Vernon Coleman : The Drugs Myth
vernoncoleman.comContents
1 We are all addicts
2 Why prohibition fails
3 Toxic stress
4 Heroin, cocaine, cannabis and LSD
5 Legal drugs and their dangers
6 The drugs war
7 The only way ahead
1. We are all addicts
The problem in perspective. We are all addicts. Whenever a drug user is taken to court the chances are high that the people involved in the prosecution the judges and the police officers will be using and addicted to more dangerous substances than the defendant in the dock.
Have you ever drunk a cup of coffee to help yourself wake up in the morning? Have you ever made yourself a cup of tea when you have been feeling physically or mentally tired? Have you ever been so bored, lonely or fed up that you have eaten a bar of chocolate or a biscuit when you knew that you were not hungry? Have you ever taken a sleeping tablet to help you get a good night's rest? Have you ever taken a pill to help calm your nerves prior to an aeroplane flight, a trip to the dentist or an important social event? Have you ever smoked a cigarette or a cigar? Have you ever drunk a glass of sherry, champagne, beer or wine?
If you have answered 'yes' to any of those questions and of course you have! then you know what it is like to need to use a chemical to help you put up with or overcome your daily problems or to alter your mood. If you use any of the substances I have mentioned above on a regular basis, then you are probably an addict. Alcohol, tobacco and caffeine are much more addictive and hazardous to your health than some illegal substances. The surprising but inescapable truth is that most people are addicted to something.
Drug use is accepted as normal in modern society. Governments subsidize the production of tobacco and take a substantial profit on the sale of tobacco and alcohol. Many religious ceremonies involve the use of alcohol. Respectable housewives organize coffee mornings and share pots of tea together. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that drug abuse is not just commonplace but is the biggest epidemic of the twentieth century and by far the most important cause of illness and death in the western world.
Everyone does it: I doubt if there is a policeman, judge or politician anywhere in the world who has not used drugs at least once in his or her life. Most of those who oppose the use of drugs such as cocaine, heroin and cannabis are probably hooked on drugs which are far more dangerous than most illegal substances.
The fact that the use of some drugs is regarded as legal while the use of others is deemed illegal complicates the subject of drug abuse enormously. There is no logic in the laws which decide which substances are legal and which are illegal. Many of the world's most dangerous substances are perfectly legal while some relatively innocuous substances are illegal. Substances such as alcohol which are legal in one country will be illegal in another. Drugs are put into 'legal' or 'illegal' categories through an illogical, bizarre, irrational and entirely arbitrary selection system which depends more upon personal preferences, prejudices and commercial expediency than upon rational thought. The result is that in any court where an individual is being tried for possessing or using an illegal drug, the chances are high that the majority of those responsible for ensuring that the law is applied will be addicted to substances which are far more dangerous than the substance which has been used by the defendant.
Putting drugs into 'legal' and 'illegal' categories has not made much difference to the number of people prepared to try them. Laws which are patently abused or based on weak foundations get very little respect and the laws which are designed to limit drug use get about as much respect as the laws which govern the speed of motor cars on motorways. A recent survey in America showed that 59 per cent of American doctors have used illegal mood altering drugs while 77 per cent of medical students have used them. Around a third of medically qualified Americans use mood altering drugs regularly. Doctors are cutting down their consumption of tobacco which they recognize as being extremely dangerous but they are not cutting down their use of illegal drugs which they consider to be less harmful.
And other citizens seem to agree with them. Experts estimate that an astonishing twenty million Americans use marijuana regularly while seventeen million have experimented with cocaine and half a million regularly use heroin. A few years ago a survey by the Ladies' Home journal showed that a third of American women under the age of twenty five years old had taken cocaine. In 1962 American statistics showed that only four per cent of people between the ages of eighteen and twenty five had smoked marijuana. Twenty years later, after a programme of suppression that had cost billions of dollars, sixty four per cent of people in the same age group had tried it. Drug prices have consistently fallen, despite attempts to reduce the quantities available, and the purity of illegal drugs goes up as the price comes down.
In 1978 a White House presidential adviser on drugs reported that one in nine high school seniors were using so much marijuana every day that they were 'stoned' or under its influence from the time they got up in the morning until they went to bed at night. In the United Kingdom the figures are more vague. The official figures suggest that around 50,000 people are addicted to heroin and cocaine but officials suggest that the real figure is probably ten times as high. It is impossible to obtain accurate figures because people who use illegal drugs do not usually talk openly about their 'crimes'. That is another problem: drugs that are illegal cannot be regulated and the extent of their use cannot possibly be estimated accurately. All around the world illegally obtained drugs are being used by a constantly growing number of people most of whom would probably describe themselves as normal and law abiding.
