Reclassifying ketamine is more fiddling while the crack pipe burns

Why can't we have an honest conversation about drugs?

 

• 
• • Suzanne Moore
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 11 December 2013 20.00 GMT

Why can't we talk about our history of intoxication? Photograph: guardian.co.uk

Tis the season to be off your head, legally and in a ladylike manner. At the moment there is a lot of focus on the harm that us people (ie, women) do to ourselves with our: "Yay, it's wine o'clock." Or, as the Sun explains: "So many mums open the wine once the kids are in bed. The cork rarely goes back in the bottle."

One might ask why women's lives are so stressful that self-medication is needed, and why alcohol is such an astonishingly cheap way to get wasted. Legally.

I stress legal because the news that government advisers want ketamine reclassified from a class C to B drug is more fiddling while the crack pipe burns. The drug wasn't banned until 2006, but someone who gets caught with it will now face up to five years in prison instead of two. A heavy price, one feels, for the person who wants to anaesthetise themselves of an evening. Send them to prison where drugs are the currency? It's almost as if government advisers don't live in the real world.

Sure, the long-term effects of ketamine (bladder damage) are not nice and I have never doubted that it is dangerous. When I was 16, two boys I knew broke into a veterinary surgery and injected it. The dose was for horses, not humans. They both died stupid, stupid deaths.

Reclassifying it might mean a few students may now think twice. But those who will be thinking really hard are the manufacturers who will design a legal substance that guarantees the effects of ketamine and can be sold online. For this is how prohibition works hand in hand with capitalism and organised crime. Recently, we have all experienced contact highs – cooking up meth (Breaking Bad), cheering on Nigella (coke), Paul Flowers (a vile cocktail of everything and ill- considered banking). We watch Russell Brand's abstinence monologues that do indeed break the barriers of space and time.

There is no joined-up drugs policy. It is rare that I say a good word about George Osborne but, as I have said in the past, I don't care if he took cocaine. Because I don't. And to be fair to Nick Clegg – maybe I really am out of my mind – he admits that in the war on drugs, drugs won, acknowledging that many senior police officers want decriminalisation. Addiction, Clegg declared recently, is a health issue, not a criminal justice one.

Facts remain a dangerous substance in this debate, as Professor David Nutt knows. In 2009, he said that illegal drugs should be classified according to the harm, both social and individual, they cause. Alcohol would certainly have a high classification. Booze and tobacco, he said, were more harmful than LSD, cannabis and ecstasy. So he had to be got rid of, as few politicians ever seem to be able to expand their minds enough to consider actual evidenced-based policy-making.

Decriminalising certain drugs would inevitably mean misuse. But the unsayable thing is that many of us use drugs, legal and illegal, at certain stages in our lives. And enjoy them.

Instead, however, we hand over the trade to organised crime, which is why Mexico is in the state it is now, upping its poppy production massively. We have spent 10 years trying to bomb or bribe away the only cash crop the Afghans can grow (the opium poppy). What do we want them to sell? Cabbages? This year is a record one for the crop, produced mainly in Helmand, so that has really worked.

You may be the sort of person who does not want to drink or take drugs. You may not wish to expand your mind, or lose it. You may not want to connect the handing-out of mood-altering SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) with kids smoking skunk and mums' little wine clubs. You may think it's no longer cool to neck any pills other than statins. You may want to move to Uruguay, which has just legalised marijuana, though I can't think of anything worse than being in Montevideo with a load of gap yahs. It's not my drug of choice, as I like things that make you want to talk.

I would like the real drug conversation, not the gurning, coked-up, aren't-we-amazing one. Not the one where Tulisa is a threat to civilisation. Why can't we talk about our history of intoxication, personal and political? Those who make the laws that would make me a criminal are not coherent in their logic. They are cowards, afraid of a media that is neither clean nor sober. Drugs, legal and illegal, are a fact of life. Even life-enhancing. There will be casualties of drugs but there are casualties of not facing reality. Both need to be managed. Honestly, I really cannot snort another line of this hypocrisy.

