R K Misra in Outlook India
Gujarat and its 'model' have been the toast of the Indian season ever since its Chief Minister, Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister in 2014.This includes its liquor prohibition policy which has adherents like Bihar now where Nitish Kumar came to power after knocking the wind out of Modi's sails!
Billowing in the political clouds ever since, are propounded perceptions of a 'dry' India. Kumar could do with a closer look at adversary Modi's 'model' state before giving wings to his national vision.
Proud and boastful of the fact that it has been the only state in the country which was born 'dry' and continues to remain so till date, Gujarat's much hyped liquor 'totalitarianism' took a humpty-dumpty like fall last week when over 20 people died after consuming hooch near Surat. What has now become a standard drill after decades of practice, is in place. Newly anointed Chief Minister Vijay Rupani is making all the right noises. Top cops and district heads-transferred, smaller fry suspended. The anti-terrorist squad (ATS) chief took charge of investigations. A three-man top cop panel headed by additional director general of police (ADGP), looked into the matter and submitted its report to the state home department head. Within 24 hours over a thousand country liquor cases registered. Carton loads are being seized at entry checkpoints into the state. A full blooded search for the culprit methanol is under way. Blah, blah, blah and the farce goes on.
Consumption or possession of liquor without a valid permit is a non-bailable offence in the state. A person arrested on either count has to be produced in court to be bailed out. And yet it oozes Bacchus brew from every nook and cranny of its ample frame.
Booze, as the upwardly mobile call it, is lucrative business and according to conservative estimates, a Rs 30,000 crore annual turnover, pure black money spewing industry. While Prime Minister Modi may have pulled out all the stops to unearth Indian black money stashed abroad, his decade and a quarter year stint as chief minister of the state, failed to dent the business. In fact, to be fair to him, no chief minister who held office in the state was ever able to stem the flow.
The business has three components. At the bottom of the pyramid is the poor man's drink--hooch, lattha or moonshine. Then follows the desi or country liquor which is the preferred drink of rural Gujarat followed by brewery liquor at the apex (rum, whisky, gin, vodka etc). Hooch is the preferred drink of the urban labour class while 'desi' distilled, largely for captive consumption in villages, ranks safer and a notch higher. The fruit liquor 'mahua' ranks in this category. With a consumer base of the middle and affluent class in cities and towns, Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL) as brewery made liquor is called in official parlance, holds sway. Country liquor is a cottage industry but brewery liquor flows into the state from MP, Rajasthan, Maharashtra even Punjab and Haryana.
Let's take the case of Gujarat's biggest city Ahmedabad. A network of about 1000 bootleggers sell anywhere between 1.5 to2 lakh litres of moonshine per day. Women outnumber men in this business. This is besides the IMFL business where the brand of your choice is home delivered to you. The trade is tech-savvy and 'whats app' and other suchn mobile applications come in handy. Surat is reported to guzzle 50,000 litres per day and almost 70 per cent of the 18,000 villages in the state brew their own country liquor. All major cities report high consumption and rural areas are no exception. There are 61,000 health permit holders in the state and worth of the average daily consumption of alcohol to permit holders is put at around Rs 75 lakhs.
No bootlegger can operate in Gujarat without police connivance. At every 'point' of the operation, negotiations have to be done with the cop for a certain amount of money and this goes right up to the top and from there to the political top brass. The cops may be sloppy in policing but would be the envy of management experts in planning and distribution of ill-gotten spoils.
Thus it is the huge amount of unadulterated black money greasing the administrative-political system in Gujarat that ensures a high decibel sound and light show only for the benefit of the masses with little or no follow-up action. Take the case of the 2009 hooch tragedy in Ahmedabad where 150 people lost their lives. Modi, then the chief minister, made all the appropriate noises. A Commission of Inquiry was instituted with former High Court judge K M Mehta as the chairman. The panel submitted its report in 2011 and there has been pin drop silence thereafter. The Gujarat Vidhan Sabha was quick to amend the pertinent act provisioning for even death penalty for those convicted in spurious liquor cases. The Bill was cleared by the then Governor Dr Kamala Beniwal. Not a single person has got life imprisonment thereafter, let alone terminal punishment.
