War On Drugs

No end in sight

The war on terror is often thought of as an expensive exercise. But everything about it pales into insignificance when we talk about the bigger war on our doorstep – the so-called war on drugs. More than a century of conflict, confiscation, court cases and incarceration later and yet there’s still no end in sight.

Johann Hari argues that the so-called war on drugs is founded on a set of mistaken premises resulting in the application of a series of wrong solutions. Hari cites the public justifications for the war on drugs in supposedly reducing addiction, as a case in point.

The underlying assumptions are that chemical hooks associated with a drug like heroin, for example, leads to addiction. If society were to punish these addicts, they’d be ‘taught a lesson’ and be less likely to continue to use drugs. But, as Hari’s reference to the prescribed pain relief drug, Diamorphine illustrates, neither assumption stands up to scrutiny.

Diamorphine is a medical name for pure heroin that is given to people in hospital who suffer severe physical pain. According to the logic of those who subscribe to chemical hook theory, some patients in hospital who have had this drug administered over time ought to become addicted. But the scientific evidence suggests that this virtually never happens.

Professor of psychology, Bruce Alexander, explained to Hari that chemical hook theory emerged from a series of simple experiments conducted earlier in the 20th century. Individual rats were put in cages and given two bottles. One of them contained water and the other contained water laced with either heroin or cocaine. The rats invariably preferred the drug and almost always killed themselves.

Rat Park

Chemical hook theory is the basis of the human war on drugs story and how, through humiliation, stigma and repressive forms of punishment, many jurisdictions deal with addiction. By the 1970s, Alexander’s Rat Park Addiction Experiment began to challenge the chemical hook theory and the assumptions on which it was based.

Instead of putting individual rats in empty cages that have nothing to do except drugs, Alexander decided to try another approach by building a cage laden with cheese and coloured balls in addition to the normal and drugged water bottles. Interestingly, in the Rat Park the rats hardly ever used the drugged water. None of them ever overdosed.

What this tells us is that where they have nothing that gives their lives meaning, rats (and humans) will be very likely to compulsively use drugs. Conversely, when they have good lives, they’re extremely unlikely to compulsively use them.

As Hari astutely observes:

“The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.”

Portugal is a shining example of a country that has built its human drug policies around these insights with incredible results. In the year 2000 Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe – one percent of the population was addicted to heroin. Every year, the government arrested, imprisoned and shamed more people, and in every year the problem got worse.

It was eventually decided that a radical cross political party approach was needed to solve the problem. A panel was subsequently set up whose purpose was to engage with the scientific facts. After having learned about Rat Park, the panel made a recommendation to the Portuguese government that all drugs be decriminalized and all the money spent on arresting, imprisoning and shaming people instead be spent on turning lives around.

Carrot, not stick

Hari says that where sensible and compassionate decriminalization and legalization policies have been adopted – for instance, Portugal, Switzerland, Colorado, Washington and Uruguay – there have been significant falls in levels of addiction and violence. By contrast, where brutal policies have been adopted based on shame, stigma and repression – for example, Arizona and Vietnam – they have resulted in greater levels of addiction, drug use and violence.

As a former undercover police officer who has dealt with drug dealers and users, Neil Woods, agrees with Hari that there is a symbiotic connection between levels of drug use and the societal context in which they are used. Woods explains that his role in undercover operations involved the manipulation of heroin users as a way for him to gain access to gangsters.

Woods would pose as a heroin user to garner empathy in order to gain trust. He recalls that people would often make a pragmatic decision to self-medicate with heroin because they couldn’t cope with the traumatic memories of their lives without using it.

In her autobiography, the singer, Marianne Faithfull, recounts how heroin saved her life because without it, she says she would have committed suicide. Other people in the public eye like Elton John and Russell Brand also had very serious addiction problems.

Hari puts it well when he says that key to understanding the nature of addiction “is about trying not to be present in your life because your life is too painful a place to be.”

Sadly, these kinds of sensitive issues among users are often overlooked by the powers that be because these powers are more concerned about prosecuting a politicised drug war. Woods says when they do occasionally acknowledge that there is a need to treat people sensitively as opposed to the enemy, the authorities only do so as a form of lip service.

Devouring

In truth, says Woods,

“the system is just eating these people and chewing them up. And whereas you have the police on one side ramping up police tactics and trying hard to catch the dealers, these dealers defend themselves with intimidation. The people caught in the middle are those that really need help.”

Woods continues:

“Stigma becomes the biggest problem. People can take a fall and they can get into all sorts of difficulties dealing with whatever trauma or difficulties they have. And once they start moving in that sort of underworld which I used to move around in inner cities, it’s very difficult to get out of it. It becomes a sort of self-perpetuating culture until you break that cycle and start looking after a few people and then you are stuck with that sort of subculture.”

Through his work as an undercover officer outlined in his book, Drug Wars, Woods highlights the violence that drug prohibition causes. The intimidation and violence between rival gangsters comes from within this subculture which exists outside the law. Drug dealers have to establish their place and reputations within neighbourhoods through violence and fear. The war on drugs creates a war for drugs through that dynamic.

Woods says:

“If you want to know how much of that is due to prohibition just ask yourself where are the violent alcohol dealers today. Everyone knows who Al Capone was. Everyone was afraid of him.”

Hari puts the case for drug decriminalization and regulation well:

“No one is frightened of the head of Smirnoff. No one’s frightened of the head of Heineken. The head of Heineken doesn’t send teenagers to go kill the head of Smirnoff’, says Hari.

Cleaning the streets

While working in the field of drug investigation, Woods’ job was to clean the streets of the drug gangs. But it didn’t take him very long to realize that the war on drugs couldn’t be won:

“I put people in prison for over 1000 years. And yet in any city, I only interrupted the flow of drugs for about two hours. Policing has no benefit at all on the flow of drugs. I can say that with complete certainty from my years working undercover and being privy to both national and international intelligence on the topic,” says Woods.

The bottom line, is there are vested interests within the system who do not want drugs legalized or regulated and are resistant to any idea of a shift in the status quo.

Woods notes:

“You’ve got the sort of alliance that one side doesn’t know is in alliance and that is the politicians who pursue the war on drugs and the gangsters who reap the profits.”

Hari concludes with some words of optimism as part of a broader expression for the need for change:

“Extraordinary changes can happen in very short periods of time. If enough people band together and demand it, we can change this issue radically’, he says.