The Drug Czar's High Math - How Phony Statistics About Cocaine Prices Hide The Truth About The War On Drugs - Reason Magazine

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Reason Magazine
The Drug Czar's High Math
How phony statistics about cocaine prices hide the truth about the war on drugs

Ryan Grim | August/September 2009 Print Edition

John Walters had some data he wanted to make public, but he also had a credibility problem. Just two years earlier, in 2005, Walters, the country’s drug czar, had cited a hike in the price of cocaine as a battlefield victory in the war on drugs—only to see the price fall just as he was touting the increase. He was ridiculed in some quarters of the press; others decided to stop listening to him.

This time around, in the summer of 2007, Walters went looking for the most receptive audience he could find. So he zipped down New York Avenue to the headquarters of The Washington Times, the conservative daily based in the outskirts of Washington, D.C. Walters, according to a staffer present at the briefing, came with a small staff and a stack of glossy pages making the case that the United States had turned a corner in the war on drugs. Prices for cocaine, he said, were rising fast. And that, he explained, can only mean a decline in supply.

The Times wouldn’t bite. The data were suspiciously thin. Walters’ numbers showing the increased price of cocaine began in 2007. The best comparison data, which he didn’t have with him but could be found online, dated back to the first half of 2003, when the RAND Corporation gathered information for a comprehensive report. The drug czar had sat on the RAND report for a full year after it was completed in 2004 because it showed prices trending downward. The RAND study was also transparent about its methodology, whereas the new numbers Walters was touting, covering the period afterward, came with no explanation of how they were concocted.

Walters finally found a platform one month later in USA Today. Soon the story The Washington Times wouldn’t touch was all over the news. Thanks to the drug czar’s cherry-picked statistics, newspapers were crowing that America was winning the war on cocaine, particularly the effort to suppress production in Latin America.

While Walters was shopping his numbers around, I was in the middle of researching my book on the history of drug trends, This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America. So I filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get whatever data Walters had left out of his presentation. I also asked for information on the methodology and analysis. My request was rejected, even though some of what I was asking for had already been given to Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who had repeatedly asked for the data. The Department of Justice, where the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is located, explained in denying my request that there was no “public benefit” to disclosing what I had asked for.

Fortunately, the Obama administration disagreed. When Edward Jurith became acting director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) in January, he quietly released the report that Walters had been keeping to himself, posting it on the ONDCP’s website. John Walsh of the left-leaning Washington Office on Latin America first wrote about the new numbers in April, nearly a year after the report was finished. It turns out there was indeed no “benefit” to releasing the information—for Walters, that is.

Rather than an “unprecedented” spike in cocaine prices, the underlying data that Walters had derived his claims from showed that 2007 featured the lowest cocaine prices on record, down 6.6 percent from 2006. Yes, the price bumped up in the middle of the year, but in his victory lap across the media the drug czar neglected to mention that the bump followed a quarter in which cocaine had reached its lowest price level since the government began keeping track in 1981. The “spike” still left cocaine costing $136.93 a gram in September 2007, 13 percent cheaper in constant dollars than the average price for 1999. This was hardly the resounding victory Walters had declared.

The numbers in Walters’ Washington Times handouts were just that: numbers. No explanation, no methodology, no context. In fact, the underlying data came from the System To Retrieve Information from Drug Evidence (STRIDE), derived from undercover buys, wiretaps, and other law enforcement sources of information about the drug trade. The Institute for Defense Analyses, a nonprofit research firm that contracts with the U.S. government, analyzed the data using the same methodology as the RAND researchers and produced the report that the Obama administration released. The STRIDE evidence showed a 26 percent spike in cocaine prices in the middle of 2007. Walters, who never disclosed his own methodology, had claimed the spike was 44 percent.

The newly released numbers and Walters’ data overlapped for 10 quarters. For three of the quarters, the new analysis showed the price of cocaine going in the direction opposite from what Walters’ numbers claimed. It’s one thing to quarrel over the size of a spike. It’s quite another to be wrong on the direction of a trend.

The Dollar Effect

It’s far from clear what caused the brief price hike in 2007. Walters unsurprisingly credited enforcement and interdiction efforts. But it’s unlikely the ONDCP and DEA really had the cocaine cartels in retreat. The more plausible explanation is that cocaine producers were targeting more lucrative markets. The rise of the euro and the concomitant decline of the dollar have made it less profitable to sell cocaine to Americans.

“The euro has replaced the dollar in the Western Hemisphere as the currency of choice among these traffickers, which is an extraordinary shift,” Karen Tandy, head of the DEA, told an antinarcotics conference in Spain in April 2007. “As cocaine use has declined in the U.S. dramatically, in the European market it has risen.”

Officials at the Spain conference said a kilogram of coke that would fetch $30,000 in the United States was worth $50,000 in Europe—and the dollar has fallen further against the euro since then. On April 1, 2007, a dollar was worth about 0.74 euro; a year later, it was worth only 0.63 euro; it’s now at about 0.7. Because of this price differential, it is theoretically profitable to smuggle cocaine out of the United States. Buried in its 2009 National Drug Threat Assessment, the Department of Justice cited the currency exchange rate as one possible explanation for decreased imports. The “declining value of the U.S. dollar provides a financial incentive for drug traffickers to sell cocaine in foreign markets where the wholesale price of cocaine is already much higher than in the United States,” the report said.

