SAFER INJECTING

The good fight?

We have been fighting the good fight against drugs for the best part of 40 years. If I suggested that it had been a roaring success, you would have a quiet chuckle to yourselves and stop taking me seriously. But if I said that it had been successful on any front, in any way at all, you might still be hard pressed to think of an example. More drugs, of more variety in the country than ever before, more people using them at an increasingly younger age, more deaths — a lot more — than ever before, more people in prison, more hypocrisy as those who fight drugs and those who use them increasingly become the same. And, as far as ‘the right message’ goes, there are more people inclined to view any official suggestion, as to what is or isn’t good for them, with derision and cynicism.

The assumption that drugs are morally wrong comes, of course, from America. There is great pressure from American policy makers on the rest of the world to tow its drug line, and it assumes that most societies, or for that matter the majority of its own constituents, share the values underpinning drug prohibition.

American drug policy has its roots in a puritanical ethic that goes back hundreds of years, and is unique to the American experience. We do not share that early history or those values, and it is surprising how many people, even those who work in drug policy, do not understand the origins of drug prohibition. Indeed, it is amazing the extent to which we accept the status quo of the illicitness of drugs as though it were ever thus.

One of the ways we perpetuate the myth of ‘drugs being bad’ is to lump all drugs together, creating the idea that marijuana is in the same family as angel dust and crack cocaine. This is dangerous and damaging to an honest debate. In America, illicit drugs are often lumped together under the term ‘narcotic,’ undermining a specific term describing a kind of drug, and diluting intelligent differentiation and understanding of various drugs, and their effects, themselves.

Drug use and our nature

The most erroneous assumption in Australia’s drug policy is that drug use is abnormal, that it is an historical aberration. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is barely a culture in the world that has not sought and used mind-altering substances of one kind or another. This is because it is part of who we are—the human condition – curious about God, curious about life after death, curious about what is on the other side of that mountain, and curious about what life will look and feel like after I chew, swallow, smoke or inhale that funny looking leaf growing from that tree.

So long as people exist they will desire, pursue and consume drugs. If we deny this, we are seriously deluded. And if we look into our heart of hearts, would we really want to live in a world where, even if not ourselves, someone is not examining and experiencing one chemical or another — playing with, testing, the boundaries of human experience? Risky, yes. Dangerous, perhaps. Like climbing that highest mountain, sending that spaceship to an ever further planet, or driving that car around a track at even more ludicrous speeds. It is in our nature.

Is a drug-free world possible?

Even in the most authoritarian, doctrinaire societies, it is a hard task to enforce a drug-free existence. If you think, for example, China has its illicit drug consumption under any semblance of control, you would be sadly wrong – it has illegal drug users counted in millions. But in a society like ours — based on liberal principles whereby the state is supposed to meddle in the lives of individuals as little as possible, where individual expression, choice and consumption of almost anything and everything has all but replaced God as the new idol — the very idea of constructing drugs as immoral, never mind trying to eradicate their material existence, is perhaps the greatest folly we have tried to sell ourselves in the second half of the 20th century. We couldn’t have chosen to wage war based on principles more inconsistent with the way we live, if we had tried.

We also live in a society that has all but lost formal rituals marking the passage from childhood and adolescents to adulthood. For the first half of this century, war generally provided what the American writer Susan Sontag noted as the need for profound experience to mark this passage, something dangerous to enter the realm of adulthood. From the invention of the teenager in the 1950s, attributed to the unprecedented material prosperity in the west, the use of illicit drugs has been exponentially increasing. Indeed, for most Westerners today, the most profound legally-sanctioned experience is the size of their credit card debt, and, frankly, this just doesn’t cut it. Drugs, especially whilst they remain illegal, will always be an obvious agent for young people to rebel against society and mark their own way in the world, the one service the illicit status of drugs provides.

Why the war will fail

This is why the war on drugs is not working, and never will. You could probably make a drug-free society if you really wanted to, at least for a time. You could have squads of narcotic militias marching through places like Kings Cross and Cabramatta, summarily executing anyone with small pupils or looking undernourished. You could raise taxes (or print money or something) and finance huge pools of labour to look through every nook and cranny of every container that graced the shores of our country, or, perhaps more effectively still, cease international trade altogether. You could have compulsory urine testing for everyone over the age of three to be conducted by no later than 5pm every Friday, at the risk of severe punishment. If this sounds far-fetched and over the top, it is no more so than the idea that the war on drugs can ever be won, that drugs will ever go away, or that they won’t always be embedded within our culture.

This is a vital point. Before we discuss the minutiae of methadone maintenance, of heroin trials, or whatever, we must acknowledge and understand the choices in the overall picture of drug policy in this country. In ten or 20 years time, there will be only three possible outcomes:

1. We will have won the drug war, and despite everything argued in this talk, drugs will have disappeared from our streets and our consciousness. If you believe this, you’ve probably been taking something that you shouldn’t have.
2. We will be where we are now, except with even more people in prison, more people dead, more people trapped on methadone with no other choices, and more people taking drugs as a generation with even less respect for the law grows older, at the same time as robotically espousing the virtues of a drug-free world. If this turns out to be the outcome, it will be a sad indictment of us all.
3. We will have given up this useless fight and will have made all drugs a commodity to be regulated rather than outlawed — a crucial distinction. The virtues, the pleasures, the dangers will be more honestly discussed, the rhetoric more readily believed. Yes, people will use drugs, they will abuse them, lives will be destroyed by them, just as they are now. But far fewer people will be dead, or alienated, or forced into crime and the criminal justice system. Instead, they will have much more control, many more options, and a great deal more honesty in dealing with these problems.

And the message that we will be sending to our young people is that we have grown up, and that taking drugs, just like drinking, with all its pitfalls, is just another expression of what it is to be human. It is time to make peace with drugs. There is no other achievable end-game.
Gideon Warhaft is the editor of Users News, published in NSW, Australia, by NUAA. This article is reproduced with permission of NUAA. Previous editions of the magazine are available on line at www.nuaa.org.au

Interestings stats

Annual drug deaths: tobacco - 395,000; alcohol: 125,000, other ‘legal’ drugs: 38,000. Illegal drug overdoses: 5,200; marijuana: 0. Considering government subsidies of tobacco, just what is our government protecting us from in the drug war?
- Ralph Nader, long-time consumer advocate in the USA

Drugs a part of our lives

In the present prohibitionist climate it is difficult to talk about the use of psychoactive, literally “mind-altering”, substances without focusing on their harmful and habit-forming properties. And it’s true that excessive use of consciousness-altering drugs, both legal and illegal, is bad for individuals and bad for society.

People who seek intoxication are taking risks with their health and flirting with addiction. Drugs can lead to crime, violence, accidents, family disintegration and social decay.
Nonetheless, intoxicants remain a part of most people’s lives.

And indeed most of us are able to consume them in moderation without spiralling into abuse and addiction.

Quote from "Pursuit of intoxication", New Scientist, November 2004, No. 2473

Australia's most costly drug?

A new Australian study indicates that the social costs of cigarettes are three times higher than any other drug, and still cost more than all other drugs combined! The study included a wide range of factors including crime, litter, passive smoking, absenteeism from work, hospital care, road crashes, loss of productivity and tax revenue, policing, pain and suffering.

Copyright © 2007 Safer Injecting: harm reduction for injecting drug users.