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Chasing the Scream

Page 32

by Johann Hari


  This time, it was not a hallucination. It was the beginning of the end of the dictatorship.

  Mujica kept the promise to Lucia that he had scribbled in the silence of the well. They bought a tiny shack9 on the outskirts of the city with an iron roof and a little stretch of farmland, and there, they planted flowers, like the ones his mother had grown in his childhood, long ago.

  One night in November 2005,10 José Mujica and his wife returned to this shack, to find it looking a little different. All their neighbors were there, cheering and singing, and there were barbecues all around them, where everyone was cooking their best meat and offering it around in jubilation. Mujica had just been elected president of Uruguay. He announced that he would not be moving into the Presidential Palace. He would be staying right here, in his shack, for his full five-year term. He would be giving 90 percent11 of his income to the poor and living on $775 a month. And as for the presidential limousine—no, thanks. He would take the bus.

  In Uruguay, the president is sworn in on inauguration day by the most popularly elected senator. That senator was Lucia. He introduced a law providing a laptop for every child in Uruguay, and he legalized same-sex marriage and abortion. But there was another issue waiting for him.

  His cabinet had been watching the news from northern Mexico as it was cannibalized by cartels. Uruguay similarly sits on the transit route for marijuana and cocaine being transported to Europe. The cartels already have a role in controlling Paraguay, the country next door. If the cartels chose to seize Uruguay, they realized, the country would be defenseless. Mujica would have liberated his nation for nothing.

  So he began to look at the history of drug policy and realized, he told me, that “we have for over one hundred years been following the policy of repressing drugs—and after one hundred years we have realized that it has been a resounding failure . . . We have to try other ways.”

  But what is the alternative? It was explained to them that when you legalize drugs, you bankrupt most of the cartels. Government regulation can provide a product that is cheaper, higher quality, and not sold in dark alleyways. The drug dealers would go the way of alcohol-selling gangsters into the dustbin of history. Mujica decided he would start with marijuana, on the assumption that over time, other drugs would follow, until they were all regulated.

  Previously, presidents across the world had held back from legalization because of two fears. The first was of the United States. The second was of their own people. But President Mujica, from his shack, was noticing a crucial shift. In the United States, several states were poised to vote to fully legalize marijuana—to allow it to be grown and sold to adults, as we’ll see later. And he resolved to persuade his people to do likewise. In solitary confinement, he tells me, he had learned “that life is a fine thing—[so] above and beyond everything, we have to defend life . . . We shouldn’t sacrifice a generation in the name of a dream.”

  To figure out how to make legalization work, he turned to two men from the land of his old honorary leader, Miss Marple: Britain.

  Many people will begin to travel some way down the road leading away from the drug war, but then they smack into a concrete wall. Written on that wall is the word “legalization,” and next to the l word, there is a mural of a man named Timothy Leary. He was the most famous face of 1960s drug legalization, a Harvard professor who dropped out to preach that everybody should take drugs and sail away on the trip that would finally bring Western civilization crashing12 down.

  His eyes flashing, Leary13 evangelized on a cascade of TV shows that he was the founder of a new religion, with cannabis and LSD as its sacraments. These drugs should, he said, be given to twelve-year-olds so they can “fuck righteously14 and without guilt”—and to prove the point he gave them to his own young teenage15 children, even as they went slowly insane.16

  “Please wake up,”17 Leary’s daughter wrote to him in letters while he swallowed more tabs than Pac-Man. “You are destructive and evil.” She later dissolved into insanity18 and committed suicide. Leary had already told his friends: “You know, I really19 am a psychopath.”

  At first, Leary had argued that drugs made you blissed-out and pacifist. Then he argued that his followers should shoot policemen because “total war is upon us.”20 When he ended up on the run in Algeria, he told the Islamic fundamentalists there that they should like him “because he had screwed up21 the brains of so many American middle-class white people.” By the end of his life, he was arguing we should all live in space, because “I’ve always been an enemy of gravity.”22

  Leary was the most credentialed salesman of legalization the American people had seen since Henry Smith Williams. Today, many people still believe that legalization would be an expression of his values—that drug use is a good thing and should be encouraged; that it would make drugs available to children; that legalization would lead to much more widespread drug use; and that it would end with the destruction of our culture as we know it.

  But the people Mujica sought out make the case for legalization for precisely the opposite reasons. They want to legalize drugs because they want to get them out of the hands of our kids, defend the basic values of law and order, and reduce anarchy and violence. They don’t want a world where drug use becomes more exciting and revolutionary. They want a world where it becomes much more boring. They are a pair of English policy wonks called Danny Kushlick and Steve Rolles. Danny had been working for years with prisoners on probation, and he was sick of watching his clients die of overdoses. Steve was a scientist investigating the effects of ecstasy, who stood with a clipboard taking notes at raves and noticed that people on ecstasy were much more friendly and less violent than the alcohol drinkers he was used to. It was startling, he says, to see the police round them up and take them off to the cells.

  Together, Danny and Steve formed a group called the Transform Drugs Policy Institute, to answer a question nobody else in the world was answering in any detail: In practice, on your street, what does legalization mean? If we end the drug war, how will drugs be distributed? Who will be allowed to use them? What would change?

