Two stories over the past few days reported as “news” which actually serve to underline how the prohibition of recreational drug use hides what’s really going on out there in the real world.

Before we consider these two reports, it’s perhaps a good idea to remind ourselves that illegal drugs are called “controlled substances” and those who support prohibition claim that policy represents “drug control”. I only mention that (again) because for normal substances and pastimes not subject to this special special form of “control” we can simply survey the population to find out what’s actually going on. Because drugs are illegal it takes special research studies to give us at least a clue as to the truth.

The result is to  let the cat out of the bag in that those people who like to think they are in”control” of the situation really haven’t got the faintest idea of the true extent of recreational drug use, the studies show this by virtue of the fact that newspapers announce with shocked headlines what everyone involved in the culture already knows, which is that despite all the efforts of prohibition, lots of people use drugs.

The first story concerned cannabis and so it was reported in traditional style. It featured a report from Wayne Hall and Louisa Degenhardt from Australia; Wayne is a  name well know to cannabis campaigners as someone prominent in the debate who usually seems to support a strange mix of prohibition and common sense. A few years ago at the Cannabis and mental health conference in London he argued against cannabis law reform on the basis that although it would be a good idea, governments are incapable of regulating and policing anything so it couldn’t be done. Anyway Wayne published his study in the Lancet last week and was reported in many papers including the Independent. Of course, being a report about cannabis the paper had to paint as negative a picture as possible

It is 40 years since cannabis unleashed the “flower power” revolution of the 1960s, encouraging a generation in Europe and the US to “make love not war”. Young people at the time hoped their legacy would be world peace. Instead, it has turned out to be a world of fuzzy dope-heads.

Oh dear, this sort of reporting got tiresome years ago - it’s just pathetic now. Anyway it was LSD that unleashed flower power.  The headline was “The world map of cannabis - Study demonstrates the extraordinary scale of the drug’s global popularity” and hinted at the bones of the story but the anti cannabis theme continued for a bit before preparing the reader for the shocking news to come:

Writing in The Lancet, Wayne Hall of the University of Queensland and Louisa Degenhardt of the University of New South Wales, Australia, say cannabis slows reaction times and increases the risk of accidents, causes bronchitis, interferes with learning, memory and education and, most seriously, may double the risk of schizophrenia. Yet these effects have failed to dent its popularity.

<Sigh> notice the phrase “and, most seriously, may double the risk of schizophrenia” is added for spine chilling effect, even though it’s a meaningless and dubious claim really which obviously includes the possibility that it may not do so.  Anyway they then added an almost grudging  qualifier that

However, they add that the ill effects of cannabis are modest when compared with the damage done by alcohol, tobacco and other illicit drugs.

But it’s still worth emphasising the negative aspects because of the “news” being presented is designed to scare:

Citing figures from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime for 2006, they say cannabis use is highest in the US, Australia and New Zealand (where more than 8 per cent of the population indulge), followed by Europe. But because Asia and Africa have bigger populations, they also have the highest proportion of the world’s cannabis users, accounting for almost a third (31 per cent) and a quarter (25 per cent) respectively.

Note use is highest in the home of the war on drugs - the USA, this correlation wasn’t picked up in the report of course. The “news” contained in this story is the fact that cannabis use is widespread - a real shock horror revelation to almost no-one other than those in “control” - and, it seems - the media.  Journalists of course never take drugs and don’t have friends who do either.

But what is clear is it really doesn’t matter that they continue to feed us this anti cannabis line, the people who matter - those interested enough to try cannabis and those who already enjoy using it simply ignore this stupidity in their millions. One can only speculate how many more users will come out of the woodwork when drug prohibition finally collapses, but few people expect the real number to be lower than crime survey guestimates.

Fact is these crime surveys are no substitute for proper population surveys, the fact that they even show the figures they do is an indication of just how out of control this “controlled drug” actually is.

