The Political Will to End Drug Prohibition

The Victorian branch of the Australian Democrats have recently released an action plan titled, Australian Democrats Plan To Halve Crime. At it’s core is a proposal to radically change our drug policy and introduce controlled government sales of illicit drugs to registered users. 

Apart from The Australian Sex Party, The Democrats are the only well know political party that support an end to drug prohibition. The Greens were once infamous for their “radical” drug legalisation policy but have since fallen in line with other mainstream political groups. Sensibly, they still support limited decriminalisation of some drug use and 'safe' injecting rooms.

In an effort to highlight the failures of our current drug laws, the Democrats have done what should have been done years ago. They provided a comparison list showing the pros and cons of uncontrolled criminal supply versus controlled government supply.

The democrats action plan lays out some hard truths about drug prohibition. They point out that almost half of all crime is caused by alcohol and illicit drug use and even after decades of prohibition, illicit drugs are freely available to anyone who wants them. Although some will argue that drugs are responsible for more than 50% of crime, the facts put forward by the Democrats are impossible to ignore. The government can no longer push the prohibition issue aside for being too complex as the simplest of facts is now crystal clear - prohibition equates to "Uncontrolled Criminal Supply”.

Uncontrolled Criminal Supply vs. Controlled Government Supply to Registered Users

Prohibition is supported by all major political parties* but causes many problems:

Controlled government supply would radically improve the situation, both reducing drug use and reducing the harm inflicted by drugs:

Uncontrolled Supply: Drugs are supplied to anyone including children and the mentally ill.

Controlled Supply: Heroin, cocaine, marijuana and possibly some amphetamines would be supplied to proven existing users. All drugs would be supplied with extensive 'how to quit' information and offers of counselling and rehabilitation.

Uncontrolled Quantity: Criminals are happy to supply as much as you can pay for.

Controlled Quantity: Drugs would be supplied in strictly limited quantities to reduce overdose risks and help ease users off the drugs.

Active Promotion: Use of drugs by new and existing users is actively encouraged by suppliers. There is a very strong incentive to get new users hooked on drugs.

Active Discouragement: Government supply agencies would continually encourage existing users to quit and would not supply new users. There would be no incentive to get new users hooked on drugs as the user could then just get them from the government.

High Availability: Illicit drugs are available throughout Australia including in high security prisons.

Low Availability: Government supply only to registered users. 

Zero Quality Control: Impurities and the concentration of drugs is left to criminal suppliers.

High Quality Control: Manufacture and distribution of all drugs would be highly regulated. There would be no harmful impurities.

High Crime Rates: Users often need to commit crimes to pay for the drugs.

Low Crime Rates: The price of the drugs would be set so that users would not need to commit crimes to pay for the drugs. Crime rates should reduce by up to 50%.

High Corruption: A vast amount of cash is available to corrupt law enforcement personnel and politicians.

Low Corruption: With the collapse of the illicit drug trade there would be much less corruption 

Needle-stick risk: Used syringes present a risk to the general population.

No needle-stick risk: Only safety syringes would be supplied with injectable drugs.

High Health Risks: Communicable diseases such as HIV, Tuberculosis and Hepatitis can thrive in the drug dependent population if it is closed off from regular health services.

Reduced Health Risks: Communicable diseases that exist in today's drug dependent population would be brought under increased control as users’ lives were stabilised.

Making Drugs Harmful: Drugs such as MDMA which are mixed with toxic chemicals are supplied in a hazardous form because they are illegal.

Making Drugs Safer: Drugs such as MDMA could be supplied to registered 18+ users in a clean, low-dose form.

*The Greens Drugs, Substance Abuse and Addiction Policy supports limited decriminalisation of some drug use and 'safe' injecting rooms. However this would have little effect on the illicit drug trade.

The comparison above from the Democrats is succinct yet revealing. When heroin was banned in Australia in 1956, there were 47 registered addicts. With the introduction of prohibition, that has now grown to over 70,000. Regardless of how tough our drug laws are, drug use continues to increase. Even with all the huge drug busts throughout the decades, drug syndicates remain firmly implanted in our society. The Democrats have taken an issue that is conveniently ignored due it’s complexity and given us a simple but realistic overview. The cold, hard truth for our law makers and politicians is that they now have an easy to understand comparison between existing laws based on drug prohibition and the alternatives. 

Recommendations from the Democrats

Democrats Website

Controlled government supply would radically improve the situation, both reducing drug use and reducing the harm inflicted by drugs:

Controlled Supply

Heroin, cocaine, marijuana and possibly some amphetamines would be supplied to proven existing users. All drugs would be supplied with extensive 'how to quit' information and offers of counselling and rehabilitation.

