends, closely followed
by disreputable retail outlets.
Exactly the same pattern will
develop with Marijuana or Ecstasy.Whatever is in the local corner
shop will be in every local school and in every youth club.Limiting
the age to over eighteen's would make the flow slightly less, but
not a lot.The irresponsible 16 and 17 year olds that currently supply
under-agers with tobacco would simply get their Ecstasy or Marijuana
from friends a year or two older.Drugs will find their way down
the age groups, with each feeling comfortable in giving supplies
to the year or two below.
People say that making drugs legal
will not increase demand - in fact, by taking away the forbidden
element it may even reduce the elusive attraction of taking drugs.This
is nonsense.We know that drug use is price sensitive:as price rises
consumption falls.But the whole aim of legalisation would be to
cut out the criminal dealer, which will only happen by undercutting
him so much on price that he goes out of business.Charging the same
as the price on the street is no good at all, and charging more
would be ludicrous. The State would then be in competition with
every dealer in the country or rather not able to compete at all
except by selling to the few who prefer to buy from the corner shop
rather than discretely from a friend.But charging less will make
habits cheaper to acquire.
Some people say that lower prices
will be a good thing.I disagree.They say it will mean less crime
and prostitution.But the way to deal with that is to provide replacement
therapy on the State for proven addicts - less easy admittedly for
cocaine addicts than for those addicted to heroin. Raise tax on
tobacco and on alcohol and keep drugs as expensive and unobtainable
as possible.
People say that you can't go on
enforcing a law that turns a majority in some age groups into criminals.But
this is nonsense.After all, current laws on smoking turn every smoker
under 16 into a criminal yet there are no howls of protest over
that.And who says that
it is a majority or even a large minority?As we have seen over and
over again, an element in the pro-legalisation lobby has tirelessly
seized every possible opportunity to overstate the numbers of drug
users - current users,
not those who tried it once.
If we look at smoking we might
find that almost all adults at one time or another tried a puff
of a cigarette, but that is hardly relevant when looking at the
impact or regulations on smoking across a whole community.What is
important is the numbers it will affect in a given month or year,
and when it comers to smoking it is less than half the population,
with Marijuana a fraction even of that number.
People say that international
control has completely broken down.It is true that international
controls are ineffective, incomplete, weak and have negligible impact
on the global drug flow, but they do send out a powerful moral message
that global society condemns drug trafficking.If we made global
drug trafficking legal, we would create a situation where telling
an audience you trade in drugs for a living is just as acceptable
as saying you trade copper, cotton or sugar.Instead we have a situation
where drugs traffickers are universally despised as international
pariahs, objects of universal contempt.And so they should be.And
that same revulsion is reserved for everyone involved in the mega-supply
chain.
Do we really want to live in a
world where a local teacher can drive from London to Paris to fill
up a car with£20,000 of Marijuana resin which he can then sell perfectly
legitimately to an authorised retailer?
We are told that as people possessing
Marijuana are rarely arrested and even less commonly prosecuted that
the law has become a mockery and should be revised.What is the point
of having a law which is not applied - or worse is applied in an
arbitrary and unfair manner?But many laws are not applied ruthlessly.It
is said sometimes that laws are made to be broken and that is true
in the sense that laws area often in place to allow steps to be
taken if necessary.
An example might be laws on the
age of consent for sex between men and women.It is very rare for
two children attempting sex together to be prosecuted if both are
willing parties.It is also very unusual for - say - a sixteen year
old boy to be charged for having sex with a fourteen year old girl.Yet
the law has several purposes.It helps define the limits of expected
behaviour, and also can be used where necessary at the discretion
of the authorities to protect a child that is being taken advantage
of.
People say that legalising some
or all drugs will deal with corruption, reduce law and order costs,
empty crowded courts, jails and prisons - and no doubt flood hospital
wards, GP consulting rooms and social workers' caseloads.We know
that high rates of drug-taking are linked to huge losses in productivity
and other costs.One set of evils will be more than replaced with
another.It is perverse to call something that is bad good, simply
because calling it for what it is has become hard work.
People say that it would be excellent
for the State to control and tax drug production and distribution.They
say it would save lives by guaranteeing drug purity. It would save
health costs, HIV infection and the rest.It is true that buying
from the State will always be safer than buying from a bunch of
criminals, but you can carry that argument to a nonsense position.Take
a terrorist group committed to economic sabotage, blowing up empty
buildings in key areas. Should the government supply fail-safe detonators
to them so that they don't land up accidentally killing themselves
and members of the public with premature detonations?It's the same
moral issue.An undesirable act is about to be committed.The State
could help reduce risks to people by supplying what is necessary,
but in so doing could give a bad example, seeming to encourage deviant
behaviour.
People say that State control
of the drugs trade would mean billions in extra tax revenues to
payfor the consequences of addiction.That may be true but why start
down that route when, as we have seen, the only way you could raise
those taxes would be by undercutting the current street prices,
which would encourage buying from official outlets and increasing
consumption. Raising money from taxing drugs would also have another
effect:drug users would be comforted by the thought that far from
doing others harm, their drug taxes do society good.Thus the perceived
tax benefits would be a further encouragement for drug use.
The same thing has happened over
the lottery.In Britain there is an epidemic of lottery addiction
among teenagers, as many as 6% of whom have stolen to pay for tickets.One
of the key justifications people make for the lottery is that it
raises money for good causes.Some charities (especially Christian
ones) have refused on principle to apply for lottery funds because
they know the organisers will use the publicity of lottery grants
to justify an activity to which many low income people are now addicted.
