Drugs are Govt-run Russian roulette
Hone Harawira obtained cheap publicity this week by wanting to end the lives of drug tourists who import methamphetamine. His idea isn’t new.
Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte encourages vigilantes to liquidate drug criminals and Indonesia periodically ends their lives with bullets, trying to make the world a better place.
The rationale is that drugs destroy lives; so people who sell them need a strong deterrent. It makes sense, using this logic, to sentence a trafficker to 19 years, as happened to a 25-year-old Taiwanese chap this week after a failed attempt to import meth.
If you want to talk about destroying lives, let’s consider this young man and his parents’ heartache. He faces a decade in our penal regime for importing a drug so benign the US has approved it for kids with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder – under the the name Desoxyn.
A form of methamphetamine is prescribed to help with weight loss, yet we destroy the lives of those who sell it illegally.
A lot of the harm comes from the fact illicit drugs are not made in a professional laboratory but by a gang cook using toxins such as hydrochloric acid.
Police then point to people getting sick from those toxins and demand ever-longer sentences. If drugs were made by Bayer and sold in a pharmacy much of the harm would disappear.
Think of drug laws as a game of government-run Russian roulette. The more severe the punishment the more profit. No matter how severe the consequences, someone will be willing to play.
It’s stretching credibility to assume convicts would have led virtuous lives but for the rewards of the drug trade, but making something illegal creates opportunities for lawbreakers.
We shut our minds to the drug villains; pushers are the epitome of evil and there is a sense of satisfaction when their lives are crushed by oppressive jail sentences. Yet we ignore the inevitability of the result. We have created an incentive machine that will lure some people; and some will have their lives destroyed.