Google Adsense - a program which allows you to display adverts on your blog, dangling the carrot of miniscule advertising returns before your face - has, for the second time, turned me down for an account, this time for what it terms 'adult content' and my use of copyrighted material (which I assume refers to the pictures I nick from Google Images).And since and pictures ofappear to be enough to convince the 'don't be evil' bods at Google that my blog ain't worth their time, I might as well write about a subject I've been avoiding for a while now: drug prohibition.
Before I start, I'll make an apology - this article is long.So long, in fact, that I decided to break it up into four parts.I usually try and keep my posts to 1,500 words or under to make them easily negotiable in a single sitting, but I thought that rather than try to constrain myself within that space, I would write something a little fuller.The problem is simply too complex, and the falsities we've all come to accept are too ingrained, to deal with it in another fashion.
And drug prohibition is worth writing about.In the name of doing good, governments around the world are pursuing unethical, uneconomic drug policies that are not only harming drug users but also harming innocent communities, domestically and around the world, and are actively perpetuating a cycle of violence, oppression, and exclusion that is not only not helping society, but is actively making it worse.Current drugs policy has created the monster it was ostensibly designed to cure.Over four articles I'd like to convince you of that idea.
I Drugs Policy: to protect and serve
The scale of the problem
Let's start by setting things up and giving a little context.The following data are taken from a survey of 16-59 olds in England and Wales done by the Home Office in 2012, which asked people if they had ever taken an illegal drug, if they had taken an illegal drug in the last year, if they had taken an illegal drug in the last month, and if so what drugs these were.*The results, given how superbly illegal the substances in question are, are striking.
More than one in three adults (36.5%) in this country have taken an illegal drug in their lifetime.Furthermore, when the survey was taken, slightly fewer than one in eleven adults (8.9%) had taken an illegal drug in the previous year, and more than one in twenty (5.2%) had taken an illegal drug in the last month.
The table opposite shows drugs taken in the last year, but is broadly representative of the distribution of lifetime usage as well.Three substances clearly distinguish themselves as our drugs of choice.By a country mile, cannabis leads the pack, with nearly a third of adults (31%) having tried the drug at some point in their lives and some 2.2 million of us having used it in 2011/12.After this, both cocaine and ecstasy have been used by around one in eleven of us, at 9.6% and 8.6% respectively.Hallocinogens (mainly LSD and mushrooms) have also been sampled by around the same number (9.2%).Heroin use stands at 0.8%, a staggering 269,000 people (though only around 50,000 had taken the drug during the year 2011/12).
Confronted with the figures, the temptation is to think of these millions of drugs users as an eternal 'someone else;' the poor, the ill-educated, and (dare I say it) foreigners.But I'm afraid you'd be wrong.Time and again, statistical data show that drug use is correlated neither with socio-economic status nor with race.Certain drugs do have their biases (it is almost uniquely the very poorest who become heroin's victims) but, taken in the round, whether your drive a Porsche to work or take the bus, there is a one in three chance you've taken an illegal drug.
Given these enormous numbers of drug users, the question then becomes why we have chosen to legislate against something so many of us apparently do.In the rest of the article, I'd like to consider the rationale behind drugs prohibition and what it ostensibly aims to achieve.
*A sample of 26,663 people was used to create the data.
The stated aims
The reason for drugs' illegality is not, perhaps, as obvious as it might first appear.With most criminal offences, you only need to describe the offence to explain why it is punishable by jail time.Once you know what rape is, it should (unless you're a very unpleasant person) be absolutely evident that someone who commits rape should go to prison.With the production, distribution, and use of illicit substances, however, we need to go a little deeper.It's not enough merely to say that drugs prohibition is intended to stop people taking drugs.That's basically a tautology; if something has been made illegal then obviously it's because the government doesn't want people to do it.This doesn't answer the why, only the what.
For my why, then, I quote from the opening of the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, which is basically the founding document for all subsequent drugs policy in this country and which mirrors similar legislation in most countries in the world.The act stipulates that:
'It shall be the duty of the Advisory Council to keep under review the situation in the United Kingdom with respect to drugs which are being or appear to them likely to be misused and of which the misuse is having or appears to them capable of having harmful effects sufficient to constitute a social problem.'