  I have been discussing these issues with Danny and Steve for nearly ten years now, and they have become my friends. As they began their investigations, Danny and Steve knew that most people believed legalizing drugs would mean there would be a crack-and-meth aisle in every branch of CVS, between the candy bars and the flavored water. Legalization, its opponents believe, means a free-for-all.

  But as they looked at the evidence, Danny and Steve came to believe that it would mean the opposite. Today, the trade in drugs consists of unknown gangsters selling unknown chemicals to unknown users, in the dark. That is the definition of a free-for-all. The only way to regulate this trade, they believe, is to turn on the lights—and the first thing they discovered is that to legalize drugs, you don’t have to invent anything new. The structures already exist, all around us.

  At the moment, we have a licensed and regulated way to sell the two deadliest recreational drugs on earth—alcohol and tobacco.

  This wasn’t always the case. For a time, various governments experimented with suppressing them by force. In the seventeenth century, Czar Michael Fedorovitch of Russia decreed that “anyone caught with tobacco23 should be tortured until he gave up the name of the supplier.” Around the same time, Sultan Murad IV of the Ottoman Empire introduced the death penalty for smoking. In both countries, people still smoked. So we set up a system where adults can buy this drug legally—but at the same time we make it clear, as a culture, that it makes you sick, you can’t do it in most public places, and most of us find the habit unpleasant.

  As a result of this policy where tobacco is legal but increasingly socially disapproved of, cigarette smoking has fallen dramatically. In 1960 in the United States, according to the General Household Survey,24 59 percent of men and 43 percent of women were smokers. Today, it’s 26 percent of men and 23 percent of women—a halving. There have been similar trends across the deve
loped world. Just because something harmful is legal doesn’t mean people rush to use it: more and more are turning away from it.

  So Danny and Steve concluded that we need to divide drugs into at least two different tiers, depending on how powerful they are. In the first tier, you find the less potent drugs, like marijuana. For them, their solution is: treat it like tobacco and booze. That would mean—in Europe, at least—no advertising. No promotions. Sell them in plain packages, with no logos but lots of health warnings, through licensed vendors. Impose strict age restrictions. Sell them in dull designated stores. If anyone uses drugs in public, while driving, at work, or while performing any responsible task that requires concentration, severely punish them. If they sell them to kids, strip them of their licenses. In other words—expand the web of regulation covering booze and cigarettes to cover them.

  At the next tier, you find the more potent drugs, such as heroin. Again, Danny and Steve say, we already have a form of regulation suitable for them. Across every country in the developed world, there is a network of doctors and pharmacists who prescribe powerful chemicals, on the basis of your doctor’s assessment of whether you need them. As you read this, they are handing out opiates and amphetamines and everything in between, for medical purposes. This, too, can be expanded—just as they’ve done in Switzerland. Under this model, addicts would be prescribed their drug by their doctor, while being offered all sorts of programs to help them stop using.

  Expanding these two tiers of regulation that already exist would, they argue, end most of the problems caused by the drug war today. It would mean people who go right now to armed gangsters on street corners will go either to licensed stores, or to doctors and pharmacists, for their drugs.

  This isn’t a vision in which we lose control of drugs, Danny and Steve argue—it’s a vision in which we gain control, at last. Legalization is the only way of introducing regulation to the drug market. If this were done, the people selling drugs wouldn’t be shooting each other, any more than your local neighborhood barkeeps send hit men to slaughter each other. The users would know what they were taking. And through taxation, we would have a huge new revenue stream to educate kids and invest in reducing the real causes of addiction.

  We have run this historical experiment once before, they point out, and we know what one of the effects will be. When alcohol was legalized again in 1933, the involvement of gangsters and murderers and killing in the alcohol trade virtually ended. Peace was restored to the streets of Chicago. The murder rate fell dramatically,25 and it didn’t rise so high again until drug prohibition was intensified in the 1970s and ’80s.

  At its heart, legalization is, Danny tells me, “a drama reduction program. Because all the excitement, the salaciousness, the sexiness of drugs is very much in their prohibition, not their regulation. Somebody once said to me—what you really need to do is get a movie made of what legalization would look like. And I said—Jesus, that would be the most boring film in the world. Because it would be. It’s going to be watching somebody walk into a shop and say, ‘Please can I have some MDMA?’ and they will say, ‘Yes, here’s some. That’ll be £4.50 please.’ There’s a real danger as we move toward the end [of the war] and the beginning of the new [system] that we continue to associate the horrors and the excitement of prohibition with a new regime that is [actually] incredibly boring.” The culture of terror will turn—slowly, but ineluctably—into a culture of tedium.

  But what happens next? I had seen clearly that prohibition doesn’t work, and Portugal shows that decriminalization is a significant advance. But what about legalization? The difference is simple. When you decriminalize, you stop punishing drug users and drug addicts—but you continue to ban the manufacture and selling of the drugs. They are still supplied by criminal drug dealers. When you legalize, you set up a network of stores or pharmacies or prescription where users and addicts can buy their drugs.