Interesting a non-story as that item may have been, today’s Times carried a real shocker which no-one ever suspected (sorry, that was sarcasm) : High society: Britain’s drug-taking clubbers - Almost all Britain’s thousands of clubbers routinely take drugs, in particular cocaine , cannabis and ecstasy.

It’s true, the Pope really is a Catholic.

This was a report from Dr Fiona Measham and Dr Karenza Moore and published in the journal Criminology and Criminal Justice which found that

98 per cent of club customers had tried an illegal drug at least once
79 per cent had taken an illegal drug within the previous month
Only half as many bar customers (35 per cent) had taken an illegal drug in the previous month
85 per cent of clubbers had tried Ecstasy at least once
83 per cent had tried cocaine at least once
44 per cent had tried ketamine at least once
40 per cent had tried MDMA at least once

Actually, if this is news to any readers, you really do need to get out more. This is nothing new and the night club scene has been like this for well over a decade at least. Around 2000 - 2001 the government imposed a whole new set of regulations on what it called “The night time economy”, many independent clubs closed down and entertainment areas appeared, featuring  clubs run by national companies which claimed to be “drug free” (alcohol not being a drug of course). The only surprise really is that anyone believed this rubbish.

Unlike the immature report in the Independent  described above with it’s anti cannabis slant, this report in the Times read like a breath of fresh air, calmly reporting the fact that a huge number of people use recreational drugs without causing or getting into trouble(and hence not featuring on crime surveys). The paper reported

To use the phraseology of Russell Newcombe, a drug researcher for Lifeline Manchester, drugs represent “cocktails of celebration” for one group. For the other, they are a “cocktail of oblivion”. And the difference is profound.

Indeed it is, as anyone who has ever been involved in the recreational drug scene will know, and that is an awful lot of us. But the story does contain a really dark message, the trend towards poly drug use is escalating and because drugs are illegal and clubs cannot admit they have drug use on the premises, there is no drug information being provided to these people. Forget Talk to Frank here, this is no job for a prohibition supporting advertising campaign.

The reports authors sum it all up

“We would like to see a sensible debate about drugs without the shock, horror bit — if only because of the sheer numbers we see involved,” says Measham. “People have a desire to get intoxicated on a Friday night — the American pharmacologist Ronald Siegel once described intoxication as the fourth strongest irrepressable human desire after food, sleep and sex.

“That suggests that blanket prohibition is destined to be a disaster. We need a more sophisticated but also more realistic response. If people have a choice they don’t really want to break the law. That’s where the debate needs to take place.”

It really is time to accept the reality of all this; illegal drugs are not controlled drugs, but they are very, very popular. Prohibition is a dangerous, expensive failure and those in charge aren’t.

A study with the snappy title of “Maternal tobacco, cannabis and alcohol use during pregnancy and risk of adolescent psychotic symptoms in offspring” was published recently  in BJpsych (abstract) (full text)  by researchers at Cardiff, Bristol, Warwick and Nottingham universities which threw another spanner in the claims that cannabis causes schizophrenia. As the title suggests this study looked at the effects of tobacco, alcohol and cannabis use by the mother during pregnancy on the offspring.

Needless to say it didn’t hit the headlines although the BBC did quietly report it with the  headline “Pregnant smoking ‘psychosis link’” (BBC news).

Of perhaps special interest is that the researcher at Cardiff was one Prof Stanley Zammit who featured in the cannabis and mental health debate a few years ago with his analysis of the famous Swedish study into military conscripts which Dr Zammit claimed to demonstrate a causal link between cannabis and serious mental illness. He was also behind the study which was widely reported as warning

The study found that those who had used the drug were 41 per cent likelier to experience an episode of this kind than people who never smoked.

