Intoxicants and the law

'That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely…. the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and always has been one of the principal appetites of the soul' Aldous Huxley, 1951 With each accumulative change in the retributive severity of laws governing the use of illegal intoxicants, the law as it stands renders itself more preposterous and less likely to be obeyed (and indeed, enforced in some countries) as it leaves the concept of reality further and further behind. The use of intoxicants in their multifarious forms is as old as humanity itself. By the term ‘intoxication’ and more importantly ‘intoxicant(s)’ I mean a chemical or substance that has mind-altering abilities. I don’t mean the tabloid representations of a dribbling, glassy eyed staggering sod that spent the last three days on an amphetamine/booze/fags filled diet. I’m looking at the average person who after a week of mind numbing boredom at work comes home (rather than the local pub) and sucks down a few billies of somewhat powerful hydro skunkweed or Mullumbimby Madness. Or the couple who, to enhance their clubbing night, drop a couple of pills or a tab or two of ying yang acid. They may go to a party and do a line or two of coke as well. They do this to take a holiday from reality in a broad sense. The need to take a holiday from reality or to skew reality, as Huxley notes above, is as old as humanity and is one of ‘the principle appetites of the soul’. The type of holidays taking place are done so via alcohol, heroin, speed, dope, cigarettes, coffee, red bull or LSD to name a few. It could also be, as Walton points out, spinning round and round in circles or holding one’s breath and standing up quickly to get that giddy, spinning feeling. Everyday reality ‘shape shifts’ for a few brief moments and we love it. And we will continue to love it no matter what mum and dad say and no matter what the law says. Rather than a complete overhaul of arcane legislative stupidity, that were put into place around the world in the early 1900’s, governments around the world actually add to these, in some places draconian, laws in an attempt to save the teeming masses from completely obliterating themselves in a haze of drug-fuelled stupor. Or so we are led to believe. They are merely adding band-aids to an already dying patient. Is it in response to pleas from the electorate to ‘save’ humans? Or is it weak, knee jerk responses to tabloid-fuelled mania? The ‘Drug War’ started by Richard Nixon thirty years ago, didn’t and doesn’t really work and we all know it, but still the illusion is maintained that the benevolence of those in power is inimitable. In an indirect way it is a war against human beings. The recent ‘sacking’ of advisor Professor David Nutt, Chairman of England’s ACMD is sadly a drop in an ocean of surreal policy efforts put forward by many governments around the world that refuse to acknowledge drugs and their place in society. Rather than look at evidence regarding drug use and implementing legislation that will keep regular citizens out of the docks (and out of the hospitals and sadly the cemetery), the British parliament has chosen to step back in time and flog a dead horse by stating that it would be ‘sending out the wrong message’. As part of the fallout from this sacking a number of scientists on the board itself resigned in protest, and a sackful of mail was sent to the Home Secretary Alan Johnson remonstrating him for meddling in the affairs of scientific advisory bodies. Those gripes came from leading Neuroscientists, Behavioural Pharmacologists and even Lord Drayson, the Science and Innovation Minister for the British Government . As long as this desire to take a bit of time out has been around, various religious and legal strictures worldwide have attempted to suppress and dispossess their populations of what some would say is their true biological inheritance. This denial of biological urges has risen quite late in the scene of humanity’s existence and it has come in the form of increasingly dangerous legislative sanctions. Somehow it has in an almost ridiculous way mirrored the illusion that ‘taking drugs’ is somehow a ‘new thing’ and that we must be protected from ourselves as we are all too stupid to make that decision for ourselves. However, if we take the biological inheritance argument further, those who want to get a buzz going, or to get well and truly fucked up cannot and will not be brushed away easily by some half baked legislative fiat, which has at it’s basis very little scientific evidence to back it up. The impulse to take intoxicants has, and always will, persist despite the malevolence of any retributive punishment. And the key difference lies in the fact that not all drug users become drug addicts. Legislation fails to acknowledge this and therefore fails to base itself on rational thought and fails ultimately to take care of the citizenry it so aims to protect. The tragic fact of this is that we are only ‘allowed’ a miniscule amount of intoxicants. Humans, being the