Harm, therefore, appears to be the key consideration.Drugs prohibition exists to prevent harm.
The prevention of harm: lethal harm
If drugs policy exists to prevent the harm, an obvious next question follows: what harm do drugs do?This is, in fact, a hugely complicated question, but years of a panicky, prohibition-based education have taught us to think that actually it's very simple and that the answer is 'a lot.'This simplistic viewpoint is aided by the fact that a cursory look at the statistics seems to bear this simple answer out.If we measure harm very simply as 'number of people killed,' some big numbers start pouring out.
In 2010* there were 4,531 drug related deaths in England and Wales.That ought to be all we need to know, right?Four and a half thousand deaths should be more than enough for any of us to get behind policies of prohibition!
All drug related deaths in 2010.Those big circles are tobacco and alcohol
Well, I suppose.If something can kill you, you should probably stay away from it.Except that pretty much everything can kill you if done improperly or to excess.Water can and does kill you if you drink too much of it.The nation's drug of choice (alcohol), killed 8,790 people in 2010 and we're happy to keep rubbing along with it.Why therefore, on the basis of harm, is alcohol considered safe enough to be legal when drugs are not?
Now, I know exactly what you're about to say: 'You're not comparing like with like.Yes lots of people die of alcohol abuse, but everyone drinks.Hardly anyone takes drugs.So absolute figures are worthless!'
Nice.You got me.
Except it's not true.Peel apart these numbers and we find, in actual fact, that based on your chances of dying if you use it, alcohol proves to be virtually the most dangerous substance on the market (other, of course, than tobacco).
The figures quoted above were drawn from reports for the Office of National Statistics, a go-to organisation for working out 'stuff in numbers' in the UK.But just because the ONS is great doesn't mean there aren't problems in the data.In fact, once we pick it apart, the data reveal that alcohol is pretty much the most lethal drug around.
To begin with, the ONS do no produce (as far as I can see) any reports which measure alcohol and other illegal drugs at total parity; they produce reports for drugs and reports for alcohol.Hidden within this lies an enormous statistical anomaly.All reports of drug related fatalities include deaths that occur as a result of drugs misuse, defined as:
'a) deaths where the underlying cause is drug abuse or drug dependence or b) deaths where the underlying cause is drug poisoning and where any of the substances controlled in the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 are involved.'
So anything that happens which it is believed would not have happened (say, falling into a river) had the deceased not taken drugs will be listed, for statistical purposes, as a drug related death.
But now let's look at the alcohol related deaths definition:'Apart from deaths due to poisoning with alcohol (accidental, intentional, or undetermined), this definition excludes any other external causes of death, such as road traffic and other accidents.'In other words, whilst alcohol related deaths are only noted if they occur as the result of alcohol poisoning or of a disease directly caused by alcohol poisoning, drug related deaths are recorded no matter what the direct cause of death actually was.
Now this isn't just an amusing little blip in the data.Accidental deaths whilst under the influence of alcohol must make up a huge number of casualties, given that alcohol plays a role in between one quarter and one third of all accidents in the UK.Furthermore it is also a causal factor in a huge number of murders and assaults (more on this below), which again do not make it into the statistics.Drug misuse deaths made up 37.8% of drug related deaths in 2010.If we add a corresponding proportion of deaths for alcohol, that brings the total alcohol related deaths to 15,545, or roughly one alcohol related death per 1,840 drinkers (based on the fact that there are about 28.6 million drinkers in England and Wales).Those odds are starting to look worse and worse
The plot thickens still further when we take into account problems associated with the recording and reporting of poly drug use; that is where someone has multiple substances in their system.Firstly, the ONS and others like them derive their statistics from death certificates.If I am a drug user who dies with toxic levels of heroin and crack cocaine in my system, my death certificate will note both drugs (since it is often difficult or impossible to determine which drug was the primary cause).When my death comes to be recorded and tabulated, in other words, I become two people, one who died of heroin and one who died of cocaine.Given that poly drug deaths count for between half and one third of all deaths, this produces a huge potential skew in the figures.