Or as the Daily Mail put it

Smoking just one cannabis joint raises danger of mental illness by 40%

Of course we don’t blame Sr Zammit for the Mail’s excess, but it would be reasonable to assume from his past work that Dr Zammit was looking for, and expected to find, a link between cananbis use during pregnancy and later mental illness. Indeed, on his university profile page he writes of the study:

Approximately 15% of the population report psychotic-like experiences not meeting criteria for clinical disorders. These occur more commonly than schizophrenia, and are likely to be closer to underlying aetiological pathways. Studies of PLIKS (sub-clinical, psychosis-like symptoms) may increase understanding of schizophrenia aetiology, and help focus prevention and intervention strategies. All the genes above, as well as cannabis and tobacco, are thought to affect glutamatergic transmission. Examination of gene-environment interplay may provide further insights into aetiological mechanisms.

So it’s reasonable to conclude that Dr Zammit did not go into this study with the mindset of someone trying to disprove a relationship between cannabis use during pregnancy and later psychotic symptoms in offspring.  That is a good thing and makes his results all the more interesting.

What the study found was that tobacco and alcohol use by pregnant women was associated with the development of serious mental illness in the offspring, but cannabis was not. The BBC reported this finding thus:

The group was also studied for their mother’s use of cannabis and alcohol. No link was found for the drug, while only those whose mothers drank more than 22 units had a higher chance of psychotic episodes.

Notice how cannabis is referred to as “the drug”, as if alcohol and tobacco are something else. But that sort of subtle bias is only to be expected sadly.

Now of course demonstrating a link does not mean proving a causal mechanism - a point which has often not been fully appreciated by sections of the media when covering the cannabis and mental health debate, but showing no link would seem to go some way to disproving any such causal role. After all, if there are no ill people, there isn’t a cause.

Now of course no one study is going to give a clear cut answer like that and it has to be noted that although the study sample was large, the number of cannabis users who had claimed not to have used tobacco during pregnancy was relatively small

So what of the study? It reports this:

Cannabis use during pregnancy
Maternal cannabis use was not associated with any suspected or definite PLIKS in the crude analysis (OR for linear trend 1.22, 95% CI 0.83–1.79). The odds ratio was reduced after adjusting for confounders (Table 2), with adjustment for maternal tobacco use having the greatest impact on attenuation of this estimate (adjusted OR = 0.94, 95% CI 0.62–1.41, P = 0.755). Of the 157 women with PLIKS data who used cannabis during pregnancy, 51 (32.5%) claimed not to have smoked tobacco during their pregnancy. There were insufficient numbers of women using cannabis to examine trimester-specific effects of cannabis use.

However, you can bet that had a link been found, the headlines would have screamed the message of cannabis use during pregnancy causes schizophrenia because it would have fitted the media’s agenda.

What the study did find was a link between tobacco use and later mental health problems in the offspring and that should be ringing those alarm bells for mental health campaigners. Throughout the cannabis and mental health campaign of the middle of this decade, no reference was ever made to the use of tobacco by the people supposedly damaged by their cannabis use, yet every one probably smoked tobacco filled joints, the nature of which give huge doses of tobacco along with the cannabis. It’s also more than possible that the parents of these ill people also smoked tobacco of course.

The evidence is still only circumstantial, but it’s looking ever more likely that tobacco has a role in the development of mental illness. That isn’t to claim that cannabis is always harmless in this respect, but  it should give us cause for concern and to perhaps encourage those interested take a more critical look at the role of tobacco.

Non of the above is intended to imply that cannabis use - or the use of any drug come to that - during pregnancy is safe and the advice as always is not to drink, smoke, toke, snort or spike when pregnant for the good of your kid.

Nobody listens to people who “cry wolf” or who are hypocrites. Nothing could be nearer the truth when it comes to the government’s anti cannabis campaign aimed at young people.

The problem we have is real; we have ever younger kids getting hold of and smoking  cannabis and despite of all the effort being put into trying to dissuade them, kids are still doing it.

