WOD.IrishTimes

HEROIN HARM AND PROHIBITION
Kevin Myers

> Pubdate: Wed, 07 Jun 2000 Source: Irish Times, The (Ireland)
> What with events in the Netherlands, and the plague of deaths in Ireland and
> Scotland, we seem - albeit inadvertently - to have come up with a solution
> to the drugs problem. On the one hand, we make it impossible for drugs users
> to tell the difference between heroin which will do the trick and heroin
> which will put them on a slab with a label around their toe; and on the
> other, we hand over control of the market to that notoriously fickle
> species, the drugs baron, who tends to go round bumping off his rivals.
> Pretty soon, we have lots of dead bodies, and no drugs problem; is that not
> right?
> And if you think that's the case, you also probably believe that Newgrange
> was built by Martians - not that it matters what you believe. Our policies
> towards the use of illegal drugs contain as much sense as plans for a
> electron microscope drawn up by a class of five-year-olds in a Montessori
> for the bewildered. We know they don't work; and what is more, as the dead
> bodies mount, and the circle of human tragedy spreads, we can be sure that a
> deliberate and studied stupidity masquerading as policy will continue to
> guide our responses to drugs use.
> Lethal Heroin
> As policy, we have decided that drugs users are to be denied the protection
> in law afforded to the consumers of other commodities. It is no more illegal
> to sell lethal heroin than it is to sell the normal stuff. In fact the only
> protection the heroin user has comes not from the law, but from the
> Thus you get the real triumph of the rigged market: large profits, high
> prices, a huge death toll, and some law enforcement officer contemplating
> the colossal success of the war against drugs. So everyone, including the
> undertakers, but perhaps not the loved ones of the dead junkies (and they
> hardly count), is happy. Policy driven to its logical conclusion: i.e.,
> utter failure.
> This is not a branch of astrophysics in which the only text books have been
> written in Tibetan. This is something quite accessible to common sense and
> the ineluctable laws of the marketplace. If you criminalise the consumption
> of anything for which there is a demand, you create a monopoly for the
> criminal underworld, who generally speaking, are more devious, more ruthless
> and more imaginative than the salaried state officials opposing them. In
> addition to their own cunning and ingenuity, they have the vast guile, the
> wit and the resources of those in the marketplace who want the commodity
> over which they have been given a monopoly by the state.
> Prohibition
> No democratic state has ever won such a battle, as the US discovered with
> its Prohibition laws against alcohol. Similarly, no society in the world -
> free, communist, or Islamic - has been able to eliminate the market for
> heroin. Since it is outside the rule of law, that market is the preserve of
> the violent and psychopathic; and they have triumphed everywhere. Geneva and
> Vancouver, Stockholm and Lyons, London and Cork - every city has its heroin
> users, its needle parks, and no society guards its junkies against lethal
> drugs.
> Why not? Are they not citizens too? Did they forfeit their rights to life,
> their protection against contamination and casual homicide, the moment they
> became addicts? Did their humanity vanish along with their resistance to
> addictive drugs? And what kind of society is it that ruthlessly refuses to
> monitor the quality of the drugs they take, which drives up the price of
> those drugs by creating a market monopoly for the most unscrupulous villains
> in the community, and then - the icing on the cake - hounds those girls who
> have turned to prostitution to pay the high prices caused solely by state
> interference in the marketplace?
> Protection
> The issue is not whether or not one approves of drugs. We do anyway. The
> very substance used in the Catholic consecration is outlawed in most Muslim
> countries (which must still enforce their drugs laws with the executioners'
> blade; and even that threat does not end the demand for, and the supply of,
> illegal drugs). Alcohol is addictive for many; and not for others. The same
> might - or might not - be true of heroin. I do not care; nothing on this
> earth would persuade me - or indeed, the vast majority of us - to dabble
> with it. But for those who do, the protections and the consumer laws of
> civil society should not be withdrawn.
> The deaths of the young junkies in Dublin are an abomination, yet the State
> seems to feel no shame for its role in the creation of a marketplace
> controlled by evil people, the Dunnes, the Mitchells and the Fellonis and
> their like, at the expense of the vulnerable, the poor, the marginalised.
> This is not through inadvertence, clandestinity or corruption, as were the
> great matters before today's tribunals. This is open, stated policy; and it
> is the true scandal of Irish life.
> Pubdate: Wed, 07 Jun 2000 Source: Irish Times, The (Ireland)
> Copyright: 2000 The Irish Times
> Contact: lettersed@irish-times.ie
> Address: 11-15 D'Olier St, Dublin 2, Ireland
> Fax: + 353 1 671 9407
> Website: http://www.ireland.com/
> Author: Kevin Myers=20
> Note: Headline by Newshawk