Drug smuggling is now the biggest and most profitable industry in the world. According to The Economist cocaine is the most profitable article of trade in the world. In California the cash value of the cannabis crop is said to be greater than the value of the grape crop supposedly the state's leading agricultural product. The world's drug business is estimated (by a United States senate subcommittee) to be worth over $500 billion a year with $475 billion tax free profits. Just 'laundering' that amount of money is very big business and many of the world's most apparently respectable banks are involved. There are drug dealers whose annual earnings exceed those of many countries. When Johnny Carson told an Oscar presentation audience that 'The biggest moneymaker in Hollywood last year was Colombia. Not the studio the country', he probably was not far from the truth. Drugs are so light and so easily transportable that they are now preferred to diamonds as an international currency. In 1978 when thousands of Iranians fled their country during the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution, many took their wealth with them as heroin because it was lighter than the equivalent in currency.
Millions of people are being turned into criminals by a series of inexplicable laws which are also threatening our civil liberties and encouraging violence on a hitherto unimagined scale. Despite strenuous and expensive efforts to uphold these laws the world's law enforcement agencies have failed, are failing and will clearly continue to fail. They are failing partly because the demand for drugs has always been there. Laws outlawing drug use are as doomed as laws outlawing prostitution. They are also failing partly because the laws which exist are widely disliked. (Laws which outlaw drug use are as unpopular and as widely disregarded as the laws which exist supposedly to control the speed of motor cars on the roads). And they are failing because they are overtly hypocritical and uniquely ill thought out. People know that tobacco is more dangerous than marijuana and so they have no respect at all for a law which flouts common-sense.
Laws which prohibit the purchase, possession or use of drugs do not, it seems, have very much influence on the use of those drugs but they do turn the people who use them into criminals, thereby creating a whole range of new problems. The credibility of the law is damaged and the number of people with no respect for the law is increased. Irrational laws which allow the free sale of some dangerous drugs and ban others (far less dangerous) drugs push millions of otherwise law abiding citizens into close contact with criminals, make them vulnerable to blackmail and expose them to other forms of crime. Thousands of serious crimes are committed by individuals who want (or need) the money to pay for extremely expensive illegal drugs. It is estimated that Britain's addicts steal at least £20 million worth of goods a day to pay for the drugs they buy. The vast untaxed profits made by those who produce, import and market illegal drugs have encouraged new levels of violence in the underworld and have helped create and sustain a remarkable series of super-rich criminal fraternities.
Do not assume by what you have read that I am in favour of drug use or in sympathy with drug abuse. I recognize that drug addiction is now a major world-wide problem. Several years ago in my book Addicts and Addictions I described drug addiction as 'the twentieth-century plague' and I think the description is still valid. There are addicts in every country in the world. For countless decades addictions have wrecked homes, destroyed careers and ruined lives in a hundred different ways. Back in 1970 more Americans were evacuated from Vietnam for drug-related reasons than for war injuries. In 1978 Lester Wolff, then chairman of the United States House of Representatives Select Narcotics Abuse and Control Committee, estimated that ten to twenty per cent of the two hundred thousand troops America had in Europe were taking 'hard' narcotics regularly. This was, he admitted. equivalent to having almost two divisions using drugs. By the mid 1980s a Department of Defense survey showed that 31.4 per cent of American servicemen in Europe were using drugs such as cannabis. cocaine and LSD and one in ten admitted to working under the influence of drugs. There have been many cases of drug abuse aboard nuclear submarines and at nuclear bases.
The cost of drug abuse is usually regarded as consisting of treating addicts and policing airports and coastal areas. But it is a much bigger problem than that. The total cost of drug use and abuse is almost impossible to quantify. During the 1980s Roger Smith, chairman of General Motors, reported that absenteeism, largely due to drug and alcohol abuse, cost his company one billion dollars a year. The American Department of Health and Human Services has estimated that drug use in factories and offices costs America at least twenty-five billion dollars a year.
Despite all the money and effort put into controlling drug abuse - most of it into more and more pieces of legislation and increasingly sophisticated police forces - the problem is getting worse.
