The Forbidden Game
Brian Inglis
Postscript
ENDLESSLY, OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS, THE ISSUE HAS BEEN DEBATED;
should cannabis, or mescaline, or LSD, be legalised? The record
of history suggests that the question should be put the other
way round: should such drugs be banned? For then, the answer
can be given unequivocally: no. Prohibition has always failed
in free enterprise societies—free, that is, to the extent that
consumers who have the means can exercise freedom of choice. If
they choose drugs, no law can stop them. Prohibition may restrict
supplies, for a time, but that will only drive up prices, bringing
in fresh supplies—or different drugs. And this flouting of the
law breeds disrespect for it, alienates otherwise law-abiding
citizens, and corrupts the law enforcers.
The question needs to be re-phrased: not, shall we legalise? but,
how shall we legalise? And to this, unfortunately, history gives
no satisfactory answer. It is easy to say, as drugs cannot be
suppressed, they should be regulated; but at this point the same
difficulty arises as with prostitution. The kind of man to whom
drugs, or prostitutes, are anathema, whether he be an Anslinger
or a Muggeridge, finds the prospect of regulating them distasteful.
It implies recognition, and they do not want what they regard
as a vice to be recognised. They consequently cling to the illusion
that drugs can be suppressed, if only the law is enforced.
This leads to a further error of policy. Unwilling to accept the
existence of a distinction between, say, cannabis and heroin,
they justify banning both, by claiming 'soft drugs lead on to
hard'. They sometimes do; but not nearly so inexorably as the
prohibition of soft drugs leads on to hard. The reason
is obvious; hard drugs are both easier and far more profitable
to smuggle. The most striking example is what happened in Hong
Kong when opium smoking, which had been tolerated for a century,
and had never given the authorities any worry (the rate of addiction
to opium among the Chinese, reports often pointed out, was far
less serious than the rate of alcoholism among the Europeans on
the island) was banned. After the ban, opium was squeezed out
of the market by heroin; and by the 1970s, according to the Commissioner
of Police, four-fifths of the men in the island's penal institutions
had been involved in drug offenses.. Much the same happened in
Vietnam, according to the investigator sent by the Pentagon to
examine the drug situation there. The only beneficiaries from
a campaign against marihuana, he reported, had been the heroin
pushers.
But governments have ignored the evidence that prohibition cannot
work. And this is not surprising, as they have a powerful financial
interest in maintaining a situation in which certain suppliers
are allowed to keep their hold over the legal drug market, in
return for their massive contribution to the revenue. Legalising
cannabis, admittedly, might have augmented the revenue; but there
was always the risk that it would provide a diversion, reducing
the quantity of liquor and tobacco sold. It is never wise to attribute
calculation, in such matters, to ministers. Individually, perhaps,
none of them may realise how the policies they have followed have
come to be formulated. But revenue has tended to be the overriding
consideration; and anything which has threatened it has been discouraged.
This has been illustrated recently in the elaborate efforts which
governments have made to appear to be campaigning against cigarettes,
as a danger to health, while in fact making very certain that
their campaign will not, and cannot, succeed. Governments, in
fact, are the real drug-pushers of our time. They seem to know—by
the instinct of financial self-preservation—that the 'safe'
drugs from their point of view are those on which users come to
depend, socially as well as psychologically—drink and cigarettes;
and they cling to the two of them, in spite of the ugly evidence
that has been building up against them. Cannabis and LSD, which
do not exert the same hold, would not serve the exchequer nearly
as well.
State licensing, therefore, though less disastrous in its consequences
than prohibition, is an unsatisfactory method. It controls drugs,
but to ensure their profitability rather than their safety. And
even where a measure of safety is sought by handing over responsibility
to the medical profession, the results (though again, better than
prohibition) have been discouraging. There is little in a medical
student's training to qualify him to dispense drugs wisely, and,
as the medical journals frequently complain, the lavish prescribing
of drugs in recent years suggests that doctors are often more
concerned to save themselves time and trouble, than to find the
cause of the patient's disorder. Just as governments are the pimps
of the tobacco and liquor interests, so the medical profession
has allowed itself to become a licensed drug-peddler for the pharmaceutical
industry.
There is little to be hoped from State intervention, therefore,
until the electorate begins to grasp the lessons of the past.
But as Hegel once complained, what experience and history teach
is that 'peoples and governments never have learnt anything from
history, or acted on principles derived from it'. And in the case
of drugs, there is an additional reason why the lessons have not
been learned; the existence of a deep irrational fear of them,
which leaves otherwise sensible and intelligent members of the
community unwilling to accept that there can be a case for legalisation,
let alone to listen to it—even when the objective is the reduction
of drug taking.