The whole business of prohibition in Gujarat is a big charade in which everyone is happy and the only ones who stand to lose out are the people. Gujarat is soggy wet so those who want to drink, get enough of it but for a price. The cop is happy, he gets his cut and the politician in power more so because he gets a fair share as well besides the rip off from transfers and postings by playing favourites. Right from the sub-inspector to the DGP, the transfers are all at the behest of the Home department and the politicians who preside over it. The bootlegger is happy because he still manages to make money for himself despite all the pricks and cuts. It is only the honest tax payer who gets fobbed because the state loses a huge amount of money in excise and allied duties. Never mind this common man, he was in any case, born to bear the burden of the cross. Moonshine for the earthy, sunshine for the dirty.
Showing posts with label prohibition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prohibition. Show all posts
Saturday, 24 September 2016
Monday, 4 January 2016
Prohibition, Discrimination in Kerala's alcohol policy
Suhrith Parthasarathy in The Hindu
Since 2007, the Kerala government has sought to tighten its Abkari (excise) policy with a view to making liquor less freely available in the State, ostensibly in the interest of public health. At first, the State sought to amend the policy by permitting new bar licences to be granted only to those hotels that were accorded a rating of three stars or more by the Central government’s Ministry of Tourism. In 2011, these rules were further changed. This time, all hotels that had a rating of anything below four stars were disentitled from having a licence issued to serve alcoholic beverages on their premises. However, those hotels with existing licences were accorded an amnesty, which permitted them to have their licences renewed even if they did not possess a four-star mark.
Regardless of what our respective moral positions on policies of prohibition might be, and regardless of the potential efficacy of such programmes, the judgment on the validity of Kerala’s liquor policy militates against the fundamental promise of equal concern and treatment under the Constitution.
As virtually its last significant act of 2015, on December 29, the Supreme Court of India delivered its judgment on the validity of Kerala’s newest liquor policy, which seeks to prohibit the sale and service of alcohol in all public places, save bars and restaurants in five-star hotels. Regardless of what our respective moral positions on policies of prohibition might be, and regardless of the potential efficacy of such programmes, the new law, as is only plainly evident, militates against the fundamental promise of equal concern and treatment under the Constitution. In placing five-star hotels on a pedestal, the law takes a classist position, and commits a patent discrimination that is really an affront to the underlying principles of our democracy. Regrettably, though, the Supreme Court’s judgment, in The Kerala Bar Hotels Association v. State of Kerala, eschews even the most basic doctrines of constitutionalism, and, in so doing, allows the state to perpetrate a politics of hypocrisy.
Kicking off the excise policy
Since 2007, the Kerala government has sought to tighten its Abkari (excise) policy with a view to making liquor less freely available in the State, ostensibly in the interest of public health. At first, the State sought to amend the policy by permitting new bar licences to be granted only to those hotels that were accorded a rating of three stars or more by the Central government’s Ministry of Tourism. In 2011, these rules were further changed. This time, all hotels that had a rating of anything below four stars were disentitled from having a licence issued to serve alcoholic beverages on their premises. However, those hotels with existing licences were accorded an amnesty, which permitted them to have their licences renewed even if they did not possess a four-star mark.
The Supreme Court held, in a convoluted judgment, in March 2014, that the deletion of three-star hotels from the category of hotels eligible for a liquor licence was, in fact, constitutionally valid. The court provided a rather bizarre rationale for what appeared to be a palpable act of favouritism. Even hotels without a bar licence, it said, were entitled to three-star statuses under the Ministry of Tourism’s rules and regulations.
In August 2014, the Kerala government sought to further intensify its Abkari policy, by making its most drastic change yet, in purportedly trying to enforce complete prohibition. Only hotels classed as five star and above, by the Union government’s Ministry of Tourism, the new policy commanded, would be entitled to maintain a bar licence. To give effect to this rule, the Abkari Act, a pre-constitutional enactment that was extended in 1967 to Kerala, was duly amended, and the State’s excise commissioners issued notices to all hotels of four stars and below, which served liquor, intimating them of the annulment of their respective bar licences.