Size matters too. The euro is denominated in notes of 200 and 500, making transportation of large sums of money much easier, given that the biggest American note is worth only about 70 euros. When you’re moving hundreds of millions of dollars, that represents a real convenience. Donald Semesky, the DEA’s chief of financial operations, has noted that 90 percent of the €1.7 billion that was registered as having entered the United States in 2005 came through Latin America, “where drug cartels launder their European proceeds.” As the cocaine market has shifted, use along its new
trade routes has grown. A 2008 United Nations report notes increases in use not only in South and Central America but also in Africa, where seizures jumped tenfold from 2003 to 2006 and then doubled again between 2006 and 2007.

West African nations, which make Colombia and Mexico look like models of transparent governance, have become important stopping-off points for coke traffickers on the way to Europe. Out-of-work African youth make cheap foot soldiers, and drug runners with expensive equipment and weaponry have little to fear from airports that are barely electrified and cop cars with empty gas tanks. “Africa is under attack,” warned Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, in a 2008 Washington Post op-ed piece. “States that we seldom hear about, such as Guinea-Bissau and neighboring Guinea, are at risk of being captured by drug cartels in collusion with corrupt forces in government and the military.” From West Africa, the cocaine heads to Spain and Portugal. In 2006, according to the U.N., Spain’s level of coke use was equivalent to America’s for the first time ever.

From the drug cartels’ perspective, the beauty of shifting exports to Europe is that the resulting decline in shipments to the United States can indeed lead to higher prices here. While expanding their business elsewhere, the cartels are getting more money per unit of American product.

So when Walters claimed we were winning the war on cocaine, he was knowingly manipulating the truth. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Walters’ deceptions were just the latest in a long history of propaganda and misbegotten federal policies in which drug enforcement marginally affected the supply of a given substance, prompting drug warriors to declare victory as Americans kept consuming narcotics.

How the War on Pot Hooked the Country on Cocaine

“We’re making no excuses for drugs, hard, soft, or otherwise,” President Ronald Reagan declared on June 24, 1982. Reagan redoubled efforts at curbing drug imports, militarizing drug policy, and successfully pushing mandatory minimum sentences for minor drug offenses. In 1980 the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report listed fewer than 100,000 arrests for heroin and cocaine, which were tabulated together. By 1989 that figure had jumped to more than 700,000.

But the first battle Reagan would fight in his war was against marijuana. That required laying siege to Northern California, a drug war battleground that until then had largely been ignored. The Campaign Against Marijuana Production began in the harvest season of 1983. U-2 spy planes and military helicopters flew over the Golden State looking for green crops. The DEA reported seizing 64,579 plants that year. Federal law enforcement officers marched in the streets chanting, “War on Drugs! War on Drugs!” The opposition printed bumper stickers: “U.S. Out of Humboldt County.”

The federal haul in Northern California was three times larger in 1984 than the year before. Nationally, pot plant seizures rose from about 2.5 million in 1982 to more than 7 million—an amount that rivals the government’s previous estimate of the entire domestic crop—in 1987. Reagan even began to go after “ditch weed,” a wild variety of cannabis, descended from hemp grown by American farmers for fiber, with so little THC (marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient) that it is useless for getting high. The first year the White House kept data for ditch weed eradication, it claimed to have uprooted about 9 million plants. That number was up to more than 120 million by 1989, and reached half a billion in 2001.

The 2004 RAND report reveals that these sustained efforts drove up the price of pot. The report also includes a startling, though often misunderstood, observation. “The marijuana price trends…are not highly correlated with trends in prices of other drugs over time,” it says. “While the price of powder, heroin, and, to a lesser extent, crack were falling during the 1980s, the average price of marijuana generally rose.” An eighth of an ounce of pot in 1981 was going for $25 in 2002 dollars. It stayed roughly the same in 1982. By 1986, the price in constant dollars was up to $53, and it hit a high of $62 in 1991, a 150 percent rise over 10 years.

Cocaine, meanwhile, become much more affordable. The drug cost nearly $600 a gram in 1982. As Reagan redirected resources toward battling pot, coke prices began to tumble. By 1989, it was down to $200 a gram, in 2002 dollars, cheaper in real terms than it had been during the last national coke binge a century earlier. At the same time, average purity levels nearly doubled.

Clearly, the price trends of marijuana and cocaine are highly correlated, but the correlation is a negative one. In the 1980s, marijuana price increases drove demand toward other drugs. The war on drugs, hard, soft, or otherwise, helped persuade pot smokers to put down the bong and pick up the crack pipe, the mirror, or the needle. Pot use plummeted under Reagan. In 1979 about half of America’s 12th graders told University of Michigan researchers they had smoked pot that year, the same proportion as five years before. This fraction fell throughout the ’80s, dwindling to one-fifth of the country’s high school seniors in 1992. But the use of other drugs either stayed the same or increased as people started looking for a different, cheaper high. Self-reported use of inhalants by 12th graders rose 75 percent, from 4 percent to 7 percent, between 1981 and 1987. Cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine use all went up during the decade.

The price of heroin dropped by one-third in real terms between 1981 and 1988. By 1996 it had dropped by two-thirds. The DEA didn’t start tracking crack prices until 1986, around the time the drug’s popularity took off; its price promptly fell by about half during the next five years. In rural areas, the price of meth fell by a quarter from the early ’80s to the middle of the decade.

The stated goal of U.S. drug policy is to lower demand by increasing price. Reagan’s drug war did precisely the opposite. The only exception was pot, the least harmful drug covered by the federal Controlled Substances Act.

When it comes to cleverness, the drug czar has nothing on the drug market, as the latest cocaine price data show. People like to get high, and they’ll find a way to do it. Chop down all the pot plants, and the dealer will still have blow. Push them both down, and some guy will cook up something crazy with gasoline and Sudafed.