Secondly, it is unfair to any substance to suggest that it is dangerous merely because it can be dangerous when mixed with other substances.If taking a cocktail of drugs is highly dangerous, it doesn't mean that each individual drug is, in itself, a substance to be feared.Alcohol and paracetamol, when taken together, can be fatal in surprisingly low dosages.Heath Ledger died, in 2008, as the result of a (probably accidental) combination of (legal) drugs whose individual effects were relatively mild but which together shut down his respiratory system.
Discounting deaths for poly drug use and looking only at deaths in which a single drug was involved, we find that the apparent figures plummet.Deaths involving cocaine, for instance, fall from 144 to just 59.Deaths from legal anti-depressants fall from 381 to 157.From heroin: 791 to 487.And so forth.In other words, taking a cocktail of drugs makes you between twice and three times as likely to kill yourself as taking one drug alone.
Poly drug deaths
Mono drug deaths
Thirdly and finally, the distribution of drugs related deaths is anything but equal.What do I mean by this?Well, look at the two charts I have included, which display drug related deaths by drug, both poly drug deaths and mono drug deaths.Notice anything?Certain of the circles are hugely larger than any of the others.In fact, of the 2,747 drug poisonings that occurred in 2010, 2,443 were caused by heroin (or one of its derivatives), by prescribed medications like codeine, and by freely available drugs like paracetamol.**So admittedly, that makes these drugs very dangerous.Based on number of users and number of deaths, if you use heroin or crack cocaine you appear to something like a one in 300 chance that your habit will kill you (worldwide, heroin alone accounts for roughly a third of all drugs related deaths in any country).
However, saying that heroin and prescribed antidepressants are dangerous is not the same as saying that drugs are dangerous.In fact, if we start considering drugs individually, suddenly they begin to look really quite placid.
MDMA (the active ingredient in ecstasy), for instance, a drug us children of the 90s were taught to live in fear of, accounted for only 8 deaths in 2010.That something like one per 62,500 of its estimated 500,000 users.Even ignoring the huge bias created in the statistics by poly drug use, cannabis accounted for only 11 deaths in 2010, about half the number of people who were killed by their pets in that same year.This makes for roughly one death per 290,909 cannabis users, which has got to be somewhere around the odds of dying in a fight with a duck.Indeed, the share of deaths now left to allrecreational drugs (once heroin and the prescription drugs have been removed) dwindles to a measly 304, or 490 if we adjust for the additional 37.8% that I calculated as 'drugs related' deaths.
Let's now relate that back to the drug taking population.Remember, it's argued that drugs are dangerous (even though they kill fewer people than alcohol) because everybody drinks.But there are fewer than 500 deaths a year out of an estimated drug taking population of just under three million.***This means that, as an illicit drug taker (so long as your drug of choice is not heroin or prescribed/freely available medicine), you have a roughly one in six thousand chance of dying from your habit.If you remember, as an alcohol drinker your chances of dying are something like one in eighteen hundred, nearly three and a half times that of the drug takers.
So it seems that the idea that drugs are dangerous is statistically unjustifiable, at least measured by how likely they are to kill their users.What other categories of harm are there that we might apply?Well, to my mind there is non-lethal harm to the user and there is social harm to those around the user and to the society at large.The latter of these two I will deal with in a later article.Let's conclude this article by looking at the former.
* This is a year I'll be using as much as I can.It's recent enough to count as 'recent', but long enough ago to general have good data available.
** More on this in the next article.
*** Based on the fact that 8.9% of adults reported using drugs in the last year, out of a population of 33.6 million adults in England and Wales (2011 figures).
The prevention of harm: non-lethal harm
Measuring non-lethal harm is even more complicated than measuring lethal harm and is actually hugely controversial.To statistically measure something like 'mental anguish' or 'ability to function normally' is pretty well impossible, so here I'm going to have to confine myself to more general remarks.But let's start by looking at the following diagram.
