The drugs policy of harm production
October 6th, 2008 | Published by BRAHA Editor in Drug Culture
By Melanie Phillips
A silent coup has taken place in drugs policy. The legalisers have captured the Home Office. The government has quietly downgraded its attempt to reduce the number of people taking illegal drugs.
This astonishing development became clear last Friday, when the Home Office minister Bob Ainsworth told a conference that the government was going to place ‘harm minimisation’ at the centre of its revised drugs strategy, to be unveiled in a few weeks’ time.
To the unwary, ‘harm reduction’ — as ‘minimisation’ is more commonly known — may sound a worthy enough aim. But it is actually a euphemism for throwing in the towel altogether against drug abuse.
For the advocates of ‘harm reduction’ say we should not try to reduce drug use through the law. Instead, we should accept it as a way of life and minimise the harm it causes. So they want to provide ‘injecting rooms’ — where users inject illicit drugs under official supervision — and promote treatment of addicts with substitute drugs such as methadone.
The aim should not be to get people off drugs, apparently, but to keep them on drugs indefinitely — in a way that makes them (according to a conference speaker) ‘less vulnerable’. In other words, they say there’s a safe way to use drugs.
Yet there is surely no safe way to use drugs; that’s why they are illegal. Ainsworth told the conference that the government believes methadone treatment should be increased. But how can one justify keeping addicts permanently addicted?
What’s more, ‘harm reduction’ is actually a cover for the demand to legalise drugs altogether. This was clear from the agenda of last week’s conference in Ashford, Kent. For despite the fact that it was organised by a group including the Home Office and Conservative-controlled Kent county council, it was dominated by legalisers with startling track records.
The veteran Dutch drug legaliser Peter Cohen — who told the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf in 1997: ‘I openly admit I use drugs’ — said it was ‘criminal’ for the state to deprive drug users of their ‘consumer choice’ in shopping around for a better brand of cannabis or the very best quality ecstasy.
Freek Polak, a Dutch psychiatrist, who once said politicians would have to be ‘forced step by step’ to support drug legalisation, protested that requiring heroin addicts to be supervised by a doctor when the drug was prescribed to them in the Netherlands was ‘an enormous restriction on their social activities’.
And another speaker, the Rotterdam pastor Hans Visser, once ran an illegal heroin supply scheme.
This group was described to me by Hans Koopmans, of the De Hoop psychiatric hospital for drug users in Dordrecht in Holland, as ‘the nucleus of the legalisation movement in the Netherlands. They are a small minority, extremists as far as Dutch drug policy is concerned.’
At the conference, one preposterous claim followed another. Ira Glasser, the former head of the American Civil Liberties Union and another prominent legaliser, claimed that fatty foods were just as much of a killer as drugs such as crack cocaine or heroin. The real purpose of making drugs illegal, he said, was to victimise black Americans. And since so many black people in Florida had been deprived of the vote because they had drug convictions, it even followed that keeping drugs illegal had led directly to George W Bush ‘fixing’ the American election.
The presentations were so wacky that if you closed your eyes you might think you had been transported back in time to the counter-culture of the 1960s.
But this wasn’t Haight-Ashbury, or even contemporary Amsterdam. This was Ashford, where some 200 council staff, drug action teams, police officers, magistrates, academics and civil servants spent two days being bombarded with arguments for liberalising or legalising drug use.
It is simply astounding that the Home Office and Kent County Council should lend their authority to such a group to spread their ideas in Britain. So how could this happen?
The answer is that most drug agencies now promote ‘harm reduction’. The Home Office listens to them. And some of the most prominent of these agencies –– Turning Point, Drugscope, and the International Harm Reduction Association (IHRA) – were involved alongside the Home Office in organising this conference.
Should the Home Secretary be unaware that ‘harm reduction’ is a Trojan horse for legalisation, he should investigate the IHRA’s website. For there he would find authors extolling the benefits of LSD, claiming that laws criminalising drug use ‘violate certain basic rights of the person’, and recommending that hallucinogens such as LSD and mescaline should be licensed.
And he would also find the IHRA blurting out one truth at least — that ‘meaningful harm reduction’ inevitably requires legalisation. Of course it does. For if one accepts the premise behind ‘harm reduction’ — that everything should be done to make the drug user’s life more comfortable — it follows that laws that make such drug use illegal prevent that from happening.
But of course, the law is designed not for the benefit of drug users but to protect society from them, and this radical ‘harm reduction’ approach is actually contrary to three UN drug conventions.
As Herbert Schaepe, secretary to the UN International Narcotics Control Board has written, these conventions require countries to significantly reduce both the supply and use of drugs. ‘Harm reduction’, he said, could not be allowed to thwart the wishes of the UN. So ‘injecting rooms’, for example, would not be permitted.
These three conventions are the biggest obstacle in the way of drug legalisation. So now the legalisers have set their sights on getting them abolished altogether.