According to Dr Williarn Pollin, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the United States, more than one quarter of all deaths in America are premature and caused by addiction. But it is legal drugs which cause the vast majority of the deaths. In Britain tobacco kills 100,000 people a year while there are 700.000 alcohol addicts and 700,000 families struggling to cope with the problems alcohol addiction produces. There must surely be something fundamentally wrong with our present system. In America approximately 100.000,000 people drink alcohol and about 60,000,000 smoke tobacco - both legal substances. The combined death rate for these two drugs is around 500,000 people a year. In the developed world the average adult spends around $325 a year on tobacco and $750 a year on alcohol; cigarette smokers kill thousands through their side stream smoke; drunken car drivers kill hundreds of thousands. And yet approximately 20,000,000 Americans use cannabis ~ which is illegal - but no one has yet died from it. In America around 500.000 people use heroin regularly and another 500. 000 use cocaine every day but the total number of deaths attributed to all illegal drugs is around 3,500 a year - and most of those deaths are a consequence of the fact that the drugs involved are provided illegally. are often contaminated and are of doubtful and variable purity. The startling truth is that the illegal drugs of addiction are not as dangerous as the legal drugs of addiction.
The cruellest irony of all is. perhaps, the fact that drug dependence and drug injury are now the commonest doctor induced diseases and both are among the commonest of all diseases. At any one time, six out of ten people will be taking a drug of some kind and half of those drugs will be have been prescribed by a doctor. If all those drugs were essential and safe the figures would not be so worrying. But four out of every ten people who take prescribed drugs suffer severe or noticeable side effects and many end up needing medical treatment for problems produced by the drugs they have been given. Every year in Britain 200,000 people are admitted to hospital because of a drugs overdose of some kind and 4,000 of them will die. In other words more people in Britain are killed by prescribed drugs than are killed by illegal drugs in America and Britain together. Amazingly, one in every six people in hospital are there because they have suffered side effects from treatment they have been given. It is, it seems, doctors as much as patients who are addicted to drugs (though it is, of course, patients who end up suffering the physical and mental agonies of that addiction).
In Britain, where doctors get most of their training and information about drugs from drug companies, eight out of ten consultations end with the doctor writing out a prescription. Doctors sometimes claim that this happens because patients expect a prescription (in much the same way that a child visiting Father Christmas in a store grotto expects to be given a present) but this simply is not true. Millions of the patients who are given a prescription did not want to be given drugs and as many as one in seven fail to have their prescriptions dispensed.
Of all the problems produced by the drugs that doctors prescribe, drug addiction is undoubtedly one of the most troublesome. And although doctors have been instrumental in building up the world's heroin and morphine addiction problems, it is with the so-called 'minor' tranquillizers and sedatives that doctors have done most damage. At the start of the twentieth century doctors regularly prescribed bromide for nervous or anxious patients. Thousands became addicted. During the middle part of the century bromide was replaced by the barbiturates which were regarded as much safer and less likely to produce dependence of any kind. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s when the dangers associated with the barbiturates had become widely known, a newly discovered group of drugs - the benzodiazepines - were introduced as safe, effective and non addictive alternatives for patients who needed help to relax or to get to sleep. Within a very short space of time thousands of doctors were prescribing vast quantities of the benzodiazepines for millions of patients and by the late 1980s virtually every developed country in the world had a major benzodiazepine addiction problem. For the third time in less than a century doctors and the drug industry had successfully created and promoted drug addiction.
With all addictions the size of the problem is increased dramatically by the fact that the majority of addicts cause enormous pain and heartache to those around them. Each individual case of addiction acts like a small explosion, involving and destroying wives, husbands, parents, children, brothers, sisters, friends, neighbours, employers and workmates. No one knows how many lives have been ruined by drug use, abuse or addiction but the total number of lives affected must be at least five times as big when those whose lives are indirectly affected are included. How many of us can say that our lives have never been touched by another's addiction? Addicts are squeezed between those selling drugs (aggressive and threatening when the drugs are illegal and subtle, manipulative and insidious when the drugs are legal); the punitive legal system and the harassed, unimaginative and over-pressured medical profession. Friends and relatives are frequently left to try to pick up the pieces of a shattered life themselves and, fired by a mixture of love, guilt, fear and compassion, are left to struggle to deal with social, mental, emotional, spiritual and physical demands for which they have no training and no preparation.
Although drug addiction is now recognized as a major international problem, many people still have a narrow view of what is a 'drug' and what makes an 'addict'. People who happily drink themselves silly every Saturday night or who smoke sixty cigarettes a day look down their noses at individuals who use cocaine or heroin and imagine that because one type of addiction is legal and another is illegal there must be some real difference between the severity of the two. The truth is, of course, that the only differences are social and legal. The alcohol addict is just as much a victim as the heroin addict and is, indeed, almost certainly more at risk of suffering long-term physiological damage. Social and environmental circumstances and many factors outside individual control (including luck or a lack of it) determine the nature of an individual's addiction.
