UK: Parents tell the Commons to legalise all drugs – April 2002 Parents tell the Commons to legalise all drugs
by The Guardian
Copyright: The Guardian
Parents whose children have suffered from heroin and other drug abuse told MPs yesterday it was time to legalise all drugs.
Fulton Gillespie, whose son Scott died from a heroin overdose two years ago, told the Commons home affairs select committee inquiry into the drug laws that he believed "if you try to regulate supply there is no point in leaving the power station in the hands of the criminals".
Hope Humphreys, whose son was jailed for 2 years for supplying ecstasy to fellow university students, said the drug laws succeeded only in making criminals out of people who were not criminals.
"Most students like to smoke cannabis and take ecstasy and most do not have a problem with drugs. But they do have a problem with the law. My son went to prison because he told the truth that he was getting the ecstasy for a friend." The evidence from parents who do not support the drug laws came in the
committee's last session of its inquiry. It is expected that its report, to be published later in the spring, will endorse a more liberal approach to the drug laws.
Other parents and those who run support services for the families of drug addicts told MPs how difficult it was to get access to help and services, such as residential rehabilitation for heroin addicts.
Mr Gillespie said: "There are very few things in life that concentrate the mind more than losing a child. Until my son became involved in drugs, I was one of those people who thought the answer was just to build more prisons.
"I have given this a lot of thought and come to the conclusion that the only way that would work would be to legalise all drugs."
He said his son had funded his habit by stealing and had spent five weeks in prison without drugs. On his release, as the coroner found, his body could not take his normal dose. "I am concerned that he is dead because of the law," said Mr Gillespie.
He did not believe that legalising all drugs would increase consumption. "The executive should take control, regulate supply and make sure it is clean because the kids are going to use it anyway."
Research published today explodes the myth that the police rarely take formal action over cannabis offences, with the 69,000 people cautioned or convicted for possession in 1999 representing one in seven of offenders dealt with for all crimes. The study, by South Bank University's criminal policy research unit,
shows there has been a tenfold increase in the number of possession offences since the mid-1970s.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
‘Alarming’ rise in drugs cocktails BBC News
A study into ecstasy use across Devon and Cornwall has found an increasing number of users also take other hard drugs such as cocaine and amphetamines.
Eight out of 10 people who took part in the survey said they indulged in chemical cocktails for their kicks.
And nearly 75% were using ecstasy weekly, fortnightly or monthly - taking between four and five pills in a typical 24-hour session.
The study was carried out by researchers from the Peninsula Medical School in Plymouth.
They toured pubs and clubs in the two counties and spoke to 400 ecstasy users.
Police 'concern'
Researcher Tobit Emmens, said: "I think that the extent of use is alarming in the amount of other drugs that are being used.
"We have a youth culture now where drug use is considered acceptable, and possibly even normal.
"What we are getting now is people using a whole lot of stuff together."
He added that the report highlighted the easy availability of drugs.
Detective Chief Inspector Andy Lucock from Devon and Cornwall Police, said: "We are concerned by the findings.
"Our hope is that the research will help people in the criminal justice system - and all other agencies working with drugs users - to provide an enhanced focus to drugs education."
There’s millions of us – and we aren’t losers (BBC Health) A new study shows that millions of Europeans have tried ecstasy. Contrary to the stereotype of drug users being marginalised and suffering from their drug use, most are professionals or students.
Between three million and 3.5 million adults in the EU have probably tried ecstasy at least once, says a European drug monitoring body.
Up to half a million have taken it once a week or more at some time in their lives, according to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.
In a review of the situation across the EU's 15 member states, the Lisbon-based agency found that most users of ecstasy and other synthetic drugs are not people on the "margins" of society or in any way disadvantaged.
Instead, most are students or young professionals, most of them relatively well off.
"These trends seem to have established themselves rapidly across the EU," said Mike Trace, the Centre's chairman.
"The main reasons people say they consume ecstasy is to feel more pleasure when they dance, and to have fun," the Centre said in statement.
"Other recreative drugs are consumed to gain confidence or energy, or in search of new experiences."
Policy-makers
Whilst noting that reducing the risks to the ever greater numbers of "normal" young people who take drugs is one of the main concerns of policy-makers at local, national and international level, the centre warned of the need for responses to the problem to be realistic and well-founded.
