The new failure of prohibition
With the golden glow of hindsight we can all see that the era of prohibition in America spawned corporate crime, largely because the public appetite for illegal liquor was so insatiable that petty criminals had to become organized just to cope with the demand. The shores of the Great Lakes today bear testament to the vast sums of money that were made on both sides of the Canadian border. In the West, where the consumer is king, woe betides any government that dares to impose restrictive legislation upon the public mistress of choice. The freshly tailored mafia made over $100bn during prohibition [1], money that was wisely reinvested within their modern empire of pornography, gambling, loan-sharking, narcotics, hijacking, extortion and labor racketeering, a range of activities which nets the ‘outfit’ more than any US corporation (hard to figure precisely seeing as they don’t pay tax).
Generally, it is widely agreed that twenties prohibition was associated with horrifying machine gun militias, drained the resources of law enforcement, did little to prevent alcoholism, spawned the modern mafia, and proved to be an utter debacle. So why was prohibition so clearly misguided and foolish in the twenties, when today’s global war on drugs is deemed to be necessary, effective, and unavoidable?
Well, are we winning our world war against narcotics (we’ll leave terrorism out of this discussion)? A simple glance at the official figures from the UK offers the answer in a nutshell. In 2007 there were 2,590 recorded drug seizures throughout the UK, in which some 36.1 kg (with a street value of £1.8m) of cocaine was captured [2]. Compare this to the estimated £8bn UK drugs trade (33% of the taxable revenues spent upon tobacco and only 41% of that lavished on alcohol), and a simple calculation reveals that less than a hundredth of one percent of the cocaine pouring into the UK’s ports was actually seized by all of her majesty’s boys in blue. Although the UK represents only a small (4%) proportion of the global trade in illegal drugs, ‘guesstimated’ at around US$400 billion a year [3], it does reveal just how staggeringly ineffective our attempts to seize or intercept illegal shipments are. If we bear in mind the estimated £15bn in social costs the illegal cocaine industry inflicts upon the UK through the actions of some 327,000 ‘problem’ users in England alone [4], the skewed cost-benefit analysis of prohibition becomes apparent. Of course this analysis does not even begin to factor in the vast bill for policing drug enforcement legislation [5], or indeed the expensive participation of the coastguards, Royal Navy & customs officers. For instance in 2002/3, the UK's direct annual expenditure on ‘tackling drugs’ as part of its ‘National Drug Strategy’ was over £1 billion, and this bizarrely excludes the costs of policing, customs, courts, prisons, the probation system, or indeed of drug-related crimes [10].
So in short we are all losing vast quantities of time, money, and taxable revenues every year, and all just so we can seize less than a weekend’s drug supply to London. What is more we are making the drug barons very happy by doing so. Hang on; surely we are at least a thorn in their side? No, not really. All we are serving to foster is a booming black market for a white powder, giving the gun-toting drug barons total control over supply, allowing them to fix the prices, and to gain control over every street corner within our towns and cities. The poor farmers of Columbia (and environs) are paid only a miserly fraction of the estimated £1,000 which is received for every kilo of refined cocaine that is produced (cost price), and that is only when they are not being sprayed with herbicides or being caught in the crossfire between Farc rebels & government forces fighting over the region’s primary resource. The estimated mark up for cocaine smuggled to Europe is some 1,700% (£18,000/kg), which enjoys a further 55% price hike after it is imported into the strangely drug loving, yet drug intolerant UK (£28,000/kg). The cocaine is then cut; often with dangerous ingredients, doubling its retail value and further boosting the margins of the limousine-loving middle men of the black market economy. Doubtless, if cocaine was made available from high street chemists & pharmacies there would be no illegal cutting, Columbian farmers would not be forced to grow it, the market price would collapse, and sympathetic medical advice would be available for addicts. As for the criminal gangs and overlords, legalization would mean lower margins, container ports, economies of scale, import taxes, quality control, and a 98% drop in retail price.
There are of course those who would prefer to believe that the US-backed Columbian government is not funded by cocaine revenues, and that only the Farc rebels are funding their corrupt war through drug money. Sadly, this is almost certainly not the case, as both factions are fighting over the supply of white gold, and even the 1992 South Central LA riots were directly caused by CIA agents dumping vast quantities of crack cocaine onto the streets to fund their (illegal) war against the Contras. Columbia’s once infamous drug baron Pablo Escobar was popularly regarded as a hero by the poor, much as Al Capone was in twenties Chicago, as he funded vast social projects and gave money and jobs to the underprivileged citizens of Columbia.
