Alan had initially been dismissive of legalization, saying that ‘if it was for sale next to the cigarettes in the off-licence, I’d have a line now. I’m three pints down and I’d say “what the hell?”’ But if he went for a drink three days later, would he do it again? He had to admit that he probably wouldn’t. ‘It would be so easy to have that it would no longer be a surprise.’ Alan’s mixed feelings on the subject also surfaced in responses to the Amsterdam survey. There, too, a majority thought that while lower prices wouldn’t affect their cocaine use, it would encourage others to use cocaine. In the run-up to the liberalization of the licensing laws in England and Wales in 2005, journalists and pundits speculated that by extending the right to sell alcohol, naive politicians were paving the way for an orgy of twenty-four-hour boozing. These fears proved unfounded: having been granted the right to drink into the early hours, most Britons exercised that right no more or less responsibly than they had prior to liberalization.
Rusty, the former narcotics officer with the Department of Corrections in Arizona, insisted that legalization would bring more, not less, control over drug consumption. ‘When I talk about legalizing drugs, people say “you can’t mean heroin and crack, right?” But after thirty years of the drug war, spending a trillion dollars and locking up 1.6 million people a year, the bad guys still control the price, purity and quantity of every drug. Knowing that they control the drugs trade, which drug are you going to leave in their control? Regulation and legalization is not a vote for or against any drug. It’s not about solving our drug use problem. It’s solely about getting some control back.’ Paradoxically, by denying its citizens the right to take drugs, the United States government has lost rather than gained control over drug use.
Unfortunately, the war on drugs thrives on ignorance of drugs and misplaced faith in the power of the law to regulate human vice. The less people know about drugs, the more concerned about them they tend to be. The 2006 British Crime Survey found that older people were particularly concerned about the risks that drugs pose to young people, but were often unable to distinguish the risks involved in injecting heroin from the risks involved in smoking cannabis.30 Twenty-seven per cent of respondents to a survey of attitudes to drug use in deprived neighbourhoods of the United Kingdom reported that people using and dealing drugs was a problem in their local area and admitted feeling bewildered by the inability of the police to put a stop to it.31 One local resident told the BCS that ‘there is a feeling in this community that the police know there is drug dealing going on all around but they just don’t do anything.’32 The survey found only one example of collective action against drugs, a case in which the residents’ association had considered establishing a ‘mothers against drugs’ campaign but had been put off doing so because they were worried about reprisals from local dealers.
But the unpopularity of legalization cannot solely be attributed to the association of drugs with crime and violence in the popular imagination. The prospect of cocaine being legally available also stirs up deep-seated fears of intoxication itself. The Victorian middle class saw intoxication by sexual passion as a force that took its victim in its grip and stripped her of her precious self-control. Sexuality posed a constant threat to the probity of every decent Victorian and could only be managed by rigorous self-denial. The Victorians believed that by sheer strength of will, they could send their genitalia into functional, manageable exile and maintain the restraint, diligence and deference upon which their standing in society was founded. Instead of acknowledging human desire, including the desire to alter or temporarily dull one’s consciousness, the Victorian corralled his desire into a recess of his mind and pretended that it didn’t exist. In moments of weakness, he would succumb to temptation, and guiltily embrace what he once had banished. This to-ing and fro-ing between formal refusal of and secret dalliance with drugs and sex, has kept the British tabloids in fascinated incredulity for as long as they have existed.
‘I come from a generation that was educated in the ’50s,’ former British ambassador to Colombia Sir Keith Morris told me. ‘We did national service, and started out in life at a time when drugs were very remote and very esoteric. The social structure of family, church and trade unions was tremendously strong, there was much greater social cohesion and much greater conformity. Drugs were illegal. Homosexuality was illegal. Abortion was illegal. Off-course betting was illegal, and almost all Sunday trading was illegal. Almost everything has gone in the other direction, except the laws on drugs, which have become harsher in this country than they were then.’
Having conceded ground to more liberal attitudes in the course of the past fifty years, the righteously indignant seem to be making a last stand. Their stoic pose is one that conservatives are accustomed to striking in times of rapid change. The patriarchs of the Italian establishment and the papal state stood fast against the legalization of divorce well into the 1960s, long after it had become a grudgingly accepted fact of married life across much of Europe. Roman Catholic ideology was so embedded in the Italian political system that in spite of the increasing numbers of separated couples and the enormous social costs of denying them a legal divorce, the conviction that divorce was wrong was overpowering. It was a question of right and wrong. As such, it was not susceptible to reasoned debate.
Since he helped to draft the United States’ Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, Eric Sterling has spent many of the intervening years examining the rationale that has been put together to defend what is at root a moral objection to certain psychoactive substances. ‘Prohibitionists will say “Well, yes, none of the usual tests of a just law apply. No one has been wronged, no rights have been abridged and no duty has not been carried out. So we’re going to construct a new order, which is that if you harm yourself, we can punish you.”’ This injunction against self-harm was a novel one, and Eric has been hard pushed to find similar instances. ‘The law against suicide was a crime because you were depriving the king of a loyal subject,’ he conceded, ‘but that is not a doctrine in a democracy.’
