Why are drugs illegal?

‘To enable Harry Anslinger to keep his army of drug enforcers [the Untouchables], he created a new drug threat, cannabis, which he called marijuana to make it sound more Mexican.’ Photograph: Tomas Rodriguez/Corbis

 David Nutt in The Guardian


This is, of course, a flawed question but one that illustrates a major paradox in the UK and international laws on drugs. Some drugs – such as alcohol, caffeine and nicotine – are legal, whereas others – such as cannabis, cocaine and opium – are not. This has not always been the case.

In the 19th century extracts of these three now-illegal drugs were legal in the UK, and were sold in pharmacies and even corner shops. Queen Victoria’s physician was a great proponent of the value of tincture of cannabis and the monarch is reputed to have used it to counteract the pain of menstrual periods and childbirth. Now it is denied to people with severe enduring spasticity and pain from neurological disorders and cancer. Why?

Activists to get high together in protest against psychoactive substances ban



The truth is unpalatable and goes back to the period of alcohol prohibition in the US in the 1920s. This was introduced as a harm-reduction measure because alcohol was seen (correctly) as a drug that seriously damaged families and children. But public demand for alcohol in the US did not abate and this fuelled a massive rise in bootleg alcohol and underground bars (known as speakeasys) that encouraged the rise of the mafia and other crime syndicates.

To combat this, the US government set up a special army of enforcers, under the command of Harry Anslinger, which became known as “the untouchables”. This army of enforcers was widely celebrated by the newspapers and the acclaim propelled Anslinger to national prominence. However, when public disquiet at the crime and social damage caused by alcohol prohibition led to its repeal, Anslinger saw his position as being in danger.

To enable him to keep his army of drug enforcers, he created a new drug threat: cannabis, which he called marijuana to make it sound more Mexican. Working with a newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst, he created hysteria around the impact of cannabis on American youth and proclaimed an invasion of marijuana-smoking Mexican men assaulting white women. The ensuing public anxiety led to the drug being banned. The US then imposed its anti-cannabis stance on other western countries and this was finally imposed on the rest of the world through the first UN convention on narcotic drugs in 1961.

 

Mexican soldiers burning marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. Photograph: AFP/Getty

This process of vilifying drugs by engendering a fear of the “other people” who use them became a recurring theme in drug policy. Black Americans were stigmatised on account of heroin use in the 1950s. In the 1960s hippies and psychedelics were targeted because they opposed the Vietnam war. In the 1970s it was again inner-city black Americans who used crack cocaine who received the brunt of opprobrium, so much so that the penalties for crack possession were 100 times higher than those for powder cocaine, despite almost equivalent pharmacology. Then came “crystal” (methamphetamine) and the targeting of “poor whites”.

The UK has followed US trends over cannabis, heroin and psychedelics, and led the world in the vilification of MDMA (ecstasy). In the UK a hate campaign against young people behaving differently was instigated by the rightwing press. As with past campaigns, they hid their prejudice under the smokescreen of false health concerns. It was very effective and resulted in both MDMA and raves being banned. This occurred despite the police being largely comfortable with MDMA users since they were friendly – a stark contrast to those at alcohol-fuelled events.


Since the demise of ecstasy we have seen the rise and fall of several alternative legal highs, most notably mephedrone. This was banned following a relentless media campaign, despite no evidence of deaths and with little attempt to properly estimate its harm. Subsequently we have discovered that it saved more lives than it took because so many people switched from cocaine and amphetamine to mephedrone that deaths from these more toxic stimulants decreased by up to 40%. Since mephedrone was banned in 2010, cocaine deaths have risen again and are now above their pre-mephedrone levels.

As young people seek to find legal ways to enjoy altered consciousness without exposing themselves to the addictiveness and toxicity of alcohol or the danger of getting a criminal record, so the newspapers seek to get these ways banned too. Politicians collude as they are subservient to those newspapers that hate youth and they know that the drug-using population is much less likely to vote than the drug-fearing elderly. We have moved to a surreal new world in which the government, through the new psychoactive substances bill, has decided to put an end to the sale of any drug with psychoactive properties, known or yet to be discovered.