Now it doesn’t take much of a leap of logic to conclude that is probably not a good thing; there are plenty of common sense reasons to want to keep kids away from drugs of all kinds - not just cannabis, be the drug alcohol, glue, cannabis or whatever. Drugs will affect the child’s development and cause a range of other harms, but the government has decided to focus its efforts on cannabis and hence we have seen a whole series of government anti cannabis campaigns aimed at kids in recent months, coupled with an increase in legal sanctions with the move back to B all supported by the BBC and reported as factual news items.

So it was with interest that Radio 1 Newsbeat carried a shock horror story this week under the headline “Cannabis warnings ‘not working’” in it’s latest effort to support the government campaign:

The government has spent millions trying to warn young people about the risks of smoking cannabis, but despite high-profile television campaigns, it remains the most commonly used illegal drug in the UK.

Er, hang on. If some other - probably class A - drug had overtaken cannabis as being the most used illegal drug we really would have a serious problem on our hands. That rather daft introduction set the standard for what was to follow.

The report was in fact a trail for a programme in the “Revealed” series shown last Saturday - this one claiming to expose the truth about cannabis. If you’ve never seen “Revealed” (and I hadn’t before seeing this) it’s one of those awful “Yoof” TV shows with camera work that is carefully designed and scripted to look amateurish and  spontaneous featuring trendy looking people who are only just too old to be called young. The blurb for the programme sounded interesting:

Reporters Anthony Baxter and Aidan Campbell investigate the UK’s most commonly used illegal drug, cannabis. Adina visits a forensic lab to examine resin up close, while Anthony travels around the country to discuss attitudes towards the class B drug.

The show meets Terri who saw her life spiral out of control after spending hundreds of pounds on cannabis, and talks to teenagers who say it is easier to get hold of than alcohol.

With the help of doctors and scientists, the team separates fact from fiction and asks whether cannabis really can mess with your mind.

As usual the programme relied on selective use of information, such as

The Royal College of Psychiatrists says there is evidence to support claims that if you start smoking the drug before the age of 15, you are more likely to develop mental health problems in later life.

Maybe the Royal College of Psychiatrists does say it, but there is also quite a lot of studies out there which don’t support this claim and indeed, the concerns which were widespread a few years ago about cannabis causing severe mental illness have largely gone unsupported in more recent research. No mention was made of this of course, although anyone reading that Newsbeat report on the BBC website would see a link pointing to a story from January this year which states:

But Professor Nutt from the ACMD reckons the link between cannabis use and that kind of severe mental health problem is “probable but weak”. The latest research suggests the government would have to stop 5,000 men and 12,000 women from smoking cannabis to prevent a single case of schizophrenia in both groups.

“Using cannabis will tip a few people over the edge but in terms of most of the population, there isn’t really a risk there,” he said.

The programme drew on the recent “Frank” survey which claimed to show a large number of young cannabis users had experienced what it called “mental health problems” because getting stoned had lead to feelings of paranoia, re-enforcing the false idea that such unpleasant feelings are a symptom of real mental illness. It also made the point that cannabis is ILLEGAL and it’s AGAINST THE LAW (caps for effect). It wasn’t explained that Frank is a government sponsored anti drug advertising campaign and works to government directives.

As might be expected for a “yoof” programme, the whole thing was very shallow. Perhaps the most ridiculous part came in the forensic lab, where  Aidan is shown handling rather good examples of Indian hash and so-called “skunk” weed, then being made to wear protective clothing - mask and gloves - in order to handle young plants which hadn’t even flowered yet and to would not have contained any active constituents. Why they did this is unknown but can only have been at the direction of the people in the lab.

Of course, what the programme didn’t do  was to express even the slightest misgivings about the workings of the law in all of this, the focus was all on young people ignoring the warnings about using cannabis and asking - without really daring to give the real answer - why so many people broke this law. No thought was given to the possibility that it could be because the law is a bad law.

You can watch this episode of “Revealed” on i-player for the next few days and you’ll see what I mean about the rather tired “yoof” style production values, but don’t worry, it only last 15 minutes.

