August 12, 2010
Stalin Syndrome
Peter Hennessy’s revised and re-issued The Secret State contains a particularly astonishing revelation.
In the immediate post-war period, the Soviet Union was getting the best intelligence possible about British activities. This was because five top British agents – Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – were simultaneously working for the Russians, passing on mountains of top secret information.
When that information got to the USSR it went direct to Stalin, because he didn’t trust anybody else to prepare intelligence reports for him. Yet Stalin was a deeply deluded paranoid maniac. In particular, he was utterly convinced that Britain and the USA were planning a pre-emptive strike against the USSR before it could obtain nuclear weapons.
Yet the stolen information from Whitehall indicated that Britain was planning nothing of the sort. Devastated by conflict with Germany, Britain had zero intention of attacking Russia. Indeed, British intelligence lived in dread of a Red Army push westwards at a time when American resolve in Europe was waning.
However, Stalin had decided that Britain (and America) were preparing to attack. So he systematically ignored the best intelligence information he could have hoped for, and concluded that it was all a clever ruse by the British secret service.
Depending on perspective, we should either be deeply thankful or utterly chilled by Stalin’s delusions. We should be thankful if we decide that had Stalin treated the intelligence reports with the authority they deserved, he would have swept Westwards and conquered Europe. We should be chilled if we think that, on balance, information that should have made Stalin less paranoid – and thereby less likely to start World War III – was completely disregarded by him.
But then, doesn’t modern society exhibit a variation of this Stalin Syndrome? I refer to the special war which we’ve been fighting for 40 years; our war on drugs.
As the recent Channel 4 documentaries have been making clear, this is a war which we are losing and have no hope of winning. Let’s romp through some facts, already tedious to those who’ve thought about the madness of drug criminalisation for more than 5 minutes.
Britain spent £1.5 billion “fighting” the war on drugs last year. A recent estimate put the quantity of drugs prevented from reaching the market at 1%. But even if the authorities are doing 10 times better than that, they’re way off the 60-70% supply-prevention rate that the UN estimates is necessary to have any appreciable impact on the drug trade.
We spend further billions putting drug users and dealers in prison. Addicts are not rehabilitated, and leave prison only to fall back into cycles of crime and dependency. Dealers likewise pass through the permanently revolving door of criminal justice and drug supply. In the meanwhile, the drugs trade systematically corrupts law enforcement officers, customs officials, members of the judiciary and just about any section of society it comes into contact with.
British money spent on heroin makes its way to Afghanistan, where it is used to fund an insurgency in which British troops are being killed and mutilated. Although research shows that white and middle class citizens are as likely to use drugs as the poor and ethnic minorities, it is the latter that overwhelmingly make-up the prison population. In America it’s even more extreme, as Monday’s instalment at Channel 4 showed.
And that’s not even touching on the civil liberties question: why, exactly, should informed and consenting adults not be allowed to take certain substances in the privacy of their own homes, especially when this does no harm to others? Unlike alcohol, which kills thousands every year and lies behind most street violence and domestic abuse…but which is entirely legal.
The evidence is in: drug criminalisation does not work, and we need a change of approach.
But for whatever reason, the powers-that-be are exhibiting Stalin Syndrome. Refusing to accept the evidence because it does not fit the pre-determined conclusion: that drugs must continue to be criminalised. And because of Stalin Syndrome, the Channel 4 documentaries will make absolutely no difference whatsoever.
In Uncle Joe himself, Stalin Syndrome risked the destruction of the entire planet. At least with the war on drugs it simply guarantees that we continue to collectively live-out the definition of insanity: to keep doing the same thing over and over, even when it’s failed.
Oh, that and the devastation of millions of lives across the globe. Hey, it’s your world. Try not to choke on it.
Tom said,
August 12, 2010 at 8:26 am
“The evidence is in: drug criminalisation does not work, and we need a change of approach.”
Hurrah! Aux Barricades!
Left Outside said,
August 12, 2010 at 8:55 am
Couldn’t agree more Paul.
There is a fascinating ability for all people, not just paranoid dictators, to ignore the evidence on this.
The War on Drugs (capitalisation obligatory apparently) has acheived a hegemonic status where its aims and methods are seen as common sense.
In fact, it is not so much that people ignore the evidence, but that when evidence is presented to them it is twisted to fit into the War on Drugs narrative. “Prohibition not working; prohibit harder.”
Richard said,
August 12, 2010 at 9:09 am
I believe the pro-criminalisation lobby hang onto the examples of Singapore and Sweden where a tough approach appears to work. Suffice to say though that we are neither of those countries.
