27.05.1999

Demon drugs and Dallaglio

Communists are for a rational approach to recreational drug use

Many at the helm of society, including MPs and newspaper journalists, are often drugged up to the eyeballs: their traditional drug of choice, however, is alcohol. Winston Churchill famously consumed a bottle of brandy - daily.

Lawrence Dallaglio, England’s now former Rugby Union team captain, told an undercover News of the World reporter, then later denied, that he took cocaine and ecstasy with two other members of the British Lions squad during their victorious tour of South Africa in 1997.

Drinkers and smokers on rugby’s governing body, which accepts the right of this Murdoch rag to present a prima facie case against Dallaglio, carry on drinking and smoking while Dallaglio faces public opprobrium for admitting only to a long past illegal drug use. Blair’s minister of sport has welcomed the rugby captain’s resignation. The sick irony, of course, is that the consumption of illegal drugs is endemic. Moreover rugby football in particular operates within a subculture that positively encourages over-indulgence in the game’s favourite legal drug, alcohol.

Britain’s ruling class simply does not want those it rules to get away from their control, even if temporary and illusory, when the escape is fuelled by illicit narcotics. Profits can be made out of those that are, quite arbitrarily, legal drugs, whether on medical prescription or sold by publicans and tobacconists. The state gives its blessing to the use of legal drugs because it has the power to do so. Even though the dangers of use, let alone abuse, of alcohol and tobacco have become known, there is not the slightest prospect of the capitalist state prohibiting them.

Control via licensing and taxing is as far as our rulers find it necessary to go when it comes to these dangerous, but legal, drugs.

They concede that adults should be allowed to decide their own use of alcoholic beverages and tobacco, even if it means there is a risk that some (ab)users may endanger their health or cause danger to others (eg, drunk driving). Adults are simply advised of the dangers by public health propaganda. Largely because of secondary smoking fears, restrictions on where smokers can puff away in public have tightened; but there is still no prohibition on anyone over 16 purchasing cigarettes, cigars, or pipe tobacco, nor is there likely to be any.

On the contrary, outlets for the legal sale of alcoholic drinks have increased dramatically over recent decades: off-licences and supermarket retailers exist where previously there were none. Tobacco and drink distribution and sale are regulated (though in terms of sales of tobacco products to under-16s, not particularly strongly), taxed, and controlled by the state, at least to some degree. Their use is considered perfectly acceptable.

On the other hand, Dallaglio presents an example of how those who might kick over the traces are whipped to heel. Following the News of the World article (May 23), he issued a statement which said, in part,

“1. I categorically deny ever having dealt in illegal drugs in any way whatsoever. 2. I categorically deny ever having used illegal drugs, whether on the 1997 tour of South Africa or at any other time during my rugby career ... any use of illegal drugs is wrong and unacceptable.”

In order to have even a chance of playing in the England team again, the man has had to eat crow, to be demeaned into answering questions about himself which the state considers its ultimate prerogative to ask. Police, the courts, and prisons, the whole criminal justice system, are there to ensure compliance with the arbitrary nature of the British drugs laws (the legal systems of England and Wales and that of Scotland are separate but equal on this one). Even in those areas where the police give cautions or magistrates give conditional discharges for possession, the state is still insisting on its rights to control us. Slaves we are indeed when we cannot decide what we put in our own bodies.

Use of narcotic and stimulant drugs has been a human pastime since prehistory. Alcoholic drinks have been brewed, peyote eaten, coca leaves chewed, and cannabis, opium and tobacco smoked for centuries. The state determines which of these substances adults shall be allowed to consume and which they shall be punished for using. The absence of choice in this matter is in fact a question of democracy, a question which it is the duty of workers and their organisations to take up to expose the state’s oppressive exercise of its power.

News of the World reporter Louise Oswald and all the other ‘public interest’ hacks who have outed high profile illegal drug users are deluding themselves and those duped by their lies that they are acting as arbiters of the general good. In fact, their purpose is to ensure that the rest of us see how even those in the public eye like Lawrence Dallaglio can be cut down to size, can be made to knuckle down, can be forced to meet criteria the state unreasonably and arbitrarily lays down. By challenging the state’s right to dictate what we shall or shall not do with our bodies we actually start to challenge its right to exist.

As part of the Communist Party’s minimum programme, we call for the full legalisation of all drugs.

Tom Ball