Drug News Weekly (23 October)

AFGHAN OPIUM FUNDS TERRORISM (surprise).  The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has released a report on the global opium trade opium, full of interesting numbers and facts. Apparently:
 - the global opium market is worth £39bn
 - Afghanistan produces 92% of the world’s opium
 - international terrorism has about £96m to play with from the opium markets
 - more people are killed worldwide by heroin addiction than foreign troops are killed in Afghanistan

We all know the solution, but just in case you’re new to this drug law reform thing: the best way to undermine the terrorists is through legalisation and regulation.

 * http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8319249.stm
 * http://tinyurl.com/unodc-afghan-report

AMY WINEHOUSE’S DAD is complaining about lack of treatment facilities for people who haven’t committed crimes, and is advocating more prescription for addicts on the NHS.  This happened in front of the Home Affairs Select Committee, who are preparing a report into cocaine and its usage.  Our good friends at Transform Drug Policy Foundation were there too, advocating legalisation.  They even managed to tag along to the Winehouse story in the media.

 * http://tinyurl.com/guardian-winehouse
 * http://tinyurl.com/metro-winehouse

THE GOOD PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA has finally got round to issuing advice to federal prosecutors not to bother with raids or prosecutions against those who sell “medical marijuana” legally within state regulations. We’ve been waiting for this for ten months and now it’s finally happened.  Public approval ratings in the US for legalisation of cannabis are higher than ever and now this removes another obstacle to replacing the now-threadbare war on drugs with a safer and saner hemp blanket of legislation.

 * http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1931247,00.html
 * http://tinyurl.com/guardian-obama-medical-marijua

On Drug-Driving and Illegality

Let’s Keep Drugs Illegal at the West Georgian, says:

In the case of drugs, we do not have an inalienable right to put whatever we want into our bodies if it violates any other person’s human rights. Let’s look at alcohol, a legal and widely used drug (though keep in mind that its legality has no significance in the point I’m trying to make). In 2005, 16,885 people died in the US from alcohol-related motor vehicle crashes. [...] [The] 1.4 million [people arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol or narcotics] and their potential victims (which could have been you or me) were the lucky ones. Drugs other than alcohol were involved in 18% of traffic-related deaths that year, bringing the total to 57% of traffic-related deaths that involved drugs.

[...] Alcohol impaired the judgment and coordination of the users enough that 414 children died in 2005. Those who drove under the influence violated human rights. [...] Because most (if not all) illegal drugs impair judgment, users act with compulsion and/or faulty reasoning, and therefore do not always take into account other people’s human rights. They would not have enough sense, caution, or fear to know that getting in a car is a bad idea and that they could violate others’ rights. Since this impairment of rationality is essentially a certainty, there is always a chance that someone else’s rights will be infringed when such drugs are used. Therefore, it is not one’s inalienable right to consume illegal drugs, since it needlessly puts other people in harm’s way.

The argument the article puts across is pretty much:
1. People under the influence won’t think “no, driving this car is wrong”
2. People under the influence are more likely to crash
3. So, people shouldn’t allowed to take illegal drugs.

Yes, the concern that more drug use will cause more crashes is a valid one. However, if the logic in the quoted article were consistent, we would make alcohol illegal too, which we really and completely haven’t. We have, however, put very strict requirements on alcohol consumption and driving and we punish people severely if they break them.

Drink-driving is a case where public education has massively reduced harm. Whilst commonly-used illegal drugs remain illegal, though, telling people not to take them and driving will be less effective than if they were legal and there was a clear message not to. I would like to have a study to back this up, but I have two main reasons for believing that this is so.

First, if you’re doing something illegal already, then doing something else illegal is a small extra cost; this is the argument that the drug war destroys respect for the law in a significant portion of a society. If the police are out to get you whatever you do, does it really matter what you do?

Second, the public protection message “don’t take drugs and drive” gets drowned out by the larger personal morality message “don’t take drugs”. Given that the people taking drugs are disregarding the latter, they’re not going to pay attention to the former, since they’ll see it as along the same lines. There’s no message “take drugs sensibly and safely, and this includes not driving under the influence”, which may actually make a difference.

So, kids: don’t drug up and drive. And don’t let your friends do it, either.

Why Poppers Should Not Be Made Illegal

I read an article recently on poppers and the gay scene in the UK. Poppers are carcinogenic, and some variations of then are now illegal (in the EU, at least). They also significantly suppress the immune system, according to a host of studies. I don’t condone or urge against their use, but I certainly don’t think making them illegal is any solution. I wrote a lengthy comment on the article and have reposted it here, beneath the quote. The article in question is Poppers: the Sweet Smell of Hypocrisy:

Who’d ever thought a little glass bottle could cause so much damage? Originally developed to help people with serious heart conditions, these dangerous drugs are still being sold all over the country – and on the gay scene you can’t miss them. [...]

Despite the massive amount of public resources being ploughed into safer-sex messages targeting Crystal-Meth users, binge drinkers and participants in other more well know high risk sexual behaviours, alarming research carried out by the Medical Research Council and the Terrance Higgins Trust has recently declared that poppers appear to be “the only drug associated with an increased risk of acquiring HIV” and concluded “if you sniff poppers there’s an increased risk of HIV transmission if you have unprotected sex”. In 2007 the Terrance Higgins Trust also released findings of a major new study which discovered 80% of HIV positive men used poppers compared to 58% who remained negative. The connection between HIV and poppers is indisputable.

An interesting article. Making poppers illegal, however, cannot be the solution to stopping people using them. After all, making other drugs illegal has done nothing to stop people using them, with some 30% of the UK population having used an illegal drug at some time in their lives.