Law-makers argue that because drug users are deluded by the drugs they take, they are in no position to recognize the harm that they do to themselves. Society has a moral obligation to intervene, against the will of the drug user if need be, to save him from his own worst impulses. Legislators then go a step further, arguing that the prohibition of those drugs provides the best framework for dispensing medical treatment to those who want to stop taking drugs, and managing those who can’t or won’t stop taking drugs. But the assumption that the power of these drugs is such that they take away the individual’s power of autonomy and self-determination is unsustainable. Most people simply do not behave that way when they use these drugs.
Writers such as Peter Cohen and Harry Levine have tried to trace the origin of the modern concept of a ‘drug’ over which the ‘addict’ is unable to exercise control. They point to the birth in the mid-eighteenth century of individualism, a new ideology centred on the free individual, the precious fruit of long struggles against colonial dependence, slavery and the aristocracy. Where humanity’s defining purpose had until then been to acquire God’s grace for the salvation of the soul, from the Enlightenment onwards, the quest for God’s grace was replaced by the independent individual’s exercise of free will. In modern times, this has been supplanted by a new quest for and duty to a healthy body. The confusion that results from this clash of the paternalist impulse and the need to respect the free choice of the free individual is apparent in polls conducted in France in 1999. Eighty-five per cent of respondents agreed that criminal penalties should be imposed on consumers of heroin and cocaine; 70 per cent of them thought that cannabis smokers should face penalties too. But when the question was reframed to emphasize the rights of the user, one third of interviewees agreed that the prohibition of cannabis was an infringement of the right to use one’s body as one sees fit.33
To mete out punishment as part of a duty of care seems contradictory. Even compulsive drug
users are aware of and responsible for their drug use, to an extent that paternalists find hard to admit. It might appear easier to ban the drug with which the users hurt themselves, but this allows wider society to avoid confronting the reasons for self-harm. All the interest falls on the weapon, and none on the motives of the wielder. Besides, the debate is academic unless paternalists can impose their ban effectively, which, as the preceding chapters have shown, they can’t.
Although more than five hundred years have passed since Europeans first encountered the coca plant, cocaine is arguably the last botanical extract to be traded in large quantities and at an accessible price on a global scale. Alcoholic drinks, the most widely consumed and accepted of all drugs, are produced in Britain and most Britons are aware of the production process. But most psychoactive drugs are imported and not produced nationally, so there is also a fear of foreign substances. Despite the long history of cocaine use in the West, the drug is still new and exotic. Heroin likewise remains an exotic drug, despite archaeological evidence of opium poppy drinks being consumed for their pain-killing properties in northern Europe since Neolithic times. Medieval medical books expounded the medicinal properties of opium, but also made plain that regular heavy use could lead to dependency.34 Opiates have been regarded as familiar to one generation, and exotic to the next, only to have once again become familiar, and the same might be said of tobacco. When tobacco was first introduced to Japan, the authorities would regularly cut off the fingers and lips of smokers as punishment. These days, the Japanese get through 336 billion cigarettes a year.35
It takes some time to learn how to use a new drug, to find out what it is good for, the negative effects to avoid, and then to decide whether on balance it is worth taking. The learning curve is slowed by a lack of education about mind-altering substances, which will not be remedied as long as teachers disapprove of drug use and the law bans it. Drug education as it is currently taught is destined to become ridiculous as more people who have grown up in drug-taking cultures join the teaching profession. Instead of devising effective public health policies to manage widespread, limited-risk drug consumption, and a minority of compulsive, usually deranged hard drug users, the parameters for the debate have been set by politicians and law-makers, who find it expedient to pander to fear of foreigners, fear of black violence and fear of crime.
Understandably, the prospect of cocaine being legally available is a daunting one, but past experience provides a model for a legal, regulated market in cocaine and other drugs. The period at the end of the nineteenth century showed both the highest levels of availability and the lowest levels of abuse. Reverting to that legal market would be an incremental process, mirroring in reverse the way in which drugs such as cocaine were banned in the first place. The first step would be to restore doctors’ rights to prescribe drugs like cocaine and heroin to chronic users. This is already happening in Switzerland, where 5,000 heroin users and 50 cocaine users receive their supplies on prescription from a doctor. The scheme has been judged a success, and Swiss medical authorities want to expand it.
Dr E. K. Rodrigo, the former drug tsar of Sri Lanka, has conjectured that ‘legal availability of drugs would work in the same way as alcohol. People would apply for a licence to sell cannabis, coke and heroin. The government would be freed from chasing these people and it would be a controlled legal trade. You would still have the problem with health, but you have that anyway. At least this would take away the criminal aspect and we could concentrate on reducing the health problem as much as possible.’ In a legal market, those who develop problematic cocaine use would benefit from services similar to those that already exist for problem drinkers. This would in essence be a case of facilitating a cycle that tends to occur spontaneously anyway, and compulsive cocaine users would in all likelihood need those services for a much shorter period of time than most alcoholics.