Sadly and perversely, our attitudes and prejudices are determined by our circumstances, social position, personal experiences, family and, most of all, by our local laws and customs. In the Andes a hill worker will chew coca leaves; in Jamaica a labourer will depend upon cannabis; in New York, London and Sydney a labourer will rely on beer to get him through the day whereas an officer worker will ease away tensions with a glass or two of vodka or gin. The influence of our laws on our habits is immense and I have no doubt that by making drugs such as heroin, cocaine and marijuana illegal and allowing drugs such as tobacco and alcohol to remain legal the authorities in many countries have helped to contribute to the size of their drug addiction problems. Some folk fear cocaine and heroin because they (wrongly) assume that their very illegality proves that these drugs are dangerous. But they assume that drugs such as alcohol and tobacco which are legal cannot possibly be all that bad. The result is that our bizarre and irrational legislation is responsible for millions of premature deaths. Patterns of drug use - and abuse - are embedded deep in our culture and there is no readily accepted, legally approved drug available anywhere in the world that is not now, has not been in the past, or is not likely to be in the future, the subject of a vigorous campaign of suppression in another culture.
A number of useless and purely pedantic arguments have confused the picture even more and have contributed to the size of our current problem by encouraging a false sense of security among politicians, doctors and drug users. There have, for example, been attempts to divide drugs into 'hard' and 'soft' categories. Drugs such as heroin and cocaine are usually put into the first group whereas drugs such as the benzodiazepines inevitably find themselves in the second group. This sort of classification has no basis in science, for the benzodiazepine tranquillizers are much more dangerous and much more addictive than the so called 'hard' drugs.
There have also been numerous attempts made to differentiate between 'dependence', 'habituation' and 'addiction'. For many years, for example, the amphetamines were regarded as producing nothing more than a mild habituation. It was argued that they could not possibly be considered 'addictive' and the suggestion was that there was a major difference between habituation (a self-directed enthusiasm for a drug) and addiction or dependency (a physiologically based need to keep taking a drug). By the time doctors had realized that the amphetamines are, in fact, among the most addictive of all drugs it was too late: they had been widely over-prescribed and many hundreds of thousands of users had become dangerously and in some cases irreversibly addicted. Today, we know that it is in practical terms quite impossible to differentiate between psychological addiction and physical addiction; both are serious and potentially destructive.
Another major error made by many of those who have written about addiction has been to assume that it is possible to define a particular drug's addictive qualities in a very specific way. In practice this has added to the confusion because it is not solely the pharmacological properties of a drug that make it addictive; it is a combination of the drug's pharmacological qualities and the circumstances in which a person finds and uses the drug. You only have to look at the different effects that alcohol can have on different people to see the truth of this.
And finally the whole picture has been blurred even further by the fact that modern pharmacists have succeeded in producing an almost infinite variety of refinements on original products. Many of these refined products have completely different properties to the originals. Heroin is obtained from opium but is considerably more powerful. Cocaine is derived from the coca leaf but the two substances have very different qualities. By and large the more modern variations are far more powerful and potentially dangerous than the natural originals.
However far back in history you go, there is always evidence to show that whenever times were hard or difficult men and women tried to forget their personal agonies and overcame their fears and anxieties by using drugs. Drug use - and drug abuse - is not a new phenomenon. But it is becoming a bigger problem. And there are several reasons for this.
First, as I have already explained, modern pharmacological compounds are infinitely more complex and more dangerous than original, natural products. We have access to far more potentially addictive products than any other people in history. Today the individual under pressure can choose between heavily promoted and cleverly marketed legal drugs such as tobacco, alcohol, caffeine and tranquillizers and widely available, seemingly glamorous illegal products such as cocaine, heroin and cannabis. People have always used substances such as leaves, fermented grapes, plant juices and hallucinogenic fungi to enliven or calm their lives but never before have there been so many people refining, preparing, manufacturing, distributing and promoting products designed to help us escape from our own world.
Our ability to move around the world in hours instead of months has meant that we now have the opportunity to share habits and customs with different races. We frequently find ourselves in possession of drugs for which we have no historical cultural uses. Every country has its own accepted drugs of addiction (often used for stimulating thought or conversation or for helping people to work or to relax) but international travel has given us open access to a lending library of psychoactive substances which we don't understand or know how to use properly. For centuries the natives of Peru used coca leaves and learned how best to use them. Then scientists from the west took the leaves into their laboratories and produced cocaine. The Peruvians are now using cocaine. We in turn have introduced much of the world to the dangers of the cigarette (the most efficient way of using tobacco to cause cancer) and refined alcohol (the quickest way to rot your liver).
Second, attempts to control drug use by introducing a web of laws have backfired. Many of today's problems have been created by our attempts to outlaw drug use.