The new policy was immediately challenged in a series of petitions filed in the Kerala High Court by hotels of various different denominations. In May last year, after a division bench of the High Court had ruled in favour of the State, the hotels filed appeals before the Supreme Court. They raised two primary grounds of challenge, both predicated on fundamental rights guaranteed under Part III of India’s Constitution.
Fundamental rights
First, the hotels submitted that in cancelling their bar licences, and in prohibiting them from serving and selling liquor on their premises, the State had infracted their right, under Article 19(1)(g), to practise any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or business. Second, they pleaded, in separately categorising hotels of five stars or more, and in permitting those hotels alone to serve liquor in public, the new Abkari policy had made an unreasonable classification, by treating persons on an equal standing unequally, and therefore violated Article 14 of the Constitution.
First, the hotels submitted that in cancelling their bar licences, and in prohibiting them from serving and selling liquor on their premises, the State had infracted their right, under Article 19(1)(g), to practise any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or business. Second, they pleaded, in separately categorising hotels of five stars or more, and in permitting those hotels alone to serve liquor in public, the new Abkari policy had made an unreasonable classification, by treating persons on an equal standing unequally, and therefore violated Article 14 of the Constitution.
The first argument was admittedly going to be a difficult one to maintain. The liberty to freely carry on any trade or business is subject to reasonable restrictions that may be imposed by the state in the interest of the general public. The Constitution itself, in Article 47, requires States to make an endeavour towards improving public health, including by bringing about prohibition of the consumption of liquor. Therefore, quite naturally, any policy in purported furtherance of such goals would almost always be viewed as a legitimate limitation on any freedom to do business. In fact, in 1994, a constitution bench of the Supreme Court, in Khoday Distilleries Ltd. v. State of Karnataka, explicitly questioned whether any right to trade in alcoholic beverages even flowed from our Constitution.
“The State can prohibit completely the trade or business in potable liquor since liquor as beverage is res extra commercium,” wrote Justice P.B. Sawant. “The State may also create a monopoly in itself for trade or business in such liquor. The State can further place restrictions and limitations on such trade or business which may be in nature different from those on trade or business in articles res commercium.” Therefore, the court, in The Kerala Bar Hotels Association case, perhaps, had little choice but to hold the Abkari policy as being in conformity with the right under Article 19(1)(g).
Such a holding, though, ought not to have precluded the court from scrutinising the liquor policy with further rigour. The mere fact that a commodity is res extra commercium — a thing outside commerce — does not give the state absolute power to make laws on the subject in violation of the guarantee of equal treatment. While a law might represent a valid constraint on the freedom to trade, it nonetheless must confirm to other constitutional commands, including Article 14, which assures us that the state shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws within the territory of India.
The point of classification
Equality, as the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin once wrote, is a contested concept. But it is however, in its abstract form, a solemn constitutional pledge that underpins our democracy. The Supreme Court, in some of its earliest decisions, interpreted Article 14 as forbidding altogether any law that seeks to make distinctions based on class, except where reasonable classifications are made in a manner that does no violence to the provision’s core promise. The court also crystallised a basic two-prong test to determine what constitutes such a classification: there must be, it held, an intelligible differentia, which distinguishes persons or things that are grouped together from others left out of the group, and this differentia must have a rational relation to the object sought to be achieved by the law in question.
Equality, as the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin once wrote, is a contested concept. But it is however, in its abstract form, a solemn constitutional pledge that underpins our democracy. The Supreme Court, in some of its earliest decisions, interpreted Article 14 as forbidding altogether any law that seeks to make distinctions based on class, except where reasonable classifications are made in a manner that does no violence to the provision’s core promise. The court also crystallised a basic two-prong test to determine what constitutes such a classification: there must be, it held, an intelligible differentia, which distinguishes persons or things that are grouped together from others left out of the group, and this differentia must have a rational relation to the object sought to be achieved by the law in question.
