Johann Hari

May 2, 2003, Friday

SECTION: COMMENT; Pg. 21

LENGTH: 1207 words

HEADLINE: DANNIELLA WESTBROOK IS LUCKIER THAN SHE
KNOWS

BYLINE: JOHANN HARI

BODY:
Here's a great idea for a TV show: let's take a
fragile recovering coke addict who's just had her
septum restored (it was eroded away by the constant
coke use, you see). And let's dump her in the middle
of an Australian jungle with a horde of weird egotists
and a pair of unnaturally cheerful Geordie midgets,
bombard her with insects and rats, and watch her go
mad! Sounds cruel? It's nothing compared with the way
we treat most drug addicts in this country under our
current failing system of drug prohibition.

Danniella Westbrook is currently enduring a week on
I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!, watched by 10
million of us. (She seems only marginally less
miserable than in her former life on EastEnders, where
her character, as I recall, seemed to run away to
Spain on an abnormally high number of ocassions.) But
the blunt truth is that if she had not been lucky
enough to have the wealth to pay for private rehab,
she would probably be reduced to the state of most
female Class A drug addicts in Britain: selling her
body on the streets in a desperate bid to feed her
addiction for the next week, day, hour.

In a country with a population of 58 million people
and between 250,000 and 500,000 problematic Class A
drug-users, we have 3,000 rehab places available on
the NHS each year. That is not a misprint. 3,000
places - which works out as one rehab place per 83 to
166 addicts. I cannot find a single expert on our
current drugs policies who believes that Danniella
would have ended up in one of these extremely limited
slots. This is because she was not involved in theft,
most of our treatment places are designed for opiate
users (despite the advice of the World Health
Organisation), and she has two young kids (places that
can accommodate women with children are even more hard
to find).

Without an EastEnders-enhanced bank account and a
millionaire husband, Danniella would have been left to
the vagaries of underfunded detox programmes "in the
community". As she tried to stop, she would still have
been surrounded by her coke-using friends and
temptation at every turn; the chances of succeeding in
weaning herself off would have been slim.

The repercussions of this policy are massive. Tiggey
May, a senior researcher at South Bank University,
studies British prostitutes. She explains: "A huge
number of the women I meet on the streets want to go
into rehab, but they know that finding a place is
extremely difficult. The proportion of addicts who are
women is increasing, but mother and baby units haven't
been created at anything like the same rate, and most
women don't have somebody they can just leave their
children with... A majority of the women working on
the streets are crack addicts, but they don't get the
support to change their lives that they badly need."

And it's not just the women themselves, the countless
lost Danniellas whom nobody watches on prime-time TV
and nobody notices, who suffer: it's you and me. A
Home Office-commissioned study last year found that
the economic and social cost of Class A drug use add
to an amazing pounds 10.1-17.4bn a year - and 88 per
cent of that spending goes on crime. Half of all
property crimes, according to Home Office Minister Bob
Ainsworth, are caused by addicts. Every second theft,
then, is a consequence of the failure of the
government to invest in rehab: remember that next time
you come home to see your door broken open and your
valuables gone.

If ever there was an example of where "tough on crime,
tough on the causes of crime" could be put into
practice, this is it. The long-term savings - for
police and court time and government money - involved
in providing rehab are massive, and the political
capital waiting to be seized in a country terrified of
crime is vast. If the Government needs an easy source
of revenue for funding this massive crime reduction
programme - one of the few methods which has been
shown time and again to work - they could legalise and
tax the vast and unstoppable drugs trade that already
exists in this country. Drug-dealing happens every
second of the day, and only the most blinkered
authoritarians now think that it can be stomped out
through "crackdowns". It is only a misplaced fear of
public opinion that stops the Blair government - which
does not consist of fools - from admitting this.

They know perfectly well that the country that has
most vigorously tried this kind of drugs repression,
the US, has ended up with the biggest drug problem of
all developed nations.

