Face the Facts -- and End the War on Drugs

The proponents of the ‘war on drugs’ are well-intentioned people who believe they are saving people from the nightmare of drug addiction and making the world safer. But this self-image has turned into a faith – and like all faiths, it can only be maintained by cultivating a deliberate blindness to the evidence. The recent furor about the British government’s decision to fire its chief scientific advisor on drugs, Professor David Nutt, missed the point. Yes, it is shocking that he was ditched for pointing out the mathematical truth that taking ecstasy is less dangerous than horse-riding and smoking cannabis is less harmful than drinking alcohol. But this is how the war on drugs has to be fought. The unofficial slogan of the prohibitionists for decades has been: The facts will only undermine the war, so invent some that show how successful we are, fast.

Look at the United States, the country that pioneered the drug war, and still uses its military and diplomatic might to demand the rest of the world cracks down. In 1998, the Office of National Drug Policy (ONDP) was ordered by Congress to stop funding any scientific research that might give the impression that we should redirect funding from anti-trafficking busts into medical treatment of addicts, or that there is any argument to legalize, regulate or medicalize drug use. It’s Nutt cubed: only tell us what we want to hear. So, to give a small example, the ONDP spent $14 billion on anti-cannabis ads aimed at teenagers, and $43 million to find out if the ads worked. They discovered that kids who saw the ads were more likely afterwards to get stoned, so the evidence was suppressed, and the ad campaign marched on.

What would happen if we started to build our drugs policy around the facts, rather than our desire for a fuzzy feeling inside? Professor Nutt only took tiny baby steps in this direction before he was booted out. He argued that we should rank drugs by the harm they do, rather than by the size of the panicked headlines they trigger. Now the row is fading, it is possible to see how conservative he was. A must-read new report out this week – ‘After The War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation’ – follows the facts as far as they will take us. It shows that the rational solution is to take the drug market back from the unregulated anarchy of criminal gangs, and transfer it to pharmacists, off-licenses, and doctors who operate in the legal economy. To see why this is necessary, we have to look at some of the facts our politicians refuse to see.

Fact One: The drug war hands one of our biggest industries to armed criminal gangs, who unleash terrible violence across the country. When alcohol was prohibited in the US in the 1920s, it didn’t vanish. No: armed gangsters like Al Capone stepped in and sold it – and they shot anybody who got in their way. Yet today, Wine Rack does not shoot up Thresher’s. Oddbin’s does not threaten to kill anybody who sees its staff selling wine. Why? Because it wasn’t the booze that caused the violence; it was the prohibition. Once alcohol was reclaimed for legal businesses, the dealer-on-dealer violence swiftly stopped.

Where there is a huge profit to be made in a black market – it’s 3000 percent on drugs today – people will fight and kill to control it. Arrest a dealer, and you simply trigger a new war for his patch, with the rest of us caught in the crossfire. The Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman calculated that there are 10,000 murders in the US alone every year caused this way. Legalize, and you bankrupt most organized crime overnight. With their profits in free-fall, the gangsters don’t suddenly become cuddly – but the huge financial incentives to remain a gangster wither fast. It’s the drug war that keeps them in business, and legalization that shuts them down. As Friedman said, “Prohibition is the drug dealer’s best friend.”

Fact Two: Under prohibition, drug use becomes more hardcore. Before alcohol prohibition, most Americans drank beer and wine. After prohibition was introduced, super-strong moonshine became the most popular drink, as booze rapidly became 150 percent stronger. Why? The writer Richard Cowan called it “the iron law of prohibition”: whenever you criminalize a substance, it gets stronger. Because they are smuggling and stashing a substance, the dealers condense their product to give the biggest possible kick while taking up the smallest possible space. It’s at work today: it’s why dealers invented crack in the 1980s. The researchers Matthew Robinson and Renee Scherlen found: “The increased deadly nature of drugs under prohibition led to 15,000 more deaths in 2000 [in the US alone] than [if] prohibition had not made drugs more dangerous.”

Fact Three: The drug war doesn’t reduce drug use – but the alternatives can. Some people believe these two dark side-effects are a price worth paying if prohibition stops a significant number of people from picking up their first bong or needle. It was an understandable enough argument – until the evidence came in from countries that have experimented with ending the drug war. On July 1^st 2001, Portugal decriminalized the possession of all drugs, including heroin and cocaine. You can have and use as much as you like for your own needs, and if you are caught, the police might refer you to a rehab programme, but you will never get a criminal record. (Supplying and selling remains illegal.) The prohibitionists predicted a catastrophic rise in addiction, and even I – an instinctive legalizer – was nervous.

Now we know: overall drug use actually fell a little. As a major study by Glenn Greenwald for the Cato Institute found, among teenagers the fall was fastest: 13-year-olds are 4 percent less likely to use drugs, and 16-year-olds are 6 percent less likely. As the iron law of prohibition predicts, the use of hard drugs has fallen fastest: heroin use has crashed by nearly 50 percent among the young, who were not yet addicted. The Portuguese have switched the billions that used to be spent chasing and jailing addicts to providing them with prescriptions and rehab. The number of people in drug treatment is now up by 147 percent. Almost nobody in Portugal wants to go back. Indeed, many citizens want to take the next step: legalize supply too, and break the back of the gangs.