So now that we have established beyond rational objection that the prohibition of narcotics is hugely expensive, fuels crime, taxes the nation, and is entirely ineffective at doing anything other than making criminals rich and powerful, we are forced to seek other reasons for the ongoing rule of irrationality. As far as crime & punishment are concerned, if a drug dealer is caught he (or she) can be locked away, certainly, but while incarcerating a hundred rapists, burglars or murderers would doubtless reduce the number of dangerous criminals at large, for every drug dealer that is locked away, there are a dozen poor, driven and desperate individuals who are literally dying to take their place & enjoy the prosperity afforded by prohibition. After all, where there is a supply there will always be a demand. Driving something unpleasant underground or into the shadows, whether it be drugs or prostitution, merely ensures that the problem will grow uglier and darker, even if it could ever be swept out of sight and out of mind. Such ostrich policies are the very embodiment of ignorance, and sweeping your household dirt under the carpet is no way to run a clean domestic economy.
There are those who will reply with the clarion call of ‘legalization will only increase use’. Well, possibly, although this remains to be seen. However, the single action of decriminalizing the personal possession of drugs has resulted in lower drug use in countries such as Portugal, Italy, Spain, Holland, Switzerland and most recently, Russia, all of which claim lower rates of drug use than the UK [10]. Indeed the ‘use’ argument fails even to compensate one single factor alone, that impurities present through cutting illegal drugs are killing hundreds of people a year in the UK alone, not withstanding those who die from accidental overdoses arising from variations in drug purity or potency. Would you opt to return to the days of back street abortions or obtain your prescriptions from unqualified medical practitioners? Of course not, but unscrupulous dealers are wholly unconcerned whether their end product is contaminated just so long as they make good money. At least Merck, Pfizer or GSK can be sued for killing people with their product.
Before we start giving any false impression that narcotics themselves are decimating the population of our towns and cities, consider that deaths related to drug misuse by people under the age of 30 in the UK fell in 2004 to 401 individuals [6] as opposed to 8,221 alcohol-related deaths during the same year [7]. A glance at Scotland, hardly Britain’s healthiest nation state, suffered over 13,000 deaths due to tobacco in 2004, and another 2,052 as a result of alcohol. Compare this to the 356 Scottish deaths relating to Illegal drugs and the full scale of the hypocrisy becomes apparent [11]. Given that the maximum term for possessing a class A drug is 14 years in prison, and the actual act of supplying it can mean life imprisonment, when corner shop owners are not averse to supplying alcohol or cigarettes to minors, and it is difficult to decide whether it is the drug users or legislators who need psychiatric evaluation. Alcohol, caffeine and nicotine are also social drugs of choice which are widely consumed drugs, and are at least as damaging and potentially harmful to public health in their own right. So why pick on cocaine, cannabis and heroine? After all heroine was the recreational drug of choice in Victorian Britain, much as cocaine is today [8]. One can only imagine that cocaine, cannabis and heroine make people less co-operative and less inclined to work.
U.S. taxpayers spend some $69 billion a year on their ‘war on drugs’ (it is amazing how America loves to declare war on anything that it does not control, like, or condone). Across the globe, gun battles rage unchecked over supply and distribution rights, all fuelled by a black market profitability that defies belief. It is impossible to determine precisely how many of the thousands of gun-related deaths that occur each year are directly, or indeed indirectly, related to drugs, but many are, and most of the firearms used were financed by drug money directly or indirectly.
Even within the ultra-conservative United States, a lobby of police officers, collectively known as Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, actively advocates the repeal of drug prohibition. Even experienced US law enforcement officers believe that narcotics are best regulated and distributed through public health agencies. Perhaps I could not phrase their words of wisdom any better, ‘The day we regulate drugs to adults, we eliminate easy access for our children, we evaporate the worth of Osama's heroin stash, we negate the Colombian drug cartels, we basically eliminate overdose deaths, and we begin to restore respect for the U.S. system of justice now tainted by black market billions’ [9]. It is perhaps worth recalling that after the repeal of Prohibition (1920-32), the wave of alcohol-related crimes mysteriously disappeared...
Alas the Labour government is in no mood to U-turn against its hard-line anti-drugs policy, even though class A drug use in England & Wales alone costs the government some £17bn a year, of which 90% is crime-related [11]. The ‘maverick’ Chief Constable of North Wales has recently argued that prohibition has ‘created a crisis in the criminal justice system, destabilized producer countries, and undermined human rights worldwide.’ He argued, as any educated teenager might deduce, that ‘By pursuing a policy of legalization and regulation, the Government will dramatically reduce drug-related criminality and [that] will enable significant funds to be transferred from law enforcement…[towards] treatment procedures’. So why don’t we abandon this new age of prohibition? Perhaps it is simply because there is no money in it…
[1] * Doubtless a massive underestimate
[2] http://www.psni.police.uk/4._drug_seizures_and_arrests_summary.pdf
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug
[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6178026.stm
[5] http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/hors249.pdf
[6] http://www.ic.nhs.uk/pubs/youngpeopledrugmisuse2006
[7] http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/alrate0207.pdf
[8] http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofEnglish/imperial/india/opium.htm
[9] http://november.org/stayinfo/breaking06/CausingViolence.html
[10] http://www.tdpf.org.uk/Policy_Crime_DrugsandCrime-TheLinkisProhibition.htm
[11] http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article3061121.ece
Generally, it is widely agreed that twenties prohibition was associated with horrifying machine gun militias, drained the resources of law enforcement, did little to prevent alcoholism, spawned the modern mafia, and proved to be an utter debacle. So why was prohibition so clearly misguided and foolish in the twenties, when today’s global war on drugs is deemed to be necessary, effective, and unavoidable?
