Philip Adams on the War on Drugs

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/drugs-and-death/story-e6frg7fx-1226030912198


CORBY in her cell. Kids on death row. Drugs to Bali? Coals to Newcastle.

The toxic trade in narcotics, one of the world’s biggest industries, fills the prisons from Texas to Malaysia with addicts, mules, small-time dealers – and countless people have gone from death row to the gallows or its high-tech variants. Whilst societies waste their efforts on counter-productive and corrupting policies of prohibition, interdiction, imprisonment and capital punishment, the trade goes on. The “war on drugs”, like so many US wars, is well and truly lost. Like the prohibition of alcohol it was doomed from day one. It is one of the greatest failures in the history of social policy.

The history of mass-marketed addiction – like the British trade in opium in China – might make one sympathise with the attempts of Asian societies to limit the social damage of drugs. But the state murder of minor players doesn’t help. Or even slow the flow. At best there’s a hiccup in the supply lines and a brief boost to product prices. (We can rely on our allies in Afghanistan to plant more poppies). The well-publicised seizures of drugs by Customs officers here or in Bali, with their claims of million-dollar “street prices”, are street theatre.

The Federal Police involvement in the arrest of Australian kids at Denpasar airport was a disgrace. Here they’d face a few years in jail. In Bali, some of them face the firing squad. Though Indonesian jihadists oft walk out of courts or prisons beaming in triumph, our young fools will be killed? Enough politeness. Gillard and Co must raise the roof in protest. Or perhaps we could organise a boycott of Bali until sanity prevails.

We distanced ourselves from the death penalty decades ago, leaving it to the likes of Texan governor George W. Bush to run assembly lines of executions. Yet Australia remains in a coalition of the willing addicted to US-inspired law-and-order policies on drugs. We ignore the fact that booze and cigarettes are far, far more destructive to this country than heroin, pot or ecstasy. Users, cops, judges, medical authorities, academics and intelligent politicians know we’re involved in a vast farce... but next to nothing is done. “Harm minimisation” efforts are hampered by the usual moral-panic merchants, and the drug barons laugh all the way to their money-laundering banks.

Meanwhile those sad, silly kids in Bali await their fate. They’ll face the firing squad or, like Corby, immense jail terms.

Though English Breakfast tea and a few roll-your-own fags (no, not the naughty ones) are the limits of my drug intake, I take a hard line on hard drugs. Legalise the lot. Take cops, corruption, prisons and nooses out of the equation and treat addiction as a health problem rather than a crime. Spend the money we’d save on sorry attempts at interdiction and the penal system on public health programs.

Hear the thunder of disapproval from the moral panic merchants? The same rat-bags who oppose even needle-exchange rooms? Significantly the other group that hates the idea of the most modest changes to the drug laws are the drug lords. Think of the impact on their profits.

In the meantime write to your PM, your MP and the Indonesian embassy protesting the plight of the prisoners in Bali. They deserve a kick in the arse, but hardly death. Or life in prison. It would make slightly more sense to save the life sentences for the executives of the cigarette and binge-drinking industries.