If there’s one certainty about American drug use, it’s this: We’re always looking for a better way to feed our voracious appetite for getting stoned—for something cheaper, faster, or more powerful. Drug trends feed themselves as word spreads about the amazing new high that’s safe and nonaddictive, cheap and available. Then we discover otherwise—and go searching for the next great high. We often circle back to the original drug, forgetting why we quit it in the first place. Drug czars past and present can gin up whatever numbers they like, but they can never change that reality.

Ryan Grim (ryan@huffingtonpost.com) covers Congress for The Huffington Post. He is the author of This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America (Wiley).

What's Wrong With The War Against Drugs - Nick Davies

Good day, dear readers. I have railed often against pharmaceuticals in my diatribes here...but nothing makes the point more than this document that I found at Flat Earth News. I know that the scumbags of the world who wish for WE THE PEOPLE to endlessly murder ourselves with their poisonous pharmaceuticals will come down upon me like a plague. They will continue to demonize narcotics, despite the fact that Coca-Cola actually used to contain cocaine, to NO ONE'S PHYSICAL, MENTAL OR PSYCHOLOGICAL DETRIMENT.

Please, read on.

What's wrong with the war against drugs

The Guardian, February 2001

On April 3 1924, a group of American congressmen held an official hearing to consider the future of heroin. They took sworn evidence from experts, including the US Surgeon General, Rupert Blue, who appeared in person to tell their committee that heroin was poisonous and caused insanity and that it was particularly likely to kill since its toxic dose was only slightly greater than its therapeutic dose.

They heard, too, from specialist doctors, like Alexander Lambert of New York's Bellevue Hospital, who explained that "the herd instinct is obliterated by heroin, and the herd instincts are the ones which control the moral sense... Heroin makes much quicker the muscular reaction and therefore is used by criminals to inflate them, because they are not only more daring, but their muscular reflexes are quicker." Senior police, a prison governor and health officials all added their voices. Dr S Dana Hubbard, of the New York City health department, captured the heart of the evidence: "Heroin addicts spring from sin and crime... Society in general must protect itself from the influence of evil, and there is no greater peril than heroin."

The congressmen had heard much of this before and now they acted decisively. They resolved to stop the manufacture and use of heroin for any purpose in the United States and to launch a worldwide campaign of prohibition to try to prevent its manufacture or use anywhere on the planet. Within two months, their proposal had been passed into law with the unanimous backing of both houses of the US Congress. The War Against Drugs was born.

To understand this war and to understand the problems of heroin in particular, you need to grasp one core fact. In the words of Professor Arnold Trebach, the veteran specialist in the study of illicit drugs: "Virtually every 'fact' testified to under oath by the medical and criminological experts in 1924... was unsupported by any sound evidence." Indeed, nearly all of it is now directly and entirely contradicted by plentiful research from all over the world. The first casualty of this war was truth and yet, 77 years later, it still goes on, more vigorous than ever, arguably the longest-running conflict on the planet.

Drugs and fear go hand in hand. The war against drugs is frightening - but not, in reality, for the reasons which are claimed by its generals. The untold truth about this war, which has now sucked in every country in the developed world, is that it creates the very problem which it claims to solve. The entire strategy is a hoax with the same effect as an air force which bombs its own cities instead of its enemy's. You have to go back to the trenches of Flanders to find generals who have been so incompetent, so dishonest, so awesomely destructive towards those for whom they claim to care.

The core point is that the death and sickness and moral collapse which are associated with Class A drugs are, in truth, generally the result not of the drugs themselves but of the black market on which they are sold as a result of our strategy of prohibition. In comparison, the drugs themselves are safe, and we could turn around the epidemic of illness and death and crime if only we legalised them. However, it is a contemporary heresy to say this, and so the overwhelming evidence of this wars self-destructive futility is exiled from almost all public debate, now just as it was when those congressmen met.

Take heroin as a single example. And it's a tough example. In medical terms, it is simply an opiate, technically known as diamorphine, which metabolises into morphine once it enters its user's body. But, in terms of the war against drugs, it is the most frightening of all enemies. Remember all that those congressmen were told about 'the great peril'. Remember the Thatcher government's multi-million pound campaign under the slogan 'Heroin Screws You Up'. Think of Tony Blair at the 1999 Labour Party fulminating about the 'drug menace' or of William Hague last year calling for 'a stronger, firmer, harder attack on drugs than we have ever seen before'. And now look at the evidence.

Start with the allegation that heroin damages the minds and bodies of those who use it, and consider the biggest study of opiate use ever conducted, on 861 patients at Philadelphia General Hospital in the 1920s. It concluded that they suffered no physical harm of any kind. Their weight, skin condition and dental health were all unaffected. 'There is no evidence of change in the circulatory, hepatic, renal or endocrine functions. When it is considered that some of these subjects had been addicted for at least five years, some of them for as long as twenty years, these negative observations are highly significant.'

Check with Martindale, the standard medical reference book, which records that heroin is used for the control of severe pain in children and adults, including the frail, the elderly and women in labour. It is even injected into premature babies who are recovering from operations. Martindale records no sign of these patients being damaged or morally degraded or becoming criminally deviant or simply insane. It records instead that, so far as harm is concerned, there can be problems with nausea and constipation.

