21.05.2008
Legalise, not reclassify
Communists see no reason to make any drugs illegal, writes Jim Moody
We witnessed a truly desperate attempt to garner the Daily Mail vote recently. Despite various cabinet ministers baring their souls (what souls?) and declaring that, yes, they had taken drugs when much younger, home secretary Jacqui Smith pushed marijuana up a criminal notch from class C to class B for today’s users.
According to the home office, “problems related to cannabis use” are now “serious enough” to justify the change: “The decision reflects the fact that skunk, a much stronger version of the drug, now dominates the UK’s cannabis market. Skunk swept other, less potent, forms of cannabis off the market, and now accounts for 81% of cannabis available on our streets, compared to just 30% in 2002.”1
Whereas until the late 1980s generally available cannabis contained around 3.5-4% of its active ingredient, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the skunk strain of cannabis developed by selective breeding usually has a content of between 6% and 15%.
Irrespective of the strength of cannabis presently available on the street, however, the fact remains that this particular drug has been used at least since neolithic times, according to the archaeological evidence. Cannabis was certainly in wide use in antiquity in subcontinental India, as is mentioned in the sacred Vedas (ganjika in Sanskrit). The Assyrians also used the drug, calling it qunubu, in some religious ceremonies. Scythians, Thracians and Dacians consumed it. Later, Sufi mystics of the Mamluk period (13th-16th centuries) did too. So its lineage is long and it has previously been regarded as socially acceptable, even seen as holy. Today, one million Rastafarians include the spiritual use of cannabis among their central practices.
A hypocritical aspect of Smith’s announcement is that stepping up the sanctions available against cannabis users goes completely against the recommendations of the government’s own recently commissioned study into drug abuse. The report of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), Cannabis: classification and public health, prominently states: “... after a most careful scrutiny of the totality of the available evidence, the majority of the council’s members consider - based on its harmfulness to individuals and society - that cannabis should remain a class C substance. It is judged that the harmfulness of cannabis more closely equates with other class C substances than with those currently classified as class B.”2
This recommendation follows an erudite exposure of the illogicality of illegal drugs legislation earlier this year. Two months ago a team of leading scientists - professor David Nutt, Dr Leslie A King, William Saulsbury, and professor Colin Blakemore3 - proposed a new ranking of legal and illegal drugs, graded by their degree of potential for harm. Nutt et al did not propose any rearrangement of classified drugs, though scathingly concluded: “… neither the rank ordering of drugs nor their segregation into groups in the Misuse of Drugs Act classification is supported by the more complete assessment of harm described here.” They assessed three major areas - “the physical harm to the individual user caused by the drug; the tendency of the drug to induce dependence; and the effect of drug use on families, communities and society” - and ranked 20 drugs in order of harm.
The first four were relatively unsurprising: heroin, cocaine and street methadone (all currently class A under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 as amended), plus barbiturates (which is class B). But number five on their list was alcohol, which is, of course, quite legally available for adults. Alcohol is listed above ketamine, which was first classified (as a class C drug) in January 2007, and amphetamines (class B).
There was further embarrassment to officialdom, as the scientists placed tobacco in the next, ninth, position, immediately above buprenorphine/Tamgesic (class C), followed in order by cannabis (now class B again), solvents (uncontrolled, but sale restricted by age), 4-MTA/4-methylthioamphetamine (class A), LSD (class A), methylphenidate/Ritalin (class B), anabolic steroids (class C), and GHB (class C). That big tabloid bugbear Ecstasy/MDMA (Class A) came next, near the bottom of the harm list, just above alkyl nitrites/poppers (uncontrolled) and khat (uncontrolled). Their listing was thus a melange of unclassified and variously classified drugs.
This all goes to show how unscientific and arbitrary the current classification system under the Misuse of Drugs Act is. It is a narrowly political device intent on a particular form of social control. The home secretary’s upgrading of cannabis merely accentuates the idiocy of the present classification of illegal drugs, many of which, as we all know, are far less harmful than alcohol and tobacco. In fact, Nutt et al considered both these legal drugs distinctly more dangerous than cannabis.