Third, we have changed our world enormously in the last century or so in a thousand different ways. Agriculture, industry, communications, transport and welfare - all have changed. In many countries the sanctity of the family has been abolished. Individual pressures in the 'developed' world are quite different today to the pressures which existed a generation ago. Most of us have fewer fundamental fears (What will we eat?', 'How will we keep warm?') than our ancestors had but we are exposed to far more frustrations and far more pressures which are totally outside our control. Most importantly, the changes have taken place at such a rapid rate that we simply have not been able to evolve fast enough. As a result we have acquired an infinitely varied number of physical and mental problems produced by our responses to the stresses created by these developments.
At the same time that international travel has made it easy for us to exchange drug use with other countries, the variations in local laws and customs have created great confusion and bitterness between many populations. We in the west complain angrily about farmers in South America or the Middle East growing opium poppies or coca bushes and we insist that they destroy their natural, long established crops to protect our citizens from the refined products which our scientists will make out of those simple, natural and relatively harmless substances. At the same time we use drugs such as alcohol which they abhor, condemn and fear. We are so arrogant that when we are told that we must not take our alcohol into their countries we regard them as interfering and we treat their laws with contempt, making no secret of the fact that we think them rather backward and exceptionally repressive.
As a community our attempts to deal with drug addiction have been unsympathetic, ineffective and largely counterproductive. Legislation has been introduced to outlaw those types of addiction which are not protected by powerful business interests, while those drugs which are protected by industry remain freely available and attempts to control their availability or promotion are regarded as unacceptably repressive in a free society. We describe those who use legal drugs as 'sick' and 'in need of help' but those individuals who are caught using illegal drugs get very little sympathy or help. The standard theory seems to be that if an addict is caught he or she must be punished and put in prison. We ignore the fact that this 'remedy' doesn't work because as soon as the addict is released from prison he goes straight back to his old surroundings. The forces and pressures which led him into drug addiction won't have changed (indeed, being in prison has probably made things worse) so his responses to the world won't have changed either. Nothing will have been done to change his self-image, motivation or lifestyle. He picks up his bad habits again not because he has a continuing and irresistible physical need but through social circumstances. Most heroin addicts are not hooked on heroin but they are irretrievably bound to the heroin lifestyle. Sending addicts to prison simply ensures that the problem will continue.
Ever since humans first discovered ways to 'escape' from their misery by the use of drugs, men and women have used artificial stimulants and psychoactive drugs to improve or hide the way they feel. Drug addiction is commoner today than it has ever been. We have spent a fortune trying to suppress drug use. But drug addiction is a plague which is growing faster than at any previous time. Those who sell drugs are richer than ever and drug law enforcement has failed miserably. Drug treatment programmes fail and seem doomed to continue to fail. What all the legislators and politicians and doctors seem to forget is that it is our nature to escape from unhappiness when we can. Attempts to prevent or penalize drug use are all doomed to failure.
When I first supported the idea of the decriminalization of drugs in 1986, numerous interviewers and reviewers seemed to have difficulty in realizing that I was being serious. Today, the idea has attracted a considerable amount of support. But many of those who opposed decriminalization still refuse even to talk about the idea. Many of those who oppose drug use seem to me to be able to combine hysteria and remarkable naivety with their demands for more legislation, not less. Writing in The Economist recently, a worried American citizen argued that 'The solution is a tough-minded policy that identifies and punishes drug use in five areas: at school, behind the wheels of vehicles, for parolees and probationers and for teenagers at home. Such a wide policy of zero tolerance can be enforced only by widespread use of urine testing. When this new technology is employed, the demand for drugs will wane, the gangsters will drop drug sales, and the epidemic will end.' Others worry that any move towards decriminalization will be seen as being 'soft' on crime. Politicians find such an approach difficult to accept, even though their much loved out-and-out war on drug use has clearly failed to have any effect at all.
When an advisory committee suggested in 1968 that Britain should consider changing the law on marijuana, the then Home Secretary James Callaghan said that 'to reduce the penalties for possession, sale or supply of cannabis would be bound to lead people to think that the government takes a less serious view of the effect of drug taking.' In 1972 Richard Nixon set up the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse in America. The commission recommended the decriminalization of marijuana but Nixon had apparently already rejected the recommendation before the commission had finished its deliberations. When in 1983 it got wind of suggestions that a more liberal attitude towards drug use might prove profitable the United Nations Narcotics Control Board stated that 'determination may sometimes be giving way to permissiveness. To adopt such an attitude would be retrogressive.'
