19.10.2005

Legalise all drugs

Carey Davies comments on the 'drugs scandal' surrounding Tory leadership hopeful David Cameron

The Conservative Party has been scandalised of late by suggestions that leadership contender David Cameron had, at some point in his student career, taken class A drugs. Cameron was asked at a fringe meeting at this year's party conference if he had ever taken illegal drugs (of any kind). Caught off guard, he replied cryptically that he had had a "typical student experience". Subsequently, Cameron was again quizzed on Question time, where he defended what he called his right to a private life "before politics" and refused to say whether or not he had experimented with drugs. Of course, the inmplication is that he has in fact done so - borne out in a later television interview, when he commented: "I did lots of things before I came into politics which I shouldn't have done. We all did." At 39, Cameron is, by his own admission, part of a generation which would have been familiar with drugs at university. It is odd, therefore, that supporters of one Tory contender can connive to damage an opponent's reputation using drugs as a weapon when many of them are themselves of the same generation of students that was eyeball-deep in 'illegal substances'. Clearly, there is monumental hypocrisy here: despite his own tacit admission, Cameron and the Tory Party would continue to pursue a drugs policy which effectively criminalises an entire section of society. It is not just a 'private matter': the furore over this tells us a lot about not just Tory hypocrisy, but the hypocritical attitude that prevails amongst the bourgeoisie as a whole. For revolutionary socialists and communists, there should be no argument over this question. To criminalise drugs is to criminalise people: all drugs should be legalised. Nevertheless, most of the left prefers to take the position that only cannabis is fit for legalisation - the Scottish Socialist Party is the prime example, having simultaneously campaigned for legalising marijuana and clamping down on so-called 'hard' drugs. Respect as yet has no position on the question - although one cannot help feeling that its Socialist Workers Party leadership would be more than happy to keep it that way: even the call to legalise cannabis would be far too much for representatives of the mosque, I am sure. Those like the SSP could point, for instance, to the huge number of deaths involving heroin relative to other drugs. In 2003, it claimed nearly twice as many lives as cocaine, methadone and MDMA/ecstasy put together - but these statistics are only half the story. It is true that heroin, as it can currently be procured, kills more than other drugs; but this does not make a case for its continued illegal status or even stricter 'control'. Quite the opposite. Street heroin is 'cut' with a mix of substances that bring their own risks: sometimes powdered milk and talc; other times foul poisons. The opiate itself can range in purity from three to 99%. In other words, users never know what they are getting: their fate is in the hands of the cartels and gangs that mix the stuff. The incentive for them to produce a dangerous substance derives from the drug's very illegality. It is a historically verifiable fact that prohibition itself is profoundly unhealthy: when drinking alcohol was criminalised in the 1920s and 30s USA, the gangsters who controlled the underground flow would often mix it with all kinds of filth, or make it ludicrously strong. That way the amount of illegal alcohol that was handled could be kept to a minimum; the flipside was that people went blind from drinking it. Likewise, heroin use comes with a huge assortment of risks that stem directly from its status as an illegal drug. Some of the additives do not dissolve as well as the drug does, which leads to lethal blockages of blood vessels. This is not to mention the danger of shared needles, squalid conditions in drug-dens and the torment of giving it up. Incredibly, a more addictive, unsettling substance - methadone - is prescribed as the legal solution to kicking the heroin habit, as a sort of 'comedown' drug. Its effect is, however, quite the opposite: victims become addicted to methadone instead! In Scotland alone, it caused 80 deaths last year. That which applies to heroin covers all drugs. There is very little argument for prohibition. Above all, it is an utterly dysfunctional way of dealing with the endemic and widespread fact that people take drugs for leisure, and always have done. From shamans to students, it has never been unusual. Mind-bending substances have always held an appeal for human beings. We all, in David Cameron's words, "err and stray". But in class-based capitalist society, the way in which the state deals with drugs is particularised by class determinants: typically, the working class gets raids, patrols and beatings, while wealthy middle class gatherings are usually left to smoke in peace. Understatedly, the national treatment agency mentions "evidence of a strong relationship between social deprivation and immediate drug-related deaths". In fact, it is social deprivation itself that poses the greater danger: it is the poor who are most likely to suffer from the absence of quality control, the inability to secure speedy treatment and so on. Like many things we consume, drugs - including those that are currently legal, like alcohol, tobacco and caffeine - can be dangerous if misused. Booze, heroin and the rest are just a form of recreation, perhaps snatched at because of an absence of genuine fulfilment in life. But it is the criminal law which surrounds them that derails life. Not only does illegality rule out health and safety control: it also vastly inflates the price of the drug. Scorned, addicts live on the furthest margins of society because the law condemns them to the status of irresponsible pariahs. Communists understand that humans have always taken drugs; the real problem is a society that criminalises the millions who do so. Drug laws do not save lives: in fact, they do the opposite. They were conceived and are enforced in order to police the working class. Any partisan of that class should therefore fight for their abolition, and work for the legalisation of all drugs. This should be non-negotiable. To have this position is not to be 'pro-drugs', or some such simplistic rubbish. Instead, it involves an understanding that the whole phenomenon of drug consumption in our society, with all its malign manifestations, stems fundamentally not from the nature of the drugs themselves, but from the way they are distributed, produced and monitored. Criminalising drugs increases the powers of the state over the mass of people in our society, primarily the working class. Therefore drugs must be socialised, with their legal supply responsibly regulated and addicts provided with clinics, treatment and support, not truncheons and handcuffs. Socialists should not be discussing which drugs are 'okay' and which should remain outlawed. We say, legalise them all!