The intention to cause harm

The war on drugs came up with another daft idea this week, from Scotland this time. The problem is the failure of the drug war to keep pace with the never ending succession of new drugs which have to be made illegal before they can be banned or, as the government would have it, “controlled”.

The Times carried a story headed “Drug law shake-up aims to curb ‘legal’ highs” (17th Feb) , a report about an idea of Fergus Ewing, SNP Minister for Community Safety in the Scottish government. The Times reported:

Current thinking is that the new definitions will criminalise the sale of anything in situations where it can be “reasonably expected” to be used as a hallucinogenic or intoxicant by human beings, regardless of what its other uses are.

A pedatic point perhaps but Mephedrone – the substance at the heart of this latest panic – is actually a stimulant so it could be argued wouldn’t be covered by this description, unless of course tea and coffee also were.

Perhaps Mr Ewing is using these definitions in the slap-dap way that leads people to talk of cocaine as a “narcotic”, fine for tabloid newspapers but not for points of law. What he is trying to say possibly is that it should be illegal to sell any substance which could reasonably be assumed was intended to be used for recreation other than certain permitted substances which would have to be named. This could get very messy indeed and in any case would mark a huge departure from the existing drug control acts.

Aside from the obvious problems a law like this would raise though a bigger can of worms could be  opened. The Times story gave this explanation of the thinking behind Fergus Ewing’s idea:

“After all, the whole basis of Scots criminal law is that there is a mens rea — a mental intent to do harm or to cause benefit at the expense of others in a way which is unacceptable.

Essentially a crime has been committed if the intention is to harm someone. As this blog has commented on several times before, the war on drugs as practised in this country is unique in that it has the aim of making the supply of illegal drugs as uncertain as possible; high levels of contamination, variable strengths and dosages are used as indicators of success by the government. Now however dangerous drugs are, deliberately making the supply side uncertain in this way is clearly intending to cause harm above and beyond anything caused by the drug taking. That would seem to be a clear intention to cause harm.

There is an interesting precedent. Thanks to the Transform Twitter feed I came across this interesting item on Slate – “The chemists war”. Essentially, during American alcohol prohibition tens of thousands of people suffered ill effects from illegal booze because the government had put supplies of industrial alcohol through a process called “denaturing” – contaminants were deliberately added to make the alcohol undrinkable. These contaminants were often poisonous, but the whole regime was justified because alcohol was illegal and thus the victims only had themselves to blame.

What we have today is (we hope) different in that (hopefully) the government isn’t actually adding contamination to the illegal drug supply in the way the American government did in the example above, but they do know it’s happening and they are using the fact that it’s happening to re-enforce the prohibition message, just as the American government tried to do. Take for example the Talk to Frank cocaine information here; it’s a flash presentation, skip the intro and click the “impurities” tab on the right. Snort your virtual line and we see the government funded campaign warning people that street cocaine is often only 1% pure, that some of the contaminants listed are claimed to “be linked to cancer” and more. The government’s drug unit are therefore clearly aware of the risk of serious and unknown health risks because of this consequence of their policy, yet far from doing anything to safeguard people from these risks they use the increased risk as a measure of success of the policy. This whole situation is clearly deliberate.

In the news right now is the scandal of heroin addicts contracting Anthrax though contaminated supplies of street smack. It’s been playing out in Fergus Ewing’s Scotland for some weeks now and several people have died. This week saw the first case in London and Reuters reported Brian McCloskey, the Health Protection Agency director in London, who said

“While public health investigations are ongoing, it must be assumed that all heroin in London carries the risk of anthrax contamination. Heroin users are advised to cease taking heroin by any route, if at all possible, and to seek help from their local drug treatment services,”

So all that can be done is to tell addicts to obey the law is it? BBC news reported Dr Laurence Gruer of Greater Glasgow Health Board as saying

… there were limits on how much a future outbreak could be prevented because of the unregulated way in which heroin is produced and supplied.

And of course he is right, this “unregulated production” is, of course, because heroin is a “controlled drug” in politician speak. It’s an unregulated product produced in unhygienic conditions caused solely and  entirely by the government policy of a war on drugs. This would not be happening if heroin were not illegal and supplied by organised crime,  it need not be happening even now if the addicts were allowed a legal maintenance supply of properly produced pharmaceutical grade heroin administered in clean, hygienic  conditions. Nobody gets an illness like anthrax from pharmaceutical grade diamorphine, they only get it through government imposed prohibition.

As to cannabis we’ve reported the various contamination scares here, perhaps it’s worth showing this video again sent to UKCIA a few months back

This contamination seems to be a form of clay, probably added to increase weight. Now of course clay will dry out and when smoked could cause far more tiny particles called PM10’s to be sucked into the lungs than the smoke would have contained, so even something apparently benign may prove hazardous. The problem is of course, these are all “unknown unknowns”, we won’t know about the dangers until we see the victims.

We should never forget though that the drug war is global and its victims are not just the heroin addicts on the streets of Glasgow or London. Today’s (new look) Observer carried a story from Argentina about the cocaine by-product called “Paco” which is “turning Argentina’s slum children into the living dead”. This is the other end of the illegal drug trade, the same deadly trade created by our very own prohibition laws.

Ask most people here to explain the cause of the grisly gallery in Chamorro’s kitchen and the answer will be a single word: “paco”. A toxic and highly addictive mixture of raw cocaine base cut with chemicals, glue, crushed glass and rat poison, paco is the curse of Argentina’s urban poor. And consumption of this bastardised, low-grade drug is eating away at the vitality and hope of the most deprived neighbourhood areas of the capital.

It would seem quite reasonable to assume that if “mens rea” means anything in law, prohibition should be illegal. Not just here but world wide. I doubt people like Fergus Ewing would see it that way though, they need to take their blinkers off.