14.08.1997

End state drug abuse

The death of five-year old Dillon Hull, shot dead in a Bolton street last week, has again produced calls for the decriminalisation of drugs.

The killing occurred in broad daylight while Dillon was walking with his stepfather, John Bates, who is believed to have been the target of a drugs-related assassination attempt. As in many towns and cities, the trafficking of illegal narcotics in Bolton has provoked deadly rivalry between gangs trying to protect their monopoly over this lucrative trade.

The likely profit is worth the risk of being killed or jailed for years. For example a kilo of heroin can ‘earn’ a dealer more than £100,000 - the astronomical price is due entirely to its illegality.

Yet overwhelmingly the bourgeois response is to apply the same old failed remedy over again. Government politicians and establishment worthies launch version after version of the ‘war against drugs’ - more powers to the police, heavier sentences for traffickers and casual users alike, and scare-mongering miseducation drives in schools, where relatively harmless substances are portrayed as the source of all evil.

Prior to last week’s tragedy the government had called for applications to the post of ‘UK anti-drugs coordinator’ - immediately dubbed the ‘drugs tsar’ - whose role will be to “take an overview of strategies to combat substance abuse” and make recommendations to the government.

One thing is certain: the appointee’s job will not be to stimulate “an open, honest discussion about the drug problem”, as called for by the Bolton West Labour MP, Brian Iddon. “Clare Short mentioned the word ‘decriminalisation’ and got into hot water for doing so,” he said, referring to the fact that the former shadow transport secretary was demoted by Tony Blair for daring to ‘think the unthinkable’.

Blair has ruled out any easing of legal restrictions on even the most harmless of substances such as cannabis, despite the growing evidence that it may have beneficial medical uses. A US committee of medical academics, headed by Dr William Beaver of Georgetown University School of Medicine, has called on institutes of health to research the drug’s potential.

Hundreds of thousands of young people regularly use Ecstasy. It generates humour, happiness, confidence and energy, which are usually followed by fatigue, mood swings (including depression and paranoia) and sometimes nausea. Despite some well publicised cases and media-managed scare stories, alcohol-related deaths are much higher than those caused by Ecstasy. The long-term effects of taking unadulterated E for a sustained period are criminally under-researched, precisely because of its illegality and the establishment’s determination to brand it a ‘killer drug’.

Yet trafficking in Ecstasy, or even just giving it to a friend, carries a recommended jail sentence of three to five years. Ironically illegal drugs are usually more readily available, and therefore cheaper, in her majesty’s prisons than outside.

Having inculcated the population with the ethos of the ‘drugs evil’, the bourgeois parties are unable to adopt a more honest approach even if they wanted to, for fear of losing the ‘respectable’ votes of middle England. Besides, the ‘need to combat drugs smuggling’ is one of the excuses given by the government for opting out of the European Union policy of dismantling internal border controls. A crackdown on drug abuse is also the excuse used to give the state’s police and immigration authorities greater powers to stop and search and to force entry into workers’ homes.

Paul Flynn, the Labour MP who campaigns for decriminalisation, condemned the underlying rationale of the ‘drugs tsar’ appointment, with its failed ‘get tough’ approach, and lambasted the hypocrisy of his colleagues: “Almost all the premature deaths of MPs are drugs-related,” he said, explaining that “There are 16 bars in the House of Commons and they sound off about drugs with a whisky in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and a packet of paracetamol in their top pocket.”

What is needed is full legalisation of all drugs, ‘hard’ or ‘soft’. That would immediately put the traffickers out of business by reducing the price of their commodities to a tiny fraction of their present street value. It would also end the crime-dependency of addicts. Narcotics must be subject to quality control, impossible while their use is itself illegal.

The state should have no right to interfere in what substances we consume, whether for leisure or temporary escape from oppressive alienation. Alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, Ecstasy, heroin or crack - all are drugs which can give pleasure but may cause great harm through misuse. We neither advocate nor condemn their use.

But we do advocate that workers start to take control over their own lives through organisation. Drugs may bring temporary ‘liberation’ from poverty, unemployment and dead-end drudgery, but there is nothing like the real thing.

Alan Fox