"Drugs are not forbidden because they are dangerous but dangerous because they are forbidden."

You heard it here first kids; drugs are bad. It may come as a surprise that Alcohol comes on top of this list of harmful drugs composed by the former governmental adviser David Nutt’s new outfit; but what is more surprising is that some of the drugs on this list are actually considered illegal by our society. In this short series we will cover the benefits of some of the above offending substances that have been recently discovered by the scientific community and also have a chat about how this list would look if we adopted a sane drug policy.

In this instalment we’ll go with the biggies, and by any definition these are all addictive drugs that harm their users as well as the rest of us: Alcohol and Heroin.

Statistically you are far more likely to be hurt by getting on a horse.

Alcohol is legal, meaning that:

a) The tax on booze pays for the hospital/polis time that ensues.

b) The harm it does is significantly less than if it were prohibited.

(America found this out the hard way in the Noble experiment from 1920-1933. In this time criminals became rich selling largely contaminated alcohol across the length and breadth of society, whilst this did almost nothing to the amount that Americans drank, it turned John Doe into a criminal and it turned the law into a standing joke. Useful graphs illustrating the point courtesy of the University of Albany here.)

The title of this article is a quote from John Marks, a radical GP who after the prohibition of heroin decided to prescribe it in the early 90s to addicts around his surgery in Liverpool. Addicts in this trial didn’t need to steal or bring new customers to their dealers in order to feed their addiction and so committed 93% less theft, burglary, and property crimes. The number of new addicts also saw a huge drop as drug dealers stayed away from the area, knowing there was no point in being there. Marks allowed addicts to escape the cycle of criminalisation and instead live normal lives with jobs and kids and matching luggage and all the rest.

The headline is from a paper where Marks slammed our drugs policy as ‘harm maximisation’ and ‘inhuman’, and that our laws are basically a carbon copy of the American Christian-fundamentalist inspired policy of prohibition. Most retired police officers will admit that prohibition has been a gigantic waste of time, and indeed leading doctors have ceded that prohibition of the most dangerous drugs has done more harm than good.

The Scottish Socialist Party stands for the prescription of Heroin; a move that would topple powerful criminal enterprises, protect our citizens from addiction and allow us to divert resources away from expensive and ineffectual policing and towards saving our public services from spending cuts.

Tune in next time when we look at how scientists have found that 30-hour trips can break addiction, X can blast away shell-shock and how even middle-aged, middle class Christians can after a year agree that an afternoon in a drug experiment gave them ‘the most meaningful experience of their lives’.

***SSY in no way encourages young people to experiment with illegal drugs. This piece aims to illustrate the insanity of our drug policies only.***

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