Policy > Published Articles > Drug Prohibition and Beyond

Danny Kushlick, Director of Transform, argues that a much more radical shift in our approach to illicit drugs will be needed if we are to deal with drug-related offending. For him, ending the drug war and dealing with the consequences of drug misuse means ending prohibition itself.

During a recent conversation with a leading figure in the drug policy world I raised the issue of why so little academic research was devoted to exploring prohibition and its alternatives. His answer was highly illuminating. First, he said that in some senses prohibition is a given. It is so much a cornerstone of contemporary policy that it remains unquestioned as the overarching paradigm. Second, because prohibition is likely to be with us for ten to 20 years, it is not vulnerable to change as a result of new research in the same way that smaller areas of drug policy are (for instance, the policing of cannabis or ecstasy reclassification). Basically, the thinking goes: if you want to change policy, you have to influence a minister to take action quickly around a relatively specific and detailed policy area, through calling for incremental change.

This is all well and good if you are committed to making incremental changes. However, if, as Transform Drug Policy Institute does, you want to create a more significant paradigm shift, a view that looks from within the prohibitionist framework will never allow the vision necessary to make the transformation.

What exactly is the problem?
'Our drugs policy can be described as nonsense on stilts. People who inject these substances and abuse their bodies don't want to mug your granny, break into your car or burgle your house to steal your video and flog it down the pub for a tenner. They have to. We are talking about handing the keys of the asylum to lunatics. We have given control of the most dangerous substances in our society to armed criminals. This cannot be a sensible policy.' So said Richard Brunstrom (Chief Constable of North Wales Police) at a conference organised by the Royal Society of Edinburgh recently.

The fact is that prohibition creates crime and criminals. The activities of recreational (non-problematic users) are unnecessarily criminalised, bringing millions of otherwise law abiding citizens into contact with the criminal justice system. This group has no other choice than colluding with the illegal supply chain.

The picture is qualitatively worse in terms of crime creation when it comes to problematic users.

Amongst the crimes driven by prohibition are: soliciting - the emaciated teenagers on the streets of every major UK city selling their bodies to strangers for a rock of crack; trafficking - the poverty-stricken drug mules caught at customs smuggling cocaine from Jamaica; murder - the gun-toting gangster defending his 'turf'; theft - the strung out shoplifter with a string of convictions; burglary - the inmate detoxing in his cell, doing his fourth stretch after robbing seventeen more houses; and tax evasion, fraud, bribery etc - organised crime bosses sitting pretty atop multi-million pound empires.

Prohibition creates and exacerbates social exclusion and urban deprivation. It has filled our prisons to the point of overflowing. The negative consequences are myriad and they all arise from the unwillingness of governments the world over to change in response to a long-standing policy failure.

Fundamentally, this failure does not arise because cannabis and ecstasy are in the wrong class under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, or because there are not enough treatment places, or because judges do not make enough use of community penalties or even because deprivation has increased. It arises as a direct result of the enforcement of the global prohibition on the production, supply and possession of a specific group of psychoactive substances.

Big P and little p
Consider a previous experiment in prohibition - the one with the capital 'P'. Alcohol Prohibition was a thirteen-year experiment in the United States between 1920 and 1933. It created the US Mafia (the St Valentine's Day Massacre was a turf war); brought about institutional corruption of the police force; and led to illegal drug dens (Speakeasies were the crack houses of their day). It sounds familiar.

What about the differences? Significantly, why didn't alcoholics steal to support their habit? The answer is simply that illegally made alcohol was relatively cheap.

When alcohol was relegalised the Mafia moved into illegal drugs (now one of the most profitable commodity markets on earth); speakeasies became bars again; alcohol turf wars ended; and alcohol-related corruption ended to be replaced by illegal drug-related corruption.

The lesson is that we cannot legislate away a demand-led market, either on the supply side or the demand side. No commodity has ever been successfully prohibited in this country. Every prohibition ever implemented has eventually been lifted and the supply of the relevant commodity regulated and controlled instead.

Bowing to the inevitable
The likelihood is that our current prohibition will end within twenty years, perhaps sooner. The pressures that prohibition creates (when combined with high levels of demand) are so huge that the current paradigm contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

Moreover, while the effect of prohibition in the UK is catastrophic, it is even more terrible for developing countries involved in the illicit trade. Here the cost of prohibition is human rights abuses, government corruption, production run by paramilitaries and outside interference by foreign powers. The list goes on. Domestic prohibition is part of the wider global scene that makes the collateral damage in producer and transit countries inevitable.

The current debate
The drugs debate has moved on a long way in the last ten years. It is no longer stagnant - polarised as it once was between 'prohibitionists' and 'legalisers'. Whilst those poles still exist, the significant discourse now operates between those who wish to see prohibition replaced with effective systems of regulation and control and those who believe that prohibition can be 'improved' so as to mitigate some of its worst effects. Both camps admit that 'the war on drugs has been lost'. The former put forward a long term vision of what the world might look like without prohibition. The latter suggest that shorter-term 'tweaks' to prohibition can improve policy outcomes and/or see the underlying causes of problematic use as more important than the overarching legal framework.

Conclusion
If the war is unwinnable there is absolutely no point in leaving our troops on the battlefield. There is no evidence to show the benefits of pursuing a prohibitionist policy. There is no halfway house. The major weapons in the war on drugs are our drug laws. Ending the war on drugs and removing prohibition are synonymous.

If we admit that the war on drugs has been lost, we are forced to recognise that rather than botching the attempt to eliminate drugs we must regulate and manage their distribution. The options for regulation are: over the counter sales, on and off-licence sales, pharmacy sales and medical prescription.

The four legal options offer varying degrees of state control and regulation that can be applied as appropriate to different drugs. All would effectively remove the extraordinary illegal profits, collapsing the illegal market and removing the criminality from suppliers and users.

What is crucial now is to engage with the issue of how we replace the failed policy of prohibition across communities, professions, agencies, government departments and indeed nation states to develop alternative policy. The onus is on us all to look ten to twenty years hence, call for the troops in this war on drugs to come home and develop a Marshall Plan to reconstruct those communities and countries that have been devastated by the drug war.

Nacro 'Safer Society', Summer 2003.