Or go back to the history of 'therapeutic addicts' who became addicted to morphine after operations and who were given a clean supply for as long as their addiction lasted. Enid Bagnold, for example, who wrote the delightful children's novel, National Velvet, was what our politicians now would call 'a junkie', who was prescribed morphine after a hip operation and then spent twelve years injecting up to 350 mgs a day. Enid never - as far as history records - mugged a single person or lost her 'herd instinct', but died quietly in bed at the age of 91. Opiate addiction was once so common among soldiers in Europe and the United States who had undergone battlefield surgery that it was known as 'the soldiers' disease'. They spent years on a legal supply of the drug - and it did them no damage.

We cannot find any medical research from any source which will support the international governmental contention that heroin harms the body or mind of its users. Nor can we find any trace of our government or the American government or any other ever presenting or referring to any credible version of any such research. On the contrary, all of the available research agrees that, so far as harm is concerned, heroin is likely to cause some nausea and possibly severe constipation and that is all. In the words of a 1965 New York study by Dr Richard Brotman: "Medical knowledge has long since laid to rest the myth that opiates observably harm the body." Peanut butter, cream and sugar, for example, are all far more likely to damage the health of their users.

Now, move on to the allegation that heroin kills its users. The evidence is clear:
you can fatally overdose on heroin. But the evidence is equally clear, that - contrary to the claims of politicians - it is not particularly easy to do so. Opiates tend to suppress breathing, and doctors who prescribe them for pain relief take advantage of this to help patients with lung problems. But the surprising truth is that, in order to use opiates to suppress breathing to the point of death, you have to exceed the normal dose to an extreme degree. Heroin is unusally safe, because - contrary to what those US congressmen were told in 1924 - the gap between a therapeutic dose and a fatal dose is unusually wide.

Listen, for example, to Dr Teresa Tate, who has prescribed heroin and morphine for 25 years, first as a cancer doctor and now as medical adviser to Marie Curie Cancer Care. We asked her to compare heroin with paracetomol, legally available without prescription. She told us: "I think that most doctors would tell you that paracetamol is actually quite a dangerous drug when used in overdose, it has a fixed upper limit for its total dose in 24 hours and if you exceed that, perhaps doubling it, you can certainly put yourself at great risk of liver failure and of death, whereas with diamorphine, should you double the dose that you normally were taking, I think the consequence would be to be sleepy for a while and quite possibly not much more than that and certainly no permanent damage as a result." Contrary to the loudly expressed view of so many politicians, this specialist of 25 years experience told us that when heroin is properly used by doctors, it is "a very safe drug".

Until the American prohibitionists closed him down in the 1920s, Dr Willis Butler ran a famous clinic in Shreveport, Louisiana for old soldiers and others who had become addicted to morphine after operations. Among his patients, he included four doctors, two church ministers, two retired judges, an attorney, an architect, a newspaper editor, a musician from the symphony orchestra, a printer, two glass blowers and the mother of the commissioner of police. None of them showed any ill effect from the years which they spent on Dr Butler's morphine. None of them died as a result of his prescriptions. And, as Dr Butler later recalled: "I never found one we could give an overdose to, even if we had wanted to. I saw one man take 12 grains intravenously at one time. He stood up and said, 'There, that's just fine,' and went on about his business."

Heroin can be highly addictive - which is a very good reason not to start taking it. In extreme doses, it can kill. But the truth which has been trampled under the cavalry of the drug warriors is that, properly prescribed, pure heroin is a benign drug. The late Professor Norman Zinberg, who for years led the study of drug addiction at Harvard Medical School, saw the lies beneath the rhetoric: "To buttress our current program, official agencies, led originally by the old Federal Bureau of Narcotics, have constructed myth after myth. When pushers in schoolyards, 'drug progression', drugs turning brains to jelly, and other tales of horror are not supported by facts, they postulate and publicize others: 'drugs affect chromosomes'; 'drugs are a contagious disease'. Officials go on manufacturing myths such as the chromosome scare long after they are disproved on the self-righteous assumption that 'if they have scared one kid off using drugs, it was worth the lie.'"

Take away the lies and the real danger becomes clear - not the drugs, but the black market which has been created directly by the policy of prohibition. If ever there is a war-crimes trial to punish the generals who have gloried in this slaughter of the innocent, the culprits should be made to carve out in stone: "There is no drug known to man which becomes safer when its production and distribution are handed over to criminals."

Heroin, so benign in the hands of doctors, becomes highly dangerous when it is cut by black market dealers - with paracetomol, drain cleaner, sand, sugar, starch, powdered milk, talcum powder, coffee, brick dust, cement dust, gravy powder, face powder or curry powder. None of these adulterants was ever intended to be injected into human veins. Some of them, like drain cleaner, are simply toxic and poison their users. Others - like sand or brick dust - are carried into tiny capillaries and digital blood vessels where they form clots, cutting off the supply of blood to fingers or toes. Very rapidly, venous gangrene sets in, the tissue starts to die, the fingers or toes go black and then have only one destiny - amputation. Needless suffering - inflicted not by heroin, but by its black market adulterants.

Street buyers cannot afford to waste any heroin - and for that reason, they start to inject it, because smoking or snorting it is inefficient. The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine records that a large proportion of the illness experienced by black market heroin addicts is caused by wound infection, septicaemia, and infective endocarditis, all due to unhygienic injection technique. Street users invariably suffer abscesses, some of them of quite terrifying size, from injecting with infected needles or drugs. Those who inject repeatedly into the same veins or arteries will suffer aneurysms - the walls of the artery will weaken and bulge; sometimes they will start to leak blood under the skin; sometimes, these weakened arteries will become infected by a dirty needle and rupture the skin, leaving the user to bleed to death.

