THE LAST DAYS OF THE WAR ON DRUGS

At an international symposium on regulating cannabis held in London,
there was the obligatory pony-tailed man conspicuously smoking a
roach. But the besuited delegates completely ignored him. Which is
what most of them propose doing at a policy level about the whole
marijuana 'problem.'

I noticed the ashtray winking up at me as soon as I sat down at the
table. I was having dinner at an auberge at the far end of L'Ile
d'Orleans, and it seemed to be saying: "This is Quebec, where we
aren't afraid to live and we aren't afraid to die. You can have an
after-dinner cigarette here if you want."

I did want, as it happens. I started smoking at nine and quit in my
late 30s, but after-dinner cigarettes were always the best, and very
occasionally I do make an exception. So I got a pack of Players Light
from the bar and lit one up -- and it hit me, as it always does, far
harder than if I had just lit up a joint.

Regular tobacco smokers don't know what they're missing, because
regular use dulls the effect; most of the time, they're just feeding
the addiction. But if your system is really clear of nicotine, the
first two or three puffs don't just taste good; your vision sharpens,
your whole body buzzes, and you're floating three or four inches off
the ground. Then the whole effect clears within minutes of putting the
cigarette out. If it wasn't so addictive, if addiction didn't ruin the
effect -- and if it didn't kill so many of its users -- tobacco would
be the ideal recreational drug.

Marijuana (or cannabis, to be technical) is not addictive and it's not
a health problem, but it has drawbacks too. Much the same ones as
alcohol, in fact: The high lasts an inconveniently long time, and
temporarily affects judgment in ways that make it incompatible with
driving, for example. Marijuana doesn't have the same association with
violent behaviour as alcohol, and it would be equally foolish and
futile to try to ban it, but, like alcohol, it clearly needs to be
regulated; no sales to under-18s, for example.

Except that marijuana is illegal. Over the past three decades there
have been more than a million drug arrests in Canada, resulting in
hundreds of thousands of Canadians getting criminal records after
conviction for possessing small amounts of cannabis. We assume that
Canada, unlike, say, Arkansas, does not send people to jail just for
cannabis possession, but last year an estimated 2,000 Canadians did go
to jail for just that offence (though many of them were people unable
to pay the fines that were originally imposed).

Relax. This is not yet another article about how we ought to legalize
banned drugs in order to cut the crime rate and save addicts' lives. I
used to write pieces about that, but now I don't bother. As far as the
technical and philosophical debate is concerned, the war is over; we
just haven't declared a ceasefire on the actual battlefronts yet. But
that is coming too.

One sign that the "war on drugs" is nearing an end is the willingness
of mainstream newspapers in Canada, Europe and even the United States
to open their columns to informed advocates of legalization in ways
that would have been unimaginable 10 years ago. (The most recent
examples in The Globe and Mail were articles by then business
columnist Terence Corcoran and by Eugene Oscapella and Diane Riley of
the Canadian Centre for Drug Policy.)

But the most convincing evidence for impending change is that experts
in the field are now moving on from mere advocacy to discussing how
drug use should be regulated after the war ends.

Which brings us, in roundabout fashion, to the international
symposium on Regulating Cannabis: Options for Control in the

21st Century, held at Regent's College in London on Sept. 5.
In the coffee room there was the obligatory pony-tailed,
middle-aged man conspicuously smoking a roach behind a table
with leaflets on it -- but there was only one, and the
besuited participants from 14 countries completely ignored
him. Which is also what most of them propose doing at a
policy level about the whole marijuana "problem."

As Benedikt Fischer of the Drug Policy Research Group at the Centre
for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto put it: "It is a waste of
energy at this point to go for formal political and legal reform."
This was the central paradox at the symposium: Almost everybody
present agreed that "depenalization," decriminalization, even de facto
legalization of marijuana use was coming to many countries in
practice, but almost none believed that it would be achieved through
the usual means of changing bad laws.