Those who oppose a more liberal approach invariably seem to confuse decriminalization with legalization (the former suggests merely an absence of legal control whereas the latter suggests approval) and to assume that those who support a more liberal approach must be permissive. In fact, of course, decriminalization is usually offered simply as a logical and sane method of controlling and limiting drug abuse more efficiently and humanely. Sometimes those who oppose a more liberal approach do so because they seem genuinely frightened (frequently claiming that drug addicts are a major source of crime and infection in our society and seemingly convinced that anyone who takes one puff on a marijuana cigarette will inevitably end up turning into a super-sex-crazed-child-molesting-old-lady-mugging-bank-robbing-lunatic) while sometimes there is an undeniably racist element in scare propaganda.
When American reporter P. J. O'Rourke suggested legalizing drugs to a policeman, the law enforcement officer replied: 'We're talking scum here. Air should be illegal if they breathe it'. According to The Times in London, the Guardian Angels' method of dealing with drug offenders in America is 'to raid a house, beat up the addicts and destroy all drugs and equipment; then to empty their pockets and burn their money. It works and costs nothing'.
Even today many voices of the establishment find the mere thought of decriminalization too much to bear. just look at the attitudes expressed by four of Britain's leading national newspapers in 1989 after I produced a pamphlet entitled Drugs: The argument for decriminalization. The Observer described suggestions of legalizing drugs as 'nonsense of a pernicious kind'; The Times said that 'Drugs are an evil to be fought, not to be accommodated'; The Guardian predicted that 'legalizing the trade would only increase addiction', and The Daily Telegraph argued pompously that 'a government which gratuitously added one more health risk in order to ease its task would forfeit public respect'. Under continuing pressure from public opinion, politicians all over the western world continue to call for more funds and more resources to fight the drug 'war'.
Maybe our politicians would do better to look at the reasons why people take drugs rather than putting all their efforts into trying to deal with what is a consequence of society's problems rather than a primary problem in itself We live in a strange society. Our politicians and legislators attack drug use and then go home and drink themselves silly. They give out pompous and patronizing advice and ignore the real problems. In the summer of 1983 the British government issued a press release designed to discourage glue sniffing. The release said: 'Don't do it. It's just not worth it'. The politicians seem to have ignored the fact that when twelve-year-old children are so miserable and lonely and empty of hope and so full of despair that they spend their free hours huddled underneath canal bridges trying to blow their minds and escape the real world by sniffing glue out of old crisp bags, there is something drastically wrong - and an appeal to 'pull up your socks and be a sensible fellow' may not be the sort of help that is needed.
2 Why prohibition fails
History shows that drug use is an old-established method of dealing with unpleasant stresses and with anxieties of all kinds.
Men and women have always used drugs to enable them to escape from their day-to-day anxieties and worries, to enable them to find peace and temporary contentment, to excite and stimulate themselves when they feel bored, to give themselves energy when they feel tired and to allow themselves to experience and explore new worlds.
Primitive peoples chewed nuts and leaves and ate mushrooms to give themselves energy; the priests of ancient civilizations used herbs to enable them to influence the moods of their congregations and to enter mystical states in which they could talk to the Gods; opium was first used seven thousand years ago; alcohol was first brewed and sold five thousand years ago. The use of drugs to change perceptions is older than industry. older than the law, older than medicine and older than farming. In ancient caves archaeologists have discovered evidence to show that stone age people heated poppy heads so that they could inhale the fumes in order to forget the cold. their hunger and their fear of being eaten alive.
Every generation - even those from times which now seem to us austere and obsessed with strictly regimenting the behaviour of the masses - used drugs to escape from those things which they found distasteful, distressing or simply disappointing. No group of individuals were more correct than the British Victorians but it is clear that they were avid drug users. Alcohol was popular but the most widely abused drug of the age was laudanum - a tincture of opium - which was immensely popular with men and women of every social group. Everyone from the aristocracy and the intelligentsia down to the working classes consumed their laudanum in a seemingly endless variety of over-the-counter preparations such as Codfrey's Cordial and Dr J. Collis Browne's Chlorodyne. Addicts drank a pint or even more a day of their favourite, powerful concoction. Writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Thomas de Quincey all wrote under the influence of opium while Robert Louis Stephenson wrote The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde under the influence of cocaine and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used the same drug when working on his Sherlock Holmes stories. Not to be outdone, the Americans of this era took to drug use with great vigour and by the end of the nineteenth century could choose from over fifty thousand over-the-counter medicines which contained drugs such as heroin, morphine, cocaine and cannabis. It was even possible to buy products containing opium through the Sears Roebuck mail order catalogue.