Hence, in determining whether Kerala’s Abkari policy violated the right to equality, the question was rather simple: has the State made a reasonable classification in consonance with Article 14 by permitting only five-star hotels and above to serve liquor? When we apply the test previously laid down by the Supreme Court, there is little doubt that the distinction that the policy makes between hotels on the basis of their relative offering of luxuries constitutes a discernible intelligible differentia between two classes of things. But a proper defence of the law also requires the government to additionally show us how this classification of five-star hotels as a separate category bears a sensible nexus with the object of the law at hand. The changes in the liquor policy were ostensibly brought through with the view of promoting prohibition, and thereby improving the standard of public health in the State. Now, ask yourself this: how can this special treatment of five-star hotels possibly help the Kerala government in achieving these objectives?
The Supreme Court, as it happened, made no concerted effort to answer this question. This could be because, however hard we might want to try, it’s difficult to find any cogent connection between classifying five-star hotels separately and the aim of achieving prohibition. The court, therefore simply said, “There can be no gainsaying that the prices/tariff of alcohol in Five Star hotels is usually prohibitively high, which acts as a deterrent to individuals going in for binge or even casual drinking. There is also little scope for cavil that the guests in Five Star hotels are of a mature age; they do not visit these hotels with the sole purpose of consuming alcohol.” Given the palpable inadequacies of such a justification — and also given its validation of a manifestly classist position — the court also used the State government’s excuse of tourism as a further ruse to defend the law. But when a policy exists to promote the prohibition of the consumption of liquor, it’s specious to use an extraneous consideration, in this case, tourism, to defend a classification made in the law, regardless of how intelligible such a classification might be.
Prohibition often has a polarising effect on the polity. But the criticisms of the ineffectuality of such policies apart, Kerala’s new law ought to have been seen for what it is: paternalism, at its best, and, at its worst, an extension of an ingrained form of classism that is demonstrably opposed to the guarantee of equality under our Constitution. The judgment in The Kerala Bar Hotels Association case is therefore deeply unsatisfactory, and requires reconsideration.
Thursday, 4 July 2013
Ban qat? Theresa May might as well ban cats
A simple analogy shows how absurd the basis for the home secretary's drug prohibition plan really is
Qat and a cat – equally harmful to society? Photographs: Martin Godwin for the Guardian (left); Chip Mitchell/Getty Images (right)
Now this is embarrassing. I'm expected to have something to say about Theresa May's intention to ban the plant-drug qat, but due to a texting error by a new intern, I'd been preparing my thoughts on the Tory plan to ban cats, a plan which I now learn may not exist. Fortunately for her, I find that many of the same arguments apply, so I'm not quite back at square one.
The proponents of a ban on cats qat may be well intentioned, but rely on a mixture of exaggerated, selective, anecdotal, prejudiced and most frequently erroneous and illogical arguments. Cats are Qat is indeed associated with harm, which can be very serious at times, but it is unwise to generalise from the most extreme cases, or assume that cats areqat is solely to blame for complex problems of owners users.
Advocates for a ban are sometimes prone to demonise cats qat and, cynically or credulously, to fuel unfounded fears against owners users. Historically, cat owners were persecuted as witches. Qat users find themselves linked spuriously to terrorists, the ultimate folk-devils of our era.
Despite all the rhetoric, when detailed studies are made that explore the actual empirical evidence, suspicions about the dangers of cats qat are revealed time after time to have little basis in reality. A balanced assessment also exposes the prejudices of those campaigning for a ban on cats qat. Theresa May, who wants to disregard expert advisers and label as criminals any people who possess cats qat, has disregarded the evidence before, personally undermining her own government's promise to reduce the far greater harms caused by dogs alcohol.
By nearly every possible objective measure, dogs cause alcohol causes far greater danger to health, life and society at large than cats qat, or indeed any other pet drug. People rightly worry about the harm caused to society when people are irresponsible with dogsalcohol: the thousands of hospital admissions; the mess and intimidation we encounter on our city streets. However, insight and experience show that these harms to society can best be minimised through education, co-operation and maybe regulation, not by criminalisation and ostracism. Bans offer an opportunity for governments to posture and express their toughness to the electorate, but our legislative agenda should be driven not by the naive assumption that simple bans solve complex problems, but by evidence of what might actually best serve the interests of the public.