In the mid 1990s, the World Health Organisation estimated that 40% of recent AIDS cases internationally had been caused by drug users sharing injecting equipment. The British record on AIDS is better because in the late 1980s, the government quietly broke with its prohibition philosophy and started to provide clean needles. Nevertheless, by June last year, one thousand black market drug users in this country had died of AIDS which was believed to have been contracted from dirty needles. More needless misery and death.

Far worse, however, is the spread of Hepatitis C, which can kill by causing cirrhosis and sometimes cancer in the liver. The official estimate is that 300,000 people in this country are now infected. Dr Tom Waller, who chairs Action on Hepatitis C says the truth is likely to be much worse. And almost all of these victims are black market drug users who contracted the disease by sharing dirty injecting equipment. Dr Waller says there is now a 'major epidemic', threatening the lives of 'a great many people'. Needlessly.

Street buyers buy blind and so they will overdose accidentally: they have no way of telling how much heroin there is in their deal. Dr Russell Newcombe, senior lecturer in addiction studies at John Moores University in Liverpool, has found the purity of street heroin varying from 20% to 90%. "Users can accidentally take three or four times as much as they are planning to," he says. It is peculiarly ironic that governments set out to protect their people from a drug which they claim is dangerous by denying them any of the safeguards and information which they insist must apply to the consumption of drugs which they know to be harmless. (Compare, for example, the mandatory information on the side of a bottle of Vitamin C tablets with the information available to a black market heroin user.)

Street buyers often run short of supplies - and so they mix their drug with anything else they can get their hands on, particularly alcohol. Heroin may be benign, but if you mix it with a bottle of vodka or a handful of sedatives, your breathing is likely to become extremely depressed. Or it may just stop. In any event, whether it is poisonous adulterants or injected infection; whether it is death by accidental overdose or death by poly-drug use: it is the black market which lies at the root of the danger. The healthiest route, of course, is not to take the drug at all: but for those who are addicted, prohibition inflicts danger and death. Needlessly. Water would become dangerous if it were banned and handed over to a criminal black market.

The same logic applies to drugs which, unlike heroin, are inherently harmful - like alcohol, which is implicated in organic damage (liver) and social problems (violence, dangerous driving). American bootleggers brewed their moonshine with adulterants like methylated spirits, which can cause blindness. (Hence the proliferation of blind blues singers.) And there are documented cases of drinkers during prohibition injecting alcohol, with all of the attendant dangers. (It is instructive to look back on the prohibitionists' efforts to justify their war against alcohol with hugely inflated statements of its danger. In his history of drugs, Emperors of Dreams, Mike Jay records the claims that alcohol was an 'environmental poison' which generated cretinism and several otherwise unrecognised syndromes including 'blastopthoric degeneration' and ‘alcoholic diathesis'.)

The risks of consuming LSD and Ecstacy are increased enormously by their illegal and unsupervised manufacture. Nobody knows what they are swallowing. Yet, when a Brighton company developed a test to check the purity of Ecstacy, the government's drugs advisor, Keith Hellawell, condemned it and warned that the company risked prosecution. It is the same with black market amphetamines: speed alone may not kill, but speed with a blindfold is highly likely to finish you off.

In the same way, the classic signs of social exclusion among addicts are the product not of their drug but of the illegality of the drug. If addicts fail to work, it is not because heroin has made them workshy, but because they spend every waking minute of the day hustling. If addicts break the law, it is not because the drug has corrupted their morality, but because they are forced to steal to pay black market prices. If addicts are thin, it is not because the drug has stripped away their flesh, but because they spend every last cent on their habit and have nothing left for food. Over and over again, it is the black market, which has been created by the politicians, which does the damage.

The man to whom the government turns for advice on drugs, Keith Hellawell, appears to know none of this. When we interviewed him for Channel Four, he insisted that heroin itself was dangerous and then repeatedly dodged requests to come up with any evidence at all to justify his claim. Subsequently, when we offered his department as much time as they would like to find any evidence, they failed to come up with anything at all and passed the question to the department of health, who also failed. It is fair to conclude that the government's drugs adviser literally does not know the first thing about heroin.

The confusion between the effect of the drug and the effect of the black market is riddled not only through government policy but also through government statistics which completely ignore the distinction with the result that teams of researchers study drug policy, use compromised statistics and simply recycle the confusion, thus providing politicians with yet more false fuel for their fire. Home Office figures on drug deaths, for example, are hopelessly compromised. Eighteen months ago, the department of health, which might have been expected to know better, produced new guidelines for doctors dealing with drug users and recorded the following: "Generally there is a greater prevalence of certain illnesses amongst the drug misusing population, including viral hepatitits, bacterial endocarditis, HIV, tuberculosis, septicaemia, pneumonia, deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary emboli, abscesses and dental disease." All of it true of the black market. None of it true of the drug. No attempt to make the distinction.

The black market damages not only drug users but the whole community. Britain looks back at the American prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s and shudders at the stupidity of a policy which generated such a catastrophic crime wave. Yet, in this country now, the prohibition of drugs has generated a crime boom of staggering proportions. Research suggests that in England and Wales, a hard core of black market users is responsible for some £1.5 billion worth of burglary, theft and shoplifting each year - they are stealing £3.5 million worth of property a day. As a single example, Brighton police told us they estimate that 75% of their property crime is committed by black market drug users trying to fund their habit. And yet goverments refuse to be tough on the cause of this crime - their own prohibition policy.