A lot of the people present were lawyers, and they clearly didn't like
this. Most of them would prefer to deal with regulating hitherto
banned drugs in the same rational, straightforward way that the U.S.
ended alcohol prohibition in 1933: American lawmakers just passed the
21st Amendment to cancel the 18th Amendment, made new laws about where
and when and to whom alcohol may be sold, and then taxed the hell out
of it. It was an approach that accepted that lots of people would
still suffer from alcohol abuse -- but at least they would no longer
go blind or die from poisonously bad alcohol, and the criminal black
market that thrived on prohibition would be closed down.

As soon as the various panelists in London got into the nuts and bolts
of post-prohibition policies for marijuana, however, they all had to
acknowledge the same problem: In the course of this century, American
anti-drug crusaders have exploited their country's growing clout to
turn international law into an almost insuperable legal barrier to
rational drug policy. It might make sense to legalize marijuana use,
but you can't.

As late as 1900, all the drugs that we are now called to fight a "drug
war" against were perfectly legal. Everybody knows the story behind
Coca-Cola's early success, but the use of barbiturates in modest
quantities was equally acceptable on the other side of the Atlantic.

Opium, sold freely in pharmacies in Britain, was the valium of the
Victorian middle class. And the 1912 Hague Convention for the
Suppression of Opium and Other Drugs, arising from a U.S. initiative
three years before, was an unmitigated disaster for A.R. Clark's
pharmacy in Braemar, Scotland, which had previously done a thriving
business in supplying heroin, cocaine and other drugs to the Royal
Family round the corner at Balmoral Castle.

But the real war on drugs only got under way after the Second World
War, when America's undisputed superpower status enabled it to impose
its prohibitionist domestic policies on the rest of the world as well.
The 1961 United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the 1971
UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances (to ban new drugs that hadn't
existed in 1961), and the 1988 UN Convention against Illicit Traffic
in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (to close loopholes and
criminalize even cannabis possession) constitute a towering wall of
prohibition.

The Single Conventions not only block the outright legalization of
drugs, but also render most "harm-reduction" policies (maintenance
doses of heroin and methadone, needle exchanges and safe injection
rooms, decriminalization of possession and retail sale of small
amounts of cannabis) of doubtful legality. Yet there is no hope of
dismantling or substantially amending the Single Conventions until the
United States is ready to end its "war on drugs," and it will almost
certainly be the last to kick the habit.

There are stirrings of revolt against prohibitionist policies even in
the United States, things like the 1996 referendum in California that
legalized the medical uses of marijuana (principally for pain relief

in AIDS and cancer patients and sufferers from multiple sclerosis).
Similar referenda will be held in November in Alaska, Arizona,
Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and Washington D.C. But the federal
government has fought back by raiding the "cannabis buyers' clubs"
that have been set up to provide marijuana to patients too ill to grow
it themselves. (The city of Oakland, California, in response, has
tried to afford legal protection by designating some club members as
"municipal officials.")

Change will doubtless come to the U.S., but so many Americans --
bureaucrats, police, prison guards -- now make their living from the
war on drugs that they constitute an institutional pressure group
similar to (though less wealthy than) the celebrated
military-industrial complex. This often results in active U.S.
disinformation efforts like the suppression early this year of a key
chapter in the World Health Organization's first report on cannabis in
15 years, which originally concluded that cannabis, compared to
alcohol and tobacco, posed less of a threat to health. (The respected
journal New Scientist published a leaked version of the report in February.)

It is dangerous for even the most prominent and respected Americans to
question the wisdom of the war on drugs: Former Secretary of State
George Shultz was vilified and ridiculed, and Attorney-General M.
Jocelyn Elders lost her job. So one must not expect early movement
within the U.S. federal government on these issues, and until that
happens there is not a snowball's chance in hell of changing the
Single Conventions. So what is the rest of the world to do in the
meantime? The answer, put bluntly, is to cheat.

And the cheating is happening. All over Europe, and now in Canada,
initiatives are being taken that get around rigid and immovable
anti-drug laws under the guise of medical and public-health
experiments, or simply turn a blind eye to actual practice while
leaving the draconian anti-drug laws on the books.