inquisitive lot they are, will always want to know what is on the other side of the fence. Except that taking the leap over the stile into possibly different pastures also means rubbing shoulders with some of the less salubrious members of our citizenry. With that they are by themselves in many ways and will need to deal with the producers of these intoxicants who are not governed by quality control or health and safety regulations. By ‘criminalising’ a substance and creating a ‘war’ as such on it, legislators are in a sense increasing the harms associated with the use of non-medical substances. Rather than saving us from ourselves, they are creating a situation whereby the health of drug users is actually causing far more harm than good. A recent report, After the war on drugs: Blueprint for regulation, comprehensively highlights the harms caused by the prohibitionist stance. In its foreword it cites some alarming figures gleaned from WHO sources and looks at HIV/AIDS statistics as an example of how legislative zealotry harms human beings. Outside Sub-Saharan Africa 30% of HIV/AIDS infection are attributed to injecting drug use. In Europe and Central Asia a whopping 60% of this blood-borne death sentence is contracted via injecting drug usage As seen above in the egregiously poor behaviour of Johnson in his sacking of David Nutt, any change (or suggestion of change) in the status quo is generally met with much hue and cry. Whether that change is a move away from the punitive and castigatory legislation currently in place in many countries to a medical or even community model, you can be sure that the onslaught of shrill moral shrieks will be deafening. This deafening sound has, and will continue to, drown out reason, evidence and sound argument when assessing the place of intoxicants in society. Emotion, a very subjective concept seems to rule over realistic, evidence-based arguments. This has and will cause lives to be lost or ruined. If one looked at the current laws and attitudes in most countries and compared them to a two-year-old child, the destructive and negative rage that it is displaying would be regarded by most as a tantrum or a case of the ‘terrible twos’. Some parents would ignore such a child and let them scream until they were blue in the face, then fall asleep sobbing ‘s-s-s-sorry…s-s-s-sorry’. However this one is not going to stop at pushing over a lovely Murano vase to the tiled floor and then running off to his bedroom. Oh no, this one is growing bigger and nastier and wreaking larger amounts of havoc and destruction to the lives it crosses. It is growing into a big bully and as we have seen in England recently will result in lives being destroyed. Murano vases can be replaced, but human lives cannot as a result of poor decision making by some governments. One of the most obvious, but ill-founded, assertions is that should the laws change the government will be opening up some type of floodgate whereby those who choose to imbibe will increase at such an exponential rate that the very foundations of society will crumble. The death toll will go through the roof, hospitals will be inundated with OD cases, crime will escalate (?) and we will all go to hell in a hand basket faster than we already are. This comes from a local MP I spoke with the other night (who was strangely enough under the influence of a very strong and potentially dangerous substance, alcohol). Rather than push the case at the time, I pondered upon it later and thought if this type of argument is scrutinised, its validity veers from questionable to just plain silly. Judging by the way that users of any intoxicant, whether it sits inside or outside of the law, flout or ignore the law this thinking does not wash well. I would argue that if you asked people why they do NOT choose to imbibe in intoxicants, most answers would NOT be of the ‘it’s illegal’ nature. Generally it will be of the ‘I don’t like them (or that particular one’), ‘I’ve given up’ or ‘I don’t want to’. We cannot ignore this one, for to do so would continue to cause pain and heartache for those whose lives have fallen as a result of having to resort to ‘criminal’ activities either to feed an addiction or to get a buzz going for a night out clubbing. I’m not saying I can offer a watertight alternative but statistics have shown that by taking even one drug off the ‘nasty’ list crime can be reduced, substances can be made safer and more and more affordable, and illness and death rates can be cut. The ‘British System’ as it was known, looked at drugs as less of a legal ‘problem’ and chose to let the medical establishment run the show, which went against the grain of worldwide drug policy paradigms. From the 1920’s until the 60’s it offered pharmaceutical grade heroin and cocaine to addicts, keeping the number of users very low when compared to other countries that took the ‘elimination of addiction’ approach. This was slowly whittled away at though by international political pressures and is now a distant and sad memory. The most famous holdouts of this policy was the