This ban is predicated on more media hysteria about legal highs such as nitrous oxide and the “head shops” that sell them. Lies about the number of legal high deaths abound, with Mike Penning, minister for policing and justice, quoting 129 last year in the bill’s second reading. The true figure is about five, as the “head shops” generally now sell safe mild stimulants because they don’t want their regular customers to die.

‘Queen Victoria’s physician was a great proponent of the value of tincture of cannabis, and she is reputed to have used it to counteract the pain of menstrual periods and childbirth.’ Photograph: Alamy

The attack on nitrous oxide is even more peculiar as this gas has been used for pain control for women in childbirth and surgical pain treatments for more than 100 years with minimal evidence of harm. But when a couple of premiership footballers are filmed inhaling a nitrous oxide balloon, then it becomes a public health hazard. In typical fashion the press renamed it “hippy crack” to scare people – what could me more frightening to elderly readers than an invasion of hippies on crack? In truth, the effect of nitrous oxide is nothing like crack and no self-respecting hippy would ever use it. Still, it seems likely it will be banned along with every other mind-altering substance that is not exempted.

The psychoactive substances bill is the most oppressive law in terms of controlling moral behaviour since the Act of Supremacy in 1558 that banned the practice of the Catholic faith. Both are based on a moral superiority that specifies the state will decide on acceptable actions and beliefs even if they don’t affect other people. Worse, it won’t work – evidence from other countries such as Poland and Ireland that have tried such blanket bans shows an increase in deaths as people go back to older illegal drugs such as cocaine and heroin.

Moreover, it may seriously impede research in brain disorders, one of the few scientific areas in which the UK is still world-leading. But hey, who cares about the consequences of laws, so long as the police and the press are appeased?

So the short answer to the question “why are (some) drugs illegal?” is simple. It’s because the editors of powerful newspapers want it that way. They see getting drugs banned as a tangible measure of success, a badge of honour. And behind them the alcohol industry continues secretly to express its opposition to anything that might challenge its monopoly of recreational drug sales. But that’s another story.

The Self-Hating State

Devolving policy to “the market” doesn’t solve the problem of power. It makes it worse.

GEORGE MONBIOT

  

In other ages, states sought to seize as much power as they could. Today, the self-hating state renounces its powers. Governments anathematise governance. They declare their role redundant and illegitimate. They launch furious assaults upon their own branches, seeking wherever possible to lop them off.

This self-mutilation is a response to the fact that power has shifted. States now operate at the behest of others. Deregulation, privatisation, the shrinking of the scope, scale and spending of the state: these are now seen as the only legitimate policies. The corporations and billionaires to whom governments defer will have it no other way.

Just as taxation tends to redistribute wealth; regulation tends to redistribute power. A democratic state controls and contains powerful interests on behalf of the powerless. This is why billionaires and corporations hate regulation, and – through their newspapers, thinktanks and astroturf campaigns – mobilise people against it. State power is tyranny; state power is freedom.

But the interchangeable middle managers who call themselves ministers cannot wholly dismiss the wishes of the electorate. They must show that they are doing something to protect what people value. They resolve the contradiction between the demands of the electorate and the demands of big business by shifting their responsibilities to something they call “the market”. This term is often used as a euphemism for corporations and the very rich.

To justify the policy of marketisation, they invest the market with magical capabilities. It can reach the parts that the ordinary scope of government can’t reach; it can achieve political miracles. I don’t believe that market mechanisms are always wrong. I do believe that they fail to solve the problem of power. In fact they tend to compound it.

Last week the European Emissions Trading System died. It was supposed to create a market for carbon, whose escalating price would force companies to abandon fossil fuels and replace them with less polluting alternatives. In principle it was as good a mechanism as any other. What it did not offer was a magical alternative to political intervention.

The scheme collapsed on Tuesday, after the European Parliament voted against an emergency withdrawal of some of the carbon permits whose over-supply had swamped the market(1). Why were too many permits issued? Because of the lobbying power of big business. Why did MEPs refuse to withdraw them? Because of the lobbying power of big business.

If a market is to serve a wider social goal than simply maximising corporate profits, it must operate within a tight regulatory framework. Pricing mechanisms do not magic away the need for regulation: if anything they enhance it. To make them work, politicians still have to confront and overcome powerful interests. They still need to govern and decide. Yet everywhere markets are invoked as an alternative to dirigiste and decisive government.