The oldest and best-known example is the Dutch "coffee shop" system.
It began in 1976, when the Dutch government adopted a policy of
separating the soft and hard drug markets by turning a blind eye to
the emergence of "coffee shops" that openly sell retail quantities of
cannabis and hash to their (over-18) customers.

Dutch law still officially makes marijuana possession an offence
(though not one subject to criminal penalties), but in fact there are
now an estimated 1,500 of these "coffee shops" all over the country,
some operated by municipalities. Nobody gets arrested, the government
collects value-added tax (a GST, that is) on the sales, and the black
market for marijuana has shrivelled up. In 1992-96, only 7.2 per cent
of Dutch youths aged 12-15 had tried marijuana, compared to 13.5 per
cent of Americans of the same age.

For a long time the Dutch were virtually alone apart from Spain, which
decriminalized private use of marijuana in 1983, but now they are
being emulated all over the place. French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin
has declared himself in favour of decriminalization, as have the
Belgian government and the Luxembourg parliament. In April, the
Italian government finally stated that it would act on the 1992
referendum in which Italians voted to decriminalize personal drug use.

The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is planning a three-year pilot
program to sell up to five grams of marijuana per day through
pharmacies to over-16 participants in one big city, one small town and
one rural area, with the idea of spreading the system state-wide if
results are satisfactory; the council of health ministers from all of
the country's states has approved the plan in principle. The Swiss
have allowed 200 "hemp shops" to open in the past two years. They sell
12-gram bags of marijuana for 50 francs -- with printed instructions
that it is to be mixed into bathwater or hung in clothes closets as an
aromatic.

In Australia, the Northern Territory, the state of South Australia,

and the Australian Capital Territory moved to on-the-spot fines for
cannabis possession that involve no criminal record years ago, and
this year the states of Victoria and Western Australia are adopting
simple "caution" systems. And in Canada, where a recent poll found
that a narrow majority of 51 per cent favour decriminalizing
marijuana, the Vancouver police, until recently the Canadian leaders
for marijuana busts (260 per 100,000 people, compared to 41 and 43 per
100,000 in Toronto and Montreal, respectively), have announced that
they will only press charges for simple possession if there are
aggravating factors.

Not surprisingly, there is a parallel movement in a number of
countries toward the so-called British system of prescribing heroin
for addicts who are not ready or able to quit. The Swiss have been
running a pilot program with about 1,000 volunteers since 1994, with
excellent results: Criminal offences by participants dropped by 60 per
cent, their health improved enormously, the number in regular
employment more than doubled, there were no deaths from overdoses, and
no prescribed drugs were diverted to the black market. The
Netherlands, Spain and Luxembourg are planning similar
heroin-prescription programs, and the League of Cities in Germany has
petitioned the federal government for leave to do the same, with
support from the police chiefs in 10 of Germany's 12 biggest cities.

A majority of Australia's state health ministers approved a heroin
prescription trial last year, but were blocked by Prime Minister John
Howard (who faces an election next month). Vancouver is considering a
similar program, which would be a first in North America. "Filling
prisons or hospital beds with substance abusers does not make any
public policy sense," said police chief Bruce Chambers in a July press
conference, while chief coroner Larry Campbell stated bluntly: "It's
time someone stepped forward and said the war on drugs is lost. We
cannot even pretend to be winning the war."

No less an authority than Raymond Kendall, secretary-general of
Interpol, said in 1994: "The prosecution of thousands of otherwise
law-abiding citizens every year is both hypocritical and an affront to
individual, civil and human rights . . . Drug use should no longer be
a criminal offence." But given the power of the U.S. government and
the international legal barriers it has erected, nobody is able to
sign a separate peace in this war. What they are doing, instead, is
deserting one by one.

Gwynne Dyer, a Canadian-born writer based in London, is a regular
contributor to Focus.


Checked-by: Rich O'Grady