So what’s going on? Why is the government’s anti cannabis drive apparently falling on deaf ears? Perhaps it’s down to the “crying Wolf” issue mentioned above.

It should always be remembered that the best form of advertising for any product is word of mouth recommendation from people you know. Now lots of young people know older people who use cannabis without ill effect. Cannabis is very, very widespread and it’s use established in large parts of society. Many children have grown up in homes where cannabis is used, their parents or brothers and sisters use it. So these kids will know personally people who have used and continue to use cannabis without ill-effect. So who are they going to believe? A government run campaign or their family and friends? Do we even have to ask that question?

The problem is that the things the government is trying to warn the young people about are claims built on the back of wild exaggerations. Remember the cannabis makes you mad campaign so enthusiastically promoted by campaigners such as Marjorie Wallace of SANE (Radio 4 MP3 from 2005) and the associated claims of 25-fold increase in cannabis strength as promoted by the Independent newspaper in 2007?

The skunk smoked by the majority of young Britons bears no relation to traditional cannabis resin - with a 25-fold increase in the amount of the main psychoactive ingredient, tetrahydrocannabidinol (THC), typically found in the early 1990s.

These claims have been rubbished often enough now and are widely understood to be hype - to be crying “Wolf” - yet the present campaign is based on these over-egged claims. Just as the old legalise cannabis campaign slogans of “the harmless herb” were easy to demolish, so are claims built on such obvious hype. It hasn’t been helped by certain people taking the lead in bringing it all about; the whole exercise is well understood to be a government inspired and directed campaign because it follows the enthusiastic support of Gordon Brown and other government figures and the move back to class B which was done against expert advice. In other words, this sort of thing is something “everybody knows” is a government lie.

The other problem is  the anti cannabis campaign is seen as hypercritical - and in truth it is. We are seeing all these warnings about cannabis and very little if anything similar about alcohol. Indeed, if you’re a teenager you’ll probably be familiar with the ongoing sexual health campaign featured on posters appearing in colleges around the country.  This is actually a very good campaign warning kids to be aware that when they get drunk they’ll lose their inhibitions and be likely to have unprotected sex. Nowhere on the posters does it say “don’t drink” or “don’t have sex”, this is a real world campaign giving sensible advice in a way that can be believed.

There are also good campaigns which encourage sensible drinking and awareness of what can happen if you drink too much. Young people are told to expect to fall asleep in the loo, to pass out and to injure themselves through excessive drinking. Again, it’s all good advice but the difference between it and the information given for cannabis is only too obvious to young people.

The plain talking of the alcohol and sex advice  stands in start contrast to the cannabis information which warns of the danger of feeling a bit paranoid and of getting arrested.

The real danger of all this hype is to cause the baby to be thrown out with the bathwater - to discredit all the information now being given out about cannabis - and as we started off by saying, there is a real problem out there with kids using drugs. Cannabis is not 100% harmless and we need effective measures to keep kids away from it. If it is true as the TV programme claims (and as personal experience also shows) that cannabis is easier to get than alcohol for kids, then we should accept that the problem rests with the way the establishment treats cannabis, which is so far removed from the way large chunks of society treat it.

So rather than spending our BBC licence fee making programmes which simply reflect government propaganda,  perhaps the BBC could actually tell the truth about the failings of drug prohibition and the dangers it’s causing? After all, don’t we have a right to expect the BBC to tell us the truth, or is its role no more than a government mouth piece?

Despite all the headline grabbing research that’s been carried out to look for cancer causing properties of cannabis, there doesn’t seem to have been any research done to look at the effects of mixing cannabis and tobacco, as is common practice here in the UK. As this blog has mentioned before, a safer smoking campaign to wean cannabis users off tobacco is an urgently needed measure here, but the government will have non of it.

So it was with some interest I saw a report of a study from the USA in the August e-zine of the Australian anti cannabis campaign NCPIC (National Cannabis Prevention and Information Campaign).