Well, are we winning our world war against narcotics (we’ll leave terrorism out of this discussion)? A simple glance at the official figures from the UK offers the answer in a nutshell. In 2007 there were 2,590 recorded drug seizures throughout the UK, in which some 36.1 kg (with a street value of £1.8m) of cocaine was captured [2]. Compare this to the estimated £8bn UK drugs trade (33% of the taxable revenues spent upon tobacco and only 41% of that lavished on alcohol), and a simple calculation reveals that less than a hundredth of one percent of the cocaine pouring into the UK’s ports was actually seized by all of her majesty’s boys in blue. Although the UK represents only a small (4%) proportion of the global trade in illegal drugs, ‘guesstimated’ at around US$400 billion a year [3], it does reveal just how staggeringly ineffective our attempts to seize or intercept illegal shipments are. If we bear in mind the estimated £15bn in social costs the illegal cocaine industry inflicts upon the UK through the actions of some 327,000 ‘problem’ users in England alone [4], the skewed cost-benefit analysis of prohibition becomes apparent. Of course this analysis does not even begin to factor in the vast bill for policing drug enforcement legislation [5], or indeed the expensive participation of the coastguards, Royal Navy & customs officers. For instance in 2002/3, the UK's direct annual expenditure on ‘tackling drugs’ as part of its ‘National Drug Strategy’ was over £1 billion, and this bizarrely excludes the costs of policing, customs, courts, prisons, the probation system, or indeed of drug-related crimes [10].
So in short we are all losing vast quantities of time, money, and taxable revenues every year, and all just so we can seize less than a weekend’s drug supply to London. What is more we are making the drug barons very happy by doing so. Hang on; surely we are at least a thorn in their side? No, not really. All we are serving to foster is a booming black market for a white powder, giving the gun-toting drug barons total control over supply, allowing them to fix the prices, and to gain control over every street corner within our towns and cities. The poor farmers of Columbia (and environs) are paid only a miserly fraction of the estimated £1,000 which is received for every kilo of refined cocaine that is produced (cost price), and that is only when they are not being sprayed with herbicides or being caught in the crossfire between Farc rebels & government forces fighting over the region’s primary resource. The estimated mark up for cocaine smuggled to Europe is some 1,700% (£18,000/kg), which enjoys a further 55% price hike after it is imported into the strangely drug loving, yet drug intolerant UK (£28,000/kg). The cocaine is then cut; often with dangerous ingredients, doubling its retail value and further boosting the margins of the limousine-loving middle men of the black market economy. Doubtless, if cocaine was made available from high street chemists & pharmacies there would be no illegal cutting, Columbian farmers would not be forced to grow it, the market price would collapse, and sympathetic medical advice would be available for addicts. As for the criminal gangs and overlords, legalization would mean lower margins, container ports, economies of scale, import taxes, quality control, and a 98% drop in retail price.
There are of course those who would prefer to believe that the US-backed Columbian government is not funded by cocaine revenues, and that only the Farc rebels are funding their corrupt war through drug money. Sadly, this is almost certainly not the case, as both factions are fighting over the supply of white gold, and even the 1992 South Central LA riots were directly caused by CIA agents dumping vast quantities of crack cocaine onto the streets to fund their (illegal) war against the Contras. Columbia’s once infamous drug baron Pablo Escobar was popularly regarded as a hero by the poor, much as Al Capone was in twenties Chicago, as he funded vast social projects and gave money and jobs to the underprivileged citizens of Columbia.
So now that we have established beyond rational objection that the prohibition of narcotics is hugely expensive, fuels crime, taxes the nation, and is entirely ineffective at doing anything other than making criminals rich and powerful, we are forced to seek other reasons for the ongoing rule of irrationality. As far as crime & punishment are concerned, if a drug dealer is caught he (or she) can be locked away, certainly, but while incarcerating a hundred rapists, burglars or murderers would doubtless reduce the number of dangerous criminals at large, for every drug dealer that is locked away, there are a dozen poor, driven and desperate individuals who are literally dying to take their place & enjoy the prosperity afforded by prohibition. After all, where there is a supply there will always be a demand. Driving something unpleasant underground or into the shadows, whether it be drugs or prostitution, merely ensures that the problem will grow uglier and darker, even if it could ever be swept out of sight and out of mind. Such ostrich policies are the very embodiment of ignorance, and sweeping your household dirt under the carpet is no way to run a clean domestic economy.