Those wanting a ban on cats qat might do well to consider the historical precedent. Driven by tabloid hysteria, the UK government introduced The Dangerous Dogs Act 1991, banning four breeds of dog. Since then, hospitalisations for dog bites have more thanquadrupled, with experts highlighting the absurdity of criminalising possession of particular types of dog instead of addressing issues of owner behaviour and responsibility. Driven by a moral agenda, alcohol was banned in the US in the 1920s, successfully handing the trade to organised crime networks. While prohibition probably reduced consumption, overall harm rose as the people most harmed by alcohol were denied the help they needed and were instead branded criminals. Now in the UK, the freedom of individuals to lawfully own a dog drink is respected, and we recognise even that petsalcohol might have some social value too.
Those who don't like going near dogs alcohol, who think that dog owners drinkers are wasting good money on dog food alcohol and valuable family time going on walkies to the pub have a valid opinion, but we don't think their values should be imposed on others through the criminal justice system. The same is true of cats qat: no one should mistake their inalienable right to find cats qat disgusting with a right to interfere with the personal choices and pleasures of others.
The risks associated with dogs and cats alcohol and qat are not something we should take lightly, but bans are an excuse to do nothing productive to address a problem, which the government has been doing very well already. Twice they have asked the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) to review the harms of qat, (they are obliged to get expert advice before they ban it), and twice the ACMD has said that a ban would be inappropriate and disproportionate, while making a series of considered recommendations for awareness-raising and community engagement, access to treatment services and improving health standards of qat cafes. While the government has no problems collecting millions in tax on qat imports, it seems reluctant to consider any investment in looking after qat users, except if they are in prison cells.
All right, I think we've chewed over the qat/cat analogy long enough, but there is a serious point to be made here. I got into a little trouble for comparing the risks of death and serious injury from horse-riding and ecstasy, so I should be sure to say that whilst horse-riding really is comparably risky to the class A drug, in terms of acute harm, I expect that khat use is more often seriously problematic than cat-ownership. However, we should be comfortable with the idea of comparing the risks of drug use with other risks we might face: cooking, trampolining, sunbathing or pet ownership. Our drug laws are purportedly there to protect individuals and society from harm – they are not meant to be there to uphold any specific moral values and punish deviance from them. If politicians wish to argue for drug prohibitions on a moral basis, because they think it is obnoxious and dissolute to sit around getting high from leaves or intoxicated by drink, that's fine, let them make the case, and see whether parliament or the electorate have an interest in policing people's personal habits. What they must not be allowed to do is to push a moral agenda against an already marginalised group through laws intended to regulate drugs on the basis of evidence of their harmfulness.
Tuesday, 2 July 2013
The subversive world of online drug dealing
Encrypted websites selling illegal drugs may render prohibition obsolete, but their profit-driven nature could be just as harmful
Drugs … 'there will always be a market'. Photograph: Anthony Bolante/Reuters
A nameless admin at Atlantis, a website selling everything from magic mushrooms to marijuana to crack cocaine, posted an advert on YouTube last week. The video was swiftly taken down, but not before about 40,000 people had seen it, copied down the strange URL and gone off to investigate. It's part of a bold new marketing campaign to allow people to easily buy illegal drugs, wherever they are in the world. Whether that's a good or bad thing is debatable.
Atlantis is a competitor to the Silk Road, an underground online market where drugs are bought and sold openly, sent to users under plain wrap in the mail. But where the Silk Road hides and does not share its URL very widely, Atlantis is shockingly blatant and comes over like a cocky web start-up. It is paying dividends: the site's owners claim to have processed half a million dollars in deals since March. There are allegations that it is a honeypot, drawing in ex-Silk Road vendors by charging lower fees, and offering proprietary encryption, rather than demanding that users learn PGP software (Pretty Good Privacy). This means the site's owners might be able to see where dealers on the site are sending drugs to, and identify customers, or listen in on email conversations and begin to expose dealers. Might the DEA have set up a bogus site to ensnare the unwary?
