Legalise it! No, legalise them!
I think it is refreshing that Jamaica has found itself on the vanguard of legalising ganja. However, I penned this piece not as an advocate of ganja smoking, but as an advocate of logic. To my mind, there also needs to be some fresh thought on our approach to dealing with all illegal/’hard’ drugs not just in Jamaica, but everywhere. For obvious reasons no one can, will, or should advocate for hard drugs in any way similar to the advocacy on behalf of ganja and ganja users.
Conventional wisdom seems to support pursuing a war on drugs in a “fight-fire-with-fire” approach. It is conventional because most people think this is the right thing to do — drugs are bad, therefore they must be illegal. I can support that drugs are bad in umpteen ways, but the jury is out for me as to whether they need to be illegal. And I definitely disagree with the current approach.
First of all, the war on drugs is an unwinnable war. The drug problem has got worse everywhere war has been waged against it, with the possible exception of Colombia; and in that case the problem has got proportionately worse in other countries like Peru and Bolivia. Mexico and the US are the most spectacular examples of the war’s “unwinnability”. It is unwinnable because it is so demand-driven, and because there is too much money involved. What we also don’t accept is that the vast amounts of money around the drug trade is due to the fact that it is illegal. And this is the crux of the problem, not the use of drugs per se.
What is far worse than drug use, or a drug user, is the crime, criminal empires and pervasive corruption that grow to support their production, transportation and distribution. I will discuss three areas:
Corollary crime
When many of us think of the violence that generally surrounds the drug trade, we convince ourselves that this sort of violence is localised and only affects people in the trade. That is true only to an extent. Consider, once someone gets involved in the drug trade, there takes hold a systematic depletion of work ethic (or distortion of the effort to reward expectation) that causes crime to become their first resort to meeting their material needs. Consider also the proliferation of guns that goes along with the drug trade. When you combine those two things, you end up with a second tier of crime that is not directly related to drugs, but is perpetrated by people who have a taste for easy money, are desensitised to risk, and armed.
This second tier will include extortion, carjacking, robbery, and even rape, all perpetrated against persons not necessarily involved in the drug trade. Extortion has a particular multiplier effect. Take, for example, a residential construction site where the cost is ultimately borne by the tenant of that building through rent charged based on the total construction cost; a shop owner who must pass the expense on to his customers; a road project the total cost for which is paid for ultimately by taxpayers. This is a crime with victims who don’t even realise they are victims.
Expense borne by taxpayers: This is the simplest to explain. We can start by agreeing that a considerable number of our prisoners are there on related charges — possibly most of them. Investigations, police operations, prosecutions, and custody of the perpetrators all have direct expense line items in our country’s budget. Add to that untold weaponry, training, personnel, training, time spent drafting legislation, etc, ad infinitum. Not to mention the negative impact on commerce. To quantify that may be just beyond possible.
Corruption
This one is both a corollary crime and an expense, and is probably more pervasive, and more expensive, and less visible, but impacts us all. The corrupting influence of the drug trade, and the powerful — and even the not so powerful — people engaged in it; bribery, blind eye turning, inflated contracts, deliberately botched prosecutions, on and on. We need to appreciate the extent to which the corruption of law enforcement (policemen), the judiciary, politicians, and professionals (civil servants, lawyers, accountants, etc) emanates from, or is exponentially increased by the drug trade. I hardly think this point needs much explanation, especially in the Jamaican context, but it is no less real in other countries. But the slope of corruption is a slippery one. And where persons have compromised themselves in one regard they are all too willing to do so again, then we end up with officials who then become malleable — principle, regulations, propriety be damned.
After digesting those three features of the drug trade, allow me to return to my original point, the war on drugs as prosecuted is unwinnable. Unfortunately, if we continue our current approach, then all three offshoots of the trade I have cited above stand to only get worse. These three features, to my mind, far outweigh any risks or ill effect of persons having access to drugs without significant legal ramifications. They are direct consequences of the fact that the production, transportation, distribution, and use of drugs continue to be illegal, and that their illegality is combated in the way that it is.
While I could, I choose not to base my argument on the fact that people ingest dangerous things like alcohol and cigarette smoke, and neither is illegal; nor that it is possible to make being under the influence in certain situations illegal and stop there; nor that people should have a right to put whatever they want into their bodies; nor that we could reserve the right to regulate drug use in a similar manner as we do alcohol, cigarettes, and dangerous medications; nor that the taxes could earn revenue for our economy instead of being a drag on it; nor that people clearly will take drugs regardless of the legal ramifications. While all those are true, I base my argument on the fact that we will not stem the violence, expense, or corruption until we decriminalise drugs and instead regulate it. I refer to this view as a fact because it is proven. Yes, there is evidence. Exhaustive case studies on this was phenomenon was conducted by numerous countries almost 100 years ago, not the least of which was the United States of America. The same USA, I might add, that is the most strident proponent of the current “war”.
The case studies were not academic exercises, but live tests. A real life experiment which took the form of the very real era of Prohibition — an era lasting in the United States on a Federal level from 1920-1933, but also in Russia 1914-1925, Iceland 1915-1933, Finland 1919-1932, Norway 1916-1927.
In all these countries alcohol was made illegal and, while doing little to abate consumption, it instead gave rise to organised crime and corruption, and certainly in the US the scale of crime had not been seen up to that point. After much hand-wringing at the time, when the laws were finally repealed, the risk and hence the profits were drained from these illegal liquor enterprises. In their place grew legitimate businesses established to fill the demand for profit, paying billions of dollars into State coffers, instead of draining from them. Should the same action be considered now, there would need to be careful thought as to what sort of regulation and enforcement would be needed, but no consideration beyond the grasp of our law drafters, civil stakeholders, and legislators, all people smarter than myself.
The suggestion to decriminalise and regulate drug production and use is not to ignore the fact that drugs are dangerous and wreak untold damage to people who choose (choose!) to use them. This would need to be addressed, and could be done as very much a part of the overall strategy. Were the Government to allocate 10-20 per cent of the savings realised in all the various areas, the money could be used to generously fund education and advertising campaigns of all sorts, as well as rehabilitation and other medical and counselling facilities. A decriminalise-and-regulate strategy could have the simultaneous effect of eliminating the crime/violence, expense and corruption, while actually curtailing drug use.
This position might be taken as an over-simplification of the problem, but ask, who benefits from the illegality of drugs and who exactly are the victims? I know I don’t benefit from illegal drugs. But for the reasons above and at least a half dozen others, I know I’m a victim.
A Isa Johnson is a business manager with an interest in politics and a commitment to trying to find new solutions to old problems. He can be reached at: aijohnsonjm@gmail.com