The global version of this damage was put succinctly by Senator Gomez Hurtado, former Colombian ambassador to France and a high court judge, who told a 1993 conference: "Forget about drug deaths and acquisitive crime, about addiction and AIDS. All this pales into insignificance before the prospect facing the liberal societies of the West, like a rabbit in the headlights of an oncoming car. The income of the drug barons is an annual five hundred thousand million dollars, greater than the American defence budget. With this financial muscle they can suborn all the institutions of the state and, if the state resists, with this fortune they can purchase the firepower to outgun it. We are threatened with a return to the Dark Ages of rule by the gang. If the west relishes the yoke of the tyrant and the bully, current drug policies promote that end."

Having attacked and maimed and killed the very people they claimed to be protecting; having inflicted a crime wave on the same communities which they said they were defending; having run up a bill which now costs us some £1.7 billion a year in this country alone: this war's generals might yet have some claim to respect if they were able to show that they had succeeded in their original objective of stopping or, at least, of cutting the supply of prohibited drugs. They cannot.

In December 1999, the chief constable of Cleveland police, Barry Shaw, produced a progress report on the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, which marked the final arrival of US drugs prohibition in this country: "There is overwhelming evidence to show that the prohibition-based policy in this country since 1971 has not been effective in controlling the availability or use of proscribed drugs. If there is indeed a war against drugs, it is not being won... Illegal drugs are freely available, their price is dropping and their use is growing. It seems fair to say that violation of the law is endemic, and the problem seems to be getting worse despite our best efforts."

Mr Shaw was able to point to a cascade of evidence to support his view: between 1987 and 1997, there had been a tenfold increase in the seizure of illicit drugs, and yet the supply on the streets was so strong that the price of these drugs had kept dropping; in 1970, only 15% of people had used an illegal drug, but by 1995, 45% had; in 1970, 9,000 people were convicted of a drugs offence but in 1995 94,000 were. The Home Office responded to the chief constable's report with complete silence: they refused even to acknowledge receiving it. Internal reports from the American Drugs Enforcement Agency confirm the chief constable's conclusion. (They say Britain now produces so much cannabis that we actually export it to Holland.)

Prohibition has not merely failed to cut the supply of illicit drugs: it has actively spread drug use. The easiest way for new users to fund their habit is to sell drugs and consume the profit; so they go out and find more new users to sell to; so it is that when one child in the classroom starts using, others soon join in; one user in the street and neighbours soon follow. Black market drug use spreads geometrically. The Health Education Authority in 1995 found that 70% of people aged between eleven and thirty five had been offered drugs at some time. Pushers push. When Britain began to impose prohibition of heroin in 1968, there were fewer then 500 heroin addicts in Britain - a few jazz musicians, some poets, some Soho Chinese. Now, the Home Office says there may be as many as five hundred thousand. This is pyramid selling at its most brilliantly effective.

In private, the Home Office's best defence is that they are so short of reliable intelligence on drugs that nobody can finally prove that the war is lost: they simply don't know how much heroin or cocaine is imported, or many people are using it. At the Cabinet Office, Keith Hellawell argues that the 30 years since the Misuse of Drugs Act do not really count, because, until he took over, British governments did not have a real strategy. He told us he was supporting new international tactics (which he could not divulge) and was now seeing figures (which he could not give us) to suggest finally they were going to succeed. This recalls earlier declarations that "we have turned the corner on drug addiction" (President Nixon, 1973) or "Heroin availability continues to shrink" (DEA,1978). In the meantime, world heroin production has tripled in the last decade, cocaine production has doubled and, in the Home Secretary's Blackburn constituency, police say drug use in the Asian community has soared by 300% in four years.

But the underlying point is even more worrying: once you understand that the real danger comes from the black market and not from the drug, you can see that even if, with some magic formula, the generals started to cut the supply of these drugs, the result would be disastrous. The price of heroin, for example, would start to rise and, since there is no evidence at all that heroin addicts cut their consumption to fit their wallets, they would have to commit more crime to fund their habits. And if the dealers also responded like good entrepreneurs, they would try to keep their prices down by adding even more pollutants to the heroin, thus increasing the health risks to users.

This government has not begun to consider legalisation. No matter the truth about the danger and the death, no matter the truth about the cause of crime, the position is, as Jack Straw put it to the 1997 Labour conference: "We will not decriminalise, legalise or legitimise the use of drugs". Why? The obvious answer was offered to us by Paul Flynn, Labour backbencher and staunch opponent of prohibition: "It is being fuelled by politicians who are vote gluttons, who believe that there is popularity and votes to be gained by appearing to be tough on drugs."

While Keith Hellawell and other prohibitionists are embarrassed by their screaming lack of success, those who want to legalise can point to clear evidence that providing a clean supply of drugs will help with the physical and mental health of users, will cut crime in the community and drain the life out of the black market.

The Swiss, for example, in 1997 reported on a three-year experiment in which they had prescribed heroin to1,146 addicts in 18 locations. They found: "Individual health and social circumstances improved drastically... The improvements in physical health which occurred during treatment with heroin proved to be stable over the course of one and a half years and in some cases continued to increase (in physical terms, this relates especially to general and nutritional status and injection-related skin diseases)... In the psychiatric area, depressive states in particular continued to regress, as well as anxiety states and delusional disorders... The mortality of untreated patients is markedly higher." They also reported dramatic improvements in the social stability of the addicts, including a steep fall in crime.