Meanwhile, the country that abandoned this policy
soonest and opted instead for funding rehab and harm
reduction, the Netherlands, is seeing its junkies age
without a large younger generation to replace them.

(It is worth bearing in mind that the US drug war is
now being fought by a President who has himself
tacitly admitted that he has used cocaine, a crime for
which he is happy to send others to jail for 20
years.)

There is a myth that those of us who campaign for
drugs legalisation would happily see the whole country
descend into an opium-induced trance. The defenders of
prohibition conjure up a post-legalisation dystopia:
one year after drugs are legalised, they imagine,
heroin-injecting housewives will lie in a blissed-out
sleep in Britain's gutters next to shaking,
cocaine-hungry bank managers. The whole of Britain
would become an omnibus edition of I'm A Celebrity...

This is absurd. I defend the right of individuals to
use drugs recreationally and in moderation, and this
is possible with both cocaine and heroin. (The British
Government backs this in one sphere at least: US
pilots and soldiers fighting alongside "our boys" in
Iraq have been given amphetamines to sharpen their
concentration. Why soldiers and not, say,
journalists?) But crucially, just as I support and
occasionally enjoy limited drug use, we legalisers
also see reducing the number of addicts as absolutely
central to our agenda.

There is no contradiction here: it is far easier to
fight addiction when drugs are in the open, carefully
regulated and sold in pharmacies (thus bankrupting all
drug-pushing). Most important, under legalisation -
which will happen in a European country in the next
few decades, I am sure - we will have huge sums of
money that would go not into the bank accounts of
criminals (as it does today) but into a flowering of
well-funded rehab projects across the country. Drugs
legalisation and reducing the number of drug addicts
are not opposing goals: they are as firmly linked as
Siamese twins.

It is the supporters of the current system who are not
serious about fighting drug addiction. They prefer to
cling to the discredited myth that the supply of drugs
can be stamped out by plugging every port and
coastline on this island, and that we can carry on
spending a pittance on rehabilitation.

So if you think Danniella seems to be cracking up out
there in the Australian rain forest, spare a thought
for all the other women with drug problems who lack
her advantages in life. It is the prohibitionists -
who refuse to tax the drug trade and spend the money
this would raise on rehab - who are inflicting this
living nightmare upon them.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

Copyright 2003 Newspaper Publishing PLC
The Independent (London)

February 27, 2003, Thursday

SECTION: COMMENT; Pg. 19

LENGTH: 909 words

HEADLINE: THIS FANTASY WORLD OF DRUG PROHIBITION

BYLINE: JOHANN HARI

BODY:
The United Nations International Narcotic Control
Board (INCB) has attacked one of the few progressive
drugs reforms introduced by any British government
since the disastrous tide of prohibition began to roll
across the world in the 1960s. The downgrading of
cannabis - a drug which more than half of all British
citizens under the age of 30 have tried - from Class B
to Class C, earmarked for this Easter, was the barest
minimum that could be done in a country where even The
Daily Telegraph, Peter Lilley and The Economist
support legalisation. Yet the INCB has condemned it as
a move made by a government "intimidated by a vocal
minority that wants to legalise illicit drug use".
This "vocal minority" includes, according to a 2001
ICM poll, more than half of all British people when it
comes to cannabis.

The INCB is among the world's most hardline exponents
of drug prohibition. Whenever a country moves in the
direction of greater tolerance and reducing harm, the
INCB is there to beat it with a big stick. Despite its
disingenuous attempt yesterday to claim to speak on
behalf of African nations, it is effectively a puppet
of the United States, a nation whose drugs record
speaks for itself. The latest US Department of Health
found last year that despite endless "crackdowns" over
two decades, 87 million Americans have used illegal
drugs, and nearly a million regularly use the most
hardcore of all, crack cocaine.

The intellectual poverty of the prohibitionists is so
obvious that it no longer merits serious discussion.
They are not interested in evidence from the real
world; they are simply blinkered ideologues. Yet the
INCB still tries to enforce the catastrophic US model
across the globe. Any nation that tries to liberalise
even mildly finds itself, as Britain has, under
intense US/UN pressure.