Drugs are taken for pleasure – realise this and we can start to reduce harm

 

The web-based Net Pleasure Index is an attempt to gather information about a much-ignored element of drug-taking

• David Nutt
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 3 December 2012 12.36 GMT

'The fact that there are so many users of illicit drugs means that the pleasures must often be seen to outweigh the pain, just as they do for alcohol and tobacco.' Photograph: Scott Houston/Sygma

 

The mainstream penalty-driven approach to drugs control is both morally and intellectually flawed. Morally, it ignores the use and, in some cases, promotion of drugs such as alcohol and tobacco that are much more harmful than most "illicit" drugs. Intellectually, it ignores the reasons people choose to take drugs, and why they value them. One of the most important motivations for taking drugs, which cannot easily be acknowledged by the authorities, is personal pleasure.

The UK government position seems predicated on the view that all drug users are addicts, enslaved to their drug of choice by virtue of a lack of moral fibre. In fact, we know that even for the most addictive drugs – heroin, crack cocaine and crystal methamphetamine – most users do not become addicted. And of course at the initiation of use people are not addicted, with almost everyone who tries out a drug doing so through personal choice rather than being made to by dealers; so there is clearly a lot of choice in the use of drugs.

There are several reasons for people choosing to try drugs. For "legal" drugs particularly alcohol and tobacco, that most people find unpleasant to start with, the choice to use is largely driven by fashion, manifesting through peer pressure. With alcohol, the drinks industry has marketed less aversive mixtures (alcopops) to help people overcome the taste of alcohol. It also engages in massive sexually orientated advertising to induce use, much of this illegally targeted at underage drinkers via social media sites.

In the UK last year half of all 15- to 16-year-olds were intoxicated on alcohol at least once a month, despite the drinking age being 18. This behaviour is de facto "illegal" though the government turns a blind eye, which means that many are addicted to alcohol before they are able to legally purchase it. For "illicit" drugs the choice to use is more complex, as the risk of being caught and getting a criminal record needs to be taken into consideration. Yet up to 50% of young people break the law to use these at some stage in their lives. To better deal with the consequences of this use – for example up to 5% of regular cannabis users may be dependent — we need better information about the reasons for use.

In some cases illicit drug-taking is about challenging authority, but in most cases it's about psychological exploration, often driven by positive comments and encouragement from friends. Then, once the hurdle of "breaking the law" has been overcome, the value of the drug in terms of personal pleasure and positive social engagement can be weighed against the risks of being caught. For a sizeable minority of users "illicit" drugs are taken to reduce pain and suffering (eg cannabis for multiple sclerosis, psilocybin for cluster headaches). Similarly, alcohol is often used to reduce anxiety and deaden sadness.

The fact that there are so many users of "illicit" drugs such as cannabis, MDMA and ketamine means that the pleasures must often be seen to outweigh the pain, just as they do for alcohol and tobacco. Until we properly understand the personal value of all drugs (including alcohol and tobacco), harm- and use-reduction policies are bound to fail.

In some countries even admitting that there might be a value in drug use is effectively barred from public discourse. In order to start an honest dialogue with people who use drugs we need to balance the focus on drugs-related harms by exploring pleasure, which is what motivates most people who use drugs, including alcohol.

The new web-based Net Pleasure Index, part of the 2013 Global Drug Survey is an attempt to gather this information for a wide range of drugs. It is aimed at the recreational rather than addicted user of alcohol and other drugs (tobacco users rarely admit to any pleasure, as they are mostly dependent).
Along with questions on drug policy and prescription drug use, the data it generates will help decision-making by government and individual users about the relative likelihood of new "legal highs" becoming a problem and help us better understand what motivates the use of different drugs. It will also guide advice on websites such as the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD) and aid harm-sation educational approaches such as the Global Drug Survey drugs meter.

If you are one the 90% of the UK population who use some sort of drug then please take the time to join the 13,000 people who have already taken part in this year's Global Drug Survey and give us your insights.