There are equally impressive results from similar projects in Holland and Luxemburg and Naples and, also, in Britain. In Liverpool, during the early 1990s, Dr John Marks used a special Home Office licence to prescribe heroin to addicts. Police reported a 96% reduction in acquisitive crime among a group of addict patients. Deaths from locally acquired HIV infection and drug-related overdoses fell to zero. But, under intense pressure from the government, the project was closed down. In its ten years' work, not one of its patients had died. In the first two years after it was closed, forty one died.

There is room for debate about detail. Should we supply legalised drugs through GPs or specialist clinics or pharmacists? Should we continue to supply opiate substitutes, like methadone, as well as heroin? Should the supply be entirely free of charge to guarantee the extinction of the black market? How would we use the hundreds of millions of pounds which would be released by the 'peace dividend'? But, if we have any compassion for our drug users, if we have any intention of tackling the causes of crime, if we have any honesty left in our body politic, there is no longer any room for debate about the principle. Continue the war against drugs? Just say No.

Additional research by Jane Cassidy

See below for quotes on prohibition of drugs and alcohol

"All penalties for drug users should be dropped ... Making drug abuse a crime is useless and even dangerous ... Every year we seize more and more drugs and arrest more and more dealers but at the same time the quantity available in our countries still increases... Police are losing the drug battle worldwide." Raymond Kendall, secretary general of Interpol, January 1994

"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this."
Albert Einstein "My First Impression of the U.S.A.", 1921

"The current policies are not working. We seize more drugs, we arrest more people, but when you look at the availability of drugs, the use of drugs, the crime committed because of and through people who use drugs, the violence associated with drugs, it's on the increase. It can't be working." Keith Hellawell, Guardian 23 May 1994, three years before he was appointed drugs adviser to the government.

"Our emphasis here is based not only on the growing seriousness of drug-related crimes, but also on the belief that relieving our police and our courts from having to fight losing battles against drugs will enable their energies and facilities to be devoted more fully to combatting other forms of crime. We would thus strike a double blow: reduce crime activity directly, and at the same time increase the efficacy of law enforcement and crime prevention." Milton Friedman "Tyranny of the Status Quo"

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other in order that the people may require a leader. -- Plato

Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can't stop what it's meant to stop.
We like it.
It's left a trail of graft and slime
It don't prohibit worth a dime
It's filled our land with vice and crime,
Nevertheless, we're for it.
-- newspaperman Franklin P. Adams, 1931, in the New York World, on the release of the Wickersham Commission report

I am against Prohibition because it has set the cause of temperence back twenty years; because it has substituted an ineffective campaign of force for an effective campaign of education; because it has replaced comparatively uninjurious light wines and beers with the worst kind of hard liquor and bad liquor; because it has increased drinking not only among men but has extended drinking to women and even children. -- William Randolph Hearst, initially a supporter of Prohibition, explaining his change of mind in 1929. From "Drink: A Social History of America" by Andrew Barr (1999), p. 239.

"There is thus general agreement throughout the medical and psychiatric literature that the overall effects of opium, morphine, and heroin on the addict's mind and body under conditions of low price and ready availability are on the whole amazingly bland." Edward M. Brecher, 1972

"The available evidence indicates that heroin, when provided in pure form, is a relatively safe drug. Hence it is primarily the illegal nature of the drug, rather than its pharmacological properties, which leads to the health and social problems associated with its use." Ostini, Bammer, Dance and Goodwin. 'The Ethics of Experimental Heroin Maintenance.' Journal of Medical Ethics, 1993.

"When heroin-dependent persons have been provided with daily maintenance doses under medical supervision, marked physiological deterioration or significant psychological impairment has not been observed. In fact, most of the serious adverse consequences of chronic heroin use are generally related to lifestayle and factors involving needle administration." Cox et al, Toronto Addiction Research Foundation

"Heroin is very addictive but does not in itself cause any serious illnesses, nor does it harm any organs or tissues." Dr Ben Goldacre Dr Ben Goldacre, 'Methadone and Heroin: An Exercise in Medical Scepticism'

"To our surprise we have not been able to locate even one scientific study on the proved harmful effects of addiction. Earlier investigators had apparently assumed that the ill effects were so obvious as not to need scientific verification. " Dr. George H. Stevenson, British Columbia, 1956.

Dr Van den Brink, in charge of Duthc research into prescription of heroin for drug users, preparing report for Dutch Health Minister Borst, press interview: "We can only do what is within our reach. But if we thought that treating heroin addicts with heroin was nonsensical and dangerous, we would not make these recommendations."

"The addict when not deprived of his opium showed no abnormal behavior which distinguished him from a nonaddict." yielded similar findings. Dr. George B. Wallace on two studies at Bellevue Hospital in New York City

"It has not been possible to maintain that addiction to morphine causes marked physical deterioration per se." Dr Harris Isbell, director of the Public Health Service's Addiction Research Center in Lexington, 1958,

"The addict under his normal tolerance of morphine is medically a well man." Dr Walter G. Karr, University of Pennsylvania biochemist,1932

"Given an addict who is receiving (adequate) morphine ... the deviations from normal physiological behavior are minor (and) for the most part within the range of normal variations." Dr. Nathan B. Eddy, after reviewing the world literature on morphine, 1940

"Medical knowledge has long since laid to rest the myth that opiates inevitably and observably harm the body." Drs Richard Brotman, Alan S. Meyer, and Alfred M. Freedman, 1965:

"The incidence of insanity among addicts is the same as in the general population." Dr Marie Nyswander, 1956.