Ever since the first bureaucrat discovered the pleasures of obfuscation, authorities of one sort or another have attempted to stop the use of drugs. In the Ottoman Empire Sultan Murad IV introduced the death penalty for smoking. In the seventeenth century tobacco was prohibited in several European countries and a Russian Tsar introduced a law ruling that anyone possessing tobacco should be tortured until he revealed the name of his dealer. In Germany the death penalty was introduced for tobacco users in 1691. But every available piece of evidence shows quite clearly that all attempts to stop the use of drugs have been unfailingly ineffective. If history shows anything at all, then it shows that it will never be possible to outlaw illegal drug use because no law can ever make the demand disappear; and so long as there is a demand for drugs there will be people willing to supply the required product or something similar to it. Laws which are designed to outlaw drug use are doomed even more certainly than the laws which are destined to outlaw prostitution. The prostitute's client is likely to be respectable and to fear exposure but the client of the illegal drug salesman will often live outside the system and may in any case be well aware that there is little social disapproval among his peers of drug use and abuse.
Indeed, if drug laws have any effect on drug users it is to excite them rather than to discourage them. Many of those who use drugs do so because their lives are dull; they are looking for stimulation. What those who call for more laws do not understand is that the risk of being caught frequently increases the pleasure of drug use and attracts and encourages the drug user, and that the demand for drugs which provide some relief from life's vicissitudes is deeply engrained. In a crisis people will use almost anything to help them escape from their world. In the mid-nineteenth century the distillation of illicit whisky in Ireland fell off partly because of the failure of the corn crop and partly because of the legendary activities of the temperance campaign led by Father Mathew - a miracle worker who is personally credited with having managed to persuade half a million Irishmen to take the pledge. But just because the Irish were not drinking alcohol, they did not stop drugging themselves. While the stills remained unused the Irish started using a replacement. The drug was readily available because it was at the time being (quite wrongly) used by doctors as a treatment for cholera and it was popular because it produced a form of intoxication which was similar to that associated with alcohol. Within a very small space of time 50,000 Ulstermen and women had consumed 17,000 gallons of ether as an 'alternative' social lubricant. The popularity of ether dropped suddenly when the following year's successful grain crop enabled the illegal still owners to get back to business and start making whiskey again. The pledges offered to Father Mathew were conveniently forgotten.
The American attempt to outlaw the sale and use of alcohol during the 1920s illustrates perfectly the uselessness of legislation as a weapon in the war to control drug abuse. Prohibition began in 1919 as a result of the Volstead Act which was passed as the eighteenth amendment to the United States constitution after pressure from organizations such as the Women's Christian Temperance Movement ~ but despite a veto from the American president. In an attempt to ensure that the new law was obeyed and that no one made, sold or drank any alcohol at all, over a thousand special agents were hired and equipped with special badges, pistols, machine guns and hand grenades. Despite the enthusiastic publicity films which showed special agents making holes in barrels of illicit whisky and gin and allowing the contents to spill down into the drains, the result of prohibition was a disaster of quite monumental proportions.
By making the manufacture and sale of alcohol illegal the government closed down respectable distilleries and bars and opened the way for crooks like AI Capone to take over and supply the continuing demand for alcohol. By the mid 1920s just half a dozen years after prohibition had been introduced there were 30,000 illegal clubs selling alcohol in New York alone, while AI Capone controlled over 10,000 bars in Chicago. The government had opened the way for the development of a massive, powerful, well structured and extraordinarily rich underworld. By 1933 when the government realized that prohibition was just not going to work, America had acquired an enormous underground network of well organized criminals.
When, after fourteen years of prohibition, the American government finally realized that the consumption of alcohol was almost certainly going up rather than coming down, they passed the twenty-first amendment to the constitution, repealed the prohibition laws and allowed the legal sale of alcohol once again. But prohibition had already done more harm than good. In the first two years of prohibition the number of hospital admissions from alcoholism decreased slightly but within three years the incidence of alcoholism had gone up to pre-prohibition levels. After prohibition ended the amount of alcohol being produced and consumed fell by an astonishing fifty per cent.
More important still, in order to maintain their lavish lifestyles and keep their armies occupied the crooks who had made their fortune out of alcohol had to look for something else to sell. No one should have been surprised when the mobsters started importing and selling drugs such as heroin and cocaine. The prohibition of alcohol was a major social disaster which encouraged thousands of people to take up drinking (its very illegality made it exciting and glamorous and the gangsters selling it were clever enough to make their clubs fashionable and attractive places) and also created the crime empire which now imports, distributes and markets narcotics. The international drugs 'industry' which currently inspires so much legislation around the world is largely a consequence of the legal attempt to end the consumption of alcohol.
Those politicians who want to see the prohibition of heroin and cocaine enforced by the law seem conveniently to have forgotten the lessons they should have learned from prohibition. They should listen to the wisdom of John D. Rockefeller Junior who was originally in favour of prohibition but who, having seen the eighteenth amendment working, admitted 'that a vast array of lawbreakers has been recruited and financed on a colossal scale; that many of our best citizens, piqued at what they regarded as an infringement of their private rights, have openly and unabashedly disregarded the eighteenth amendment; that, as an inevitable result, respect for all law has been greatly lessened; that crime has increased to an unprecedented degree - all this I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe'.