Portugal is no fluke. It turns out that wherever the drug laws are relaxed, drug use stays the same, or – where spending is switched to treatment – falls. Between 1972 and 1978, eleven US states decriminalized marijuana possession. The National Research Council found that the number of dope-smokers stayed the same. In Switzerland, a decade ago the government started providing legal centres where people could safely inject heroin – for free. Burglary rates fell by 60 percent, and street homelessness ended. A study by the Lancet – one of the most respected medical journals in the world – found that the rate of people becoming new heroin addicts fell by 82 percent. Why? Heroin addicts didn’t need to recruit new addicts to sell to in order to feed their habit. The pyramid scheme of heroin addiction was broken.

So the drug war doesn’t achieve its goal of reducing addiction. All it does achieve is horrific gang violence – and in some cases the cartels gut whole countries like Mexico and Afghanistan. It does unwittingly press people into using harder and more dangerous drugs. And it does waste tens of billions of dollars that could really reduce drug addiction, by spending it on treatment for addicts.

The prohibitionists are therefore left a contradiction between their message and the facts. They can either change their message, or try to suppress the facts. Last week, the British government made its choice. But how long will this be tenable for them or the wider world? The prohibitionists are – from the best intentions and the highest motives – unleashing a catastrophe. Human beings have been finding ways to get stoned or high since we lived in caves. In our attempt to end this natural impulse, we have created a problem worse than drug use itself.

There is another way. Imagine a country with no drug dealers killing to protect their patch or terrorizing whole estates. Imagine a country where burglary fell by 60 percent. Imagine an America where we spent all these billions treating addicts as ill people who need our help, not hunting them down as criminals who need punishment. We can be that country. We just have to come down from chasing the dragon of a drug-free world – and start looking soberly at the facts.

 

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here. You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

To read an archive of his articles about drugs, click here.

Johann is also a contributing writer for Slate magazine. To read his latest article for them - about the loon Ayn Rand - click here.

You can follow Johann on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101

 

Follow Johann Hari on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johannhari101

Comments

[robbyJ]

It's a great theory, but more addictive drug availability means more addicts.

[greyhound2]

The current approach on the War on Drugs is like a man at the beach with a bucket bailing against an incoming tide.

[Sharon Corcoran]

When a Mexican drug lord described as an assassin makes the Forbes billionare list it is time to legalize drugs- Our drug market is controlled by Mexican drug lords-as are many of our prisons - We haven't slowed down drug use- We are making other countries extremely wealthy -WIth this economy states can't afford the costs of fighting this war- when the end result is control of our markets by foreign assassin's -

[Balzac]

Right on, man.

[robbyJ]

If you knew people who have been physically addicted to drugs, you would never want the possibility of creating more addicts. Our siblings and loved ones do not need the possible torment.

ALL Physically addictive drugs should be illegal.

Lets face it alcohol is the biggest gateway drug there is. Someone who's drunk will do things they never thought they would sober. People would get drunk, try a physically addictive drug once, and would think it's fine until they got addicted.

Think of tobacco and alcohol, just those 2 weak physically addictive drugs dominate people's actions. They shape their lives around them. If we legalized all drugs we would end up with opium dens, and your children parents siblings could fall victim in moments of weakness.

I say get rid of mandatory minimums for drug crimes, and put non-violent drug offenders in separate jails and rehabilitate them. Legalize non-physically addictive drugs, and dump the money into health care for everyone!

[zenbuck2]

Jesus Tobacco is one of the most addictive drugs there is....study up on your chemistry buddy....

[robbyJ]

haha Tobacco in terms of physical addiction is weak. Speed type drugs create severe habituation.

[boulddenwyldde]

Legalizing heroin would be the fastest way to break the back of the Taliban financially and to co-opt the Afghan people to support the U.S. development efforts there.

[zenbuck2]

I always ask people who think legalizing drugs will lead to more use: If pot was legalized today....and you weren't a pot smoker before...are you going to run out and start using? I didn't think so....

[kendraro]

Thanks Johann, as usual you are brilliant!

[robbyJ]

Physically addictive drugs should always be illegal.

We don't need people breaking into houses.

[mavsguy842]

Then alcohol and tobacco should be illegal?

[Sarah Katherine]

Great comment!

[robbyJ]

yes they should be

[TryToBeFlexible]

Uh, if they were legal and cheap, then addicts would not need to break into houses to get the money. You don't see many people burglarizing to get beer money do you?

[Nicon]

I have yet to hear about the effects of a drug causing criminal behavior. Now prohibition on the other hand causes massive amounts of criminal behavior, in a otherwise law abiding population.

The DRUGS are not the problem, prohibition is.

[Torrentlover]

Right, so what your saying is, making drugs illegal = less break ins!

Let me try one: Making prostitution illegal = less assaults!