On the x-axis is a number derived by comparing the amount of a drug required to register an effect in a human being, compared to the amount of that drug required to kill a human being (this ratio is often referred to as the toxicity index or therapeutic index of a drug).On the y-axis, drugs are ranked based on the likelihood of developing a physical dependency on them.Physical dependency is when your body reaches a state where it actually cannot function as well without the substance as it can with it, and is distinct from mental dependence - one can be physically dependant on caffeine but not on comics.
You'll note that both one of the most addictive and most toxic drugs available is alcohol.The warning that you will get 'hooked' on drugs, therefore, only appears to be truer of nicotine, cocaine, sedatives, and heroin than it does of alcohol.
Next we have the results of a study, undertaken by the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs and published back in 2010, in which twenty legal and illegal substances were ranked based upon 16 measures of harm to the user and to wider society, measures such as damage to health, drug dependency, economic costs, and crime.Note again that most of the drugs we have been taught to fear are grouped at the bottom end.Once again, a few very serious culprits (heroin, crack, and meth) sit up top and, again, alcohol sits with them.
This is because, unlike most illegal drugs, alcohol causes enormous physical and societal harm.Alcohol is involved in the majority of all murders, manslaughters, and stabbings and in half of all domestic assaults, sexual assaults, and rapes.It is involved in between one third and a quarter of all accidents in the UK.Given that its abuse leads to damage in virtually every part of the body, with serious damage occurring to the brain, liver, kidneys, stomach, and heart, it's hardly surprising that alcohol also places enormous strain on the health service, costing us around EUR2.7 billion per year.It's wider cost to society, however, is estimated at around EUR22 billion per year, or around EUR638 for every person who lifts a drink to their lips.
With all this being true, therefore, surely there must be something about the drugs that are illegal that makes them so much more dangerous than alcohol?Let's look at the four big drugs in the UK: cannabis, cocaine, MDMA, and hallucinogens.
Beginning with cannabis, two main criticisms tend to be levelled against it.The first is that smoking it has all the harmful effects of smoking tobacco.This would seem a tempting conclusion, were it not for the fact that studies proving this tend to run tests on cannabis users who smoke the drug mixed in with tobacco.The problem with any data thus garnered ought to obvious.Beyond this, the jury is still out of whether cannabis itself causes the same harmful effects as tobacco.Whilst inhaling any burnt particles is, prima facie, carcinogenic, this may, in fact, be more than cancelled out by the fact that cannabis actually has a preventative effect on cancer.One might, therefore, be tempted to point out that if you see someone smoking cannabis, you ought to warn them to take out any of the tobacco they've mixed it.Tobacco kills.
It's also claimed that smoking cannabis makes you stupid - in other words, it lowers your IQ., shortly before his death, in no less a publication than The Daily Mail, when he announced that 'science has at last caught up with the blazingly obvious.'Unfortunately, Hitchens failed to point at that the study he was so gleefully quoting had demonstrated not that cannabis lowers IQ but that, as every study on the subject has ever shown, cannabis lowers your IQ if you smoke it as an adolescent and habitually throughout your adult life.
Whilst this is, therefore, a good argument for preventing under 18s from getting hold of the drug, it's not a good argument for making it illegal.In fact, it's a very good argument for doing the opposite, because when a substance is illegal, its sale is no longer regulated.A cashier in a supermarket will ask for ID, a drug dealer wont.And that's exactly what found; surveyed teens claimed that it was significantly easier for them to acquire cannabis than it was to buy alcohol.
Sadly, I couldn't find any data on this from our side of the pond, but I have included a graph lifted from an NHS report on youth alcohol and drug use.It shows the number of individuals under the age of 18 accessing specialist help for drug and alcohol related problems.And what do you notice?That despite the fact that our supermarket shelves are lined with booze and there's a pub on every corner of every town in this country, nearly twice as many children are seeking help for problems related to the use of cannabis as they are for alcohol (a disparity not mirrored in the adult population).The criminal status of this drug, in other words, actually encourages its misuse by under eighteens.