"The consequences and risks of recreative consumption of drugs should be the object of scientific assessment," it said.
In particular, it called for action to break the close link between excessive consumption of (legal) alcohol - "the mind-altering substance most frequently consumed for recreative purposes" - and (illegal) drugs.
To be effective, it said, such action should be taken in cooperation with bars and clubs on the one hand, and the drinks industry on the other.
The work of the centre in monitoring developments in member states and acting as an information exchange is at the heart of an increasing tendency for EU member states to learn lessons from each other's experiences and move more in step in policy terms.
Recent developments include, in Portugal, the decriminalisation of possession and consumption of small quantities of any drug, and in the UK the downgrading of cannabis to a class C drug - effectively decriminalising its possession and use.
The centre is one of a number of specialised institutions under the aegis of the European Commission, each based in a different EU member states.
BBC Health, posted 23 November 2002, accessed 25 November 2002
URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2503925.stm
NY Times Editorial: Reefer Madness We interrupt our coverage of the war on terrorism to check in with that other permanent conflict against a stateless enemy, the war on drugs.
To judge by the glee at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the drug warriors have just accomplished the moral equivalent of routing the Taliban - helping to halt a relentless jihad against the nation's drug laws.
Ballot initiatives in Ohio (treatment rather than prison for nonviolent drug offenders), Arizona (the same, plus making marijuana possession the equivalent of a traffic ticket, and providing free pot for medical use) and Nevada (full legalization of marijuana) lost decisively this month. Liberalization measures in Florida and Michigan never even made it to the ballot.
Some of this was due to the Republican election tide. Some was generational -- boomer parents like me, fearful of seeing our teenagers become drug-addled slackers. (John Walters, the White House drug czar, shrewdly played on this anxiety by hyping the higher potency of today's pot with the line, "This is not your father's marijuana.") Some may have been a reluctance to loosen any social safety belts when the nation is under threat. Certainly a major factor was that proponents of change, who had been winning carefully poll-tested ballot measures, state by state, since California in 1996, found themselves facing a serious and well-financed opposition, cheered on by Mr. Wlters.
The truly amazing thing is that 30 years into the modern war on drugs, the discourse is still focused disproportionately on marijuana rather than more important and excruciatingly hard problems like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines.
The drug liberalizers - an alliance of legal reformers, liberals, libertarians and potheads - dwell on marijuana in part because a lot of the energy and money in their campaign comes from people who like to smoke pot and want the government off their backs.
Also, marijuana has provided them with their most marketable wedge issue, the use of pot to relieve the suffering of AIDS and cancer patients.
Never mind that the medical benefits of smoking marijuana are still mostly unproven (in part because the F.D.A. almost never approves the research and the pharmaceuticals industry sees no money in it). The issue may be peripheral, but it appeals to our compassion, especially when the administration plays the heartless heavy by sending SWAT teams to arrest people in wheelchairs. Thus a movement that started, at least in the minds of reform sponsors like the billionaire George Soros, as an effort to reduce the ravages of both drugs and the war on drugs, has become mostly about pot smoking.
The more interesting question is why the White House is so obsessed with marijuana. The memorable achievements of Mr. Walters's brief tenure have been things like cutting off student loans for kids with pot convictions, threatening doctors who recommend pot to cancer patients and introducing TV commercials that have the tone and credibility of wartime propaganda. One commercial tells pot smokers that they are subsidizing terrorists. Another shows a stoned teenager discovering a handgun in Dad's desk drawer and dreamily shooting a friend. (You'll find it at [url]http://www.mediacampaign.org./[/url] Watch it with the sound off and you'd swear it was an ad for gun control.)
Drug czars used to draw a distinction between casual-use drugs like marijuana and the hard drugs whose craving breeds crime and community desolation. But this is not your father's drug czar. Mr. Walters insists marijuana is inseparable from heroin or cocaine.
He offers two arguments, both of which sound as if they came from the same people who manufacture the Bush administration's flimsy economic logic.
One is that marijuana is a "gateway" to hard-drug use. Actually Mr. Walters, who is a political scientist but likes to sound like an epidemiologist, prefers to say that pot use is an "increased risk factor" for other drugs.
The point in our conversation when my nonsense-alarm went off was when he likened the relationship between pot and hard drugs to that between cholesterol and heart disease.