[robbyJ]

What I'm saying is heroin addicts can never be trusted.

[TheWanderer]

yes, you're supposed to feel better about it. Giving out prescriptions or drugs as part of the treatment of addicts ends street crime and burglaries for drugs. Clean needles mean less AIDS in the population, reducing the cost of care and treatment.

There are more treatment programs than the 12 steps used by AA and NA; these have been shown to be ineffective for both addicts and alcoholics.

Portugal did not include the crime of using drugs as a factor in their statistics; they are measuring drug-RELATED Crime, not drug crime itself.

The war on drugs is a self-serving monster providing income for police programs, platforms for ambitious district attorneys to denounce sick people as morally corrupt, criminalizing an entire population of millions sent off to for-profit prisons where they do piecework at 70 cents a day for athetlic shoe manufacturers.

Yes we can act like handingout drugs and treatmetnt is great. For all the reasons above. When drugs were legalized in Holland usage of soft drugs diminished and the rate of heroin addiction stayed roughly the same.

No one is enacting a "drug free for all." Take a little time to understand the vast area to be examined between simple black and white, right and wrong.

[Anne Johnson]

I think that one of the worst aspects of the war on drugs today is the fact that marijuana, which is not dangerous and doesn't kill anyone, is still classified as a schedule 1 dangerous drug. Yet two of the most danger and potentially de@th inducing drugs, alcohol and prescription drugs are not only legal, but aggressively marketed for mass consumption.

[DWMH1313]

I just love the TV commercials that warn against the possible side effects of various available prescription drugs that "..may cause hallucinations, strokes, heart attacks, or death (in rare occurances)!"

[Sarah Katherine]

Even the Big Pharma attempt to make money off of Cannabis: Marinol, has death as a possible side effect. Cannabis in it's natural state has never killed anyone. Yet most seem to blindly trust the pill pushers since they have the law on their side.

[GreatNews27]

If you don't think that the War on Drugs is a profit driven industry for politicians and the corporations that purchase them, then you just haven't been paying attention. Follow the money. None, I repeat, none of the people associated with the WoD want the drugs to stop. They just want a piece of the action. Why do you think we have no logical drug policy in this country. It's just too profitable, like cancer research, to stop. And if you don't think that lots of that drug money doesn't go directly into the campaign coffers of our politicians who support the WoD, then you are willfully blind to human nature. Legalize, sell, and/or dispense all illegal drugs now. How many addicts would rather have a free fix to stabalize themselves than a mega dose to get high? My guess is millions. Legalize all illegal drugs and stop the drug gangs in their tracks.

[DAWK]

IF CITIZENS HAD THE POWER TO FORCE ALL LAWMAKERS TO READ THIS AND THEN AGREE,THEY WERE WRONG,THEN 'DRUG WARS' WOULD END FOR EVER.
THE AUTHOR'S WORDS ARE EXACTLY TRUE!! ALL WE NEED-DO IS FOLLOW THROUGH ON HIS ADVICE! ELECT THIS MAN PRESIDENT!!

[3dtrix]

All of politics is empire-building - every petty bureaucrat is the lord of his or her empire, always seeking to expand it, always seeking favor of his or her overlord, who in turn...

Logic or facts relating to efficacy of policy have no place in this reality - which is as real as gravity or the heat of the sun. The investment - in man-hours, in money, in painstakingly constructed alliances - among the religious, legislative, medical, legal and judicial, law-enforcement, and incarceration sub-empires beggars the imagination, and cannot simply be swept aside by something as inconsequential as incontestable evidence of their failure to accomplish their stated goals - this would create a political black hole the dimensions of which would destabilize all of government.

What maintains mega-empires is the nurturing of their enfolded bureaucracies - the only way the reality on the street vis a vis drugs (or any other matter government addresses) will change is through the ascendancy of a NEW bureaucratic empire which absorbs or supplants the old. If one looks at the problem this way, the enormity of the challenge becomes more clear, if not more encouraging...

[moldy]

Another reason the war continues... Police Budgets! I hope this fine lady doesn't mind that I steel her post from another site but here it is....

Baldwin Co. to Use Stimulus Money for Drug Task Force
by Loretta Nall - Tuesday, November 10 2009
Tags: DRUG WAR ECONOMY Loretta Nall
This is the definition of insanity. Take money that was intended to help create jobs and use it to drive the prison population higher so tax payers will be forced to pay for housing more non-violent drug offenders.
Montgomery Advertiser
BAY MINETTE -- The Baldwin County Drug Task Force will use $465,705 in economic stimulus funds to help the unit investigate, arrest and prosecute drug offenders. (mostly pot)
Baldwin County District Attorney Judy Newcomb said the funds will enable the task force to pay overtime for authorities to work on the effort. (and teachers are being laid off?)
This is the definition of insanity. Take money that was intended to help create jobs and use it to drive the prison population higher so tax payers will be forced to pay for housing more non-violent drug offenders. The only jobs that will be created through this waste of money will be the new openings for drug dealers. Cops don't want to end the drug war. If it ended they would be out of a job!

Thanks Lorretta!