cannabisnews.com: Have We Lost The War on Drugs? 





Have We Lost The War on Drugs? 
Posted by FoM on May 27, 2001 at 13:52:06 PT
By Phillip Knightley 
Source: Sunday Times (UK)
Three years into the government's 10-year strategy to fight drugs, the war is over. The government lost. Not only is Britain awash with drugs, but they are more affordable and more easily available than ever before. The time has come to face the fact that drugs have become just another part of our leisure activity.  British kids spend as much on Ecstasy as the whole nation spends on tea and coffee. Cocaine is almost as freely available as alcohol and is nearly as popular. And it is not just the young, the trendy or the socially deprived who are recreational drug users. 
Everyone's at it. Just a cursory study of the backgrounds of people mentioned in drug-related stories in the national newspapers turned up the following occupations: plumbers, photographers, psychiatrists, doctors, receptionists, accountants, actors, dancers, chefs, waiters, investment bankers, PR executives, television producers, models, footballers, airline cabin crew, policemen, solicitors, barristers and journalists. No one wants to admit any of this because the subject is a political, emotional, religious, social and economic minefield. No one even wants to discuss the fact that the war is over and that we need to consider what we do now. This is because accepting defeat would involve admitting that the whole drugs war - both here and in America - has been a sham. A strategy to bring the drugs trade under control has always been available, but this strategy is not acceptable in the new global economic order. If London and Washington were serious about the drugs war they would hit the drugs barons where it hurts - in their pockets. They could use their powers to regulate banking and the international electronic money transfer system to halt the movement of illegal monies. But they would also have to eliminate all off-shore banks and tax havens as legitimate hide-outs for capital. But, of course, they cannot do that because legitimate business in Britain and America does not want the off-shore tax havens closed. The hypocrisy of the drugs war is that Washington and London say that they are waging war on drugs when they know that there are more important issues - namely banking and free trade. The accumulated profit from drugs, estimated at $500 billion, sloshes around the world banking system until it can be laundered, and the money-laundering capital of the world is London. True, the government has authorised the Bank of England, the British Bankers' Association, Customs and Excise, the Serious Fraud Office, Scotland Yard, the City of London Police, the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service - all liaising through the National Criminal Intelligence Service - to crack down on drugs-money laundering. But where are the 10-year sentences for drug barons and the financial services advisers who helped them wash their money? Their absence is explained officially as the difficulty in defining legally at what point dirty money becomes clean. But there is another, unofficial reason. City institutions welcome the flood of drugs money into Britain, arguing that it is safer for it to be laundered and then go into legitimate financing rather than move around unaccountably in the black economy. And it's good business. And here we are at the crux of why we lost the drugs war - economics and the theory of the market. Everyone underestimated the power of the profit motive on the supply side and the appeal of drugs on the demand side. All the police, armies, secret services, prisons and executions in the world cannot buck a market where the tax-free profit on a kilo of cocaine is 20,000%. All the drugs education in the world cannot overcome the fact that many people find in drugs enormous pleasure and feel that the state has no moral authority to deny them that pleasure - even if there are health risks. Another reason the anti-drugs campaigners lost the war was that their strategy was wrong. They should have said, "Mind-bending drugs have been part of human culture since time immemorial. Why, as recent as the early years of the 20th century, heroin and cocaine were legal and popular - Coca-Cola was originally made with cocaine. True, the world might be a better place if nobody took anything that could harm them. But since they seem determined to do so, we need to learn to live with drugs in such a way that they do the least possible damage. Let's work out what this way might be." Instead they embarked on a crusade that was based on racial and religious bigotry. American racial contempt for the Chinese became focused on their opium-smoking habits, and the Protestant missionary societies in China and the Women's Christian Temperance Union set out on a moral campaign to protect the white world from the horrors of opium. Even today, the war against drugs remains in many ways a religious matter rather than a law-and-order one. The anti-drug lobby speaks of drug-taking as "evil . . . immoral . . . a sin . . . an offence against God that can result in the loss of your soul". Yet how can a campaign be a moral one when, as the Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman says, "It leads to widespread corruption, imprisons so many, has so racist an effect, destroys our inner cities, wreaks havoc on misguided and vulnerable individuals and brings death and destruction to foreign countries?" He might have added: how can the campaign be a moral one when it so terrifies American doctors that they turn away from their patients' cries of pain and refuse to prescribe morphine for them in case they run foul of the Drug Enforcement Administration for over-prescribing? With the war over, where do we go from here? How about licensed sales outlets for drugs, a sort of drugs off-licence, where initially cannabis and Ecstasy would be on sale at reasonable prices. There would be a minimum age for purchase, just as there is now for alcohol and tobacco. The drugs would be supplied by licensed manufacturers to ensure the purity and safety of the product. Driving under the influence of drugs would carry the same penalties and stigma as driving under the influence of alcohol. Drugs off-licences would save Britain the £800m a year spent on enforcing anti-drug laws. If the drugs were taxed at the same rate as alcohol and tobacco they would provide the Treasury with revenue of at least £1 billion a year. They would cut the prison population by 10% at a stroke, reduce crime and violence and put the drug bosses out of business. I have little hope that such a scheme will be adopted. It is too logical and, as the American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz has pointed out, it is useless to present facts and logic to the anti-drugs lobby. He says the war on drugs is a mass movement characterised by demonising certain objects and persons - "drugs . . . addicts . . . traffickers" - as the incarnations of the devil. Hence there is nothing to be gained by trying to point out to its supporters that the anti-drugs lobby has lost the war. "Since he wages war on evil, his very effort is synonymous with success." Phillip Knightley debates the world-wide drugs problem with a panel of commentators that includes Rosie Boycott and the Sunday Times columnist Melanie Phillips, at the Sunday Times Hay Festival, today, May 27, at 1PM. For more information click here -- http://www.hayfestival.co.uk/ Source: Sunday Times (UK)Author: Phillip Knightley Published: May 27 2001 Copyright: 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.Contact: editor sunday-times.co.ukWebsite: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/Related Articles:Like Vietnam, Drug War is Futilehttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread9865.shtmlThe Delusional Drug War http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread9589.shtmlEditorial: Time To End War on Drugs http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread9371.shtml
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Comment #3 posted by kaptinemo on May 28, 2001 at 11:39:37 PT:
Well, there it is, Doc.
For those of you who weren't fortunate enough to go to the recent NORML conference in Washington DC, it was a blast. I got to meet some of the major lumineries whose musings you see here.Such as our own Doc Russo and The Observer. We had an interesting conversation about precisely this subject. Namely, that the banking industry of the planet is so thoroughly addicted to the presence of laundered money flowing through it's mercantilistic veins that to shut it off with no warning would mean a global depression. According some estimates I've read, the amount of 'dirty money' may equal up to fully one-third of all currency exhanges. We already know that in excess of 70% of all US currency in the M1 (printed money) supply is contaminated with cocaine residue.It's just too lucrative to be merely shut-off like a water hose. Which is why the purportedly cooler and wiser heads of the anti leadership don't share this knowledge with their more emotionally rabid and less financially astute troops. Too complex for the Great UnWashed to get that the very system that provides them with the loans they need to buy a house or car came from 'filthy lucre'.Which, in a very real sense, makes them - and everyone else who'se received a loan from a bank in the last 20 years - an accomplice to the drug trade. It's that pervasive, that dug-in, that ubiquitous. Like air. No getting away from it.Which is why, despite all the obvious failures, the war goes on. Because, in this case, the old Catch-22 maintains: Failure is productive and profitable; success means financial collapse. Alice would feel right at home at this Mad Hatter's Tea Party called the War on Drugs.
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Comment #2 posted by rbded on May 28, 2001 at 05:35:17 PT
Religion Versus the Drug Trade
  And there you have it folks.The drug war is being supported by the religious fanatics, so it makes no difference if they are shown the facts,they beleive that they are morally right,and thats all that matters to them.The blinders are on.
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Comment #1 posted by lookinside on May 27, 2001 at 14:24:15 PT:
personal opinion...
the man speaks truth...why don't they (the drug warriors)listen?
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