While nothing any government does around privacy should surprise us nowadays, from indiscriminately recording our every thought and whim, to spying on the grieving parents of murdered children with the aim of smearing their characters, the emergence of Atlantis and sites like it into the mainstream does raise the interesting prospect of a new war on encryption. Encryption software, most commonly PGP, scrambles your mail, making it impossible for a third party who does not own two special "keys" to read your mail.
Now the Prism and Tempora cats are out of the bag, and it's dawned on almost everyone what fools they've been, I'd guess that governments will soon be very keen to control encryption and will use the drug problem as a straw man defence for their next wave of intrusion. Note to government, it didn't work last time. To quote John Callas, who helped invent PGP with Phil Zimmerman: "PGP is just math, and you can't ban math."
In the UK, though, encryption can be a de facto crime under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), the Labour-era assault on civil liberties. Refuse to hand over the private keys to your private files and you can and will be jailed. IT website The Register reported in 2009 that the first person jailed under part three of Ripa was "a schizophrenic science hobbyist with no criminal record". Found with a model rocket as he returned from Paris, he refused to give police the keys to his encrypted data: indeed, he refused to speak at all, and was jailed for 13 months. Six months into his sentence the man was sectioned under the Mental Health Act and does not know when he will be released.
It's pretty easy to see what the initial official response to sites such as Atlantis will be. There'll be a concerted media campaign to scare people off. A few big busts of users, plus an attempted and likely very public assault on Bitcoin, the anonymous currency used to pay for the drugs.
But Bitcoin is essentially unassailable, because the currency has no central bank, and is made and maintained by a network of users. There's now enough of it in circulation to become a closed and private economy. Bitcoin is divisible into eight decimal places – 0.00000001 BTC is the smallest amount that can be handled in a transaction – so there's plenty of spare capacity. Perhaps an attack on Tor might work? Tor is the anonymising software that enables these markets to be hosted and accessed secretly. To quote Andrew Lewman, the Tor project's spokesman:
"Our code is all open source, everything we do is open source, and is mirrored all over the world. So even if, for whatever reason, let's say the paedophile-terrorist-druglords and the four horsemen of the apocalypse take over Tor and that's the majority usage, then the current Tor network could shut down, and just like a phoenix it will get born again. Then maybe we'll have 10 or 1,200 Tor networks because everyone starts running their own."
The only way to tackle online markets such as this is to make postal procedures hugely onerous. But that costs. The Royal Mail is about to be privatised and no one wants to invest. With 96% of its staff supporting a strike and opposing privatisation, it's hard to see workers agreeing to new requirements to scan every piece of post for drugs. In any case, queues in understaffed offices are so lengthy and the entire process of posting a letter so redolent of the frustrating world before the net there would be a customer revolt.
And there's no way sniffer dogs can tackle the circa 70m pieces of just domestic post at the sorting offices each day. When I was researching my book on the internet drugs trade, the Royal Mail refused to answer even the simplest questions about steps taken to identify packages containing drugs. The reason for that, postmen have told me privately, is that there are none. There's a new Russian anonymous market, that has just come online too. There will be many more, since prohibition makes their operation profitable and their use logical.
Free market economics, whose rules of supply and demand we so conspicuously ignore in this vast sector of the economy, make simple herbs and plant extracts or simply produced chemicals worth many millions of pounds per tonne. And so there will always be a market. That market has now been virtualised: Drugs 2.0 – click here to buy now.
But while I smile in disbelief at the defiance and subversion of sites like Silk Road and Atlantis, I can't help thinking that this cavalier dismantling of the failed and discredited prohibition model, replacing it with another system driven by private profit with no regard to people's health, risks exposing people to similar harms as prohibition did. Note past tense.
Friday, 22 June 2012
Nationalisation: Uruguay's solution to its drug problem
Law allowing state to sell cannabis could be adopted across Latin America in defiance of US
Simeon Tegel in the Independent
Friday, 22 June 2012
Uruguay – in a bid to curb a narcotics-fuelled violent crimewave across the country – has
unveiled plans to nationalise its cannabis market and become the first government in the
world to sell the soft drug to consumers.
The measure is aimed at both reducing the rising power of drug gangs and the growing
number of users of crack and freebase cocaine in what has traditionally been one of Latin
America's most peaceful nations.