Through the INCB, they oppose even the most basic
harm-reduction tactics, such as injecting rooms where
heroin addicts can inject under supervision in case
they overdose; needle exchanges (to avoid HIV
infection); heroin prescription (proven to reduce
property crimes, because addicts no longer need to
steal to fund their habit); and ecstasy testing in
clubs, combined with education about the drug (which
could save the lives of the few people who do die
using ecstasy).

As Danny Kushlick, director of the increasingly
influential Transform Drugs Policy Institute,
explains: "There is now a serious tension emerging
between the US approach to drugs - which is being
aggressively forced on the world - and the European
harm-reduction philosophy which is gradually emerging.
Portugal has effectively decriminalised personal
possession of all drugs; and in Spain and Italy,
personal possession is now only a civil offence."

At the moment, the European approach remains - just -
within the boundaries of the international
drug-control treaties, regulated by the UN, that were
set up in successive waves in 1961, 1971 and 1988.
Even these changes are achieved mostly by exploiting
clauses about medical necessity. For example, needle
exchanges, which test the ultra-prohibitionist spirit
of the treaties, are justified by the Dutch with
reference to the clauses about individual health. But
no European country can move towards full legalisation
of production and supply while remaining within the
treaties' constraints. Sooner or later, there will be
a blatant challenge to the treaties by a European
country that wants to travel this path, although
massive diplomatic pressure will be exerted to rein it
back.

The US-imposed constraints on South America are even
greater. In Colombia, 40 per cent of the national
economy is based on the international trade in drugs.
The distorting effect on the entire country is
immeasurable, with billions sloshing around in illegal
funds, corrupting both politics and the administration
of law. This is exacerbated by a US policy of mass-
spraying, with noxious herbicides, of fields suspected
to be used for cocaine-related crops. Tens of
thousands of acres of land belonging to
poverty-stricken small farmers have been destroyed,
the environmental damage is devastating, and yet the
policy is so ineffective that since it began the
cocaine yield from Colombia has trebled.

The idea that the drugs market can be stamped out is a
fantasy. A kilo of cocaine is worth pounds 1,000 in
Colombia, but, because of the massive inflationary
effects of prohibition, it is worth pounds 30,000 by
the time it reaches the streets of London. Wherever
there is a 3,000 per cent profit margin, people will
be prepared to take extraordinary risks. This market
will not die.

Legalising the supply and distribution networks of
drugs, however, would put the huge sums of money
generated by this industry into the hands of
legitimate businesses and - most importantly - through
taxation into the hands of governments that urgently
need more money for the provision of basic health and
education.

The INCB approach, in contrast, is a guarantee of
poverty in South America and mass property crime in
Britain. The Government has unflinchingly taken the
condemnation of this unaccountable body for even its
very moderate change. This should embolden it to
confront the prohibitionists again and move faster
towards the European model that will - one day soon -
replace the current anarchy and criminality of the
drugs world with regulation, legality and sanity.

The British Isles are awash with chemicals. From the council estates to the landed estates, from the granny having a cup of cannabis tea for her arthritis to the stockbrokers snorting Charlie in the toilets at Springfellow’s, from Richard Bacon to Jack Straw’s son, we are a nation of drug-users.

There are still people who hold out against legalising ecstasy, cocaine and heroin, despite great wodges of academic studies showing that this would prevent the killing of yet another Leah Betts. But there is a growing consensus in Britain that cannabis at least should be decriminalised.

Let’s be honest – if the British laws on cannabis were enforced, half of the population of this country would have to be banged up. Recent surveys have found that over 60% of people under 25 smoke the weed, and 35% have at least one spliff a week. Set against this reality, the “war on drugs” is a stupid joke. It would be as sensible to declare war on bikes, hamburgers or pet budgies.