To make a significant impact, the price of carbon needs to be in the region of €30 or 40 per tonne. It needs to be incapable of falling far, and likely to rise. At the time of writing the price is €2.8(2), and it’s going nowhere. The Economist reports that this puts European carbon permits “below the level of junk bonds.”(3)

In an important respect the scheme has been worse than useless. New airports and roads and power stations have been justified with the claim they they will not raise emissions, as the greenhouse gases they produce will be absorbed by cuts made elsewhere. The one lasting impact of the European carbon market has been to rationalise polluting projects which might not otherwise have been built.

But even as this scheme collapses, governments are launching new ones, creating markets which are far less appropriate – even in theory – than the trade in carbon. Last month, the UK’s Ecosystem Markets Task Force, a body set up by the government but largely composed of corporate executives, published its final report(4). It invokes the magic of the markets to fill the gap left by the withdrawal of democratic governance.

Not everything it proposes is dangerous and wrong. Creating incentives to reforest the hills from which our rivers flow, or for farmers to use anaerobic digesters to process waste makes sense: as long as it redeploys rather than augments farm subsidies. But in other respects an attempt to reconcile the protection of the living planet with commerce simply turns the biosphere into another corporate asset.

For example, the task force revives the old myth that nature is best served by harvesting timber. As long ago as 1995 a paper by the biologists Clive Hambler and Martin Speight showed that of the woodland insect species listed as threatened in Britain, 65% are threatened by the removal of old and dead wood, while just 2% are threatened by a reduction in this management(5). But the task force maintains that bringing “unmanaged woodlands into active, sustainable management for woodfuel … is a win-win for business and nature.”(6) Just as the myth was at last being laid to rest, it has been revived by the need to make nature and markets appear compatible.

This is an example of what happens in a market-based system: any clash between generating profit and protecting the natural world is resolved in favour of business, often with the help of junk science. Only those components of the ecosystem which can be commodified and sold are defended(7,8,9). Nature is worthy of protection when it is profitable to business: the moment it ceases to be so, it loses its social value and can be trashed. As prices fluctuate or crash, so do the fortunes of the ecosystems they are supposed to protect. As financial markets move in, with the help of the environmental bonds and securitisations the task force champions(10), the defence of nature becomes ever more volatile and uncertain. The living planet is reduced to a subsidiary of the human economy.

When governments pretend that they no longer need to govern; when they pretend that a world regulated by bankers, corporations and the profit motive is a better world than one regulated by voters and their representatives, nothing is safe. All systems of government are flawed. But few are as flawed as those controlled by private money.

Beware of the rabid right, not the loony left

YASMIN ALIBHAI BROWN

Sunday 14 April 2013

In the wake of Thatcher's death it has been shown once again that the most intolerant, Stalinist and insistently PC forces are on the right

On January 30th 1978, the day my son was born, Margaret Thatcher charmingly told white TV viewers their country was in danger of being “swamped” by other cultures. Enoch Powell’s gory warnings about black and Asian immigration  were rebranded and detoxified by the wily, well groomed, Lady Tory and embedded in the nation’s psyche. Her words were calculated, and won her populist support and admirers within her party. Sixteen months later she became PM.

In the ceaseless cacophony following her death, scant attention has been paid to her supremacist views of Empire (Bruge Speech, 1992) or the race riots, or the many deaths in custody of black men, or government-sanctioned unfair policing, or her deep hostility to immigrants of colour or concomitant warmth towards white Zimbabweans and South Africans. As the blogger Jacqueline Scott writes: “Racism fattened under Thatcher”. Forgotten too is her vendetta against the GLC and ILEA, those London bodies that did not fall in line with her little-Englandism. The politically correct, radical right has silenced all such talk and much more besides.

Make no mistake, the most intolerant, Stalinist and insistently PC forces today are on the right, not on the so called “loony left”. Last week the right hysterically attacked the Diana Fund for supporting a pro-immigration organisation. Diana was a friend to the outsider and the despised; yet those she was close to are kicking off about this funding. The same reactionary battalions stopped the BBC from fully playing a song that legitimately got into the top of the charts, because it “insults” the hallowed Tory matriarch. Most of our newspapers are on the right and they push, and sometimes bully, broadcasters into that same ideological space. Fearful of bad headlines, the BBC meekly accommodates their propaganda – and so the right gets bolder and more demanding.