"We want to fight two different things: one is the consumption of drugs and the other is the
trafficking of drugs," said the Defence Minister Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro.
"We believe that the prohibition of certain drugs is creating more problems in society than the
drug itself. Homicides have risen as a result of the settling of accounts [between rival drug
gangs] and this is a clear symptom of the appearance of certain phenomena that did not
exist previously in Uruguay." Under the plans, the government would initially grow cannabis
and sell it to registered users. But once the scheme is up and running, it hopes to cash in
and allow private companies to take over the production of the drug.
Possession of small amounts and consumption of marijuana is currently not illegal in Uruguay
but growing and selling it is. The new bill would seek to put the drug dealers out of business
by making it easier, safer and possibly cheaper for users to buy marijuana from official
dispensaries.
President José Mujica, a former leftwing guerrilla, has now sent a bill to the Uruguayan
congress which is widely expected to approve it. The legislation is part of a larger packet of
measures to tackle law and order issues.
Last night, even opposition lawmakers were tweeting in qualified support. One, Luis Lacalle
Pau, of the centre-right National Party, wrote: "I don't believe it would be a good thing to
continue associating marijuana with money." The measure represents a rejection of the
"stepping stone" argument that cannabis is a gateway drug to more damaging substances. Mr
Fernández Huidobro highlighted the government's expectation that it would actually result in
a fall in the use of harder drugs.
It also marks the latest chapter in the region's gathering rebellion against Washington's "war
on drugs", launched in the 1970s by President Nixon. Many Latin Americans resent being
blamed for producing coca – cocaine's key raw ingredient – when impoverished peasant
farmers are largely responding to demand from the US and Europe.
The costs of prohibition to the region have been huge, with Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador
and Guatemala in particular, seeing tens of thousands die as the drug cartels confront law enforcement and battle each other for control of the main cocaine corridor from the Andes
into the US market.
"An erroneous decision by Nixon has been what has caused all these disasters, declaring a
war that has been won by the narco-traffickers," Mr Fernández Huidobro told the Montevideo
newspaper El País.
In the last 12 months , the Mexican President, Felipe Calderon, has called for "market"
alternatives to prohibition to be considered while Colombia's President, Juan Manuel Santos,
has said he would welcome an international debate about legalisation.
Worryingly for Washington, both presidents come from the right of the political spectrum and
have been staunch supporters of the war on drugs.
Uruguay is thought to have around 150,000 regular consumers of cannabis, roughly 5 per
cent of the population, representing an annual market worth around £50m.
Saturday, 17 September 2011
The biblical foundation for a celibate priesthood is flimsy, and now cracks are beginning to show in the Catholic church's ban on marriage for those in holy orders
The troubled history of priests, sex and the church may be at a turning point
In a new autobiography published this week, Father Edward Daly, former bishop of Derry and the handkerchief-waving priest of the famous Bloody Sunday photograph, has called for an end to the celibacy rule for Catholic priests. Pointing to the severe decline in numbers of serving clergy (while the worldwide Catholic population has almost doubled since 1970, the number of priests has remained virtually static), Daly believes crisis could be averted by allowing priests to marry. Many see clerical celibacy as fundamental to the church, but in fact it is a religious tradition rather than a strict scriptural prohibition, and it has been far from universally observed throughout its history.
The biblical foundation for a celibate priesthood is flimsy. While Saint Paul recommended celibacy, he thought anyone who cannot "contain themselves" should marry, "for it is better to marry than to be burnt" (1 Corinthians 7:9). Further, the Gospels spoke of apostles who were married, with no hindrance to their ministry. But the model of Christ's own celibacy (emulated by the priest acting "in persona Christi") marked it out as a higher calling, and ultimately an unmarried priest would be more committed to his religious duties, his celibacy giving him the "power to attend upon the Lord, without impediment" (1 Corinthians 7:35).
The first official attempt to impose celibacy on those in holy orders was made at the Council of Elvira (c 306), and efforts to enforce it followed throughout the middle ages. But how it played out in practice varied enormously, and stories of married clergy and fornicating popes abounded. Pope John XII was accused by a 10th-century synod of having "fornicated with the widow of Rainier, with Stephana his father's concubine, with the widow Anna, and with his own niece, and he made the sacred palace into a whorehouse".
