Party time in Berlin; repression is great when it stops.

The reason Prof Nutt was sacked last week was made pretty clear by Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary; we can’t have people questioning the workings of the drug laws by spreading knowledge of the truth. He knows that as soon as the debate about drugs is opened up, the whole regime of prohibition will come crashing down.

It’s party time in Berlin; twenty years ago on Monday night perhaps the world’s most obvious symbol of intolerance and repression, the Berlin wall, fell. Within hours of the announcement that travel restrictions were eased, thousands upon thousands of East Berliners had pushed open the barriers  in that hated wall. Within days new crossings were opened, within months the whole thing was abandoned and within a year the DDR as East Germany was known had ceased to exist.

The plan may well have been to simply allow a more relaxed regime at the border, but that never stood a chance of being realised. The Berlin wall had existed for as long as it did only because huge sums of money were spent on policing not just it, but also the population. People in the DDR knew only too well that they were being watched, that the knock on the door could come at any moment.

Those of us who were  lucky enough – if that’s the right thing to say – to see the Berlin wall in all it’s foul ugliness will be familiar with the guard dogs, the death strip of carefully raked sand and the bright searchlights  and will understand not only the extent of this repression, but also the strength of belief those who enforced it had in what they were doing.

The whole policy on which  Berlin wall was founded was a one way street; the border was forever being strengthened with more search lights, more trip wires, more surveillance and even more walls. The death strip was made ever more deadlier, right up to the end, indeed even as the gates were forced open on the Bornholmer Strasse check point the East German government was investing in its “anti fascist protection barrier” and all the associated instruments of repression.

Yet the wall and everything that went with it was swept away almost overnight as soon as those at the top who were underwriting the  whole project – in the Kremlin of course – pulled the plug.

It isn’t pulling at the credibility strings too much to compare the mindset of the regime that maintained the Berlin wall with that which continues the prohibition of drugs. Sure, the principle on which both were founded is entirely different, but the way both actually go about their business is not so dissimilar.

Both are regimes imposed on the population without their consent and are designed to restrict what adults can say or do, hence both treat the public as the potential enemy. The drug war  can only exist as the Berlin wall could only exist by virtue of continued and ever stronger repression and open criticism simply cannot be tolerated. True we don’t have a physical barrier to compare with the wall, or quite the infrastructure of the Stasi (yet) but just about everything else is there to some extent or another, especially in in some parts of the country, such as police stop-searches, mass surveillance, “grass up” phone lines, plain clothes “secret” police, the knock (or battering ram) on the door and so on. The UK is fast heading toward a police state and the drug war is one of the – if not the- prime drivers providing all the excuses politicians need to put the infrastructure of repression in place. We have further to go maybe, but we are certainly on the road.

This is why Alan Johnson saw what Prof David Nutt was doing as being so dangerous and why there has been so much fuss made about the categorisation of cannabis by drug war supporters, even though it means nothing to most ordinary people.

If the war on drugs were  to be relaxed even a little it would encourage a public debate. It wouldn’t just be a debate about the relative harms of different drugs, it would also open the floodgates to a range of debates about the effectiveness of different regimes in achieving their stated goals, the type of policing we have and more, much more, besides.

In any case the whole foundation that prohibition is based on – the belief that the way to “control” drugs is to repress their use and hence the restrict what the population is allowed to do – would be placed under the glare of public scrutiny and it could never withstand such scrutiny. Alan Johnson knows this so he did his best to close down the debate before it got out of hand.

If we go back a few years this need to keep the infrastructure of repression intact was at the root of the prohibitionist campaign against cannabis reclassification to class C.  The relaxing of the law against cannabis (such as it was) was seen as a crack in the dam, the thin edge of the wedge. So the door for further reform was clearly open and it had to be slammed shut and quickly. Cynics amongst us would argue politicians of both main parties saw the logic in this because a major change in the drug laws would result in a huge change to the infrastructure of repression their power base is built on.

So it is with repressive regimes which can only survive by keeping the lid on things. As soon as the repression is eased up demands for further change are only to be expected. Once change begins it becomes hard if not impossible to control and tends to run it’s own course. Repression has to be absolute and unquestioned or it falls, just like the Berlin wall.

The question is, has the damage (from the drug warriors point of view) already been done? The answer is probably “yes” because one of the main planks the policy is built on – that it has some kind of grounding in science – no longer exists. That is now something which is widely understood amongst the general public and indeed, isn’t really being denied by the government.

But more – and again it’s doubtful if Johnson had this in mind when he sacked the professor – the reason he gave for the sacking is about to be undermined by the very thing Prof Nutt did becoming enshrined in the rights afforded to independent advisers. Scientists of course must have the right to lecture on their work and if the government is to continue to have the input it needs from scientists, then it has to accept their right to criticise government policy in the public domain if that’s what their work leads them to conclude. The reason given by Johnson for sacking David Nutt was because he (Nutt) had exercised precisely that right. Alan Johnson therefore has a big problem because this aspect alone means the secrecy element prohibition needs in order to keep functioning has been compromised.

But there’s even more because Alan Johnson has asked for a review of the ACMD, including – and this is the howler – an examination of the “value for money” the ACMD represents. Apart from the fact that the members of the ACMD are unpaid and thus one would think quite good “VFM” he is on very, very thin ice with that one. The value for money of the policy of prohibition is a total unknown and the government has long refused to even contemplate an examination of it. Transform have been demanding a proper cost-benefit analysis of government drugs policy for some time of course and the government’s consistent refusal to even consider such a thing lead Transform to do it themselves. with interesting if predictable results. How much better it would be if the government were to allow the real thing though and just what secrets would it reveal about the effectiveness of the war on (some) drugs? They won’t do it of course, probably because the huge cost and ineffectiveness of the regime would be exposed by openness and public scrutiny.

So for now the lid is kept on, Alan Johnson is still in post and the political establishment has rallied round, but out on the streets  those difficult questions are being asked and the policy of prohibition is in he spotlight like never before.

There are a few voices speaking up for The Home Secretary’s action of course including most politicians. Most of the rest most of them were either mentioned in or contributed to the comments section the latest blog from Kathy Gyngell of the Centre for Policy Studies: Names such as Neil McKeganey head of the centre for “drugs misuse”, Professor Parrot the self-proclaimed “ecstasy expert”, Mary Brett of Europe Against Drugs and Peter Stoker, National Drug Prevention Alliance are of course, all well known characters supportive of prohibition. Missing from that list of course is Debra Bell, who has non the less been over the moon regarding the sacking.

The thing is cannabis prohibition and the move back to class B are claimed to be based on concerns built on scientific evidence, or at least, that’s how it started. Now they’re based on “public perception” which may not be as it was before all this blew up and the need to “send out messages”, which is now open to criticism because there is no evidence to show that such “messages”work. The line in the sand will probably move again soon and another reason for prohibition will be constructed, but this constant moving of the goalposts is a sure sign of weakness.

Once one person was allowed through the Berlin wall on the night of 9th November 1998 it was all over. Once a small move is made in the regime of prohibition it will be all over for that as well. The collapse, when it comes, will be almost as spectacular as happened in Berlin twenty years ago in it’s own way . That day can’t come soon enough.