  One crucial question hangs over this vision—one that understandably stops many people from buying this whole argument. If we make drugs more easily available, won’t more people use them? And a whole range of concerns follows from that. There are, for me, three in particular. If more people use them, won’t more people become addicted? Won’t more people overdose? And won’t more kids get hold of drugs? If you are thinking of moving beyond decriminalization into legalization, these are the central questions that have to be answered.

  To determine whether drug use would increase, I started to go through the evidence carefully—and I soon found that it is mixed. There are two important pieces of proof from the past—the quasi legalization of marijuana in the Netherlands, and the end of alcohol prohibition in the United States. They offer different lessons.

  In 1976, the Dutch introduced26 a new drug policy. They announced if you had up to 30 grams of marijuana on you, the police wouldn’t take it away. This is, in effect, decriminalization of personal use. All legal punishments for cannabis use among adults ended. What happened next? According to all the available evidence,27 over the next seven years, levels of drug use remained the same. Then the Netherlands took another step, which was to allow cannabis to be sold openly in licensed cafés. This was a move from the decriminalization of personal possession to—effectively—the legalization of selling the drug itself. They backed away from calling it legalization, because that would breach the UN treaties authored by Harry Anslinger. But it is, for all intents and purposes, a very modest form of legalization.

  And the results, it turns out, were equally clear. There was an increase in the use of the drug. Among the group most likely to smoke weed, eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds, the proportion of people who had used cannabis in the previous month rose from 8.5 percent to28 18.5 percent. For other age groups, there was a smaller but still real rise. This increase did not29 happen in other European cities at that time, so it is reasonable to assume it was a result of this policy. Some of this increase was probably due to the fact that people are more likely to openly admit to smoking cannabis when it is no longer a crime—but it is unlikely that this explains all of the rise.

  This finding suggests that there is no significant increase in drug use if a country decriminalizes possession, but some increase when they legalize sale. The reason seems to be pretty obvious: it’s about ease of access. We all, I think, know people who would not approach a street dealer for a drug in an alleyway, but who might buy it if it were sold in a store or pharmacy in the local shopping mall.

  It’s important to be candid about this rise, but also important not to exaggerate its scale. Cannabis use rose a little, but it is still low in the Netherlands. Some 5 percent of Dutch citizens30 reported smoking cannabis in the previous month, which is lower than the United States31 at 6.3 percent and the EU average of 7 percent. Cannabis consumption didn’t spiral out of control, and it remains low compared to other countries.

  But there’s a significant complicating factor to this rise—one explained to me by Danny. Try, as you read this, to see “drug use” as an overall number—everyone in the world tonight who is taking a drug counts as one drug user. You’d include everyone buying a joint or taking an ecstasy pill. But should you include every pint of beer and every shot of whisky in that tally? If you don’t count alcohol as drug use, then drug use would go up. But if you do count alcohol as drug use, then there is some evidence suggesting overall drug use will not go up after legalization. Why? What seems to happen when you legalize marijuana is that a significant number of people looking to chill out transfer from getting drunk32 to getting stoned. After California made it much easier to get marijuana from your doctor—anyone claiming a bad back was given a permit—traffic accidents fell by 8 percent,33 because lots of people made this shift, and driving when you’re stoned (while a bad idea) is nowhere near as dangerous as driving drunk.

  That’s why Danny believes that talk about a rise in “drug use” is the wrong way of thinking about it. The more interesting question, he says, is how patterns of drug use will chang
e. If we legalized ecstasy and lots of people transferred from getting drunk on a Saturday night to taking ecstasy on a Saturday night, that would count in the official statistics as an increase in “drug use.” In fact, he says, it would be an improvement. Our streets would be less violent. Domestic violence would fall. Fewer people would get liver diseases. This is a more complex calculation, he says, than can be measured on a narrowly statistical balance sheet.

  I understand Danny’s point, and I respect it, and want it to be right—but I don’t think it tells the whole picture.

  Here’s an inconvenient fact for those of us who favor reform. There is strong evidence that during alcohol prohibition, fewer people drank, and after it ended, more people drank. It’s hard to tell precisely, because measuring an illegal activity is always tough, but you can look at rates of cirrhosis of the liver, which corresponds with heavy alcohol use, and get a fairly good sense. Drinking seems to have fallen by between 10 and 20 percent34 during Prohibition, and after it ceased, there was a very slow rise back35 over several decades. They weren’t transferring to other intoxicants—there wasn’t anything else. They were staying sober—in substantial numbers. It wasn’t just a fall in drinking either. It was a fall in alcoholism.

  Why? The best explanation is that there are significant numbers of people who want to obey the law because it is the law. If something is illegal, that has a deterrent effect all on its own. Then, on top of that, if you ban something, it does become somewhat harder for most people to get hold of. I have complained in this book that the people who support the drug war sometimes use propaganda to promote their cause, so it’s important that I resist the temptation to produce propaganda of my own. Those of us who have come to believe we should end the drug war have to be candid. The evidence suggests there will probably be a modest but real increase in use. Some significant share of that will be people transferring from alcohol, but probably not all of it. It should be acknowledged: one of the successes of prohibition that it probably does hold down drug use somewhat.

 

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