These scientists’ work is the kind of informed advice that drug users need: that and good quality drugs. Whatever the problematic nature of drug use and abuse, legal prohibition means state control through the criminalisation of users. It has no benefits for the vast majority of the population, whether drug-users or not. In fact, prohibition is positively harmful to society as a whole, since it puts drug dealing under the control of criminals, with no quality control - resulting in adulteration, poisoning and overdosing - and crime by users, who commit burglary, robbery and theft to pay for their overpriced drugs of choice.
More objectionable, however, is the intense hypocrisy of the state’s approach to drugs and drug-taking, and the arbitrary criminalisation it entails. The illegality of some drugs ensures their usage cannot be socialised. Users are harried and forced into unwise and dangerous transactions. Intellectual laziness and the lack of a democratic imperative amongst the complicit mass media means that it rarely broaches discussion of why some drugs are illegal in the first place. But the two contrasting reports cited above show that the bourgeois consensus is not watertight. In its efforts to curry favour in right populist quarters, government refusal of even limited reform (eg, by downgrading cannabis to class C) shows a bankruptcy and desperation that may rebound on it.
First and foremost, users will, in the main, continue to consume illegal substances. No serious commentator appears to dispute this. Nor does the government in reality, though it pays lip service to the nonsensical idea that ‘cracking down on drugs’, as it tries to show itself doing, will pay electoral dividends. Continued illegality and enforcement of the law by the criminal justice system will not deter users, but will simply criminalise them and add to the onerous state controls over their lives.
Second, the raison d’être for the state making illegal what individual adults do with and put into their bodies is argued not at all, but assumed as ‘common sense’. We, of course, challenge this encroachment on our democratic rights. Cultivation and use of cannabis were outlawed in 1928: so until 80 years ago cannabis was not even controlled by English law. Indeed, Sir John Russell Reynolds’s article in the first edition of The Lancet lauded the benefits of cannabis. As Queen Victoria’s personal physician, he reportedly prescribed it for her period pains. The case has yet to be made for its continued control.
Third, home secretary Smith’s announcement is only the latest attempt at modifying law for none other than crudely political purposes. When cannabis was made illegal in the 1920s USA it was on the back of a xenophobic campaign, renaming the drug marijuana so that it could be associated with foreigners (ie, Mexicans) portrayed as intent on corrupting decent young Americans.
Earlier this decade the Scottish Socialist Party went some way towards the correct stance on drugs, but ultimately failed to bite the bullet. Although it campaigned for ‘soft’ drugs like cannabis to be legalised, SSP policy was for ‘hard’ ones to remain illegal in an ‘independent socialist Scotland’. This attitude is useless to the working class, not up to snuff as a democratic position that points toward it becoming a class for itself, an aspiring ruling class.
As to the Socialist Workers Party, it uses Steve Rolles of the Transform Drug Policy Foundation to shilly and shally over the question. While decrying police harassment, he fails to come out plainly for legalisation. “Prohibition” must, he says, “be questioned as the dominant paradigm, and alternative policies, including legalisation and regulation of some or all currently illegal drugs need to be seriously considered.”4 I suppose ‘questioning’ and ‘seriously considering’ is better than nothing. More recently, Rolles was again given space for what amounts to advising the government: “The aim of drug policy should be to reduce the harm drugs cause. Current policy is failing to do this. Only by rational consideration of prohibition’s failure, and of the policy alternatives, can we take positive steps toward this goal.”5 Not good enough by half, comrades.
Communists see no reason to make any drugs illegal. We advocate the complete legalisation of all drugs and drug-taking. Drug misuse is a social problem that requires social answers. As it stands, criminalising drugs and drug-users exacerbates the problem.
Legalisation, on the other hand, would allow for quality control. And drug gangsters would lose their business. Then we can properly socialise recreational drug use.
Notes
1. www.homeoffice.gov.uk/about-us/news/cannabis-reclassified
2. drugs.homeoffice.gov.uk/publication-search/acmd/acmd-cannabis-report-2008
3. ‘Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse’ The Lancet Vol 369, No9566, March 24 2007.
4. ‘Drugs policy run by prohibition addicts’ Socialist Worker February 18 2006.
5. ‘Plans to reclassify cannabis obscure real debate’ Socialist Worker February 16.