Confronting the fear of legalisation

The demonisation of recreational drugs has been a sustained and well-funded campaign going back to the days of Reefer Madness and beyond. As a result, many people have an acute fear and loathing of illicit drugs, which divides them from users who have tested the truth and found the War on Drugs to be largely based on scaremongering.

Last night Dr Norm Stamper, ex Police Chief of San Diego and Seattle and who now campaigns for regulated legalisation, spoke in Sydney about this.

"I agree in principle to what you are saying," said one listener, "but how can any government possibly consider the legalisation of a drug like methamphetamine [ice]?"

Dr Stamper told the story of a person he met who had been an ice addict for ten years before getting clean, and who was similarly horrified at the prospect of legalising it. Dr Stamper replied by asking where had the addict obtained his drugs every day for ten years, and pointing out that this continuous availability showed prohibition had failed. The man hadn't thought of it that way, and neither do prohibitionists want you to see it like that.

But, as Dr Stamper pointed out, "It doesn't matter what the drug, the principle is the same."

Listeners at the Centre for Independent Studies last night went through the usual litany of objections, the next one being a concern that regulated legalisation would tempt more people to try such drugs. Dr Stamper referred to the recent Zogby Poll which asked 1,028 people this very question. Only 0.6% said 'Yes'. After all -- as I keep asking people -- if heroin was legal would you start sticking a needle in your arm? So-far the answer has been 100% 'No'.

Another scary drug is LSD which, while inspiring the likes of Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and Martin Sharpe, has also messed with the brains of various 'acid casualties' -- all under prohibition of course. Yet the drug is making a research renaissance as Swiss and US clinicians find its guided use can produce excellent results in treating cluster headaches, depression and post-traumatic stress, often removing the cause of the problem rather than just masking the symptoms like legal antidepressants. Such research was shut down in the 1960s when acid was made illegal. So much for the evidence base of the War on Drugs.

Warning: Don't try this at home, especially with a new 'super LSD' available on the black market in Australia called DOI which police claim produces a three-day trip.

Pictured: Dr Norm Stamper speaking at a meeting in Parliament House last week.

Signs of sanity in the WoD

Michael Duffy again sortied into sensible analysis of Australia's War on Drugs in the Herald this weekend.

'Australian governments spend about $4.7 billion a year on the war on drugs,' he wrote.

And: 'John Humphreys, an economist with the Centre for Independent Studies, says: "It gets interesting when you try to do a cost-benefit analysis on the prohibition. Basically, there aren't any benefits."

Today I'm going to hear Norm Stamper speaking at Parliament House -- He's the ex-cop from Seattle who is a spokesman for LEAP, (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition), also featured separately by Michael Duffy in the SMH this weekend, quoting Mr Stamper:

"Every once in a while, someone in government has claimed progress," he said, "but they've been wrong. The immutable law of supply and demand will continue to work its magic for ever. Purity and prices will fluctuate, people's behaviour will fluctuate, but there has never been any point in the drug war where we've come close to winning. It is unwinnable, and it's immoral."

Still, the drug warriors will continue their moral panic and our local police will continue believing the fairy stories they learned during their training at Goulburn so they can continue fooling themselves they are doing something useful as they persecute Sydney's counter-cultures.

But for how long can they keep it up?

I wrote my own piece last week on the travails of Oxford Street, highlighting the role of over-regulation in aggravating the problems it seeks to solve -- including the way sniffer dogs frighten the nice people away from the inner city and thus promote the drinking culture people complain about so regularly. Here's the link to the City News piece.

More casualties in the War on Drugs

It seems Victorian police are improving their tactics in the War on Drugs, resulting in a sharp rise in the number of women being jailed. This might be a 'result' for the police, but it has led, according to a report in The Age, to...

a raft of complaints about the management of the state's female maximum security prison, the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre.

... community advocates want the prison's general manager, Emma Cassar, removed over a recent spate of near-fatal suicide attempts and drug overdoses and an unpopular restructuring of prisoners' pay.

Drug overdoses and suicide attempts? Gee, what a great outcome. Then, as The Age points out, what do these women do when they are released? What would you do if you were, say, a penniless female parolee with no job or home? The options are not attractive.

And who called a jail "The Dame Phyllis Frost Centre"? The very name would give you the heebie-jeebies. But apparently the late Dame Phyllis was a kindly soul who worked to improve the diet of female prisoners and help them keep their babies with them.

Sounds like things have changed for the worse. It's time to end this unjust and ineffective "War".

Heroin addiction treatment: is forced rehabilitation the way?

Drug Free Australia's Gary Christian is again asserting that harm minimisation measures such as heroin trials or methadone maintenance just keep people addicted to drugs, and Sweden's harsh regime of forced rehabilitation is the answer. His reasoning is that Sweden also has very low rates of drug use, and a 1997 study showed 96% support by the Swedes for forced rehabilitation. It's a seductive thought -- just catch 'em, lock 'em up until they are over the withdrawals and let 'em go to become model citizens, problem solved!

As usual though, Gary Christian ignores several key points made by others in the debate -- could it be that Sweden's Lutheran majority with its temperance tradition is the main cause of both the harsh drug laws and the low usage rate? Prohibitionists always present the former as being the cause of the latter. Maybe not? Drug usage rates in nearby European countries with much more liberal approaches to drugs are as low or lower than Sweden's. This clearly indicates that the harsh approach is not the only way.

Also I wonder if forced rehabilitation (which I understand to mean involuntary incarceration) is very successful. What are the recidivism rates? Mike Ashton, writing in 2007 about outcomes from residential rehabilitation programs aiming at abstinence (the most expensive form of treatment), said:

"Despite the investment made in their rehabilitation, perhaps just 1 in 7 were enabled to sustain abstinence out in the real world and some (conceivably, every single one) of these will have had to enter methadone or other community-based treatment programmes to avoid continued relapse. Of the heroin users among them, within a fortnight of leaving residential care half had returned to the drug. (Gossop M. et al. “Factors associated with abstinence, lapse or relapse to heroin use after residential treatment: protective effect of coping responses." Addiction: 2002, 97, p. 1259–1267)

Added to this is the increased death rate as people with newly low tolerances accidentally overdose. And how many 'abstinent' success stories simply switch to alcohol abuse but are counted as 'cured' by prohibitionists with their double-standard regarding licit and illicit drugs?

And If Sweden is the shining success story it is claimed to be, someone had better explain it to several of their neighbours who must be really ignorant if prohibitionists are right: To quote from Alex Wodak in The Age the other day:

"In 1997, a large Swiss study concluded that for this minority of entrenched heroin users who had never benefited from repeated episodes of diverse treatments or prison, giving them heroin as part of their treatment provided huge benefits, with few side effects. Their physical and mental health improved considerably. Consumption of street drugs decreased. Crime, measured three different ways, decreased substantially. The treatment was much more expensive than the standard methadone treatment, but for every Swiss franc the program cost, there were gains of two Swiss francs.

"Rigorous scientific studies were then also conducted in the Netherlands, Spain, Germany and Canada. All showed similar results. All were published in reputable journals. This month, the results of a British study were released. Again, the results were similar to the previous studies. In each, heroin was self-administered under stringent supervision. Abundant, high-quality psychological and social support was provided.

"After a decade of heroin-assisted treatment in Switzerland, the treatment is still only provided to a steady 5 per cent of those seeking help.

"This small minority of severely dependent drug users is so important because they account for a disproportionate share of the drug-related crime.

"In a national referendum last year in Switzerland, 68 per cent supported retaining heroin-assisted treatment as a last resort. The Netherlands now also provides the treatment. Earlier this year, 63 per cent of members of the German parliament voted to allow heroin-assisted treatment. All major political parties in Denmark recently supported the treatment."