Controlled Quantity

Drugs would be supplied in strictly limited quantities to reduce overdose risks and help ease users off the drugs.

Active Discouragement

Government supply agencies would continually encourage existing users to quit and would not supply new users. There would be no incentive to get new users hooked on drugs as the user could then just get them from the government.

Low Availability

Government supply only to registered users. 

High Quality Control

Manufacture and distribution of all drugs would be highly regulated. There would be no harmful impurities.

Low Crime Rates

The price of the drugs would be set so that users would not need to commit crimes to pay for the drugs. Crime rates should reduce by up to 50%.

Low Corruption

With the collapse of the illicit drug trade there would be much less corruption 

No needle-stick risk

Only safety syringes would be supplied with injectable drugs.

Reduced Health Risks

Communicable diseases that exist in today's drug dependent population would be brought under increased control as users’ lives were stabilised.

Making Drugs Safer

Drugs such as MDMA could be supplied to registered 18+ users in a clean, low-dose form.

Implementation

Registration of Users: Users would be able to buy their drugs from the government after proving they were already addicted. Eligibility and other details of the registration and supply process would be developed by a panel of medical and addiction recovery professionals.

Delivery

A public inquiry involving medical and addiction recovery professionals would determine the safest and most cost effective means to source, deliver and administer each type of prescribed drug.

Early Intervention

We support early intervention programs, especially those that target disadvantaged families. 

Fallout from Drug Prohibition

Let’s look at drug prohibition around the world and analyse how successful it really it. Below is a description from Rod Hamilton on how prohibition has failed.

Drugs and humankind have peacefully co-existed for millions of years... since before we are human, as animals too enjoy drugs.

Anyone can learn history to realise that prohibition and violent punishment and discrimination of drug users started when, after thousands of years of peaceful drug taking, violent prohibitionists decided to forcibly stop people from buying, selling and possessing drugs. Of course, the consequences are exactly the same as in all other countries were violent prohibition has been applied: aggravating to unheard extremes a hypothetical evil, justifying the destruction and plundering of countless persons, promoting the ill-gotten wealth of corrupt inquisitors, and creating a prosperous black market for all the forbidden items

Some prohibitionists still have the drivel to insist that all this violence has nothing to do with prohibition, that it is your drug consumption what is causing prohibition enforcers to violently steal and kill thousands of peaceful drug users and producers, while at the same time giving the control of dangerous drugs to violent criminals which are in most cases indistinguishable from prohibition enforcers. This is, obviously, not true, as drug consumption used to take place peacefully long before violent prohibition was forced on us and prohibitionists started violently kidnapping (some) drugs users, sellers and producers of (some) drugs, with the most terrible consequences:

In India, a huge opium production there during the nineteenth century did no give rise to anything that could be called "abuse", and in 1981, not a single case of heroin addiction was reported there. But in 1985, when the county accepted a harsh repressive legislation to comply with international directives, the population began to substitute poppy juice for heroin, and in 1988, the number of Indian heroin addicts, mostly young, was estimated to be one million. Its neighbour Pakistan, with a much smaller population, had double that amount, according to the health minister of the Benazir Bhutto government, whereas a decade earlier the phenomenon had been largely unknown.

In Malaysia, where the death penalty was invariably applied to anyone possessing more than fifteen grams of heroin, the government estimated in 1986 that there were 110,000 heroin addicts, exceptional in a country with a population of ten million. The same thing occurred in Thailand, were the penalty was death or a life sentence but there were about half a million junkies. The principal result of these draconian laws was to create a monopoly of the traffic concentrated in a few hands, well infiltrated into institutions, and excluding competition. Something similar was true in Latin America, where even though legislation drifted into harshness, cocaine production in 1991 was a million kilos, something inconceivable twenty years before, and great land extensions were assigned to poppy cultivation.

In Europe, where illicit drug problems were largely unknown until the seventies, a persecution initially directed against psychedelics ended up being identified as a battle against the Enemy Within, American style, creating conditions favourable for organized bands around the hashish, heroin, and cocaine traffic. Starting at the end of the eighties, this traffic began to include MDMA and other design analogues. Criminality related to drugs had passed from being a negligible chapter to one encompassing three-fourths of all convictions, saturating prisons catastrophically, multiplying by a factor of a thousand the involuntary deaths from fatal intoxication, and filling the streets with sellers and informants, paid with a percentage of what they turned in, whose intervention adulterated the product and at the same time assured its ubiquitous presence. News about substances that "disappeared" or "were reduced" after confiscation suggested that there was an informal tax, destined to support that dense layer of double agents, and that everything confiscated tended to en up, in whole or in part, in the black market.