It is, of course, possible that something could be extremely widespread but still be wrong and worth cracking down on. Anti-semitism was very common in Weimar Germany; rape remains very common in many developing societies; and homophobia is prevalent across the globe. We don’t respond by saying that just because it happens a lot, the government shouldn’t do anything about it. So it is worth asking: is there anything actually wrong with smoking cannabis?

Well, we all know a few people who light up a spliff the minute they wake up and are stoned pretty much throughout the day. I had a friend – I haven’t seen him in a while now – who used to be pretty sharp, energetic and funny, who took to smoking so much dope that he just became an apathetic, anaesthetised blob. But it’s not like the evil weed came from nowhere and took over his mind. He was depressed, he wasn’t getting anywhere with the opposite sex or in his work, and only once all this caused him to sink did he turn his flat into an immense ashtray littered with stubbed-out spliffs. (I once found three under his pillow when I was so horrified by the mess in his flat that I decided spontaneously to tidy up. Grim.) If it’s hadn’t been for spliffs, I am certain he would have found another drug. Alcohol would have been even worse: at least the cannabis never made him aggressive or obnoxious. So the existence of people addicted to cannabis isn’t an argument for criminalising it. Addictive personalities will find something to be addicted to no matter how many chemicals you ban.

But, yes, we should also admit that there are other draw-backs to cannabis. It can shag your shirt-term memory, as I learned after a few too many spliffs just before one of my GCSE exams. (I forgot the name ‘John Steinbeck’ – which was pretty dumb given that he wrote the set test I was being examined on.) It can, in a tiny number of cases, precipitate schizophrenia if it runs in your family and happens to be latent in your personality. And it’s pretty carcinogenic too – it’s more like to bring on cancer than smoking a tobacco cigarette. It was, after all, excessive cannabis use that killed Bob Marley in his forties. Oh, and the munchies can make you put on serious weight. I’ll never quite forget one night last year when a friend and I managed to eat three entire KFC buckets (the large family-sized mothers) after smoking a little too much.

Once we’ve admitted all these drawbacks, though, we can also celebrate the huge positive factors of cannabis. Unlike this country’s favourite drug, alcohol, cannabis makes you warm and lovely. Have you ever seen a fight break out at a party where everyone was toking? Have you ever woken up and realised that you had majorly insulted somebody because you were stoned? Amsterdam’s cannabis café culture causes far lower levels of street violence than the pub culture of Britain’s cities.

Cannabis is the ultimate relaxant. My ex-boyfriend used to tell me that the only time my neck muscles were ever truly relaxed was after a few spliffs. (He failed to make the connection between that fact and his rather poor sexual technique, but, hey, that’s another story…) It makes us more tactile, more friendly and more open.

Also, it works wonders for people with arthritis and diseases like multiple sclerosis. Britain is one of the few remaining countries in the West which is cruel enough to criminalise cannabis use for medical purposes – although the government has now at least commissioned a report to investigate the issue.

So, given all this, how can anybody support the on-going ban on cannabis? Partly, the arguments are based on ignorance. Jack Straw, who until last year was in charge of enforcing Britain’s drugs laws as Home Secretary, was so naïve that when he was President of the National Union of Students in the seventies (he was the leader of Britain’s students, for god’s sake), he was handed a spliff in a public meeting as a joke and he didn’t know what it was. His one time Tory equivalent, the notoriously freakish Anne Widdecombe, was even worse. She seriously proposed in 2000 that anybody found with cannabis should be marched to a cash point and immediately fined. When even the police themselves reacted by pissing themselves laughing and pointing out that the plan was completely unworkable, the Virgin Anne was forced to backtrack.

The current Tory Shadow Home Secretary, Oliver Letwin, admits he has smoked cannabis – but only because somebody “put it into my pipe as a joke when I was at Oxford, and I didn’t know what it was. I was jolly cross!” When the argument for legalizing cannabis was recently put to the increasingly deranged Margaret Thatcher, she barked back, “Legalising cannabis would be like legalising murder! Murder!” Onlookers stood open-mouthed and wondered how she had escaped the men in white coats.