Legalizing drugs is not a popular proposal because most people imagine a scenario in which crack cocaine would be sold next to the super-strength lager in the supermarket. But Dr Rodrigo also made a vital stipulation. ‘No drugs should be allowed to be marketed. Make all of them available, but no promotion.’36 The commercial context in which legal drugs are made available is of fundamental importance. Alcohol control policy in North America has historically swung from one extreme to the other, from strict prohibition to a free and highly commercialized market. When alcohol returned to the over-ground of American life, it was soon subjected to the incantations of advertising gurus and marketing executives like any other product. But blanket prohibition and unfettered legal commerce are the extremes at either end of a wide spectrum of possible control. At present, powerful interest groups keep psychoactive substances at one extreme or other of that spectrum. On the one hand, the police support the blanket prohibition of illegal drugs and generally oppose any proposal they regard as loosening their control of access to illegal drugs, such as needle exchange programmes, supervised injection sites or medical prescription of heroin. On the other, big multinational alcohol and tobacco manufacturers support unfettered legal commerce and often oppose further government controls on their products.
Allowing cigarettes to be freely traded and consumed created a situation in which more than half of the adult population of Europe and the United States smoked. In spite of the terrible harm caused by their product, tobacco corporations have done all they can to defend the interests of their shareholders over those of the public at large. Nevertheless, lung cancer, heart disease and emphysema are not taken to be sufficient grounds for a legal ban on tobacco. Governments have instead opted for a middle way in managing the distribution of potentially harmful tobacco and alcohol. They allow commerce in malt whisky, but mitigate against the harm it can do by restricting advertising. Many governments also insist on training programmes for people who serve alcohol, designated driver schemes and courses to educate drinkers about the risks of drinking too much.
In the United States, 16 per cent of high school seniors smoked cigarettes in 2004, a huge drop from the 27 per cent that did so in 1975.37 The catalyst for this change has been credible scientific evidence of the harm done by long-term tobacco smoking and government control over how tobacco is marketed, where it is sold, and who is allowed to buy it. These controls have led to a fundamental shift in public attitudes to smoking. The lesson to be learnt from the enormous harm done by tobacco in Europe and the United States is that handing supply of such a noxious habit to profit-driven corporations is not the most appropriate of the regulatory approaches available. Their advertising and marketing only stimulate the demand for tobacco products. But making cigarettes illegal would be entirely counter-productive. High taxation, honest education and effective treatment programmes are what count. As Sir Keith Morris says, ‘people would take drug education much more seriously if drugs were legal, as they’ve taken tobacco campaigns seriously. Some people ignore it, but large numbers of people have taken it to heart, because they believe the evidence.’
Judge James Gray of Orange County, California, agrees that the commercial setting for drug sales is of paramount importance. ‘If you want to talk legalized drugs, talk aspirin. Aspirin can be advertised, there are trade names, there are no age restrictions, you can buy as much as you want to, and the price is set by the free market. I wouldn’t do that. I would have strictly regulated and controlled government-packaged stores for adults. I would not want it to be advertised. I wouldn’t want someone to go into the drug store and say “I heard on the radio that you’re having a special on six-packs of Great Kick Cocaine.”’
Aside from its commercial setting, let’s assume that price would have a considerable bearing on the popularity of cocaine in a future, legal market. Alcoholic drinks were about three times more expensive during the Prohibition Era in the United States than they were before alcohol production was outlawed in 1922. It has been suggested that if cocaine were legalized, it could retail at prices twenty times lower than those of today.38 On the assu
mption that compulsive users will pay practically any price for their drug of choice, it follows that cheaper drugs would obviate their need to commit crime to raise the money to buy them. But cheaper drugs would also invite more consumption by more recreational users. The most effective way of reducing demand for recreational drugs would be by raising a sales tax. The current tax regime for beer, wines and spirits has been successful in making milder alcoholic drinks more popular than the stronger forms. It has been estimated that a legal market in drugs in the United States could bring an additional £2 billion in taxes into state coffers every year,39 which could then be used to fund comprehensive drug education programmes.
Establishing a workable tax regime would be a careful balancing act. If taxes were too high, people would certainly try to find cheaper supplies, creating a black market that would leach off the legal market. This is just what has happened to the tobacco market in the United Kingdom, as criminal organizations exploit varying tax regimes by illegally importing huge quantities of cigarettes from the European Union. But black markets are not inevitable. Legal cocaine that retailed at anything less than £40 a gram would wipe out the illegal competition. There is no black market in selling alcohol to minors because off-licencees and pub landlords have a strong incentive to obey the law that prohibits the sale of alcohol to minors. Some teenagers find ways of getting their hands on alcoholic drinks, but a survey of American teenagers conducted in 1996 found that 42 per cent of them find marijuana easier to buy than either beer or cigarettes.40
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