Early this week we heard an interesting news story from SOCA – the Serious and Organised Crime Agency – concerning cocaine purity. Apparently cheaper deals of cocaine – which are now becoming popular on the mass market we’re told – contain as little as 10% cocaine. Not only that, but it’s being cut with a dangerous banned drug. The BBC reported on Tuesday, 28 October 2008:
Much of the seized cocaine is found to have been cut with phenacetin – a pharmaceutical drug banned some years ago in Britain and most other nations for causing kidney failure and cancer.
Now this is where google comes in useful. Not only did the BBC carry this story without critical examination, but they didn’t even check their own archives. Had they done so, they would have found this story on the BBC news website dated Thursday, 23 November 2006,
Cancer chemical in street cocaine
Cocaine’s street price is falling as it is being cut with carcinogenic painkiller phenacetin, police say.
The warning from the UK’s Serious and Organised Crime Agency (Soca) comes as new figures are released detailing the use of Class A drugs in the UK.
It goes on to say that
The painkiller was initially banned from general use in 1968 after it was linked to bladder and kidney cancer.
The ban was later revoked – but its legal use is highly restricted because of the dangers it poses.
So this is not a new story, it was a rehash of a two year old one and seems to be wrong in at least one important detail about phenacetin. “Why”? Seems a reasonable question.
Now it’s important to stress that whatever the dangers of cocaine are – and there are many – cancer of the bladder and kidney are not among them. This is happening because cocaine is illegal, highly profitable and supplied by an unregulated criminal industry which is totally uncontrolled. This is a danger caused entirely and solely by prohibition. Indeed, as low levels of purity of street drugs are a measure of success for the drug war, this could be argued to be a desired outcome of the policy and is a danger caused and created by SOCA, the very outfit now issuing the warning.
Anyway phenacetin in cocaine isn’t a new story and isn’t caused by the recent availability of “Bargain basement” deals. Also contamination of illegal drugs is not something the authorities make that much of a fuss about normally, it’s just something that happens under prohibition. Death or injury from contamination is a price worth paying to deter use according to those who support the war on drugs.
So again, why this story now?
Friday produced this splurge of “good news” from The home Office, as reported in the Guardian:
Drug use declines as seizures reach record
It seems cannabis use has declined greatly to levels not seen for around 10 years and this decline has accounted for the overall drop in drug use figures. This drop in use of course has occurred during the period when cannabis was downgraded to class C, a point not lost on the Guardian:
The record level of seizures was fuelled by a 44% rise in confiscations of small amounts of herbal cannabis as a result of the introduction of police warnings for personal possession in 2004.
Having cannabis as a class C drug has made enforcement of the law more possible – which was the real reason for doing it and which is why reclassification to B isn’t really going to change anything. Cannabis possession will still be dealt with by warnings in the main as the Home Office announced the other week. So why the regrading to B if the present regime is working so well and cannabis use is falling so massively?
A Home Office spokesman said the decision was based on its potential to cause harm and not on the prevalence of its use.
Actually, it was being done to “send a message” that cannabis use was “unacceptable” as Mr Brown put it, the move was indeed aimed at reducing the prevalence of its use. What a strange claim for the Home Office to be making.
“We have to ensure that the classification of cannabis reflects the alarming fact that skunk, the highest-potency herbal cannabis, now dominates the cannabis market; and we must respond robustly to reverse the massive growth in the commercial cultivation of cannabis in the United Kingdom in the last few years. Reclassifying cannabis will help to drive enforcement priorities to shut the cannabis farms down,” the Home Office said.
Of course it will do no such thing, the law relating to cannabis farms is not changing at all. The only effect of moving cannabis back to class B is to allow a more repressive regime against small time users, which, we’re told by the home Office, isn’t going to happen anyway to any great extent.
But back to the main story and the claims made by the Home Office that
The estimated falls in drug consumption are matched by a 15% rise in seizures of all classes of drugs by the police and customs in England and Wales to 186,028 – a level not seen since 1973.