Could it be that 96% of Swedes are wrong? Or that their solution might be right for their country but not others? These shades of grey have no place in DFA's black-and-white world of harsh judgement. But they exist, Mr Christian, whether you ignore them or not.

UK heroin trial slashes crime

A UK trial supplying chronic addicts with heroin under medical supervision has produced clear, positive results, reducing use, normalising the users' lives and slashing the crime they otherwise committed to feed their habit, reports the BBC.

It seems everyone wins. Now for governments to grasp the nettle and respond to the evidence. Don't hold your breath.

PS 22 Sep: The Age today ran a piece quoting Dr Alex Wodak recommending prescription heroin in Australia. The interesting thing is the readers' comments -- almost all in favour except a few flint-hearted individuals with an empathy bypass who recommend zero tolerance and execution, without offering any evidence that it actually works.

PS 23 Sep: And here's a firsthand account from a nurse who worked on the UK trial, with comparative costs of different approaches to drug abuse. He paints a a very positive picture of the trial and its benefits. It's a very different outlook from that of prohibitionists who would rather see continuing high rates of crime and death than 'send the message' that drugs are OK by treating addicts. There were 1,952 drug-related deaths in the UK in 2008, 45% from opiates and 39% from alcohol.

Prohibitionist campaign struggles with self-contradiction

The prohibitionist group Drug Free Australia is promoting a worldwide petition commending and supporting the War on Drugs. Its header states it is from Parliament House NSW but no Parliamentarian is identified in the document.

The No Place for Drugs Commitment, A Proclamation about the Harms of Illicit Drugs is Co-sponsored by Drug Free Australia and Women’s Federation for World Peace, for whom a web search reveals only a listing in a business directory and the Yellow Pages, with a Seaforth NSW address but no website [I have since learned WFWP is a branch of the Moonies].

The Commitment lavishly praises the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) which remains radically prohibitionist and claims to control drugs, despite worldwide evidence that drugs are rife and the War on Drugs kills thousands of people each year.

The Commitment focuses on harms to children and indigenous communities but contains typical rhetoric such as: "drugs control the body and mind of individual consumers, drug crops and drug cartels control farmers, and trafficking and crime controls communities;"

-- which seems to be a tacit admission that prohibition has failed to control drugs, especially after UNODC declared in 1998 it would make the world drug-free in ten years.

Herschel Baker of Drug Free Australia included me in a broadcast email promoting the Commitment. Concerned that their message could actually result in more harm to children, I replied to the address list as follows:

I have read the commitment disseminated by Herschel Baker of Drug Free Australia and commend the concern shown for children, who indeed should be kept away from drugs.

However the core message in the commitment is that prohibition is an effective way to do this. Given the latest claims about an eight-year-old Australian indigenous child smoking cannabis, it is evident that prohibition and the war on drugs has failed in its objective.

The Commitment itself claims that indigenous drug use is 21 times higher than the general population. This recognises that prohibition is therefore 21 times less effective among indigenous communities. Do you seriously believe society can intensify its war on drugs by a factor of 21 to combat this, or that it would be effective?

It's more likely that drug use by indigenous children is a symptom of wider social problems in those communities. What is wrong with the eight-year-old's parenting and environment that leads to the child's cannabis use? And even if prohibition did choke the supply of cannabis to that community, the child would most likely turn to sniffing glue or petrol, or drinking alcohol, all of which are far more dangerous than cannabis.

The cure for this problem is a lot more complex than drug prohibition, and concentrating on this one aspect risks diverting attention from the deeper causes of the problem. The drug use is not the fundamental problem -- it is a symptom of the problem.

The illicit drugs industry rivals the global oil industry in size, so the UN's Antonio Maria Costa's depiction of this as a 'stabilised' market is a hollow claim.

I and many other responsible people who support the reform of drug laws believe regulation and education based on truth rather than one-sided arguments will effect better control over drugs than prohibition, which historically creates the fertile ground for the very illicit industry that it seeks to proscribe.

It must be admitted that drugs are not 'controlled' when they are easily available to any young person in any town in most countries of the world.

I urge you to reconsider your position. Prohibition in fact worsens problems and puts young people at greater risk. I am sure supporters of this Commitment have the very best intentions but the solution they support in fact aggravates danger and harm.

Respectfully,

Michael Gormly

The petition today has 25 names including Drug Free America head Calvina Fay -- although a couple of people have signed twice and Herschel Baker's own name is misspelt.

Below is a cut-and-paste of the signature list today -- for the record, as it will probably be edited in future:

Peter Phillips

EDward Kenneth Dove

John Chapman

Nan Ott

Serge LEBIGOT

Jan Baker

Sandra Bennett

mary gillespie

KAYODE ADEDOYE

Chuck Doucette

lynn sanchez

Mina Carakushansky

Elizabeth Pallett

jeremiah ronshausen

amy ronshausen

Bill Cameron

Bill Cameron

David Raynes

Lana Beck

Karen Belanger

Dianne Glymph

Dianne Glymph

Frans Koopmans

Cecilia Piedra

Calvina Fay

chris behrens

Hereschel Baker

NCPIC hard-wired for bias

The National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre is not funded to provide balanced information according to its director, Professor Jan Copeland.

Prof Copeland revealed this to a reporter from The City News who asked her why the Centre failed to provide information about the medical uses of cannabis.

“The free national cannabis information and helpline is not targeted at those who seek information on possible medicinal uses of cannabis and is not funded for this purpose,” Prof Copeland is reported as saying.

In other words, the Centre is tasked to provide only one side of the story. This of course makes a mockery of its claim to be 'evidence-based' as it relies only on negative evidence and must ignore positive evidence – evidence which is sufficient to have persuaded 14 states in the US to legalise medicinal cannabis, because it has been found to help people suffering a number of serious diseases including multiple sclerosis, post-traumatic stress syndrome and cancer.

A tagline on NCPIC's homepage coyly acknowledges this: "evidence-based information and related harms", it says (my bolding).

This makes a mockery of the term 'evidence-based' because if you acknowledge only the negative evidence about ANYTHING you create an unbalanced picture of it. Imagine researching cars, looking only for harms. Or football, or mountain-climbing. Focusing on only the negative aspects of any of these things (which are far more 'harmful' than cannabis) makes it easy to produce a horrifying picture of death, disease, violence and incapacitation. In other words, demonisation.

So it's fair to say NCPIC, a leftover from the John Howard years, has no more credibility than any political propaganda machine and people should balance its offerings with less one-sided sources of information, such as the myriad links via this site.

We acknowledge that there are harms to cannabis, so in that crucial sense The Kings Cross Times is more balanced and credible than NCPIC.

Just to prove it, we link to NCPIC above. For a really good look at some full-on prohibitionists check Drug Free Australia's site -- then compare their information to some of the other sites linked in the right-hand column. Then there's the Scientology anti-drug site Drug free Ambassadors, members of whom I encountered dressed in identical clothing running around Kings Cross distributing an anti-ecstasy booklet that was almost laughable in its panic-mongering. Ironically the warcry of this bunch of clones was "think for yourself, don't follow the crowd".

Below is a very scientific Scientology graphic illustrating the evils of ecstasy. It's rather good, don't you think?

Jan Copeland spins the evidence

If the worldwide consequences were not so disastrous, it would be almost funny to watch prohibitionists spinning their self-contradictory message. This week Professor Jan Copeland, Director of the National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre (NCPIC) made a startling statement reported in The City News -- nothing to do with me although I write for that journal -- in a story covering NCPIC's recent Cannabis Conference:

The Hemp Embassy also believes that the NCPIC, as an information service, should be providing information to the public about studies that suggest cannabis is not a gateway drug, cannabis does not have a causal link with schizophrenia and that cannabis does not cause lung cancer.