The study, called “Comparison of subjective, pharmacokinetic, and physiological effects of marijuana smoked as joints and blunts” (abstract here) was carried out by Ziva D Cooper and Margaret Haney at Columbia University in the USA. In the best tradition of scientific research they performed a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study to directly compare the subjective, physiological, and pharmacokinetic effects of marijuana smoked with an without tobacco.

It’s worth pointing out a huge cultural difference between the USA and the UK. In the USA most people who smoke cannabis smoke it pure. A “joint” in US stoner slang is simply grass rolled up in a ciggy paper without the pile of Golden Virginia you’d expect to get here. However in recent times the habit of smoking “blunts” has appeared. A “blunt” is a hollowed out cigar filled with cannabis. A blunt is therefore cannabis wrapped in tobacco leaves, a concept most British tokers would understand as being a joint. It’s important to bear this in mind when reading the study.

The sample was rather small - just 12  people who were already cannabis/tobacco smokers over just 6 sessions.

Participants were blindfolded and smoked three puffs from either a blunt (tobacco joint) or a joint (pure cannabis) containing marijuana with varying Delta(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) concentrations (0.0, 1.8, and 3.6%). Subjective, physiological (heart rate, blood pressure, and carbon monoxide levels) and pharmacokinetic effects (plasma THC concentration) were monitored before and at specified time points for 3h after smoking.

The results?

(Tobacco free) Joints produced greater increases in plasma THC and subjective ratings of marijuana intoxication, strength, and quality compared to  blunts (tobacco/cannabis), and these effects were more pronounced in women compared to men.

In other words the tobacco free joints were better at delivering the cannabis “hit”, more cannabis per puff.

However, blunts (tobacco/cannabis) produced equivalent increases in heart rate and higher carbon monoxide levels than (Tobacco free) joints, despite producing lower levels of plasma THC.

In other words the tobacco joints are more harmful in terms of carbon monoxide levels and don’t work as well as pure joints.

The conclusion?

These findings demonstrate that smoking marijuana in a tobacco leaf may increase the risks of marijuana use by enhancing carbon monoxide exposure and increasing heart rate compared to (tobacco free) joints.

Wow, proof at last. Mind you to conclude that cannabis plus tobacco is more dangerous than just cannabis is a pretty obvious conclusion really. It would seem pretty intuitive to assume that one drug taken alone is going to be less hazardous than two taken in combination, but a least now there’s some solid evidence to support the common sense logic.

It would be good to see some similar research carried out on UK tokers to better guage the effects of mixing the two drugs, but as has already been said, the government has consistently refused to address the issue.

The reaction in Australia isn’t any better, despite tobacco/cannabis use being somewhat more common there than in the USA.  NCPIC’s Dr Melissa M Norberg reported:

In addition, participants reported liking joints more and believed that they were stronger and produced a better high than blunts.

Well, as the plasma levels of THC were higher with the tobacco free joints they probably did get more stoned. But as to whether the subjects found the pure grass joints more to their liking is debatable and is a claim not made in the abstract as such (the pure joints were rated as a higher “quality” than the tobacco blunts, that could mean a few things). If true though it would bes very interesting, because that’s not what (tobacco) joint smokers so often say here. The usual reaction is that tobacco joints are more enjoyable than pure grass joints. Tobacco is a good mixer drug - it goes with almost every other drug and it’s drug effect is to make users feel good about having taken it.  Again though, this should be seen as a problem caused by tobacco as it is very likely to lead to higher levels of cannabis use as people chase the feel good effect of the tobacco, indeed experience at UKCIA indicates that people who smoke tobacco joints smoke more cannabis than those who do not. So that comment by Dr Norberg is probably a wrong interpenetration of the results.

The conclusion the anti-cannabis NCPIC draws is predictable for a drug war campaign:

These findings suggest that smoking (tobacco/cannabis) blunts may increase cannabis use harms.