The story is clear – robust enforcement is driving drug use down – prohibition is working. Of course, it took a blogger to do the sort of digging the media should have done. The Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) Daily blog took a critical eye to the figures:
Great news, one might think. Certainly the press lapped it up: ‘Cocaine seizures “highest ever” ‘ announced the BBC website; ‘Drugs use declines as seizures reach record’ was the headline in the Guardian; and ‘Cocaine seizures up by a third’ proclaimed the Metro.
Sadly, this was all another shocking distortion of the truth – and yet another example of Labour’s attempt to control the news in face of the evidence. The summary headlines could and should have read, ‘the latest figures show that quantities of Class A Drugs seized fell by 30 per cent on the previous year and are the lowest figures since 1999. They have fallen by a combined 64% per cent on peak takes of heroin in 2001 and cocaine in 2003.’
So what has happened is the country’s drugs policy has changed in the past year or so from concentrating on – as they used to say – the drugs that do most harm – heroin and cocaine to concentrating on small scale cannabis possession. After all, there is only so much money available, only so much police time and as these figures show the increased effort against cannabis has lead to decreased effort against heroin and cocaine.
The CPS blog again:
The reality is that far from going up, the amount of Class A drugs (seized) has slumped once again, as it has every year since 2003. Cocaine quantities seized have dropped to 3,191 tonnes, 53% down 2003’s record take. And the amount of crack cocaine seized in 2006/7 was a shocking 73% down on 2003. The continuing failure to stem the importation of heroin is no less worrying. The paltry 1,003 kilos taken in 2006/7 shows a 62% drop since 2003.
Which brings us back to the start of this blog, the cocaine warning from SOCA, and the question “why now”, given they’ve known about this contamination problem for some time? The CPS speculate
Was SOCA carefully positioning itself in case it was criticised for these disastrous figures? Cocaine has to be cut because there is a shortage might have been a useful story to plant ahead of the collapsing seizure figures…
Had our press and media done it’s job, failure of policy would indeed have been the headline story, but instead of proper reporting, all they did was to reprint the press releases the government and SOCA gave them. All is not well with the government’s drugs strategy, expect more spin to be faithfully relayed.
good post derek – typical statistical shenanigans from the Home Office. amazing how they spin any outcomes as either signs of success if there is anything remotely positive or ‘we need more of the same’ if they are bad.
Ive posted on the CPS blog BTW
(oh, and the above post is spam: delete)
The statistics presented in the WoD are the numbers of convenience. No one believes them least of all those who issue them.
After many years involved in Drug Rehabilitation it has become apparent that “abuse” of drugs can be a problem – all things in moderation ( and ther is a whole other argument about adulterated substances here). However what is not so readily apparent is the shift in thinking of the western “democracies”. Once upon a time our Police were entrusted with the task of “maintaining the peace” now they have become “law enforcement officers” – the reason for which is simple: if one creates more laws, there is more opportunity for a law to be broken and then it can be enforced cf. the recent changes to the law that makes almost any offence arrestable. Why is this? the answer is employment and increased taxation. More enforcement officers and all the attendant lackeys that are employed in the “Justice” system, from do-gooders to prison officers and probation teams and on and on ad nauseam (hooray for Franz Kafka). But it is precisely this shift that is so dangerous to our hard won freedoms and one of the causes of the unpopularity of the Police. Not to mention that rather than legalizing and taxing all drugs and treating the fall-out as a social issue, our governments are willing to wage actual war on this issue, after all, what is the war in Afghanistan about if not drugs – opium in particular, a flower that could be used in modern medicine more safely than the synthetic versions and employ farmers in that country legitimately, a flower that it is perfectly legal to grow in your own garden in this country, – no, it is much better to let the pharmaceutical companies create addicts, including our dear old PM himself(anti-depressants). It is much better to allow organised crime (if there is such a thing) to distribute and profit from the sale of these substances at the risk of being caught (small) and maintaining our Black economy, to justify the employment and training for all sorts of “jobs” now that we as a Nation (GB) no longer do or make anything at all!
The figures quoted above do nothing but illuminate this charade – failure to enforce effectively is good – it allows ever more restrictions to be imposed, more employment, more licencing, training, inspecting, monitoring, more quango’s, more media coverage etc. etc. This is “Policy” the same policy that allows local government to fine people large sums of money for putting their rubbish in the wrong colour bag or for dropping a bio-degradeable apple core.
A free country? Never.