Professor Copeland said: “Each of these studies is of interest, although up to five years old, but none are without significant methodological flaws.”

Methodological flaws? ALL of them? Up to five years old? It's funny how all those studies are common traffic among AOD professionals and I have seen no credible claims that these studies are flawed, whereas many of the studies claiming cannabis is more and more dangerous are quickly exposed as junk science, especially NCPIC's offerings. Further, the studies suggesting cannabis is not so harmful tend to be large population studies, reflecting actual reality, while the studies portraying cannabis as the 'new satan' tend to be very small reductive exercises which are designed to show harm, and usually get all the headlines.

I think this is a case of the kettle calling the 'pot' black.

A great example of junk science is NCPIC's own study which attempted to label cannabis as a cause of (sorry, 'linked with') violence. It did a quick statistical crunch of people presenting at St Vincent's Casualty and found that a lot of the people involved in violence had used cannabis. Never mind that they may have also taken ice, or alcohol, or been beaten up because they owed their dealer $400 (a symptom of prohibition, not the substance). Never mind that St Vincents Casualty is constantly besieged by marginalised, dysfunctional junkies trying to wangle opiate medicine, which would skew your sample somewhat and is another consequence of prohibition. Never mind the St Vincent's Casualty doctor who wrote to the SMH observing that he had never seen an emergency caused by cannabis. Never mind the swathe of studies showing that cannabis does not cause violence.

And these studies are not tinpot little junk studies such as NCPIC's, either. Major, credible evidence reviews consistently find that cannabis is not a cause of violence -- carried out by such bodies as the Canadian Special Senate review (2002), the British Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, SUNY Buffalo's Department of Family Medicine (2005), the US National Drug Intelligence Center, and Oxford University. Are these organisations all producing flawed science, Professor Copeland? Or are you little more than a propagandist on a payroll?

I got all the above references from a new book, Marijuana is safer, So why are we driving people to drink? Funnily enough, another of the 45 footnoted references in the same chapter is a 2007 study by none other than Jan Copeland herself. It showed that 70% of Americans who seek treatment for cannabis are coerced into it by the courts (rather than presenting because they thought they had a problem), which pricks another of the current prohibitionist myths -- that an increase in cannabis-related presentations to doctors shows that today's 'skunk' is super-potent and causing problems which send the 'victims' to the doctor.

Ironically, NCPIC itself seems to be propagating this myth, despite Professor Copeland's own study. A story yesterday in the Townsville Bulletin about eight-year-old indigenous kids smoking pot quoted a NCPIC report:

The centre reported last year 19,000 general practice consultations across Australia in 2008 involved the management of cannabis-related problems.

We have 'drug courts' here in Australia which also give people busted for cannabis the choice of conviction or 'treatment'. This one is a furphy, Professor Copeland, as you well know by your own research. Or are you going to claim your own research is 'methodologically flawed'?

While it is obvious that eight-year-old kids should not be smoking pot, I would suggest that the problem is not the pot -- it's the kid's social environment. If you prevented them smoking pot without addressing the larger social problems, the balloon effect would probably just push them onto sniffing petrol or glue, far more harmful. Would heavier pot prohibition really solve the plight of disadvantaged Aboriginals? Or is it a simplistic red-herring?

But such logic is too deep for the moral panic merchants. The story goes on to parrot all the current myths:

...teachers needed to be more skilled in educating students about the serious mental health issues, including addiction and dependency, depression and schizophrenia, associated with regular use of cannabis.

Oh well, so much for accurate public information.

Pot easier for teens to buy than beer

My personal observation of Sydney teenagers demonstrated that alcohol, which is legal but regulated, is more difficult for under-18s to buy than pot, which is illegal and unregulated. Although teen drinking is a problem, I would guess that alcohol prohibition would see kids drinking illegal firewater behind the bus-stop after school, with worse consequences than we see today.

My perception is backed up by a report from Columbia University which says:

Forty-two percent of 12- to 17-year olds can buy marijuana in a day or less; 23 percent in an hour or less. Compared to last year, this is a 35 percent increase in teens who can buy marijuana in an hour or less (23 vs. 17 percent) and a 14 percent increase in teens who can buy marijuana in a day or less (42 vs. 37 percent). From 2007 to 2008 this represents an increase of 1.4 million teens who can buy marijuana in an hour or less (5.8 vs. 4.4 million), and an increase of 1.1 million teens who can buy marijuana in a day or less (10.6 vs. 9.5 million).

Half of 16- and 17-year olds say that among their age group smoking marijuana is more common than smoking cigarettes.

Marijuana continues to be easier to buy than beer: 23 percent of teens find it easiest to buy compared to 15 percent who find beer easiest to buy.

I found the link to that report in a New Scientist piece arguing that prohibition is ineffective and makes the world a far more dangerous and ugly place. Prohibitionists need to disprove that if they are to be taken seriously.

A voice of reason and compassion

From the voice of paranoid intolerance (see post below) to the words of Pastor Graham Long from the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross:

If drug law reform is ever to take place in this country, the way will not be led by politicians who count the numbers first and consider the issues second. The pompous end of the media seem to be more interested in generating heat than light. I seriously doubt whether some of the "stars" actually believe what they say and print. Alas too, the Church which at times can lead with courage, on this issue is "fiddling while Rome burns". No, if drug law reform is ever to happen in this country, I believe it will be led by parents with broken hearts. Parents who know deep down that the death of their child need not have been. It is grieving parents who just know that the "war" on drugs is pointless: They know that there must be a better way. There are plenty of parents who see in despair the endless resources we are willing to spend on "the war", that makes criminals of people who need help. It is deeply wounded parents who know that police, courts, gaols and more police are not the answer for people struggling with addiction. I may never see it, but I have a dream that one day we as a society will be able to offer help rather than judgement. I cop criticism from the chest beaters for being "soft on drugs" but I speak with love from the gutter not with a gun or a bible on my hip or from a plush office. Countries that are relaxing their approach to drug law are seeing no spike in drug taking. I think drug control makes a lot of sense and that prohibition makes no sense at all. Just to be clear, I think a drug free life is the best life. I think a country without floods and earthquakes is the best kind of country to live in. To prepare for floods; to regulate building codes for the possibility of earthquakes, does not mean that I'm "soft on earthquakes". On this highly charged subject where everyone is an expert, I would recommend that we listen less to Reverend Gentlemen, less to pompous journalists, less to the righteously indignant radio personalities; I suggest we find some parents with broken hearts and listen to them.

Be careful who you elect

The War on Drugs begun by Richard Nixon is a 'berserk aberration' according to a piece in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Nixon believed that dope was being pushed on the US by Jews, communists and homosexuals to promote immorality and weaken the state.

"You know, it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists," said Tricky Dicky, star of the Watergate scandal.

It's hard to believe anyone with such beliefs could run the world's most powerful nation in modern times, and that a policy underpinned by this paranoia is still being enforced.

Another letters exchange in the Herald

Local resident Sue Hanley and I have again crossed swords in the letters pages over the issue of alcohol restrictions in Kings Cross (after the letters people got me to validate my facts). The reader can judge the exchange to see exactly who is "out of step":

Sue's letter yesterday:

Curbs on drinkers overdue

A move that prevents Kings Cross pubs and and making any changes to their buildings that would bring in more drinkers (''Clampdown on pubs and clubs increasing hours or capacity'', September 5-6) is well overdue. This once vibrant hub of inner city living is struggling to retrieve its sophistication and cultural identity following the predations of nightclub entrepreneurs who claimed Kings Cross as their own. Adrian Bartels, of the Potts Point and Kings Cross District Partnership, in advocating on behalf of the liquor industry, is out of step with the local community which desperately wants an end to the liquor-fuelled chaos it endures every weekend.