There are those who will reply with the clarion call of ‘legalization will only increase use’. Well, possibly, although this remains to be seen. However, the single action of decriminalizing the personal possession of drugs has resulted in lower drug use in countries such as Portugal, Italy, Spain, Holland, Switzerland and most recently, Russia, all of which claim lower rates of drug use than the UK [10]. Indeed the ‘use’ argument fails even to compensate one single factor alone, that impurities present through cutting illegal drugs are killing hundreds of people a year in the UK alone, not withstanding those who die from accidental overdoses arising from variations in drug purity or potency. Would you opt to return to the days of back street abortions or obtain your prescriptions from unqualified medical practitioners? Of course not, but unscrupulous dealers are wholly unconcerned whether their end product is contaminated just so long as they make good money. At least Merck, Pfizer or GSK can be sued for killing people with their product.
Before we start giving any false impression that narcotics themselves are decimating the population of our towns and cities, consider that deaths related to drug misuse by people under the age of 30 in the UK fell in 2004 to 401 individuals [6] as opposed to 8,221 alcohol-related deaths during the same year [7]. A glance at Scotland, hardly Britain’s healthiest nation state, suffered over 13,000 deaths due to tobacco in 2004, and another 2,052 as a result of alcohol. Compare this to the 356 Scottish deaths relating to Illegal drugs and the full scale of the hypocrisy becomes apparent [11]. Given that the maximum term for possessing a class A drug is 14 years in prison, and the actual act of supplying it can mean life imprisonment, when corner shop owners are not averse to supplying alcohol or cigarettes to minors, and it is difficult to decide whether it is the drug users or legislators who need psychiatric evaluation. Alcohol, caffeine and nicotine are also social drugs of choice which are widely consumed drugs, and are at least as damaging and potentially harmful to public health in their own right. So why pick on cocaine, cannabis and heroine? After all heroine was the recreational drug of choice in Victorian Britain, much as cocaine is today [8]. One can only imagine that cocaine, cannabis and heroine make people less co-operative and less inclined to work.
U.S. taxpayers spend some $69 billion a year on their ‘war on drugs’ (it is amazing how America loves to declare war on anything that it does not control, like, or condone). Across the globe, gun battles rage unchecked over supply and distribution rights, all fuelled by a black market profitability that defies belief. It is impossible to determine precisely how many of the thousands of gun-related deaths that occur each year are directly, or indeed indirectly, related to drugs, but many are, and most of the firearms used were financed by drug money directly or indirectly.
Even within the ultra-conservative United States, a lobby of police officers, collectively known as Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, actively advocates the repeal of drug prohibition. Even experienced US law enforcement officers believe that narcotics are best regulated and distributed through public health agencies. Perhaps I could not phrase their words of wisdom any better, ‘The day we regulate drugs to adults, we eliminate easy access for our children, we evaporate the worth of Osama's heroin stash, we negate the Colombian drug cartels, we basically eliminate overdose deaths, and we begin to restore respect for the U.S. system of justice now tainted by black market billions’ [9]. It is perhaps worth recalling that after the repeal of Prohibition (1920-32), the wave of alcohol-related crimes mysteriously disappeared...
Alas the Labour government is in no mood to U-turn against its hard-line anti-drugs policy, even though class A drug use in England & Wales alone costs the government some £17bn a year, of which 90% is crime-related [11]. The ‘maverick’ Chief Constable of North Wales has recently argued that prohibition has ‘created a crisis in the criminal justice system, destabilized producer countries, and undermined human rights worldwide.’ He argued, as any educated teenager might deduce, that ‘By pursuing a policy of legalization and regulation, the Government will dramatically reduce drug-related criminality and [that] will enable significant funds to be transferred from law enforcement…[towards] treatment procedures’. So why don’t we abandon this new age of prohibition? Perhaps it is simply because there is no money in it…
[1] * Doubtless a massive underestimate
[2] http://www.psni.police.uk/4._drug_seizures_and_arrests_summary.pdf
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug
[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6178026.stm
[5] http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/hors249.pdf
[6] http://www.ic.nhs.uk/pubs/youngpeopledrugmisuse2006
[7] http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/alrate0207.pdf
[8] http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofEnglish/imperial/india/opium.htm
[9] http://november.org/stayinfo/breaking06/CausingViolence.html
[10] http://www.tdpf.org.uk/Policy_Crime_DrugsandCrime-TheLinkisProhibition.htm
[11] http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article3061121.ece
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