In the early 19th century, when opium smoking was gaining popularity in China, the Emperor took counsel from his mandarins. One party argued for taxation and regulation, the other for prohibition. The prohibitionists won, with the result that the profitability on opium sales to China rose over 1000%. The consequence was an unparalleled wave of smuggling, the penetration of opium to every corner of China, a rate of addiction never seen before or after, and ultimately the collapse of the Manchu dynasty into civil war, invasion and famine. Had the Emperor chosen the pragmatic choice of regulation and control, the use of opium in China would never have followed the course it did.

Here in Britain we seem determined to repeat the same mistakes. The adoption of strictly prohibitionist policies in the 1980's resulted in an unprecedented explosion in drug use, especially heroin, across Britain. Eventually in the 1990's it was recognised these policies were making the situation worse, and pragmatic harm reduction approaches were developed. Now it seems the Coalition wishes to abandon harm reduction and return to a strict abstinence only prohibitionist position. Its time we woke up and realised that drug prohibition is an abject failure, which affects all members of society, whether you use drugs or not. The answer is not tougher laws, or more police, but a regulated supply of drugs to those who need/want them, combined with highly visible public health education to prevent another generation from experimenting.

Although the majority of the governments generally lined up with the intransigent position favoured by the United States, the example of liberal Holland was embarrassing because of the results if produces. The Dutch actually had the highest rates of illicit drug consumption but the lowest rates of fatal intoxication and related criminality, as well as the least correlation (6 percent) between the use of heroin and AIDS, when by comparison that correlation exceeded 60 percent in France and Spain. Dutch authorities explained their country's privileged position by the population's high awareness (instead of ignorance- of pharmacology), by the absence of counterproductive mythologies or alarmist reactions that distort the real effects of drugs, and by the availability of drugs though noncriminal routes. At the beginning of the nineties, several Swiss cantons adopted this position as well, even testing the free distribution of heroin to anyone who requested it, and making certain zones available for its consumption.

Take a leaf from the Swiss. They give heroin to addicts in government clinics. Young people don’t want to try heroin, as they can visibly see its for sick messed up people queuing at some boring clinic; rather than falling for the fake glamour created by harsh prohibition combined with the latest celebrity drug scandal.

The reasons given by law, social science, medicine, and history against prohibition have not changed in the last forty years, when Szasz, Becker, and Schnur, among others, diagnosed its probable route. Within strictly scientific circles, dissidence was (and continues to be) as unanimous as support for it appears to exist among political and religious leaders.

Drugs have always been around, and they will certainly ever remain. To pretend that both users and non-users will be better protected because some of them are impure, very expensive and sold by criminals (who are, by the way, indistinguishable from undercover police and plain businessmen) is simply ridiculous, and yet more so when the street supply grows year after year.

--Rod Hamilton

Consequences of Prohibition

Police Corruption, Glamorisation of Criminality, Government Corruption, Civil Conflict, Drug Trade Funding Terrorists, Increased Illegal Gun Prevalence, Police/Suspect Altercations, Property Crime, Turf Wars, Drug Trade in Schools, Open Air Markets, Police-Community Tensions, Political Instability, Environmental Harm, Deforestation, Meth Labs, Futile Pursuits, Harm Intensification, Disease, Increased Drug Potency, Overdoses, Poisoned Drug Supply, Popularisation of Worse Drugs etc.

If You Support Prohibition...

I found this spiel from Malcolm Kyle(username: malcolmkyle) in the comments section on dozens of websites. It’s an awesome statement although it’s wrongly been attributed to Judge Alfred J. Talley who opposed alcohol prohibition back in 1926. Despite the misrepresentation, it’s still a great analogy of who supports prohibition.

If you support prohibition then you've helped trigger the worst crime wave in history, raising gang warfare to a level not seen since the days of alcohol bootlegging.

If you support prohibition you've a helped create a black market with massive incentives to hook both adults and children alike.

If you support prohibition you've helped to make these dangerous substances available in schools and prisons.

If you support prohibition you've helped put previously unknown and contaminated drugs on the streets.

If you support prohibition you've helped to escalate Murder, Theft, Muggings and Burglaries.

If you support prohibition you've helped to divert scarce law-enforcement resources away from protecting your fellow citizens from the ever escalating violence against their person or property.

If you support prohibition you've helped to prevent the sick and dying from obtaining safe and effective medication.

If you support prohibition you've helped remove many important civil liberties from those citizens you falsely claim to represent.

If you support prohibition you've helped create the prison-for-profit synergy with drug lords.

If you support prohibition you've helped escalate the number of people on welfare who can't find employment due to their felony status.

If you support prohibition you're responsible for the horrific racial disparities which have breed generations of incarcerated and disenfranchised Afro Americans.

If you support prohibition you've helped evolve local gangs into transnational enterprises with intricate power structures that reach into every corner of society, controlling vast swaths of territory with significant social and military resources at their disposal.