I was on Channel 5’s The Wright Stuff as a panellist all week and expressed unfashionably critical assessments of the Thatcher era. Some of the reactions I received made me wonder if I should better conceal or disguise my deeply-held socialist, anti-racist  views. Walking through Whiteleys, where the programmes are recorded, a group crowded and abused me. Some were racist, others insulting or filthy. It was horrible. Back home, onto my screen came more from the rabid-right PC brigade. They are offended by anyone who disagrees. Dissent, to them, is treason, an embodiment of the enemy within (Lady Thatcher’s term for striking miners).        

Every day we, the people, are instructed on what we should say, think and feel. To belong, we must not only praise Lady Thatcher for her greatness, but also be foolish, doting royalists, hate the poor, approve of welfare cuts, hate the unions, reject the principle of equality and proclaim immigration as a threat. Lady Thatcher, the Boudicca of the fanatical right, reclaimed the kingdom for them and they remain powerful, unbeatable and unbearable.

‘Yes, we spent money on paid news ads’

P. SAINATH

   

TOPICS

crime, law and justicecorruption & bribery
medianewspaper and magazine
politics

Confessions by politicians to EC belie claims of innocence by top newspapers

The political class is more honest than the media when it comes to ‘paid news’ during elections, judging by the fact that several poll candidates have owned up to this corrupt practice. At least, after the Election Commission and the Press Council of India shot off notices to them and held inquiries into the matter. They have acknowledged guilt by belatedly adding their “news” buying expenses to their election statement of accounts. Some candidates have accepted in writing that they bought what are now called, somewhat oxymoronically, “Paid News Advertisements.” But not a single one of the newspapers they say they gave their money to has accepted any wrongdoing. 

These are not just any papers. In readership terms, they include three top-ranked dailies.

In some cases, the battles are still on, involving both the politicians and newspapers concerned. On January 15, the EC found that Madhya Pradesh Cabinet Minister Narottam Mishra “failed to lodge his accounts of his election expenses in the manner prescribed by law.” He faces possible disqualification. The EC’s notice to Dr. Mishra concerns 42 news items on him during the November 2008 state elections. These, it pointed out, “read more like election advertisement(s) in favour of you alone rather than (as) news reports.” The EC names four newspapers in its notice: Dainik Bhaskar, Nai Duniya, Aacharan and Dainik Datia Prakash. Dainik Bhaskar is the second most-read daily in the country.

Less than a month earlier, the Press Council of India held quite a few dailies guilty of doing much the same thing during the 2010 Bihar assembly polls. These include Dainik Jagran, the newspaper with the highest readership in the country. The others are Dainik Hindustan, Hindustan Times, Dainik Aaj and Purvanchal Ki Raahi. Also, Rashtriya Sahara, Udyog Vyapar Times and Prabhat Khabhar.

In many cases, the route to exposure followed the pattern set in the classic case of the former Congress Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Ashok Chavan. His 2009 poll campaign for the State legislature drew scores of full pages of “news.” Not a single one of those pages ever mentioned the name of Madhav Kinhalkar, his rival for the Bhokar seat. In a 2009-10 investigation into paid news, The Hindu found a hagiographical article on Mr. Chavan appear word for word in three major rival publications. In two of them, on the same day, in all of them under different by-lines (The Hindu, Nov. 30, 2009).

The 2010 Bihar polls saw a similar pattern. This time, though, one paper came up with a truly novel defence. Same story in different papers? That’s not paid news, argues Udyog Vyapar Times. It submits that other newspapers “hack their computer site and publish the same news.” So what might look like paid news, contends Udyog Vyapar Times, is merely the outcome of desperate rivals hacking into the internal network of this Aligarh-based daily to steal their national exclusives.

How did the candidates issued ‘Paid News’ notices for the Bihar polls by the EC react? All but one seem to have accepted their guilt. According to the EC, they did so by simply adding “the expenditure included by them on account of these ‘news’ in their accounts of election expenses.” In fact, the District Election Officer of Muzaffarpur in Bihar stated flatly that the dailies had carried “news for payment.” He even had letters from the candidates owning up to buying “news.”

