Rewriting the English language and a criminalised approach to medication

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.

About UKCIA

UKCIA is a cannabis law reform site dedicated to ending the prohibition of cannabis. As an illegal drug, cannabis is not a controlled substance - it varies greatly in strength and purity, it's sold by unaccountable people from unknown venues with no over sight by the authorities. There is no recourse to the law for users and the most vulnerable are therefore placed at the greatest risk. There can be no measures such as age limits on sales and no way to properly monitor or study the trade, let alone introduce proper regulation. Cannabis must be legalised, as an illegal substance it is very dangerous to the users and society at large.

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