In fact, the claim that marijuana leads to the use of other drugs appears to be unfounded.
On the contrary, an interesting new study by Andrew Morral of RAND, out in the December issue of the British journal Addiction, shows that the correlation between pot and hard drugs can be fully explained by the fact that some people, by virtue of genetics or circumstances, have a predisposition to use drugs.
Mr. Walters's other justification for turning his office into the War on Pot is the dramatic increase in the number of marijuana smokers seeking professional help. This, he claims, reflects an alarming rise in the number of people hooked on cannabis.
But common sense and the government's own statistics suggest an alternative explanation: if you're caught with pot, enrolling in a treatment program is the price of avoiding jail. And marijuana arrests have doubled in less than a decade, to 700,000 a year, even as use of the drug has remained static.
In other words, the stampede of pot smokers into treatment is probably not a sign of more dependency, but of more aggressive enforcement.
So what's really going on at the White House drug office?
I can think of three answers.
One is that they are sincerely worried about pot. Marijuana is not harmless.
Regular pot smoking can mess with your memory and attention span, your immune system and fertility.
Mr. Walters may feel the dangers justify a lot of hyperbole.
A second explanation is the old political-bureaucratic imperative. To justify a $19 billion drug control program you need a threat that touches middle-class voters - not just the few million mostly wretched, mostly inner-city, mostly nonvoting users of heroin and cocaine.
And you want to be able to claim success.
When he appointed Mr. Walters, President Bush announced he wanted "measurable results," and the measure would be a reduction in the number of people who admit to being recent drug users - 10 percent by 2004. Well, since three-fourths of illicit drug users are pot smokers, the easy way to get the numbers down is to attack the least important aspect of the drug problem.
That will give President Bush some bogus victories to boast about when he runs for re-election.
The third reason is the culture war. Mr. Walters is a veteran of the conservative political bunkers, where pot is viewed as a manifestation of moral degeneracy. "It's still about the war in Vietnam and growing your hair long," says Mark Kleiman, a drug law expert at U.C.L.A. and a thoughtful centrist in a debate monopolized by extremes. "It's the 60's being replayed again and again and again - the S.D.S. versus the football team." For this White House, to give ground on pot would be a moral surrender.
Mr. Kleiman's view, which I find persuasive, is that the way to deal with marijuana is to remove criminal penalties for possession, use ( recreational or medicinal ) and cultivation of small amounts, but not to legalize sale. It's silly and costly to treat people as outlaws for enjoying a drug that is roughly as addictive as caffeine and far less destructive than tobacco or alcohol.
At the same time, the inexorable logic of a legal marketplace would mean a lot more consumption and abuse.
Consider this statistic: Fifty percent of the liquor industry's revenues are derived from alcoholics - people who down at least four drinks every day. The sin business, whether it's a private liquor company or a state-run lottery, may preach responsible behavior, but it thrives on addiction.
Once you're past pot, you face the gloomy landscape of hard drugs, along with newer chemical worries like Ecstasy. If your experience of the hard-core drug world is mostly from movies like "Traffic" or two splendid HBO series, "The Corner" and "The Wire," you may be inclined to despair of easy answers.
You would not be wrong.
The moralistic drug war has overstuffed our prisons, left communities fatherless, fed corruption, consumed vast quantities of law enforcement time and money, and led us into some cynical foreign ventures, all without making drugs scarcer or more expensive. Legalization, on the other hand, means less crime and inner-city misery, but more addicts.
The things worth doing are incremental and unglamorous and lacking in demagogic appeal.
They aim not at winning a spurious war but at minimizing harm - both the harm caused by drugs, and the harm caused by draconian enforcement. Almost everyone ( including Mr. Walters, in principle ) agrees that diverting drug users into treatment, preferably backed by the threat of jail, is much better than consigning them to prison.
But liberalizers are all carrot, and drug warriors are all stick.
The drug czar who so eagerly intervened in Arizona and Nevada has kept his distance from efforts to humanize New York's merciless and failed Rockefeller drug laws.
Drug reform requires not only money, creativity and patience, but also the political courage to face down ideologues. And political courage, you may have noticed, is a lot harder to come by than drugs.
Reefer Madness
The New York Times
By Bill Keller
Forums›Drugs›Drugs Research, Drugs Studies & Media Requests
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