The Press Council of India, acting on the matter referred to it by the EC, issued show cause notices to Dainik Jagran, Dainik Hindustan, Hindustan Times et al, between July and September 2011. On December 21, 2012, the PCI, on the basis of its own inquiry committee’s report, got tough. Of the high-profile line-up, only Prabhat Khabhar escaped “the highest penalty” of the Press Council — censure — under Section 14 (1) of the Press Council Act of 1978. This was the only case where the paper and the candidate both firmly denied the charge. (In all the other cases, the candidates accepted they had purchased “news”.) And Prabhat Khabar’s own record — it has strongly campaigned against paid news — added weight to its defence. The paper offered to apologise if the EC produced proof of any such aberration. It was “cautioned for the future.”

All the other dailies denied the charges, too. But, as the PCI’s inquiry committee puts it, “in all these cases, the candidate in question admitted before the Election Commission of India that he paid for the impugned material.” These dailies were found “guilty of having carried news reports that were in fact self-promotion material provided by the candidate in the fray,” and so faced the highest penalty of censure.

So quite a few politicians seem willing to confess to their paid news sins. They face penalties, too. Just 16 months ago, the EC disqualified Umlesh Yadav, then sitting MLA from Bisauli in Uttar Pradesh, for a period of three years for failing to provide a “true and correct account” of her election expenses. She had skipped any mention of her spending on advertisements dressed up as news during her 2007 poll campaign. She was the first legislator ever to bite the dust on grounds of excessive expenditure (and paid news). Dr. Mishra, Health Minister in the BJP government of Madhya Pradesh, now faces charges of the kind that got her disqualified.

Ashok Chavan case

Oddly enough, the Ashok Chavan case, which triggered off a spate of such cases, is itself bogged down in both the EC and the Supreme Court. The case of former Jharkhand Chief Minister Madhu Koda is likewise held up in the courts. Judicial delays could have a serious and possibly adverse impact in the fight against Paid News in the 2014 general election.

But what action do habitual offenders in the media face? The Paid News Committee constituted by the Election Commission has concluded that those 42 “news items” involving Dr. Mishra “appear to be advertisements in the garb of news” and fall “within the definition of ‘Paid News’.” The Press Council defines Paid News as “any news or analysis appearing in any media (print or electronic) for a price in cash or kind as consideration.” A Press Council team appointed by PCI Chairperson Justice Katju found last month that Paid News had been rampant in Gujarat during the State polls there in December 2012.

So what happens where media outlets concerned are found guilty? Where the “highest penalty” is censure and that draws not even an apology? Of course, Paid News is not only about elections, though that’s where it does greatest damage to the greatest number. It is an everyday activity in much of the media. The cloying coverage that powerful corporations get routinely reeks of it. You can see it in some completely corporate “sporting” events or “partnerships.” Governments, too, buy “news” sometimes. You can see it at work in Davos, too. Who funds journalists and channels from India at that World Economic Forum event each year is worth looking at. But that’s another story. Watch this space.

sainath.p@thehindu.co.in

Keywords: paid news, Press Council of India, Paid News Advertisements, Narottam Mishra, Paid News Committee

This media is corrupt – we need a Hippocratic oath for journalists

Our job is to hold power to account. Instead, most of the profession simply ventriloquises the concerns of the elite