In non-prohibition speak that means smoking tobacco joints makes cannabis use more dangerous, but as with the British government’s anti cannabis campaign run by Frank, there’s no suggestion of doing the obvious thing to reduce that harm - giving cannabis users information about safer methods of use and encouraging them to toke pure.

As this blog reported last week, there’s been a flurry of drug law reform articles in the media, prohibition supporters have been having their say and it’s worth looking at their arguments.

Last Sunday in the Observer saw a comment from the head of the UN Office of Drug Control Antonio Maria Costa entitled “How many lives would have been lost if we didn’t have controls on drugs?“.  We’ve noted Mr Costa’s attempts to argue that black is white before on this blog - indeed he’s becoming something of a favourite for drug law reform satirists - but last weeks article really took the biscuit for it’s twisted delusional logic.

Lets start off with the Collins Essential English Dictionary 2nd Edition 2006 definition of the word “control“:

Noun
1. power to direct something: the province is mostly under guerrilla control
2. a curb or check: import controls
3. controls instruments used to operate a machine
4. a standard of comparison used in an experiment
5. an experiment used to verify another by having all aspects identical except for the one that is being tested
Verb
[-trolling, -trolled]
1. to have power over: the gland which controls the body’s metabolic rate
2. to limit or restrain: he could not control his jealousy
3. to regulate or operate (a machine)
4. to restrict the authorized supply of (certain drugs) [Old French conteroller to regulate]

So what definition of the word “control” is Mr Costa using to describe the present policy of drug prohibition?

As a noun we clearly don’t have the power to direct the illegal drug trade,  definitions 4 and 5 clearly don’t apply.

As a verb we don’t have power over the illegal trade and we (society) certainly don’t operate it. Definition 4 is perhaps the most inapplicable definition as prohibition simply seeks to prevent the authorised supply of drugs rather than to restrict it.

So that leaves the noun meaning the “power to curb or check”, or the verb to” limit or restrain” the trade. Given that we can’t even keep drugs out of prisons and that children of an ever younger age are using drugs it would seem a bit rash to claim that the trade is being limited or restrained or that we are curbing or checking it. Indeed over the past few decades the illegal drugs trade has grown and grown, despite - we would argue because of - the false idea that control can be exerted through prohibition.

So the first and simplest response to Mr Costas’s  question is we are not controlling drugs. In truth we’re not really trying to control them, the war on drugs is trying to eliminate them - remember the slogan “A drug free world - we can do it”? from Mr Costa’s office a few years back? Of course, they don’t believe that any more, but the policy hasn’t changed.

Lets be clear about this: Illegal drugs are not controlled drugs; prohibition prevents control - there is no control over who produces drugs, who sells them, where from, the quality (strength or purity) of what’s sold,  who they are sold to (no age limits etc) and so on. What we have is NOT, quite emphatically not, “drug control”.

But ignoring if we can Mr Costa’s misuse of the word control, he goes on to suggest that had we not had prohibition, more people would have died because of drugs than have in fact died. Well, this is a difficult one simply because we don’t know how many people have died under Mr Costa’s regime, but we can speculate that the number of deaths of peasants living at the point of a gun point in producer countries (be it the gun of the narco producers or the anti narco military) is not insignificant and of course we have those involved in the trade from producer country to consumer market - again usually the poor and exploited who never really count for much. Once we’ve counted all these victims we can perhaps begin to count the victims prohibition has created amongst the drug users in the consumer countries, along with those victims of gangland violence of course. It won’t be a small number.

Now of course, under a legalised, regulated regime we would know how many people died from the trade. Indeed, we would know how many died of precisely what, be it overdose or health and safety problems in the supply industry. That’s the irony of all this, Mr Costa makes a claim he can’t substantiate against an alternative regime that would make the harm it caused absolutely measurable.

What we also wouldn’t have is the environmental degradation, the  exploitation, the corruption, the violence  or even some of the global wars Mr Costa has brought us through his regime so laughably called “drug control”. Include these wider issues and the question looks far more clear cut and Mr Costa’s argument rather weak.