Sue Hanley Darlinghurst

My letter in the SMH today:

Statistical glitch

Sue Hanley (Letters, September 7), says Kings Cross residents want more curbs on pubs. That would be why in a recent City of Sydney survey only 16 per cent of locals wanted fewer pubs and clubs. But neither the council nor Ms Hanley seems likely to let a few facts get in the way of a good moral panic.

Michael Gormly Woolloomooloo

-------------------------------------------

What bemuses me is that Ms Hanley's letters say the same thing over and over, ignoring that the debate has moved on, her points refuted. At least this time she didn't sign herself as a member of the City East Precinct Committee, a self-appointed position on a body that that has no members, has never actually done anything or had a meeting for years, and whose only other member I can recall was prolific letter-writer and fellow temperance activist Andrew Woodhouse. On the other hand Adrian Bartels is the very active president of a business association with over 100 paid-up members. His organisation, along with the Kings Cross Liquor Accord, has offered to pay for extra policing on the big weekend party nights, a measure we know works but is being ignored by the nanny state.

The government's new clampdowns will do nothing except to redirect the mayhem a little, possibly away from the well-managed party precincts. The hypocrisy is glaring as the issue is not about violence in the first place -- it's about old people losing their sense of fun but refusing to move out of the noisy fun districts.

The self-contradiction in Ms Hanley's letter is equally glaring -- she is saying the area was "once-vibrant" but complains it is now too busy. A quick reading of Kings Cross history shows that Ms Hanley's memory of a vibrant bohemian wonderland is mere rose-coloured nostalgia. It has been Sydney's party district, warts and all, for many decades.

War on Drugs 'utterly mad'

"The global trade in illicit narcotics ranks with oil and arms. Its prohibition wrecks the lives of wealthy and wretched, East and West alike. It fills jails, corrupts politicians and plagues nations. It finances wars from Afghanistan to Colombia. It is utterly mad," says The Age in an article reprinted from The Guardian.

The comment piece shows how the massive cost of the War on Drugs can be borne by the rich western countries who prosecute the War, but is tearing apart developing countries. The War is therefore deeply immoral.

This macro-level, international injustice is the flip side of the 'micro' level injustice detailed elsewhere in this blog. This is ironic given the number of prohibitionists who cast their belief in moral terms while trying to impose them on everyone else.

Another two-part series in The Atlantic Monthly shows how legitimising the medical marijuana industry in Colorado is boosting the state's tax income while laying waste to the illicit supply chain, contrary to a fairly common assertion that illicit dealing would thrive alongside legitimate, regulated supply.

How would you feel if police strip-searched your sister in public?

That's the question posed by Graham Long, Pastor of the Wayside Chapel, as he writes about one of the Chapel's female volunteers who was stopped by two male police in Kings Cross and searched on the way to work. No drugs were found, as usual, even inside her bra. But the anger and humiliation that search victims feel is real and intense.

If anyone else perpetrated this it would be a serious sexual assault. If there was any point to these police-state tactics you might accept them. But there is no point, as drug-use patterns are not affected in any helpful way.

Pastor Long's piece appears in today's City News alongside a longer piece I wrote about drug law reform, titled Global tide turning against the War on Drugs.

Help spread the word!

More doubt cast on cannabis-schizophrenia link

A new UK study of 600,000 case records has failed to find a correlation between increasing cannabis use over the decades since the '70s and rates of schizophrenia, reports ABC Online.

In that time cannabis use among under-18-year-olds rose 18-fold. Reports the ABC:

Based on the literature supporting the link, the authors argue that this should be followed by an increase in schizophrenia incidence of 29% between 1990 and 2010.

But the researchers found no increase in the rates of schizophrenia and psychosis diagnosis during that period. In fact some of the data suggested the incidence of these conditions had decreased.

While the study has its critics, it should give pause to the moral panic driving 'get tougher on drugs' policies, and a whole new marijuana myth that most of the media regurgitates uncritically.

Lies, damned lies and statistics

A doctor writing in Online Opinion neatly illustrates a statistical trick used to spin messages, usually fooling journalists into parroting figures that mislead readers. The same trick is used by prohibitionists -- and also swallowed uncritically by lazy journalists.

Dr Andrew Gunn, editor of New Doctor, writes:

The science underlying modern pharmaceuticals gets distorted by commercial considerations. Manufacturers quite naturally seek to present their products favourably, for instance, by highlighting relative risk reduction when absolute risk reduction gives a more accurate picture of a drug’s efficacy. If trials suggest a medication will reduce a patient’s risk of stroke over the next five years from, say, 4 per cent to 3 per cent then the relative risk reduction is an impressive-sounding 25 per cent (the risk reduces by one fourth) but the absolute risk reduction is a measly 1 per cent (one chance in a hundred).

Prohibitionists reverse the effect, as noted elsewhere in this blog, typically in alarmist messages about cannabis and psychosis. A 40% increase in risk sounds horrifying but if it's happening among far less than 1% of users it falls into perspective.

They should teach this statistical trick in journalism school.

If hard drugs were legal would YOU start using them?

An interesting survey in the US asked 1,028 people the above question and, predictably, well over 99% said no. So much for the 'tsunami of drug abuse' prohibitionists claim regulated supply would bring about.

Making drugs illegal does not stop people using them. Making them legal and regulated will not cause more people to use them.

Another letter published

The Sydney Morning Herald was kind enough to publish another of my letters today. It was a short sharp rant on climate change:

I know weather is not climate, but such a dry, hot August, with bushfires burning at the same time in both hemispheres, must give the most ardent denier of climate change a twinge of doubt. Surely a prudent society would get serious about reducing its consumption of coal and oil. Just in case.

Michael Gormly Woolloomooloo

Savage sentencing shames Australia

Sydney Barrister Charles Waterstreet, writing in yesterday’s Sun Herald, compares Australia with Indonesia in the extreme severity of its sentencing for drug offences. He tells of two Dutch police here to testify in an ecstasy importation case who were "astonished at the savagery of our sentences for large ecstasy importations from Europe."

"We send them away for 20 years," wrote Waterstreet. "In the Netherlands, ecstasy supply is treated as a tax offence – offenders are dealt with for the taxes they avoided in the supply. They get a couple of years."

"The Netherlands regards Australia as the Indonesia of the Pacific," he wrote in the context of Schapelle Corby's 20-year sentence there.

Our sentences are severe by any standard, but considering that drug offences are victimless crimes, this sentencing is deeply unjust and therefore immoral. Local hard-heads with an empathy bypass (usually alcohol drinkers) dismiss this with the line "Well they knew it was against the law so tough luck."

But that doesn't make the law right or justify giving someone an effective life sentence for a victimless crime. At the very least, it mocks the punishment we hand out for real crimes such as rape, assault and murder, which are often shorter than drug sentences. An unjust life sentence steals a life, so it's comparable to murder. The state is the real criminal here.

The War on Drugs is a civil war, a cultural battle between a hard right ideological hangover from the 1950s and a sizeable subculture of people who simply prefer safer, better quality drugs than alcohol. As Waterstreet says:

Blood tests of everyone in Darlinghurst, Kings Cross and the rest of the city at a weekend would be over 50 per cent positive to ecstasy, cocaine, speed and/or cannabis. Sniffer dogs would be at risk of overdosing if unleashed and given their heads in public streets at weekends in the inner city.

The War on Drugs is a civil war, a war against our own people. The stupid thing is, it doesn't even work. As Albert Einstein said: "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Australian governments should be ashamed of themselves.

World tide shifting against prohibition

Dr Alex Wodak has an opinion piece in the SMH today neatly summarising how the global tide is changing against prohibition and the War on Drugs.

None of it is new news but it's a good window into the increasing irrelevance of prohibitionist attitudes.