Such people will not accept the realities of the situation—for
example, that alcohol is a drug, and a much more dangerous one
than most of those which are banned. On the other hand, they will
swallow the corniest fantasies about other drugs. They believe
that heroin, say, has a built-in addictive attraction, so that
anybody taking it once can be enslaved for life. Yet this was
exploded years ago by Louis Lasagna, researching into addiction
in America: most people given heroin for the first time, he found
(other than for the relief of pain), were either not interested,
or actually disliked the experience. As the Le Dain Committee
put it, 'the once popular notion that opiate narcotic experience
is intrinsically pleasurable, or that physiological dependence
develops so rapidly that most who are subjected to it are promptly
addicted, is without support'.
Then, there is the persistent myth that drugs can turn the ordinary
citizen into a maniac. It is as old as Marco Polo's tale of the
Old Man of the Mountain; it has been told of almost every drug;
and it still crops up. In 1940 the rumour spread—Evelyn Waugh
recalled it in Put Out More Flags—that the German infantry
then sweeping across France was composed of teenagers, drugged
before battle to make them oblivious of danger, so that they advanced
unhesitatingly even when being mown down by allied machine-gun
fire. It later transpired that these drugs were amphetamines,
issued in case the soldiers needed to stay awake. A quarter of
a century later American troops in Vietnam brought back pills
found on allegedly drug-crazed Vietcong, who had been wiped out
in an insanely reckless attack. On analysis the pills turned out
to be antibiotics, sent to Saigon at the expense of the American
taxpayer, and then discreetly diverted by the minister who received
them to the enemy, for the usual consideration.
This is not to dispute that a drug—any drug—may precipitate
a character change; the gentle, quiet man who gets aggressive
when drunk is all too familiar a figure to publicans. But the
disorder lies in the individual, or in his life pattern; not in
the drug. Most of the troubles which have arisen are due to society's
failure to make this distinction. Yet a last line of argument
in favour of the status quo remains. Drugs may not be the
cause—any more than cars are the cause of road accidents; but
in irresponsible hands drugs, like cars, can be lethal. Does this
not require intervention, by the State or some duly authorised
body, for society's protection?
Looked at from this point of view, drugs have three main dangers.
Unquestionably the most serious is intoxication. In the long term,
though man has an astonishing capacity to survive his chosen poisons,
certain drugs can be shown to have deleterious consequences, on
the evidence of mortality statistics; and in the short term, people
under their influence—whether at the wheel of a car, or at the
heel of a drunken argument—can be very destructive. But as the
intoxicant which has the worst long-term health record is tobacco,
and the one with the worst short-term accident record is alcohol,
this represents an argument for stricter control of established
drugs, rather than of those which are illegal.
The risk of addiction—the second reason commonly given when
a repressive drug policy is being defended—has now been shown
to be less a drug problem, in the strict sense, than a psychological
disorder. Unless drugs of all kinds, including nutmeg and paint
remover, could be removed from the market, there is little point
in hoping that it can be dealt with by legislation.
It is the third common consequence of drug-taking which presents
the real challenge; the personality change which some people undergo
as a result of introduction to cannabis or LSD. Their record in
other respects is much better than alcohol and tobacco. They do
not intoxicate, unless taken in improbably large doses; they are
not addictive; and their adverse effects on health, so far as
can be judged on the evidence available, are relatively insignificant.
But they confront society with an issue that it has been unwilling
to face. People may need these drugs; not in their own right,
but as a preliminary to restoration of the link, largely lost,
between man's consciousness, and all that lies beyond it. The
personality change may be for their benefit.
The positive values people find in the drug experience—as the
Le Dain Committee put it—'bear a striking similarity to traditional
religious values, including the concern with the soul, or inner
self. The spirit of renunciation, the emphasis on openness and
the closely-knit community, are part of it, but there is definitely
a sense of identification with something larger, something to
which one belongs as part of the human race.' This theme was taken
up by Andrew Weil in his The Natural Mind. Weil argued
that to think of drug-taking, or even of drug-addiction, as something
to be prevented or cured is a mistake. The sensation, and the
craving, are symptoms of a psychic need. He produced evidence
which indicates that there is no great difficulty in getting people
off even heroin, provided they have, as it were, something to
look forward to—which suggests that withdrawal symptoms may
represent not simply the body's resistance to being deprived of
a drug, but the mind's resistance to being deprived of its effects.
To Weil, however, this does not entail believing that cannabis,
say, should be legalised. On the contrary, in his testimony to
the Shafer Commission he opposed it, on the ground that it would
be used in ways as unintelligent as tobacco and alcohol ordinarily
are. The drug scene cannot be changed by tinkering with the law,
he argued, because it is 'a manifestation of useless ways of thinking
at all levels of society—among users of drugs as well as of
non-users'.
Drug use, and drug abuse, are a reflection of society, its tensions,
its values, and its needs. To punish drug-takers is like a drunk
striking the bleary face which he sees in the mirror. Drugs will
not be brought under control until society itself changes, enabling
men to use them with discrimination, and perhaps in time to dispense
with them.