Paul Sagar said,
August 12, 2010 at 9:19 am
Richard, not only are we not those countries, but a “tough” approach may not even be the causal factor; in the case of Sweden for example it may be low levels of deprivation and inequality that does the work, for example.
Leo said,
August 12, 2010 at 1:22 pm
I think a reasonable element in why this debate hasn’t been opened up properly before, and is generally a political taboo, is the role of America. America has, since Nixon, been the leader in the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ and America uses its soft power to promote War on Drugs policies throughout the rest of the world – most noticeably in South America. Major European countries, it seems to me, are therefore particularly unlikely to drift too far in the direction of regulated legalisation. Obviously there are other reasons the subject is taboo in wider political debate – first-mover costs to the politician who raises the issue, no obvious political constituency to win over through doing so, the deeply embedded hysteria over the issue, etc. – but the role of America in shaping institutions like the UN’s attitude towards the issue, and in general propping up a War on Drugs approach across the world, shouldn’t be underestimated in my view. I don’t know if this point was made in the documentary, but the drug policy foundation Transform has an excellent blog that documents it well: http://transform-drugs.blogspot.com/
Last Hun said,
August 12, 2010 at 2:47 pm
Good point, very eloquently made.
Perhaps you may care to include a reference to the experience of Portugal, where the decriminalising the personal use but not trafficking of substances originally itended as a harm reduction measure, has according to some statistics actually lowered drug use.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2009/07/how_portugal_treats_drug_addic.html
There is of course the caveat that this was only a sample of the local population and only one age group, however I believe the general point stands.
I can also see a possible mechanismn whereby if a user no longer needs to recruit others to deal to, in order to feed their own habit, this would lead to lower recruitment rates.
Thrasymachus said,
August 12, 2010 at 2:59 pm
At least Stalin didn’t fire his spies, even when he ignored them. Prof. Nutt wasn’t so lucky, was he?
Paul Sagar said,
August 12, 2010 at 3:36 pm
Well, Stalin didn’t fire his spies in the American sense. But he did either deport them to Siberia or have them tortured in the basement of the Lubuyanka prison before having them shot…
Leo said,
August 12, 2010 at 9:35 pm
Also, good article on the NYRB blog about the drug war in Mexico:
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/aug/12/quiet-shift-mexicos-drug-war/
Paul Sagar said,
August 12, 2010 at 9:46 pm
Leo, thanks for that.
I agree about America, by the way.
John Meredith said,
August 13, 2010 at 9:29 am
It is uncomfortable finding oneself defending Stalin but I think his delusion and paranoia is overstated on this subject. It was, frankly, implausible that the KGB had five agents in these positions in MI6 and that none of them were being run back at the USSR with disinformation. If even one was a double agent he would have been able to help MI6 control the others without their knowledge. That is what the KGB would have done. If the UK and the US had been planning a preemptive attack they would have wanted Stalin to feel complacent on this point and a high-level campaign of disinformation would have been worth almost any cost. To achieve trust in the sources some real secrets and some of a good quality would have needed to have been leaked. So it is understandable that Stalin did not quite trust the sources and that, in a closed society like the Soviet society, that confirmation bias gained the upper hand. Stalin was paranoid, but he also had good reason to be paranoid, they really were out to get him.
Paul Sagar said,
August 13, 2010 at 9:48 am
John Meredith,
Your point, as a general one, is obviously sound. However, what makes the Stalin-Philby et. al. case so astounding is that it wasn’t as though the Cambridge Five just popped-up in 1946. They’d been passing on reliable information to the USSR for nearly a decade.
Of course, you’re point does still stand to a large extent: Stalin couldn’t discount the possibility that they’d been infiltrated/compromised.
But what didn’t help Stalin’s judgement-calls were the fact he read intelligence “in the raw”; with no background or weeding-out provided by his intelligence units, because he didn’t trust them and anyway none of them would do it because mistakes on their part meant a bullet in the brain. So at that level, Stalin’s paranoia made his inability to accept evidence (even when it was good) pretty thoroughgoing, because he put himself in a situation where he was unlikely to understand most of what he saw.
Bad Conscience said,
August 26, 2010 at 11:37 am
[...] As regards my friends who must become hypocrites, they’ll no doubt learn to live with it – just as their own teachers did before them. And yet the consequence of everyone learning to live with this hypocrisy is the perpetuation of a drugs policy exhibiting collective social madness. [...]