• Mexico is the latest country to decriminalise. Interestingly, the Obama Administration did not apply pressure to stop the Mexican move like the Bush administration successfully did.
• Argentina has also now decriminalised possession of small amounts of cannabis, reports The Wall Street Journal. The government praised the move, saying criminalisation had been brought in three decades ago by the then military government at the behest of US President Richard Nixon. A Catholic Church bishop has criticised the move, essentially saying it "sent the wrong message" -- that last defence of those with no valid defence.

More Junk Science exposed

In grappling with the disconnect between what prohibitionists tell us and the reality I see on the streets, I have found over and over that they quote junk science, 'studies' which often have such gaping holes in their assumptions and method that even a layperson can see through them.

The malaise extends beyond illicit drugs. My recent criticism in The City News of the City of Sydney's alcohol research shows that the data do not even vaguely support the spin Clover Moore puts on it (a spin that I note is now rapidly changing its focus, but that's another story).

It appears we the public can put little or no faith in the Science we pay for. Mostly, it seems to be engineered to support preordained agendas. There should be a law against it.

An insightful article in Today's SMH by Jessica Irvine looks at the 'modelling' that creates a lot of headlines which turn out to be simply wrong. Ms Irvine also takes a good swipe at credulous journalists who parrot this rubbish.

Take the following quote, talking about the mining sector's campaign against emissions trading:

In June the Minerals Council of Australia published a report saying ''23,510 direct jobs will be lost across Australia's minerals industry by 2020''. Wrong.

The modelling, produced for the council by another consultancy, Concept Economics, found jobs in the mining industry would grow over that time, just not by as much when compared against a certain ''reference case'', which, as it turns out, involved assuming a much higher level of ''no-change'' emissions than anyone is predicting.

A lot of the headlines claiming that [X] costs the economy $16 billion a year (or whatever) are similarly suspect. I reckon if you added up all those claims they would exceed GDP by a fair bit. Can journalists at least please lift their game? Jessica Irvine excepted! She's on the money.

PS 27 August: The prostitution of Science was again highlighted this morning in a 720 ABC radio interview with Dr Tim Hawkes, headmaster of The King’s School. He was part of a panel at Macquarie University's Annual Oration by its Vice-Chancellor Steven Schwartz about returning morality to education, which had become corrupted by post-modern relativism and reduced to the pragmatic function of wealth creation.

Dr Hawkes in the radio interview criticised the practice of drug companies writing a paper about their own products and then paying an academic to put their name to it.

Ironically Miranda Devine, whose prohibitionist columns generously regurgitate junk science about illicit drugs, was also on the panel.

PPS 30 August: Oh, and here's a story about how George W Bush's Chief Scientist in the Office of National Drug Control Policy was a political appointee with no direct experience in the field -- and he is still there, trying to undermine current policies.

Let's investigate the real causes of violence

Melbourne and The Age continues to have a more in-depth discussion about alcohol than does Sydney. Today's article goes through the usual retinue of anti-alcohol regulators who want to quadruple the price of alcohol, raise the drinking age, make bar staff responsible for others' actions and close pubs etc. But only Melbourne has dared talk about the fact that most of the the bad guys come from certain suburbs, indicating deep-rooted cultural causes behind most violence, whether 'booze-fuelled' or not. The corollary of this is that the rest of us -- by far the majority -- do not bash people and would be unfairly penalised by draconian measures.

Says The Age:

Ross Homel, a professor of criminology at Griffith University who has investigated the link between alcohol, bar aggression and violence for nearly 20 years, believes subtle changes could make a difference. He says that while alcohol seems to have a role in creating violence, many other factors - dozens in fact - come into play. [snip]

''At a time when there is an increasing demand in many countries for the authorities to 'do something' about the malign effects of the night-time economy on public health and safety, experts are not in a position to offer any firm advice, at least not advice that is firmly grounded in robust evidence,'' Homel and his co-researchers wrote in their initial findings. ''We actually know very little about how to systematically stop violence and aggression.''

So you have to wonder about the zealots who are so sure about the solutions they propose. In stirring up a moral panic about the problems they also ignore that most of the alcohol-related violence occurs among the same minority of thugs and thus has less effect on the rest of us -- so there is even less reason to punish the majority for the misdeeds of a small minority.

I would be very interested in seeing research into people who have been convicted of serious violence to see what common factors exist in their personalities and backgrounds. Addressing these factors might produce better results than further over-regulating the rest of us, and demonstrate that alcohol is only a contributing factor, not a first cause of the problems.

Nor, of course is the possibility explored that prohibition of more benign drugs might aggravate the alcohol situation. That's taboo among the panic merchants.

Why drug law reform should go 'straight'

Veteran US drug law reform advocate Eric Sterling argues at length that the reform movement is not helped by 'Hempfests' and 'pot rallies', mini-Woodstocks that are ignored by the mainstream.

He's probably correct, given that happy hippies have close to zero credibility among today's slick, sharp urban elites, political advisers, the chemical generation and vigorous right-wing movements powered by corporate subsidies.

On the other hand, argue Hempfest organisers, getting 350,000 people to an event that runs peacefully and happily says a lot about the superiority of cannabis over boozefests.

Unfortunately that is not necessarily the message that gets reported. Cheap jeers at hippies are an easy option for supercilious reporters. Take yesterday when the Nimbin Hemp Embassy floated a giant inflatable joint as PM Kevin Rudd visited Lismore Hospital to talk health. It got lots of press but I wonder how many people got the message that cannabis has medicinal value and that ending prohibition would release huge funding which could be spent on health?

Ironically and perhaps symbolically, the inflatable joint was pricked by the sharp corner of the hospital's "smoke free site" sign. Kevin Rudd just laughed.

Sadly, hippies have not been cool since about 1977 and the rise of punk. All power and joy to today's tie-dyed longhairs but there does NOT lie the path to wider reform.

Picture below of the inflatable joint lifted with thanks from the Northern Rivers Echo.

Are we driving Sydney to drink?

With Sydney, and Kings Cross in particular, consumed by a battle over booze, a new book published in the US approaches the issue from a wider perspective.

Marijuana is Safer: so why are we driving Americans to drink echoes our local situation. But here, the public discourse ignores the nexus between the two most popular recreational drugs. The alcohol debate ignores cannabis, because you can't be seen to support such a terrible, dangerous, irresponsible thing.

But as the book shows, cannabis is a lot less dangerous than alcohol in every way, making its prohibition anomalous. Yet I have watched the recreational landscapes of Kings Cross and Oxford street change during several years of the sniffer dog blitz. These dogs mainly find cannabis and ecstasy -- the two least harmful drugs -- and police often publicly search up to 100 people a week, arresting or cautioning a few and confiscating their drugs.

It stands to reason that the 'tribes' targeted by this blitz will move elsewhere and/or change their behaviour. Has the blitz accelerated the flight of gay culture from Oxford Street? Is it therefore partly responsible for the vacuum being filled by straight suburbans who drink more and are more violent? I know for a fact that aware locals no longer carry drugs when they go out. It's too risky. Word quickly gets around the backpacker set, many of whom can't believe Sydney is so backward. So they take their illegal drugs before going out (sometimes taking more than they usually would), or don't go out, or just stick to booze.

Those who do go out find that the nice drugs wear off after a time and booze becomes the only option. It all adds up to people drinking more, a dangerous monoculture.

So is the sniffer dog blitz driving people to drink? It stands to reason.

If so, it's an example of inappropriate rules creating more problems than they solve. Meanwhile the anti-alcohol lobby calls for yet more and tougher rules to solve problems which are being aggravated by other rules. At the same time prohibitionists call for ever-tougher prohibition. The balloon just gets squeezed this way and that. One rule cancels out the other.

But each debate remains in a separate box and the stupidity goes on.

