Drug war fails but the lies live on

WHILE the Morrison Government seeks to inflict flawed and stigmatising drug tests on those Australians who are in the social security system, in bars, and homes around Australia the most dangerous drug of them all, alcohol, is consumed without any hint of sanction.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan farmers are switching from the profitable business of supplying the world’s heroin market, to helping meet the ever growing demand for methamphetamines. And in impoverished nations like Guinea-Bissau and Honduras, billions of US dollars are spent killing people in the futile effort to stamp out supply chains which are keeping us all in the West with a decent supply of cocaine.

Welcome to the scandal that is the never ending USled war on drugs. A world in which there is no evidence, no science and no rationality. A world where the legal system wastes trillions of dollars each year globally in prosecuting those who make, sell and use drugs.

The origins of the policy of prohibition of substances such as cannabis, cocaine, heroin and LSD was never based on health concerns. As Antony Lowenstein, an Australian journalist who has previously bravely taken on the Zionist supporters of apartheid Israel, reveals in his new book Pills, Powder, and Smoke (Scribe 2019) US President Richard Nixon got the world to adopt a ‘war on drugs’ for base political ends. Nixon’s adviser John

Erlichman set out the strategy; “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

And the lies continue today. In fact, any expert on drugs who tells the truth about harm is cast aside in the most brutal fashion by government. Take David Nutt, from Imperial College in London, and who was once the UK government’s lead adviser on drugs policy. Nutt, with colleagues, assembled a now famous and credible table which lists drugs in terms of harm to oneself and to others. Alcohol is the most harmful drug, well ahead of heroin and ICE. Ecstasy, LSD and mushrooms are at the end of the table, with cannabis below tobacco in the middle of the table. The price Nutt paid for exercising his professional judgment was to be sacked by the tabloid news obsessed British Labour government of Gordon Brown. As Lowenstein points out, drugs policy in the UK is run by the trashy Daily Mail, a newspaper that once supported Hitler.

But what is most heinous about the war on drugs is the way in which Washington, Canberra and other Western capitals are prepared to allow millions of individuals in the countries where drugs are manufactured to die in the name of a never ending war. Lowenstein visited Honduras and Guinea-Bissau in researching his book. He sets out in startling and depressing detail the cost to humanity of our obsession with banning drugs. In Honduras the cowboys and murderers from the US drug enforcement agency the DEA (falsely portrayed as benign in the series Narcos), in a 2012 raid, killed two pregnant women and other civilians in their desire to stop a boat laden with cocaine. For almost four decades the US has meddled in this poor and violent nation to what end? The country remains a gold mine for drug traffickers. Similarly in the impoverished West African nation of Guinea-Bissau the US, the United Nations and the European Union do little to help lift this former Portuguese colony out of poverty because they focus on the pointless exercise of trying to outfox clever drug traffickers who use this

country as a springboard into the lucrative European market.

We do not allow rational evidence based policy on drugs to see the light of day. Presumably because of the sway of the US and in Australia, like the UK, the power of the anti-intellectual tabloid media, we refuse to countenance the obvious policy settings which would reduce deaths, serious harm, and poverty caused by the war on drugs in the most profound way. That is, to legalise drugs, tax and regulate. Cocaine. For example, ought be a legitimate export for countries like Honduras, Bolivia and Peru. So called party pills like ecstasy ought be sold on the open market with proper quality control regulation ensuring their safety. Cannabis is already just about legal because rightly, no one takes seriously the ban on its use. The war on drugs is a criminal failure with origins in cynical politicking. Hobart barrister Greg Barns is a human rights lawyer and a former adviser to state and federal Liberal governments. He is author of Rise of the Right: The war on Australia’s liberal values.