There can only be bad outcomes from making poppers illegal. The first is that people will instead get in touch with dealers of some kind to get poppers, rather than getting them from shops. (Unless you believe that in some way making something illegal will reduce demand for it, in which case, please talk to any of the 3% of the [UK] population who used cocaine last year.) Dealer contact will introduce lots of people to illegal markets, where other drugs are easily available and far more tempting (pills and coke will be on sale next to poppers). People will no longer know that what they’re buying are poppers (trading standards do not apply).

Another risk is that in outlawing poppers, there will be more people working out how to make more potent forms of poppers. This is happening with cannabis at the moment (there is a trend towards more potent strains, away from hash and towards skunk), and it happened with alcohol in the US during the 1920s when they prohibited alcohol (everyone went from beers and wines to hard spirits).

These issues are inherent in the nature of banning substances. However, if a ban is to make any difference, police will have to spend serious amounts of time and money cracking down on popper use and sale, which will criminalise potentially some 850 000 people who take poppers each year, and will be a waste of money and time, when such resources could be better spent on a whole range of other things.

It would seem to be a far better proposition to instead licence the sale of such substances and to tax them more heavily. According to a paper published by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, taxes are the most effective way to lower usage of alcohol/tobacco, followed by an advertising ban. It is more effective to try and change people’s minds so that they don’t want to take poppers than to try and stop getting hold of them, and the current and failing war on drugs is a testament to this.

Why Drug Law Needs Reform: A Prime Example

Judge’s anger over casual attitude to cannabis:

Judge Christopher Cornwall made comments [about the danger of cannabis use] while sentencing a Fylde coast man caught with 30g of the drug at his home. Paul Hadgraft was described as a regular cannabis user who believed the drug had a calming effect.

Michael Murray, defending, told the court: “It is dawning on him that cannabis is not as innocent as a lot of people would suspect. He says it is his wish to rid himself of what is clearly an addiction to cannabis. … He wasn’t making any money for recreational use, other than buying more cannabis to use himself and to pass on to friends.

Hadgraft was given a sentence of 26 weeks prison, suspended for 18 months, with 18 months supervision.

Here is yet another example of why drug use should be treated as a public health rather than criminal law issue. This man has been sentenced to 26 weeks in prison for owning an ounce of cannbis and selling not-for-profit to fund his own habit. Spending time in prison is not a productive way to get him sorted out if he is, indeed, an addict. The article mentions that he has had some number of previous offences on his record, which I would assume were drug-related.

In the prison system we can expect him to find it fairly easy to get hold of drugs anyway, in which case he’s most likely to come out of it having wasted about £19k of government money in the prison system alone (plus the costs of police tracking this man down, defence lawyer possibly on government-funded legal aid, and the cost of the trial), which could be spent in a whole bunch of better ways, including rehab, and tracking down people whose chief intention is actually to harm or profiteer from crime.

In addition, any job this man had he will lose; if he had a mortgage, he is in danger of repossession; if he applies for jobs in the future he has a record of jail time. Given that he already has some number of offences on his record, he may well be on state benefit, and if he isn’t, it is more than likely that when he gets out of prison he will be. He will probably remain on it indefinitely.

This man’s case is fairly typical. The government’s drug policy means that this case will continue being fairly typical; it wastes money, time, and lives. If cannabis was decriminalised and regulated, this man would not have any incentive to deal; the police would not have to spend time rooting him out and arresting him; and he would not be wasting thousands of pounds of government money merely by desiring to smoke a omnipresent weed. If he had an addiction problem, he could seek help for it without fear, and if he didn’t, he would be far more able to find jobs and function in society.

The current drug policy is a failure. It must change.

Drugz, part I

West Africa has growing cannabis production:

Farmers in West Africa are turning to cannabis as a quick cash crop, feeding the biggest illegal drug market in the world. UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) director for West Africa, Antonio Mazzitelli, told IRIN clandestine farmers are lured by quick earnings: “Faced with the choice of cannabis or cassava, some choose easy money.”

[...] Jalloh said cannabis farmers must be prosecuted. “These farmers could have planted things our country actually needs, like coffee, rice or pineapple. We don’t have enough food for our people and they go and plant marijuana because of greed. Rice takes work. It is not easy money. But at least it can feed people, rather than an underground economy.”

Once again, instead of reducing the incentive to grow cannabis by making it sell for much less (which regulation and control would achieve), a government ignores human nature and microeconomics and blame farmers for not wanting to be poor. Granted, these farmers appear to have guns, but regulation and control would mean they wouldn’t have to use them, since not only would the crop they’re growing be legal, but it would also be worth a hell of a lot less.

Caught in the crossfire: Laywer jailed for drug dealing

A LEEDS lawyer[, Dr. Roger Lowe] has been jailed after he supplied cocaine to undercover police in a nightclub sting.

Richard Reed, for Lowe, said Lowe had lost his job and he had only used the drug, which he did not supply for profit, to give himself a lift due to stress and long working hours.

Once again, we enforce health measures through the criminal justice system; this guy obviously needs help dealing with stress in less harmful ways, not being jailed for non-profit activity.

Policing drugs means that the US gets to police the world: Bolivia halts US anti-drugs work

President Evo Morales has announced he is suspending “indefinitely” the operations of the US Drug Enforcement Administration in Bolivia. Mr Morales accused the agency of having encouraged anti-government protests in the country in September.

[...] Last month President George W Bush himself put the Andean country on an anti-narcotics blacklist that cuts trade preferences.

According to Wikipedia, “Morales, [once] a leader among coca-growers, has said his government will try to interdict drugs, but he wants to preserve the legal market for coca-leaves and promote export of legal coca-products.” Whilst Morales’ term thus far hasn’t been free from problems, this is an instance of the US using drugs to hurt countries it doesn’t like.