If you are swayed by the anti-cannabis propaganda and think it's the 'new scourge', have a look at the link above to a Q and A around the Marihuana is Safer book. It's a measured, sensible work with a wealth of links to solid evidence, and it does not by any means claim that marihuana is harmless -- just safer. More and more, prohibitionists have to rely on a shrinking base of uninformed people. Truth will out.

You can get the book from Amazon.

NCPIC Director described as 'prohibitionist'

Professor Jan Copeland, highly paid Director of The National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre (NCPIC), has been described as "a very enthusiastic supporter of prohibition" on the UKCIA blog.

The writer, who says he has heard Professor Copeland speak three times at forums in the UK, claims her input into NCPIC publicity is slanted and easy to spot. This opinion resonates with this blog's sharp criticism of NCPIC's output since its inception.

Questions must be asked about a supposedly evidence-based public organisation which is seen to be driven by the personal ideology of its director. Our tax dollars should be spent on establishing the truth, not selectively interpreting evidence to support a preordained ideology.

The public has a right to assume that information presented as scientific is unbiased and reliable, especially when it comes from a Professor and they are paying for it.

And credulous media accepting NCPIC's media releases as authoritative need to look a little further into the facts, or at least seek opposing comment, before amplifying such propaganda. I name The Sydney Morning Herald and 702 Radio's Deborah Cameron as guilty in this regard. At least Professor Copeland's inaugural essay on the ABC blog was open to comments and was factually flamed.

To see previous posts on this subject, with links to the abovementioned material, just type NCPIC into the blog search field above.

Smoking marihuana gives you lung cancer, right?

Prohibitionists and credulous media are always spruiking studies that show smoking cannabis is carcinogenic. These studies usually analyse the smoke and list many of its components as carcinogenic, concluding along the lines that cannabis is "40 times more carcinogenic than tobacco" etc.

These are the type of studies preferred by prohibitionist politicians, and the research cohort knows very well this type of research is more likely to get funded and create headlines.

Such research adopts a reductive approach, and the conclusions seem intuitively to make sense, although they tend to ignore that cannabis smokers typically consume a lot less smoke than the typical tobacco smoker (who is driven by a strong physical addiction). They also fail to take into account the possible interactions between the various components of cannabis smoke in the gestalt.

Population studies, on the other hand, consistently fail to find higher lung-cancer rates among long-term smokers. The NORML site in the US runs a series on their blog under the banner "If Cannabis didn't [X] you would have read about it, right?" It lists the good news stories about cannabis that the major media consistently ignore.

It links to this story about research into cancer risk and this one about the effects on lung capacity. Both studies, along with others, showed that cannabis had either zero effect or a positive effect such as a 48% reduced risk of head and neck cancers among moderate cannabis smokers. Funny, we don't see these stories in Australian newspapers, either.

I'm not saying that cannabis is risk-free -- commonsense says that dragging smoke into your lungs can't be a good thing -- but population studies consistently fail to find the horror results the reefer madness industry constantly predicts. Let's have the truth, please.

'Big Nanny' creates angry drinkers

The Daily Tele today makes a point I have been thinking about for some time.

Anti-alcohol activists in Kings Cross regularly call for tougher RSI (Responsible Service of Alcohol) rules. But how practical is that? Writes The Tele:

There are doctors and scientists across the globe struggling to pinpoint the nexus between alcohol and bad behaviour yet on a Saturday night this judgment is being made in a second by hotel bouncers under riding instructions from terrified publicans.

Indeed. Many violent incidents are in fact caused by staff, "terrified" by already draconian fines and penalties for venues, over-reacting and denying drinks or entry to people who then get annoyed. I once saw an 18-year old barmaid refuse service to a friend of mine, a truckie in his 50s, who had had only two glasses of wine all afternoon, compliments of the pub during a 'friendly' PR reception for its local neighbours. He had a slow Aussie drawl and the north shore girl mistook it for drunkenness.

My friend was furious. Fortunately he was also a peaceful, sober type and didn't lose his cool. He never went back to that pub again. So much for PR.

Yet temperance types are always calling for even tougher enforcement of RSA rules. Just how would that work? Compliance officers lurking in the crowd, breath-testing patrons and then sacking the bar person who had served those found to be over .05?

Sorry, Big Nanny, can you please leave us adults alone to make our own decisions?

Meanwhile The Tele also reports on police pushing around a the licensee from The Gaslight Hotel in Crown St, which has now won an appeal against glass restrictions. The Tele has CCTV footage of the incident. If a customer did this it would be 'Alcohol-Fuelled Violence'.

The police should be freed to fight actual crime, not enforce nannyism.

Stings reveal corrupt police

Between a third and half of police officers and staff are believed to fail entrapment-type tests for corruption, reports The Sydney Morning Herald today.

The tests involve fake drug labs and sham bribery offers. State police forces have used the strategy for some time and now the Australian Federal Police are looking to adopt it.

The use of drug busts as a prime temptation in these stings illustrates the high correlation between prohibition and corruption, one of the core reasons why ever-tougher prohibition measures will never prevent drug use.

The insidious nature of corruption was revealed when the Police Association warned that the police conducting the tests might themselves be corrupt.

''Corruption is its most serious when those who are tasked with seeking out corruption are themselves corrupt," said a spokesperson.

Comforting, isn't it?

NCPIC reviews cannabis-driving with mixed results

A quick read of the evidence behind a new campaign from the National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre (NCPIC) reveals nothing new, although lurid posters to be circulated throughout schools bely the mixed results of the brief evidence review.

I have long wondered about the facts of this issue when I compare such reports with decades of observing drunks often pranging cars and smokers generally not. I have noticed that laboratory studies usually demonstrate higher risk but population studies don't -- and this report reflects that observation.

I would be interested in the views of others. Comments are open below!

I am automatically suspicious of anything that comes out of NCPIC, which seems to have a mission to demonise cannabis and so-far has a woeful record of amplifying junk science. The new campaign seems much more considered.

However I note a drastic disconnect between the lurid posters they will be flooding schools with, and the conclusion of the research, which begins:

There are numerous methodological limitations in the studies reviewed above that may account for the great variations and inconsistencies in their findings, which detracts from the likelihood of a clear synthesis of results.

When in doubt, demonise, seems the continuing NCPIC policy. The posters say smoking is as bad as drinking but it isn't.

The conclusion also speaks about developing new guidelines for cannabis/driving research. I have long thought that a large population study could provide a clearer answer. Take 1,000 or more long-term users (with, say three decades of smoking cannabis) and the same number of people who have never smoked. Then compare their driving and crash records. The study could also look at other factors such as health history, employment, family dynamics, social factors and the like.

Some things I note about the NCPIC report:

• It is not clear whether alcohol has been eliminated as a confounding factor for car accidents in the various population studies.

• Where studies show a percentage of injured drivers testing positive for cannabis, this percentage often seems to be below the percentage of the population which uses cannabis -- so is this statistically significant? There is also a drastic diversity of results from different studies, which makes me wonder about the alcohol factor.

• A common belief among counter-cultures which use cannabis is that the well-known 'paranoid' effects of cannabis cause drivers to be extra-cautious when driving while its other effects make them less aggressive and more relaxed. The old joke about the hippies being pulled over for driving at half the speed limit is legion. This could explain why the laboratory and driving simulator tests show such different results.

• While it is no doubt prudent to advise young people NOT to drive under the influence of cannabis (especially for inexperienced drivers, I would think), this report will be used to justify more drug-testing of drivers who will be penalised at the same levels as for drunk driving when the risk they pose to others is far lower.

The effects of drunk driving are clear, and observable anecdotally. The effects of cannabis driving are not. The report will also be gleefully brandished by prohibitionists to support their failed regime.

It's the bogans, not the venues

Melbourne, which dumped its pub lockout regime last year after violence actually rose, is now grappling with statistics that show most perpetrators of CBD violence come from its outer suburbs (see quote from The Age below).