"As to possible damage to the brain, the result of lengthy use of heroin, we can only say that neurologic and psychiatric examinations have not revealed evidence of brain damage.... This is in marked contrast to the prolonged and heavy use of alcohol, which in combination with other factors can cause pathologic changes in brains, and reflects such damage in intellectual and emotional deterioration, as well as convulsions, neuritis, and even psychosis." Dr. George H. Stevenson, British Columbia 1956.

"Morphine does not cause any permanent reduction in intelligence." Drs Harris Isbell and H. F. Fraser, Public Health Service addiction center, Lexington, Kentucky, 1950.

"In spite of a very long tradition to the contrary, clinical experience and statistical studies clearly prove that psychosis is not one of 'the pains of addiction.' Organic deterioration is regularly produced by alcohol in sufficient amount but is unknown with opiates." Deputy Commissioner Henry Brill, New York State Department of Mental Hygiene, chairman of the American Medical Association's narcotics committee, after a survey of 35,000 mental hospital patients. 1963.

"That individuals may take morphine or some other opiate for twenty years or more without showing intellectual or moral deteriorationis a common experience of every physician who has studied the subject." Dr Lawrence Kolb, US assistant surgeon general, 1925.

How Hemp Was Outlawed

Another gem from Travis Kelly:

How Hemp was outlawed

http://www.zianet.com/postpubco/ththemp.htm

Before 1931, Harry Anslinger was Assistant Commissioner for Prohibition. He represented a large group of law-enforcement personnel facing lack of work after the Repeal. In 1931, he was appointed by Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon to Direct the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics. He also happened to be married to one of Mellon’s close relatives. Mellon also had another significant position -- he owned the Mellon Bank, one of the nation’s largest, with significant interest in the fortunes of DuPont, which held patents for cheap wood pulp-acid paper, and on the manufacture of artificial textile fibers from petroleum. Both paper and textile markets were controlled by products derived from Hemp...also known of course as marijuana.

Through the 1930’s, the force leading the fight to get marijuana controlled by the Bureau of Narcotics was the "yellow journalism" of the Hearst papers. When in 1937, Anslinger led the crusade against pot before Congress, his testimony was almost entirely made up of Hearst news releases which he read aloud in the emotionally-charged style typical of the exaggerated or contrived "news" of yellow journalism. He declared marijuana was the most powerful violence-inducing substance known to mankind, and implied its use (and not desire for social justice) was responsible for the well-known violent tendencies of the Negro and Latin, among whom it was widely consumed. The culmination of the attack was the film "Reefer Madness", which time and experience have revealed to be ludicrous. On the basis of that mentality, however, marijuana was outlawed. DuPont, Mellon, and Hearst in a single move wiped out HEMP, their major competitor in the paper, textiles, and paint industries.

Until then, about 80% of all paper, canvas, rope, and paint depended on hemp, which is still unexcelled for those purposes. (The Declaration of Independence, written on hemp linen, is in excellent condition; the anti-hemp laws, written on wood pulp-acid paper, are decaying on the shelves.) Hearst’s cheap newspapers were made possible by DuPont’s acid-rain-producing paper process. DuPont’s petroleum-based fibers and oils enabled them to take over the entire market which had been dominated by hemp. Mellon’s bank, and Anslinger’s tax-funded agency became more wealthy and powerful.

As for the "violence" on which Congress’ action was predicated: when in 1944, the New York City "LaGuardia Marijuana Report" refuted marijuana’s causing violence at all, Anslinger changed his tune. Before Congress in 1948, he said he no longer felt marijuana caused violence -- in fact, quite the opposite. Marijuana was even more dangerous than previously suspected because it caused users to become peaceful. Its growing abuse was a deliberate plot by the communists to weaken the resolve of American youth to fight for their country, turning them all into pacifists. The Committee didn't want to be brought before some other Committee for being soft on commies, so they voted to keep the law on the books.

More hemp for long-lasting paper can be grown on land in a given time than wood pulp trees. Hemp seed is excellent livestock feed. Hempseed oil is excellent paint base. Hemp is persecuted to raise the value of certain stocks and natural resource holdings. Let us end the persecution of Hemp; end dependence on petroleum for inferior non-biodegradable textiles; end the destruction of American forest for inferior acid-pulp newspaper. Re-legalize Hemp!

James Nathan Post

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Think about this, and recall our Commander-In-Chief's response to the question of legalization, and it will paint a disturbing picture.

LKL - An Interesting Debate

Amazingly, Stephen Baldwin is the voice of prohibition here, after starring in both Biodome and Half Baked. He uses the same non-argument of marijuana being a "gateway drug", but Ron Paul knocks the wind out of his sails by showing nicotine to be a much more pernicious and more addictive substance, which does NOT purport to be a "gateway" to other substances.

Of course, the Congressman is correct; this is about PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY and ACCOUNTABILITY.

I just watched HIV=AIDS: Fact Or Fraud, which was brought to my attention by disinter.


It's a two hour presentation...I awoke at five in the morning, and had saved the link. If you go to the page, you'll see that there are as of my posting, 31 comments. Some of the commenters simply did not watch the film, and instead want it to be boiled down to a ten-second sound byte.

Thank you, Distraction Media, for assisting in the dumbing-down of America. I'll surmise here that the same individual would sit through an entire season of American Idol and not complain once (I'm watching it, so this is not just an off-the-cuff criticism).

This is real life, dear readers - it can't be boiled down to fit the non-attention span of the uncritical.

Back in 2002, I had read about Peter Duesberg and his hypotheses regarding the nature of HIV, AIDS and the various problems with their conflation. It was great to see that had not given up on this tack; rather, the fact of people having their funds rescinded for daring to go against the status quo only strengthens his arguments.