When prohibition ended, and alcohol was again legalized, a government that had one day opposed the drinking of alcohol with all its might immediately started taking a tax on sales of alcohol. This apparent oddity illustrates quite nicely the hypocrisy which is never far from the surface when drugs are concerned.
Consider. for example. what happened in China in the nineteenth century.
In the eighteenth century the Portuguese had started selling opium to the Chinese. When they realized the commercial potential the British started cultivating huge opium plantations in India where they could grow the opium they intended to sell to the Chinese. The sale of opium to China soon became a major source of income for Britain and for companies such as Jardine Matheson of Hong Kong and by the 1830s British companies were exporting half a million pounds of opium to China every year. When the Chinese emperor became worried about the effect all this opium was having on his people. he tried to stop the trade. but the British started a war to force the Chinese to allow them to continue selling the drug. The opium wars dominated much of the middle period of the nineteenth century simply because it was in Britain's commercial interest to maintain its drug sales. Many of Britain's largest international companies founded their fortunes on the sale of a drug which is now illegal.
How, I wonder, would Britain like it now if the Colombians began a war to protect their cocaine trade? Is it possible that the descendants and beneficiaries of the gangsters who currently sell cocaine and heroin will be running respectable and politically powerful international companies in the mid twenty-first century?
3 Toxic stress
Why the drug problem is getting worse. Why twentieth century life puts people under so much pressure that they need to use drugs to survive. And why those who endorse our drug control laws are hypocrites.
Despite all the efforts that have been made to combat drug use and to limit drug abuse, there is absolutely no doubt that drug use and drug abuse are both increasing rapidly.
In theory we should live relatively stress free lives. Few of us in the west have to worry about keeping warm, having enough food to keep us alive or finding somewhere warm and secure to sleep at night. We are better equipped with gadgets designed to make our lives easy than any of our ancestors ever were. We should be happy. We should not need to take drugs to find contentment or to help us escape from the world in which we live. We should not need to use drugs in order to make our lives more exciting.
But more and more people do take drugs. And millions of perfectly normal, apparently sensible, outwardly successful men and women are prepared to risk their freedom and their health for the relatively short moments of pleasure and contentment which they obtain from using drugs.
There are many reasons why.
Some people use drugs to help them cope with daily life; some want to numb their minds; some want to forget things that they cannot otherwise forget; some need drugs to help them cope with the frustrations they encounter every day. Boredom, emptiness, alienation, loneliness, anxiety and depression these are just a few of the reasons why drug abuse is endemic in our apparently rich and successful society.
The truth is that we live in strange, difficult and confusing times. In material ways we are richer than any of our ancestors. But in spiritual ways we are infinitely poorer.
Most of us live in well equipped homes that our great grandparents would marvel at. We have access to (relatively) clean drinking water at the turn of a tap. We can obtain light to work by and heat to cook by at the flick of a switch. Our homes are stuffed with possessions. We have wall-to-wall fitted carpets, automatic ovens. washing machines, tumble dryers, dish washers, food blenders, vacuum cleaners. television sets, video recorders and a whole host of other devices designed either to make our working hours easier or our leisure hours more enjoyable. If we want to travel anywhere we can climb into our own motor cars or we can use public buses, trains or aeroplanes. We are surrounded by the gaudy signs of our wealth and the physical consequences of several thousand years of human ambition and endeavour.
But despite all this, loneliness. unhappiness. anxiety and depression are now commoner than at any other time in our history. There has never before been as much sadness. dissatisfaction and frustration as there is today. We have become so dependent upon the 'things' with which we have surrounded ourselves that when they break down we become aggressive and irritable. We cannot cope without them. The demand for drug-based solutions to our problems has multiplied apparently endlessly.
We have access to sophisticated communications systems and yet never before have we been so aware of our ignorance and never before have so many people felt so lonely. We can fire messages around the world at the touch of a button but we no longer talk to one another. We have more power over our environment than our ancestors ever dreamt of and yet we are regularly and bitterly reminded of our helplessness and our vulnerability. We are materially wealthy and yet spiritually deprived. We have conquered our planet and begun to conquer space and yet we are continually reminded of our woeful inability to look after the planet we live on or to live in peace with one another.
On the face of it. twentieth-century life doesn't look as though it ought to provide us with too much pressure. From the point of view of our ancestors, or indeed of the millions of less fortunate individuals living in less well developed parts of the world, we have few basic worries. Yet, th
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