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 July 2011 21.30 BST
  • larger | smaller
Is Murdoch now finished in the UK? As the pursuit of Gordon Brown by the Sunday Times and the Sun blows the hacking scandal into new corners of the old man's empire, this story begins to feel like the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. The naked attempt to destroy Brown by any means, including hacking the medical files of his sick baby son, means that there is no obvious limit to the story's ramifications. Illustration by Daniel Pudles The scandal radically changes public perceptions of how politics works, the danger corporate power presents to democracy, and the extent to which it has compromised and corrupted the Metropolitan police, who have now been dragged in so deep they are beginning to look like Murdoch's private army. It has electrified a dozy parliament and subjected the least accountable and most corrupt profession in Britain – journalism – to belated public scrutiny. The cracks are appearing in the most unexpected places. Look at the remarkable admission by the rightwing columnist Janet Daley in this week's Sunday Telegraph. "British political journalism is basically a club to which politicians and journalists both belong," she wrote. "It is this familiarity, this intimacy, this set of shared assumptions … which is the real corruptor of political life. The self-limiting spectrum of what can and cannot be said … the self-reinforcing cowardice which takes for granted that certain vested interests are too powerful to be worth confronting. All of these things are constant dangers in the political life of any democracy." Most national journalists are embedded, immersed in the society, beliefs and culture of the people they are meant to hold to account. They are fascinated by power struggles among the elite but have little interest in the conflict between the elite and those they dominate. They celebrate those with agency and ignore those without. But this is just part of the problem. Daley stopped short of naming the most persuasive force: the interests of the owner and the corporate class to which he belongs. The proprietor appoints editors in his own image – who impress their views on their staff. Murdoch's editors, like those who work for the other proprietors, insist that they think and act independently. It's a lie exposed by the concurrence of their views (did all 247 News Corp editors just happen to support the invasion of Iraq?), and blown out of the water by Andrew Neil's explosive testimony in 2008 before the Lords select committee on communications. The papers cannot announce that their purpose is to ventriloquise the concerns of multimillionaires; they must present themselves as the voice of the people. The Sun, the Mail and the Express claim to represent the interests of the working man and woman. These interests turn out to be identical to those of the men who own the papers. So the rightwing papers run endless exposures of benefit cheats, yet say scarcely a word about the corporate tax cheats. They savage the trade unions and excoriate the BBC. They lambast the regulations that restrain corporate power. They school us in the extrinsic values – the worship of power, money, image and fame – which advertisers love but which make this a shallower, more selfish country. Most of them deceive their readers about the causes of climate change. These are not the obsessions of working people. They are the obsessions thrust upon them by the multimillionaires who own these papers. The corporate media is a gigantic astroturfing operation: a fake grassroots crusade serving elite interests. In this respect the media companies resemble the Tea Party movement, which claims to be a spontaneous rising of blue-collar Americans against the elite but was founded with the help of the billionaire Koch brothers and promoted by Murdoch's Fox News. Journalism's primary purpose is to hold power to account. This purpose has been perfectly inverted. Columnists and bloggers are employed as the enforcers of corporate power, denouncing people who criticise its interests, stamping on new ideas, bullying the powerless. The press barons allowed governments occasionally to promote the interests of the poor, but never to hamper the interests of the rich. They also sought to discipline the rest of the media. The BBC, over the last 30 years, became a shadow of the gutsy broadcaster it was, and now treats big business with cringing deference. Every morning at 6.15, the Today programme's business report grants executives the kind of unchallenged access otherwise reserved for God on Thought for the Day. The rest of the programme seeks out controversy and sets up discussions between opponents, but these people are not confronted by their critics. So what can be done? Because of the peculiar threat they present to democracy there's a case to be made for breaking up all majority interests in media companies, and for a board of governors, appointed perhaps by Commons committee, to act as a counterweight to the shareholders' business interests. But even if that's a workable idea, it's a long way off. For now, the best hope might be to mobilise readers to demand that journalists answer to them, not just their proprietors. One means of doing this is to lobby journalists to commit themselves to a kind of Hippocratic oath. Here's a rough stab at a first draft. I hope others can improve it. Ideally, I'd like to see the National Union of Journalists building on it and encouraging its members to sign. 'Our primary task is to hold power to account. We will prioritise those stories and issues which expose the interests of power. We will be wary of the relationships we form with the rich and powerful, and ensure that we don't become embedded in their society. We will not curry favour with politicians, businesses or other dominant groups by withholding scrutiny of their affairs, or twisting a story to suit their interests. "We will stand up to the interests of the businesses we work for, and the advertisers which fund them. We will never take money for promulgating a particular opinion, and we will resist attempts to oblige us to adopt one. "We will recognise and understand the power we wield and how it originates. We will challenge ourselves and our perception of the world as much as we challenge other people. When we turn out to be wrong, we will say so." I accept that this doesn't directly address the power relations that govern the papers. But it might help journalists to assert a measure of independence, and readers to hold them to it. Just as voters should lobby their MPs to represent them and not just the whips, readers should seek to drag journalists away from the demands of their editors. The oath is one possible tool that could enhance reader power. If you don't like it, suggest a better idea. Something has to change: never again should a half a dozen oligarchs be allowed to dominate and corrupt the life of this country.