May 28, 2009

Dishonesty and Drugs

Posted in Drugs, Politics, Society at 10:41 pm by Paul Sagar

I’ve written before about my belief that the existing prohibition on drugs is not working, albeit in a narrowly focused way.

One of the reasons I don’t think it’s working is that, at present, there is no honest discourse on drugs. Now, that isn’t a necessary feature of prohibition: we could have prohibition as well as a grown-up, mature conversation about drugs that admits there are pros as well as cons to drug use. But at present we don’t have such a discourse.

For example, I have in front of me a leaflet entitled “The Truth About DRUGS”, with the tagline “Say No to Drugs, Say Yes to Life”. It appears to be funded, ultimately, by an organisation called Foundation for a Drug-Free World, which is apparently based in Los Angeles, of all places. Apparently it is part of an “international…drug prevention programme to educate young people on the truth about drugs.”

So, in its own words, this publication purports to educate the young on the truth about drugs.

It fails. Miserably.

For a start, take the section entitled “Why do people take drugs?” Apparently people take drugs:

- to fit in
- to escape or relax
- they are bored
- it makes them seem grown up
- to rebel
- to experiment
- because they want to change something about their lives
- because they think drugs are a solution

It’s probably true that people take drugs for all those reasons. But there’s another, rather important one. People take drugs – brace yourself – because…they have a good time when they take drugs!

They don’t die, they don’t kill anyone, they don’t hurt or maim themselves, they don’t jump out of windows, they don’t lose their jobs etc etc. What they do have is a good time. Later, they go to bed. The next day they wake up and, although they might feel rough (you know, like having a hangover), they carry on with their lives as normal, functioning members of society.

It is not “educating” the youth to leave out the main reason people take drugs: that it’s fun, it’s nice, and the world doesn’t end.

Yes, some people’s lives are destroyed by drugs. It would be ludicrous to say otherwise. But it’s also ludicrous to pretend that most people who take drugs have their lives ruined. They just don’t.

And remember, some people’s lives are destroyed by alcohol  (which is legal, depsite being unambiguously more harmful than cannabis). Yet not everybody who drinks beer becomes an alcoholic. Likewise, not everybody who smokes a spliff becomes a heroin addict, stealing handbags to fuel their life-destroying habit. Which of course brings us to the fact that not all drugs are the same.

Furthermore, many aspects of this pamphlet are ludicrously sensationalist. For example, there’s a quote from “Ann”:

“Ecstasy made me crazy. One day I bit glass, just like I would have bitten an apple. I had to have my mouth full of pieces of glass to realise what was happening to me”

Anybody who has ever taken ecstasy, or been around people who have taken ecstasy, will know that to present this as a typical experience is farcical. People under the influence of ecstasy want to hug everyone and declare how much they love them. Eating glass is just about the last thing they are likely to do. This raises the question of whether this quote by “Ann” is perhaps completely made up – which I suspect it is.

It would be nice to think that this leaflet is an extreme case, funded by American nutters. But it’s not. I remember exactly this sort of dishonesty being taught to me as gospel truth in secondary school (though at that point I already knew, from personal experience, I was being fed lies).

At present, the prohibition on illegal drugs goes hand in hand with a widespread dishonesty about drugs and the people who use them. I don’t think it has to be that way. I believe prohibition is compatible with mature, honest debate and information. But I also believe that mature and honest debate and information about drugs will lead most people to realise that prohibition isn’t working. Why? Because it denies mature responsible adults the free choice of what they want to do with their bodies, puts vasts amounts of money into the hands of violent criminals, criminalises entire sections of societies and wastes money on a war that can never be won at the expense of worthier causes like hospitals and schools.

Which raises a final question: to what extent do the people producing systematic dishonesty about drugs – and I include here the tabloid media – want to prevent a mature and honest debate, precisely because they think it will lead to the end of prohibition? How significant is that, and what does it tell us about their attitude to letting people make decisions based on truthful information?

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