With weirdos like these in charge of our policies, it is unsurprising that our drugs laws are trapped in the nineteenth century. There are, admittedly, some sane people within our political class. The Liberal Democrats have pledged that if that they would set up a Royal Commission on drugs to investigate the whole question of legalisation. The incomparably wonderful Mo Mowlam saw how our drugs laws worked on the inside when she was in charge of the cabinet office (which sets drugs policies) until the last general election. Now she is out of office, Mo admits that she thinks our whole drugs edifice is entirely unworkable. She now campaigns for the legalisation of all drugs, arguing that this would reduce harm to kids and bring the whole affair out of the hands of criminal drugs gangs and into the legitimate (and taxed) economy. Mo argued for decriminalising cannabis as a first step when she was still in the government, but she was over-ruled by the ultra-conservative Jack Straw.

Of course, some of the opponents of legalising cannabis are not just ignorant like Straw. Many of them deliberately and knowingly twist the truth because they are prejudiced against cannabis-smokers, who they see as clichéd hippies in sandals. The poisonous newspaper the Daily Mail is the worst offender on this front. If you believed what you read in the Mail, you would think that one spliff will turn you into a drooling schizophrenic tramp, or that it would inevitably set you on a short ‘slippery slope’ to junkiedom. They fixate on every bit of bad news about cannabis (indeed, they often just make it up), and fail entirely to account for the fact that Britain’s millions upon millions of cannabis users somehow manage to keep themselves out of the gutter.

The journalists at the Daily Mail have revealed exactly what kind of people they are with their reaction to the Brian Paddick affair. Paddick is a hero for our time, and proof that with jack straw gone as Home Secretary, we can begin to make progress on reforming our drugs laws. Paddick is the senior police officer in charge of the London borough of Lambeth, and he made a tactical decision last year not to waste huge amounts of police time on arresting, booking and imprisoning people found in possession of cannabis. Instead, he said, they should simply confiscate any dope they find and spend the bulk of their time on chasing up real criminals – like, say, thieves and murderers. The policy has been a glowing success – street crime is down, arrests of real criminals are up, and anyone who wants to smoke dope gets on with their lives without being unnecessarily hassled.

The Mail and its allies on the far right couldn’t attack Paddick for his policies, which are overwhelmingly popular with the residents of Lambeth. So they decided to hit him below the belt. Paddick, you see, is gay. Indeed, he is Britain’s most senior gay police officer, who has risen through the (often prejudiced) ranks of the Met because of his phenomenal intelligence and skill. The tabloids began to mock him for this. That fat homophobe Richard Littlejohn, writing in the Sun, called him “the Camp Commander”, and headed an article with “Get Your Trousers on, Paddick.” He made the kind of puerile and vicious innuendos that young gay kids have to put up with in playgrounds across Britain every day.

And then, as the abuse heightened by the day, the Daily Mail managed to dig up one of Paddick’s ex-boyfriends. They waved tens of thousands of pounds under his greedy little nose and, surprise surprise, the boyfriend began to “remember” that Paddick had smoked “hundreds” of spliffs with him, along with other lurid tales. Because of this, Paddick has been suspended from his duties. The brilliant journalist David Aaronovich had compared the case to the Dreyfus affair, when French society persecuted a leading figure because he was a Jew. Make no mistake: the attacks on Paddick and his cannabis policy are gay-bashing in print, and it stinks. We can all learn a lesson from this: remember that every time you buy the Daily Mail, you are supporting rank homophobes. A gay man who buys the Mail is like a black man who buys the Ku Klux Klan weekly.

Although they could get Paddick, his policy remains untouchable. The cannabis experiment continues in Lambeth and it increasingly looks like it will be rolled out across the rest of the UK too. It’s not a perfect policy. It stops short of decriminalisation, never mind legalisation, and innocent dope smokers will still have their cannabis taken from them (often by police who will only go home and smoke it themselves). But it is a massive step forward from the absurd and unwinnable “war on drugs.”