At an undisclosed meeting in the European Parliament building in Brussels two weeks ago, a network of legalisers met to launch a campaign against the UN conventions. The Transnational Radical Party, also known as Parliamentarians for Anti-Prohibitionist Action, claims to have 52 European politician members, both MEPs and MPs, including the British Labour MP Paul Flynn.
At the Brussels meeting, it combined with the International Anti-Prohibitionist League headed by the notorious American legaliser Arnold Trebach, who declared ‘the beginning of a new bold international campaign’ to create ‘an international legal framework for the full legalisation of drugs’.
All they need to get repeal of the conventions onto the UN’s agenda is for one country to suggest this at the UN review conference on drug policies at Vienna next March. To bring this about, they will co-ordinate an international propaganda campaign targeting MPs, civil servants, experts and the public to create ‘a favourable political climate’. They have even helpfully produced a draft resolution promoting repeal.
They are targeting governments whose thinking has already been deeply corrupted. A series of meetings has been held by the health ministers of Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and France to discuss harmonising policy along the lines of the Dutch approach which turns a blind eye to cannabis use.
And last March there was a private meeting at Wilton Park, in Sussex, organised with the drug agency Drugscope and the Foreign Office. Drugscope, which is hugely influential in the Home Office, wants to decriminalise cannabis at least, and has argued that countries can get round the UN conventions.
And last March there was a private meeting at Wilton Park, in Sussex, organised with the drug agency Drugscope and the Foreign Office. Drugscope, which is hugely influential in the Home Office, wants to decriminalise cannabis at least, and has argued that countries can get round the UN conventions.
But at the meeting Martin Jelsma, a Dutch legaliser, went even further and said it was now urgent ‘to begin to question openly and seriously the straitjacket of the conventions’. Harm reduction, he said, had spread throughout Europe and was now ‘irreversible’. ‘The flood’, he declared, ‘is already on this side of the dyke’.
The flood waters certainly seem to have engulfed the Home Office. Ainsworth told the Ashford conference that the revised strategy would concentrate efforts against hard drugs, since cannabis was not as harmful. But this ignores the fact that study after study has shown the appalling effects of cannabis on the brain, the damage it does to cognition and memory and the way it can provoke schizophrenia.
The flood waters certainly seem to have engulfed the Home Office. Ainsworth told the Ashford conference that the revised strategy would concentrate efforts against hard drugs, since cannabis was not as harmful. But this ignores the fact that study after study has shown the appalling effects of cannabis on the brain, the damage it does to cognition and memory and the way it can provoke schizophrenia.
The Home Office is simply ignoring the fact that adopting different approaches to ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ drugs just doesn’t work. As Herbert Schaepe has written, the Netherlands and Switzerland, which both have a liberal approach, have not only failed to reduce demand for drugs but now have ‘significant drug abuse, illicit trafficking, manufacture and cultivation problems’ and have become suppliers of narcotics and psychotropic substances to the whole world.
The Ashford conference repeatedly hailed Dutch policy as a great success. In fact, it has been anything but. According to the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and Environment, use of soft drugs among Dutch high school students increased by more than 30% over the past ten years.
‘Drug use has gone up, both cannabis and cocaine’, says Hans Koopmans in Dordrecht. ‘The main problem of liberalisation is that we can’t convince youngsters that drugs, particularly cannabis, are dangerous.
‘The idea that as criminalisation hasn’t worked we should legalise is really very naïve. You will just get many more people addicted. As for reducing drug crime, most addicts who commit crime were doing so before they started on drugs. The link between drugs and crime is not that simple.’
‘The idea that as criminalisation hasn’t worked we should legalise is really very naïve. You will just get many more people addicted. As for reducing drug crime, most addicts who commit crime were doing so before they started on drugs. The link between drugs and crime is not that simple.’
To be fair, when Kent’s ruling Conservatives realised — too late –that their own council staff had helped draw up such an unbalanced list of speakers, they were aghast. After all, said council leader Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, Kent was opposed to the Home Secretary’s proposal to reclassify cannabis, and would never support legalisation.
When I remarked upon the imbalance to the council’s conference organisers, they launched a panicky damage limitation exercise. Hastily, they rearranged their programme by asking an anti-legalisation campaigner, Malou Lindholm, a former Swedish Green MEP who happened to be in the audience. But she was only one against many.
The really dismaying thing is that with no organised body to counter the ‘harm reduction’ propaganda, many simply have no way of knowing that what they are being told is wrong.
Countries such as Britain have a drug problem not because drugs are illegal, but because young people have long been given conflicting and ambiguous signals. Every country which has liberalised its drug policy has an escalating problem. It is only those countries which enforce the law consistently that do not.
The ‘harm reduction’ legalisers have saturated Europe with stunning success. They have now captured the British government. We have already seen the disastrous results of the cannabis ‘experiment’ in Brixton. As a result of the government’s revised drugs strategy, it will now abandon countless more young people and society at large to ‘harm production’– drug dependency, physical damage and criminally wasted lives.
To comment on any article, e-mail melanie@melaniephillips.com
To comment on any article, e-mail melanie@melaniephillips.com
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