The same is fairly obviously true of Sydney but the statistics are not published. It wouldn't be politically correct. Meanwhile our authorities insist that venue-saturation is the problem, even though violence rates are lower in the concentrated precincts like Kings Cross and higher in outlying suburbs with a lower concentration of venues.

Of course Council's real agenda is to squelch entertainment precincts in the name of gentrification, with Council egged on by a small minority of residents who seem to hate the suburb they choose to live in. The panic about violence is just a moral cover. Council's own research shows only 16–20% of Cross residents wanted fewer pubs and clubs, but as they are mostly over 50 and so are our Councillors, they drive the agenda. If this seems to contradict Council's spin, it does. I have analysed these aspects of the research in more depth in tomorrow's City News. (I'll link it on publication)

Meanwhile here's reportage from The Age on Melbourne's suburb-fuelled violence problem:

Yesterday The Age published police statistics showing that most assaults in the central city were by offenders from the western and northern suburbs, including the Premier's Broadmeadows electorate...

...Lord Mayor Robert Doyle called on police to stop troublemakers from the outer suburbs travelling to the city. He said Melbourne should follow the lead of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and target city trouble spots, transport corridors and suburbs offenders are coming from with more police.

How do you stop 'troublemakers' coming into the city? How do you know in advance who's going to cause 'trouble'? It's time we chardonnay-sippers faced the fact that we live in a young, raw, colonial country with more than its share of macho idiots in its urban hinterlands. (Think Kyle and Jackie O.) Shutting down or gating the 'naice' areas is not the answer. While we continue to blame and punish the venues in the destination areas we are not even beginning to address the real, more complex problem.

Drug laws create major social injustice

If prohibition is a false and failed instrument -- and this blog shows there is a very strong case for that proposition -- then all the people arrested, jailed, injured or killed in its name are the victims of a social injustice that ranks with any of the more visible progressive causes.

Concerned and caring people fight for the rights of minorities oppressed because of their race, gender or religion etc, but the victims of prohibition remain a relatively unseen class, even though their numbers overlap hugely with the more readily identified oppressed groups.

This is explained carefully in an article by Harry G. Levine, author and professor of sociology at Queens College, City University of New York. He shows how the 430,000 arrests in New York for possession of small amounts of cannabis since 1997 are often carried out under false pretenses by police, who also discriminate heavily against blacks and hispanics.

This is happening even though the possession of less than one ounce of marihuana is explicitly decriminalised in New York State.

And the same is happening here. While we don't seem to have professors doing the research, it's obvious enough on the streets of Kings Cross. Here police routinely stop people they don't like the look of, demand ID without legal grounds to do so, publicly search people and target particular people with sniffer dogs, while pulling the dogs off others who have been indicated.

These are not wild accusations -- I have photographs of this happening. Pictured above is a policeman clearly pulling a sniffer dog on a tight leash to a Koori man in Springfield Plaza. The man was unconcerned and the dog did not indicate. I also have photographs of several police with two sniffer dogs running down a man who was walking along the street, before putting the dogs onto him. No drugs were found, as usual.

I took this up with a previous local commander who surprised me by claiming that this was legal procedure. I had naïvely thought that the dogs operated like random breath testing for alcohol, simply trotting around until they smelt drugs on someone. But no, it seems they are an active tool of discrimination.

No-one in progressive politics seems to care about this except to a small extent The Greens who, unfortunately, have retreated from their previous policy of regulated supply in the pursuit of more middle class votes. Tough luck for the oppressed minorities, I guess.

PS 18 Aug 09: Here's a fiery talk from Ethan Nadelmann, founder of the Drug Policy Alliance in the US, speaking at an NAACP conference on prohibition as an instrument of racial oppression.

Heroin addict exposes Drug War lies

Here's a link to an excellent post that systematically refutes a series of lies and distortions made on Fox News by Calvina Fay of Drug Free America. The post is from The Australian Heroin Diaries and written by Terry Wright, who has to be commended for his unvarnished portrayal of his own addiction.

It's a great post because it wraps up and refutes the current set of myths that prohibitionists are pushing.

Pictured are American kids orphaned because prohibitionists removed their dad, who presumably got caught with a fair quantity of drugs. It's from another Heroin Diaries post which neatly demonstrates the 'collateral damage' caused by the War on Drugs. The damage is real and horrific -- but the justifications for the WoD are, at the least, extremely debatable if not specious.

Free marketeers analyse the cost of prohibition

The UK's Adam Smith Institute writes about a Transform paper analysing the cost-benefit of prohibition. Prohibition costs the UK £16.8bn per annum. The benefit varies according to how much you think legalisation would change heroin and cocaine use. As this is not quantifiable, the report projects various scenarios ranging from a 50% reduction to a doubling of use.

The benefits vary accordingly from £618m to –£309m. That's right -- we spend billions to get a benefit of millions, while we can't afford quality health and dental care. The analysis does not even take into account tax revenues the government would receive if drugs were conditionally legalised. It's refreshing to see the free market end of politics at least being consistent, unlike our own 'economic rationalists' who generally support prohibition.

While this dry cost analysis is interesting, the post brought a well put comment from one David Hart, who elegantly sums up the arguments against prohibition. I reproduce it here in full -- I have a feeling Mr Hart would not object. He is replying to a previous comment.

You are right, 555pps, in your assertion that crack and heroin can cause misery. However, so do alcohol and tobacco, and all manner of dangerous recreational activities that we would not think it sensible to criminalise. It looks like you have rather missed the point of this whole debate: it is not about whether something is dangerous enough that it should be prohibited, it is about whether prohibition is an effective and humane way of minimising the harms caused by something dangerous. Even a cursory glance at the statistics will show that prohibition of drugs causes great harm to society, almost certainly greater than that caused by the drugs themselves. And after many decades of trying to eradicate illicit drugs, they are more available and affordable than ever before. This is not just failure, this is spectacular counterproductive failure. Even if there is a substantial increase in the number of crack/heroin users after legalisation, the amount of money we would need to spend on regulating those drugs so as to minimise the risks would be small compared to the amount we currently flush down the pan in a quixotic attempt to prevent people getting a hold of them. And that's before we even get started on the gangland violence, the terrorism, the social chaos that is caused by the fact that the drug trade is currently controlled by criminals who have to use violence to resolve their disputes because they cannot use legal means.

Heroin and crack may be 'evil' (though remember we're talking about a molecule here, not something with a will of its own), but you have to answer the question: how many innocent Columbian bystanders are you prepared to see gunned down in shootouts between cartels and the police per kilogramme of cocaine prevented from making it to our shores? How many American or British soldiers killed by Taliban bombs per kilo of opium intercepted? How many Afghan girls denied an education? How many teenagers in our cities knifed because the current prohibition of drugs makes illegal dealing profitable to violent gangsters? Those who support prohibition also have blood on their hands. If you are prepared to see innocent people killed in the name of sending a message to future generations then so be it, but I'd be careful about using terms like 'evil' if you do.

The picture is from the NORML Foundation.

Financial Times enters the War on Drugs debate

London's Financial Times has run an opinion piece against the WoD, underlining the growing awareness of the issue in mainstream media.

Readers of this blog will be familiar with the arguments it presents but the piece also quotes a typical police argument for prohibition: "Class A drugs destroy the fabric of people’s lives," said Detective Superintendent Paul Carter of Cumbria Police, who is most likely an honest hardworking copper.

But add a few words to his statement and it becomes a lot more accurate and insightful.

If he had said "Class A drugs destroy the fabric of a few people’s lives under prohibition," it would reflect the fact that by far the majority of such users (including at one time George W Bush and Barack Obama) have no problems at all with Class A drugs. It would also acknowledge that prohibition is not preventing the damage that does occur, and is in fact acutely aggravating it.

