Present drug policy
Less than twenty years ago, the consensus on drug policy was, apparently, as solid as a rock. In reality there were of course dissenters, but to raise the question of radical change in direction was to bring down outrage and moral condemnation upon oneself. In recent years this has begun to change and drug policy is, perhaps, on the cusp of a paradigm shift. It was assumed simply that drugs were very dangerous and the way to deal with this danger was to use the institutional forces of the law to restrict their production, distribution and use to “medical and scientific purposes.”
What has happened recently involves a number of linked changes to these basic assumptions.
1: “Drugs” has been unpacked somewhat as a concept: we now understand that many legal substances, like alcohol and tobacco, are drugs too. Moreover, within the illegal drugs, some are more harmful than others.
2: Secondly, and in some ways more profoundly, there is an increased understanding that drugs, like other tools and consumables, can be used in ways that make them more or less harmful. Drugs are not uniquely evil, as they have often been represented, but rather are a part of life which need to be handled skillfully to minimize their danger.
3: A new pragmatism has entered the discourse: we can see that, after nearly a century of attempts to prohibit drug use by law, little has been achieved.
4: Moreover, in the course of trying to achieve a society without drug use through recourse to the law, we have made many things worse, regardless of our intentions.
5: The advent of deadly pathogens spread by injection has forced upon us a new urgency to rethink drug policy.
6: Societies have changed in some fundamental ways from the time when the basics of the prohibitive paradigm were established; the consumption of drugs is a choice which many citizens have made, and the policies of the old paradigm are increasingly inappropriate to the cultural landscape of the 21st century.
A critique of the contemporary response
The laws, policies, rules and regulations that govern the way drugs are produced, transported, traded and consumed in the world today are an amalgam of interconnected practices that result in a wide variety of consequences.
Drugs have been largely viewed as a public enemy; a commodity that ought to be condemned, outlawed and fought. They have been demonised and banned, and their negative effects exposed. Some people have avoided coming into contact with drugs because of this reputation. Despite this, the world still has a growing demand for drugs and the contemporary response to this demand has led to some devastating consequences. It seems that the current approach to managing the desire to use drugs has not only failed in its intentions to reduce that demand, but has facilitated the blossoming of a massive illicit drugs market and its associated negative consequences.
It is clear that the of the presence of drugs has a wide range of associated consequences and any attempt to build a new paradigm for drug control will have to take all of these into consideration. Not all of them can be eliminated, but many of the negative consequences of the current regime can be reduced or minimised.
Some of these effects include:
- Criminalisation of youth;
- Unequal application of the law with regard to ethnicity;
- Health impacts; HIV and Hep C;
- Poverty and social exclusion aggravated by the drug laws;
- Erosion of respect for the law;
- The heavy financial cost of a law-enforcement focus;
- In the developing world; corruption, damage of supply-side intervention and the results for growers, the environment, crime and terrorism.
The Domestic (UK) Impact
The criminalisation of youth Each year over 10,000 young people are arrested on suspicion of drugs offences, with thousands of under 21 year olds given a criminal record for possession of drugs. The social impact of this for the individual concerned includes being prevented from entering certain professions and visiting or working in countries like the USA, together with the stigma and disaffection with which a criminal record is associated.
Unequal application of the law Individuals from poor, socially disadvantaged or ethnic minority backgrounds are represented disproportionately in the number of people who come into contact with the law as a result of drugs. At each stage of law enforcement these groups are dealt with more harshly by the authorities than other groups.
Health matters Harm reduction has been sacrificed at the expense of a zero-tolerance strategy. Dependent drug users are often reluctant to access health services, which are frequently under-funded and under-resourced. Heroin, one of the seemingly most dangerous drugs has little direct health impact (apart from its addictive nature), but rather it is the marginalised social world in which heroin users exist that gives rise to its associated risks. Recreational drug users are ill-informed of the effects of the drugs they choose to take and often ignorant of the best ways to stay safe doing them. Increased potency and contaminated substances are directly attributable to the illicit market’s motivation to maximise profit margins.
Getting our priorities right The enormous cost of policing drugs and enforcing drug laws has undoubtedly been at the expense of the provision of coherent prevention and adequate treatment. The cycle of poverty and substance misuse is better disrupted with interventions other than prohibition.
Crime Drug-related crime costs the UK billions of pounds a year. The retail price of drugs such as heroin and cocaine is a reflection of the risks taken by smugglers importing them and results in the dependent user struggling to sustain an expensive habit. Overcome by the powerful desire of addiction and with often nowhere else to turn, acquisitive crime and petty theft tend to become the source of funds for those with dependence problems and little or no income.
The International Impact
Major producer and consumer markets are rarely located in the same country so the drugs are trafficked from one part of the world to another. As attempts are made to disrupt existing trade routes, new methods are found and countries previously free from a significant drug problem find themselves at the heart of the international drugs trade. Traffickers frequently choose fragile economies with unstable political systems as transit routes and the local impact can be devastating.
When developing countries in the Caribbean and more recently West Africa become the new favoured location, gangs struggling for control of the trade bring with them serious organised violence with which the authorities have neither the funding nor training to cope. The presence of vast quantities of drugs also results in a sharp increase in substance use amongst the indigenous population, whose health care systems are totally unprepared to support.
With growing pressure from western states and the UN, producer countries take action to eliminate the harvests, such as mass spraying of crops. These supply-side interventions devastate local economies, poison the immediate environment and turn citizens and their states into enemies. The vast quantities of money made by those controlling the production and supply of drugs fuels further and more dangerous illicit activity such as terrorism and organised crime. This money is also used to bribe officials and fuels corruption.