If you support prohibition you're promoting a policy which kills our children, endangers our troops, counteracts our foreign policy and reduces much of the developing world to anarchy.

If you support prohibition then you are guilty of turning the federal, state and local governments into a gargantuan organized crime syndicate, interested only in protecting it's own corrupt interests. -- The very acts for which we initially created governments to protect us from, have become institutionalized. Thanks to prohibition, government now provides 'services' at the barrel of a gun.

Neurotics build castles in the sky, psychotics live in them; the concept of a "Drug-Free Society" is a neurotic fantasy and Prohibition's ills are a product of this psychotic delusion.

Prohibition is nothing less than a grotesque dystopian nightmare; if you support it you must be either ignorant, stupid, brainwashed, corrupt or criminally insane.

If you support prohibition then prepare yourself for even more death, corruption, sickness, imprisonment, unemployment, foreclosed homes, and the complete loss of the rule of law and the Bill of Rights.

Drug prohibition has now been recognised as a complete failure by many leading experts, health professionals, police chiefs, social workers, economists and academics. It is no longer acceptable for governments to overlook the carnage caused by prohibition especially any nation that considers itself a modern, advanced society. Resorting to a "War on Drugs" mentality to determine drug policy just doesn’t cut it anymore in this age of science, research and pragmatism. Those in the political spectrum must now enter the 21st century and leave behind the silly rhetoric that seems to dominate so many important issues. Ridiculing their political opposition for recommending robust and evidence based drug policies might win the vote of an ignorant public but science and research will always surface as the clear winner in any rational debate. 

The issue of drugs touches everyone eventually and the Democrats know this. Add to this the fact that global attitudes towards drugs are changing rapidly and the idea of ending prohibition doesn’t seem as daft like when the Greens first introduced their once radical policies. But the Democrats have done something unique this time. They have provided a simple but concise comparison list that shows the current failures besides the workable alternatives. It’s simple, accurate and damning of the current policies that the major parties support so vehemently. Most of all though, it’s embarrassing.

Australian Democrats Victoria Call For An End To Prohibition

Democrats Website

December 2010

It’s time for a new tactic in the war on drugs.

After decades of prohibition anyone who wants illicit drugs can still easily get them. Attempted prohibition really means Uncontrolled Criminal Supply. 

We propose a new approach based on Controlled Government Supply. The government would take control of the drug trade by supplying selected, clean, uncontaminated drugs to registered users while providing treatment programs to get the registered users off the drugs forever.

As a part of this approach Australia would join the list of countries using Prescribed Heroin. They are: Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Canada (trials) and Belgium (trials).

Prohibition has clearly failed and yet it is still supported by all major Australian political parties*. Drugs are readily available, even in high security prisons, and supplied to anyone including children and the mentally ill. There is a very strong incentive for suppliers to get new users hooked on drugs and they are happy to sell as much as users can pay for. 

Users often need to commit crimes to support their addiction. In fact, according to the government's recent National Drug Strategy study, almost half of all crime is caused by alcohol and illicit drug use. Also, a vast amount of cash is available to corrupt law enforcement personnel and politicians. 

Zero quality control means that the level of impurities and the concentration of drugs is left to criminal suppliers. Used syringes present a danger to the general population and for users there is a high risk of contracting communicable diseases. Diseases such as HIV, Tuberculosis and Hepatitis thrive in the drug dependent population because the stigma and illegality attached to drug addiction tend to close affected people off from regular health services. 

Controlled government supply would reduce drug use and minimise the harm inflicted by drugs. Heroin, cocaine, marijuana and possibly some amphetamines would be supplied to proven existing users. All drugs would be supplied with extensive 'how to quit' information and offers of counselling and rehabilitation.

Drugs would be supplied in strictly limited quantities to reduce overdose risks and help ease users off the drugs. Government supply agencies would continually encourage existing users to quit and would not supply new users. Illicit suppliers would have no incentive to get new users hooked because the user could then just get their drugs from the government. 

Manufacture and distribution of all drugs would be highly regulated. There would be no harmful impurities. The price would be set so that users would not need to resort to crime. Crime rates should reduce by up to 50%. With the collapse of the illicit drug trade there would be much less corruption. There would be no needle-stick risk because only safety syringes would be supplied with injectable drugs. Communicable diseases that exist in today's drug dependent population would be brought under increased control as users’ lives were stabilised. 

Users would be able to obtain their drugs from the government after proving they were already addicted. Eligibility and other details of the registration and supply process would be developed by a panel of medical and addiction recovery professionals.

A public inquiry involving medical and addiction recovery professionals would determine the safest and most cost effective means to source, deliver and administer each type of prescribed drug.

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