The next argument in the prohibitionist bible is that reforming prohibition would create a 'tsunami of drug abuse'. They have no credible evidence for this but they still say it. I here repeat my usual response to this: If heroin was conditionally available legally, would you start shooting up? I wouldn't, and so-far everyone I have asked has given the same answer. Try asking people you meet. As the 'no' answers mount up, ask yourself where this 'tsunami of drug abuse' would actually come from.

Prohibitionists still peddling their nonsense

This almost laughable story from the UK Telegraph about a study into cannabis use was actually posted on an email list for Alcohol and other Drug professionals by Herschel Baker of Drug Free Australia. "Cannabis 'can cause psychosis in healthy people'" screams the headline, and it's all about the terrors of the new skunk-style cannabis -- complete with this picture of a skunk joint being rolled.

But the subjects of the study were not even given skunk, and the psychosis was transient, induced by an apparent overdose of pure THC injected into 22 very brave -- or stupid -- men, half of whom got a placebo. Unsurprisingly, those who received the placebo didn't overdose.

An analogy might be injecting people with pure vitamin A -- which is toxic in large doses -- and concluding from the resulting deaths that carrots can kill you (carrots being a good source of vitamin A).

THC overdose is an extremely unpleasant thing, but inducing it via injections proves nothing except that the loony right can still get funding from somewhere and the tabloid press still publish their 'findings'.

The article also repeats the myth that the THC content of street cannabis has risen from 6% in 1995 to 14% now. I have results from a Sydney university study showing potencies of seized NSW-grown marihuana from 1971. They range from 3% to 11.5%, the latter from wild plants picked in the Hunter Valley, decades before 'skunk' was thought of. Meanwhile some of the more looney prohibitionists still claim that potency has increased anywhere between 10 and 25 times. 25 multiplied by a potency of, say, 10% would give us weed which consists of 250% THC, a remarkable exercise in metaphysics.

Note that the study suffers from the usual traits of junk science -- small samples and a reductive method. Surely even the mentally challenged can see the difference between smoking something with an alleged 14% potency and being injected with something that's 100% pure?

It would be almost funny except that these myths still grip the public imagination, which is of course the purpose of such propaganda and of the dishonest charlatans who promulgate it. Never mind the ethics of injecting humans with an overdose.

-------------------------

By contrast, BBC UK published this thought-provoking piece about harm reduction and the concept of 'specific deterrence'. Note the comments below it. Then compare and contrast with the Telegraph piece.

How the War on Drugs relies on lies

Author and writer for the popular blog Huffington Post, Ryan Grim, has uncovered a tissue of lies and distortion produced by the previous US 'Drugs Czar' John Walters.

In doing so, Grim exposes the mechanism used by a hierarchy of prohibitionists, lobbyists and uncritical media to reinforce an ideology that has failed on all counts.

It seems Walters was desperate to show that his War on Drugs was working. One of his performance indicators was to restrict the supply of cocaine using police and military interdiction to drive up its price and thus reduce demand. (Never mind that driving up its price simply increases the profit motive that powers the drugs black market in the first place.)

So Walters cooked up some dodgy statistics and shopped around the media until he found an outlet, USA Today, that would publish his claims of success despite the fact that his statistics were not backed by documented evidence.

Ryan Grim was researching the subject at the time and tried to get hold of the Drug Czar's backing documentation using FOI. Unsurprisingly, he was refused.

That documentation has since been released and it shows that Walters was telling porkys on many levels -- this senior, respectable, authoritative man had no integrity whatsoever. Grim's piece exposes his lies, and shows that the cocaine trade had in fact merely re-focused on Europe because the declining US dollar made it more profitable to deal in Euros. He also describes how the War on Cannabis in the 1980s merely increased its price and pushed people towards cocaine in the first place.

Here we see the lies coming from the very top. This is very handy for prohibitionists down the line. For example the lobby group Drug Free Australia, armed with $600,000 from John Howard's government, regularly amplifies such material from high-ranking US drug warriors, sending it out in press releases that rely only on the perceived authority of these high-ranking people to support their claims. Then, typically, the mainstream media lazily repeats the claims without balancing comment.

Thus is the prohibition mindset reinforced and maintained with an evidence-free chain of misinformation.

The following UK blogs, from a doctor and from a libertarian, approach the problem from different angles and incidentally back up Grim's tale of the cocaine trade targeting Europe.

The Jobbing Doctor in the UK laments the increasing damage from drugs he sees in his daily practice in a working class industrial area, and calls for decriminalisation and legalisation. He links to... the UK blog Devil's Kitchen which has some concise supporting arguments on the subject.

And here's proven liar John Walters on Youtube pushing the 'new potency' myth, opposed by Bruce Mirken from the Marihuana Policy Project.

God's not listening, so who is talking back?

A Cochrane Review on the effectiveness of intercessory prayer on ill people has found statistically insignificant results. So if God isn’t listening, you have to wonder who is talking back to those who claim to receive His word. Could they just be hearing voices from their own imagination? Is this a mild form of psychosis?

I've often wondered about the stupidity of the Christian school praying for fine weather for their sports day while next door an equally pious farmer is praying for rain. How is even an omnipotent god going to decide that one?

The plain-language summary concludes:

Intercessory Prayer for the alleviation of ill health

Intercessory prayer is a very common intervention, used with the intention of alleviating illness and promoting good health. It is practised by many faiths and involves a person or group setting time aside to petition God (or a god) on behalf of another who is in some kind of need, often with the use of traditional devotional practices. Intercessory prayer is organised, regular, and committed. This review looks at the evidence from randomised controlled trials to assess the effects of intercessory prayer. We found 10 studies, in which more than 7000 participants were randomly allocated to either be prayed for, or not. Most of the studies show no significant differences in the health related outcomes of patients who were allocated to be prayed for and those who allocated to the other group.

Image: Anglo-Saxon Jesus in the clouds by me.

Is Sydney male, female or just stuffed?

Elizabeth Farrelly in the SMH yesterday reflected on gender and urban dynamics with a neat essay on 'male' modernism and 'female' post-modernism: the first works with 'space', the second 'place'. One is fast, the other warm and fuzzy.

However I think she mistakes spin for substance in the following:

A city, that is, not unlike Clover's City of Villages - proffered, as happens, by our first elected female Lord Mayor. Already, you may have noticed, Sydney city is already more centred, street-active, domestic, conservation-minded, art-oriented and jam-packed with talk-spaces. More feminine.

'Street active'? Everything is banned on our streets, from pole posters to portrait painters. Clover and her Council refuse to provide public noticeboards for it 'villages'. There is nothing to do on our streets except hurry from Point A to Point B or get drunk. These may seem small things but they are the gears and levers of local community-building.

'Art oriented'? Only if you are locally apolitical, already a respectable member of the art mafia and willing to subsume your work to the control of an endless, prescriptive, bureaucratic sausage-machine. No art that is risky or new comes from this process. Clover regularly obliterates quality public artwork applied with full permission on privately owned walls. Ask me about how Council crushed the successful Kings Cross Arts Festival.

'City of villages'? This slogan is a bit of a joke when Clover is hellbent on 'normalising' Kings Cross, thus destroying the very thing that makes it different from other 'villages' -- all of which wear the same imposed grey-granite-and-smartpole costume in the name of 'uniformity', the exact opposite of diversity.

Ms Farrelly gets closer to the mark with the following:

You may also have noticed, however, that the council spends $1m of its environmental rates levy on graffiti removal. That consultation has become a talkfest without results. And that the long fought-for laneway bars are drowning under residents' complaints. This is the downside of fem-urbanism; a tendency to tidy-mindedness, circularity and wowserism, the buttons and epaulets of stasis.