The main thrust of Mr Costa’s argument is that legalisation here would lead to an explosion of addiction in the producer countries - a “drug tsunami” he calls it. Actually that has already happened in many producer countries, yet he ignores this as if it was an unheard of concept. He fails to explain why a properly run legal trade would produce more drug harm than the criminal/terrorist trade we have now. He is, in truth, clutching at straws.

About halfway down the page Mr Costa drops a real bombshell of delusion: He writes

Drugs are controlled (not prohibited) …

Hang on, is he trying to claim we don’t have drug prohibition, or that prohibition is not the policy he supports? Is he really trying to claim that we do not have a war against drugs based on prohibition? This man is almost defining George Orwell’s “newspeak”  by redefining the English language to mean what he wants it to mean, not what it has always meant.

Actually, this might be an evolving tactic as prohibition supporters try their best to make us believe that we don’t really have prohibition any more, it’s not the first time we’ve been told that our drugs policy is not really prohibition in recent months. It was only back in August that Kathy Gyngell of the Centre for Policy Studies wrote in her blog

… law enforcement – hyperbolically designated as ‘prohibition’ by the pro drugs lobby…

I’ll be keeping my ear to the ground to see if this re-writing of reality comes up again, but just to set this straight as well: What we have as the corner stone of drug policy is drug prohibition, nothing else. It is illegal to possess or trade in so-called “controlled” substances and that is what prohibition is whether Mr Costa or the likes of  Kathy Gyngell like to think so or not. Actually, it is important to keep sight of this and not to let revisionists win with this deception.

The other brave effort this week to oppose the growing clamour for drug law reform worth a quick mention came in The Times from another regular: Prof Neil McKeganey, the director of the Centre for Drug Misuse Research at the University of Glasgow. Prof McKeganey presented the argument as he sees it against heroin maintenance - ie the NHS providing heroin to addicts. He made this statement:

If the NHS has rubbed the hard edges off the habit — effectively saying: “You don’t need to be a criminal”…one of the important drivers of recovery is being diluted.

It is unbelievable that anyone could seriously suggest that the criminal law has a role to play in the development of medical policy, in that the law should be used to endanger life in the hope it will “encourage” people into treatment. That is just so utterly vile a concept as to be quite repugnant, one that is quite unacceptable outside of a totalitarian regime. Let’s be clear, he is suggesting that the law making heroin addiction medically more dangerous and its use more chaotic actually encourages addicts into recovery and is therefore good. I would be interested to see his evidence for that actually working because it isn’t my personal experience of the way things happen. Having watched heroin addicts repeatedly jab themselves with blunt spikes in delicate parts of their bodies in countries with the death penalty for such things it’s pretty clear that the “hard edges” provided by the law need to be very, very hard indeed to have the effect Prof McKeganey seems to believe they can have.

But of course, this is the concept of “deterrence” - the idea that prohibition and criminal sanctions actually protect people and society by making drug use as dangerous as possible, yet there is scant proof if any at all that deterrence works and indeed there’s quite a lot to suggest it doesn’t.

It’s worth noting that, according to the University of Glasgow website:

In 2008 the Unit for the Study of Serious Organised Crime (USSOC) was established within the Centre (for Drug Misuse Research) with the aim of linking expertise between academia and law enforcement sectors.

This seems a strange arrangement for a university to have, but probably explains the funding route and hence Prof McKeganey’s logic.

What these examples of prohibitionist’s writings show clearly is that the support they have for prohibition is not built on hard evidence or experience, but on what they try to convince us is their faith. In the case of Mr Costa and, sorry to say, Prof McKeganey, it’s probably got more than a little to do with concerns for their position and status than any consideration of the real world, or a genuine concern for those exposed to such avoidable dangers.

Given serious drug law reform of course, these two would be out of a job.