What about the other big players?Cocaine is a tricky one, because (despite research) I'm struggling to find out what people actually think is wrong with it.It raises your blood pressure (but then, so does wine) and can cause mood swings (but then, so can wine).As the figures we saw before showed, whilst you can overdose on it, that appears to be pretty hard given that so few people do.It is slightly more physically addictive than alcohol, which can also cause problems given that it's also quite expensive.But the only real danger that I can see being claimed about cocaine (other than that people who are on it are tediously dull) is that it can be made into crack, an incredibly addictive drug which causes high levels of societal dropout and acquisitive crime.
Yet before the prohibitionists fly the flag of victory, this again is actually an argument against the drug being illegal.The only reason people make crack is because cocaine is illegal.Crack is cheap to produce and more concentrated, so it smuggles more easily.It's highly addictive and destructive, and so highly immoral, but drug dealers don't tend to mind about those sorts of things.Crack exists solely because the market for cocaine is unregulated.
The main criticism levelled at MDMA is that it is fatal.As we've already seen, this claim is not borne out by any evidence.Given that the average ecstasy tablet contains about 40mg of MDMA, you'd have to chomp down about 20-25 of them to actually kill yourself.The other warning always issued is that you don't know what you're taking when you take an ecstasy tablet.And studies have certainly shown that as many as half of ecstasy tablets have no MDMA in them at all, being instead filled with cheaper and more dangerous drugs like amphetamine (or speed).But again, as a measure of harm this doesn't really follow - MDMA is dangerous because when you take it, you might actually not be taking MDMA.Further, as with crack, issues of purity are solely the result of an unregulated market.In places where alcohol is illegal, people often make it at home in such away that drinking it will kill or blind.In countries where alcohol is legal, that doesn't happen.
Beyond this, there is no evidence that MDMA does either the body or the mind any long term harm.It is not linked to any mental illness (indeed, like wine, it appears to positively defend you against mental illness in small doses) nor is it the cause of any social harm (what little data on the subject there is shows that MDMA and crime are negatively correlated - that means people who take MDMA are less likely to commit crimes than sober people).
Lastly, the hallucinogens.Mushrooms and LSD are - in our imaginations - amongst the more dark and terrible members of the drug family.We all remember from school that people who take hallucinogens tend to attack or kill other people (mistaking them for monsters and such).Sadly I've struggled to find anything but anecdotal evidence and, with both being illegal, very little research exists on the subject.For decent quantitative research, one needs to look back to the 60s and 70s, to the work of people like David Duncan and the pairing James Barter and Martin Reite.These authors studied cases of homicide where hallucinogenic drugs had been involved and found that violent incidents, without fail, occurred only in people who had histories of paranoid mental illness or violent behaviour.Likewise, they found that people who killed themselves while taking hallucinogens tended to have done so either by accident (like a drunk falling into a lake) or because they were suicidally depressed.The idea that you take LSD and think you can fly is nothing but a playground myth,
None of this, in the end, is attempting to suggest that drugs are not without their risks.They are (or they certainly can be).But then, so too can be climbing, rowing, playing football, going swimming, and many other activities in which levels of minimum risk are accepted as unavoidable.If you go horse riding, you may break your neck; and, as Dr David Nutt (one of the UK's leading drugs experts) once pointed out (for which he was fired from his job advising the government on drugs policy) y.The point I am making, therefore, is not that drugs are harmless, but rather that the extent of any harm that most of them do has been enormously over exaggerated.Furthermore, by any data available, perhaps the most dangerous drug available on the market today is the legal one.Only a very small handful of illegal substances can be shown, by objective means, to cause greater harm to either the user or to society than does alcohol.
How then has a situation arisen in which a system which justifies itself by the prevention of harm is not only misapplying its principles, but doing so so completely that it is legislating against the safer drugs and permitting the more dangerous?In the next article. I'll examine how it is that this ridiculous disparity came about and why we allow it to continue.
* I will talk in a later article about why the use of heroin, even despite its terrible and ravaging effects, should not be punished with prison sentences.
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