So then, each of the arguments
in favour is flawed, not just slightly, but seriously.Each point
made by the pro-drugs lobby is based on a truth, but with no understanding
of the consequences.
Drug laws help contain a huge
social evil which, if they were swept away, would spread unchecked
through every layer of society.The truth is that no one can possible
be certain what the effect would be but one thing is certain:it
would be impossible to reverse the tide in the short to medium term
by tightening laws again.Even if it turned out that legalisation
created fewer problems than it might, we have no means of knowing
and the stakes are too high to abandon caution.
It is sobering to look at what
has happened in Amsterdam, where relaxation over the personal use
of Marijuana has led to problems. Technically it is illegal to buy
and sell Marijuana but official policy is one of toleration.At licensed
house parties, a government-funded testing service checks the purity
of Ecstasy tablets, but people are not encouraged to use the drug
and the police have powers to arrest anyone carrying drugs in.The
Netherlands has fewer drug-related deaths and a lower rate of experimental
use among school pupils than many other European countries.
All this sounds very promising,
positive steps towards formal legalisation with few social costs.But
that is just the surface. Many people are beginning to question
the experiment.Walking around Amsterdam recently I saw some of the
most blatant drug dealing on the street, and drug taking, that I
have ever witnessed in any city.Right in front of the main station
for example a crowd from nowhere gathered in a few seconds around
a man with a plastic bag,bustling around as eager as a flock of
hungry pigeons.Within a couple of minutes they were facing walls,
on the ground, sitting standing, taking what they were taking.
Amsterdam is a magnet for every
man and woman in Europe that would like to be able to sit in a public
café and get stoned - or more.People say that if every city was
run like Amsterdam, the novelty would wear off.However unless it
was the case in every city in the world we would still be likely
to see drugs-related tourism.Something has gone wrong with the experiment.Indeed,
it has not been repeated across the Netherlands for very good reasons.What
parent of teenage children wants to live in a street where Marijuana
is openly on sale?
Holland is now clamping down on
marijuana growers with a new Act of Parliament.At the same time
new powers have been given to town mayors to close the Marijuana
coffee shops if hard drugs are sold, delivered, supplied or found
on the premises.
The Swiss also made an experiment
of their own.A particular park in down-town Zurich was designated
a protected area where drug users could go and use drugs without
arrest.This was Zurich's answer to the growing drugs menace.Don't
harass, just embrace.Don't make things difficult for drug users,
make them easy.Instead of hounding them from street corner to street
corner, welcome them into a nice open space.No doubt some thought
it would mean that scenes like that outside Amsterdam station would
move off the streets altogether.
However the park quickly became
famous among drug injectors across Switzerland and in other nations.It
became a drug injector's paradise, a safe haven for the largest
dealers.Non-users felt intimidated, afraid to enter the park or
even to go near it.Eventually it all became too much for the city
to cope with and the freedoms were removed.
The biggest hole in the legalisation
argument is law itself, which can only work with precise definitions
and boundaries - but what does the pro-drug lobby say they should
be.The answers are confused. Many complex legal questions arise.Here
are a few examples:
·
What drugs do you legalise?
·
What potency levels should be permitted?
·
What should be the age limits for such drugs?
·
Should sales of some drugs be limited to addicts?
·
Where should they be sold?
·
Is mail order allowable?
·
What about vending machines?
·
Which drugs should be prescription only?
·
Where and by whom is cultivation or home manufacture
allowed?
·
What about advertising?
·
Restrictions on use e.g. pilots, drivers?If so, what
blood levels?
·
Licensing for drug pubs etc.?
·
What government department should supervise?
In conclusion then, there are
many reasons for decriminalising Marijuana and possibly ecstasy,
but even more reasons not to. We have troubles enough dealing with
a legalised tobacco industry and with widespread addiction to alcohol
without adding another group of hazardous substances.We have seen
that Marijuana is not an "innocent" drug, but has profound short
and long term effects which are still only partly understood, while
Ecstasy is also a drug which is becoming more rather than less worrying
as time goes by.Both are gateway drugs which make other drug use
far more likely and that is likely to continue to be the case if
they were legalised.
It is illogical and irrational
as well as unscientific to propose a law change for Marijuana without
also including Ecstasy, which raises a further challenge.With every
year the number of psycho-active drugs increases and this will continue
at an accelerating rate with new generations of designer drugs.Many
of these will turn out to be similar to Marijuana and Ecstasy in
risk profile, so a decision to legalise Marijuana could lead to a
situation where ten, fifteen, twenty or a hundred different drugs
are given the green light.
And all the time the counter-trend
is gathering speed with anti-tobacco campaigns and increasing concerns
about the future impact of long term drug-taking on a significant
proportion of the community.
The
law should stay the same, but many other things must change.There
are many steps that governments, organisations and individuals should
take without delay.So then, what should we all do?
What sort
of society do we want? -
Dangers of fatalism and pragmatism -
The problem of consistency -
Argument of naturalness -
Drugs and the law - current UK situation -
Legalisation by the back door -
The case for and against formal Legalization -
The case against legalization is powerful -
The questions no one wants to answer
Chapters:
Acknowledgements - Definitions
- Introduction - 1.The
Size of the Drugs Problem - 2.The
True Cost of Addiction - 3.Addicted
to Pleasure - 4.Caffeine,
Alcohol and Tobacco - 5.Marijuana
- 6. Cocaine, Crack and
Heroin - 7.Amphet
amines, LSD, Ecstasy and the Rest - 8.Why
Governments are Scared of Prevention - 9.Treatment
Works - 10.Legislation
and Decriminalization; The Arguments over Marijuana - 11.Conclusions;
What We Must Do - Appendices
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