Widnes Clinic in Liverpool, run by Dr John Marks. Users who entered the maintenance program were given pharmaceutical grade heroin and/or cocaine. They voluntarily registered themselves with the Cheshire Police as part of a study on drugs and crime. According to the Drug Squad, there was a 93 % drop in property crimes amongst those registered. Illuminating, to say the least. Further statistics reveal a 0% rise in HIV infection rates, compared to the 15% average rise in rates in the previous years. And lo and behold, the rise in new drug users actually dropped as well. When demand for something drops, because it is made free, supply dries up. What dried up eventually though was the funding of this clinic and in 1995, 450 addicts were basically told, ‘no more, you are now to go on the methadone reduction program’. What appeared to be the last bastion of providing people with some form of dignity in their lives was quashed by a simple stroke of a pen. Some countries have begun to slowly turn the corner regarding drug usage and are moving towards more rational, evidence based public health approaches. Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico no longer agree with the primarily UN/US based prohibitionist stance and are slowly loosening up the legal system to some extent by decriminalising possession. IN 2001, Portugal took a somewhat radical approach and decided enough was enough, decriminalising possession of ALL drugs. Decriminalisation is good, but we need to now move into some form of regulatory mode whereby the drugs that those people choose to take are safe and that the way they take them is made even safer. Certainly, those caught up in the throes of hard-core intoxicant use may well speed up their demise if a regulatory system, such as that proposed in the Transform Drugs Policy Foundation were ever put into place. Of this group those with an unfettered death wish are certainly not waiting for the government to come out and say ‘It’s cool we’ve changed the law, knock yourselves out’. They will do what they damn well please. The majority of those who dabble every now and then in speed, smack, coke, pills, acid or variants of the above do so in an innocuous and relatively harmless manner and will not end up in an ICU. Apart from the occasional bad trip, hangover, freak out or other side effect, they live their lives. It is something they actually enjoy doing and many prefer this form of intoxication compared to the eight pots of draught, twenty smokes, a knee trembler in the toilets and pizza at the end of the night. As alluded to earlier when we compared the laws and uninformed public opinion regarding intoxicant usage with a two-year-old chucking a tanty, we now can see the results of this tantrum. And it isn’t pretty. Hundreds of thousands of lives are held to ransom by conservative, arcane and retributive legislative madness. An equally uninformed and profit driven press recycles tirelessly the latest ‘drug hell’ with ‘alarming new statistics’, complete with photos and ‘daily updates’. Saddle this up with the previous couple of points I have made and we have a sad triumvirate pitted against those who either choose to take a holiday from reality for the night, or those who are at the bottom of the barrel just scraping by with a massive smack addiction. In the late ‘90’s a Melbourne tabloid would publish the total number of OD deaths for the year on the front page, right next to the number of road deaths. The words ‘crisis’, ‘frightening’ and ‘youths’ were and still are bandied about whenever a ‘terrifying new menace hits the streets’. Generally this ‘menace’ is a variation on a theme but the underlying theme is that yes, society is going down the toilet. Stock photos lifted from Photobucket of some wasted looking person in a dirty alleyway, syringes next to a playground and/or a ‘leading community worker’ accompany this journalistic tripe plastered all over the centrespread. Sadly, this type of muck is served up to the public, is digested with the morning cup of Pablo instant coffee and serves to mould much of public opinion, which by degrees further alienates those who choose to walk down a different path to reach the same destination yearned for by all humans; a brief holiday in the sun or respite from themselves, without the law, society or moral proselytizers hounding them, forcing them into hair shirts, gaols or worse still cemeteries. Huxley, A. (1951) The Doors of Perception, London, Penguin. Walton, Stuart - Out of It - a cultural history of intoxication with Jeffrey Benson (2001) Hamish Hamilton Users News No.59, Summer 09 pp 2-3 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6898456.ece Walton, Stuart - Out of It - a cultural history of intoxication with Jeffrey Benson (2001) Hamish Hamilton After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for regulation. Transform Drug Policy Foundation 2009 http://www.boogieonline.com/revolution/body/drugs/usage/liverpool.html After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for regulation. Transform Drug Policy Foundation 2009