Unperturbed by such examples, the First and Second Lateran Councils in the 12th century decreed that clerical marriages were invalid, but Thomas Aquinas asserted a century later that this was not the decree of God, but merely church law, reversible by papal or conciliar authority. Indeed, in the middle ages the prohibition of marriage had less to do with spiritual concerns than the conservation of church property. Married priests meant legitimate heirs and the loss of church assets through inheritances – something that couldn't be countenanced.
The 16th-century Council of Trent confirmed the celibacy rule (just as the Church of England was abolishing it), but it was only in the 20th century that priestly celibacy, along with all matters of sexual morality, became an obsession for the church hierarchy. Following the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Sacerdotalis Caelibatus, reaffirming the fundamental value of celibacy as allowing "a closer and more complete relationship with the mystery of Christ and the Church for the good of all mankind".
Yet the encyclical also permitted the possibility of married clergy from other Christian traditions being ordained as Catholic priests, and cracks began to show in the edifice. Although Pope Benedict rejected the idea of married priests in 2006, he has since taken up Paul VI's baton by allowing defecting married Anglican ministers to enter the church.
The absolute prohibition on married Catholic priests has gone, and with suggestions (of debatable credibility) of a link between the church's child abuse crisis and celibacy, last year's plaintive call for the abolition of the rule from Italian women romantically involved with priests, and the proliferation of groups advocating a married priesthood, a new chapter in the troubled history of priests, sex and the church may be opening.
Thursday, 2 April 2009
THE MORAL MAZE
Girish Menon
In the film Gandhi, after gunning down many non violent protesters at Jallianwalla Baugh General Dyer insisted that he was willing to offer first aid to any victim who would approach him. That was a case of selective morality and a similar argument can be made to explain our society’s treatment of the alcohol industry. In my view alcohol is no different from cocaine in its deleterious effects on society and hence its treatment should not be different from drugs.
There has always been an utilitarian argument for alcohol in that it provides jobs and more importantly government revenues. Also, the argument goes, prohibition will result in a black market. However, I do not see such an argument being upheld when it comes to consumption of heroin.
The other argument in favour of alcohol is the other old chestnut ‘consumer choice’ i.e. we should allow the consumer to decide how much alcohol he should consume instead of the nanny state taking that decision for him. This argument is a case of double standards since consumers do not have a similar choice with drugs. More importantly, the consumer choice argument is based on the assumption that a consumer is a rational actor who will only take decisions that maximizes his welfare. By consuming alcohol regularly if a person is found to be jeopardising his own future, can we call such a consumer a rational actor?
Thus in my view governments run on alcohol, politicians need it in great measure to do what they do and also the tax revenues generated are highly addictive too. The alcohol industry employs folks who look like us and are probably people like us. I would hence invite you to imagine what would be our reaction if the same alcohol industry was based in Afghanistan or Colombia. Would we treat such exports just as well?
In the film Gandhi, after gunning down many non violent protesters at Jallianwalla Baugh General Dyer insisted that he was willing to offer first aid to any victim who would approach him. That was a case of selective morality and a similar argument can be made to explain our society’s treatment of the alcohol industry. In my view alcohol is no different from cocaine in its deleterious effects on society and hence its treatment should not be different from drugs.
There has always been an utilitarian argument for alcohol in that it provides jobs and more importantly government revenues. Also, the argument goes, prohibition will result in a black market. However, I do not see such an argument being upheld when it comes to consumption of heroin.
The other argument in favour of alcohol is the other old chestnut ‘consumer choice’ i.e. we should allow the consumer to decide how much alcohol he should consume instead of the nanny state taking that decision for him. This argument is a case of double standards since consumers do not have a similar choice with drugs. More importantly, the consumer choice argument is based on the assumption that a consumer is a rational actor who will only take decisions that maximizes his welfare. By consuming alcohol regularly if a person is found to be jeopardising his own future, can we call such a consumer a rational actor?
Thus in my view governments run on alcohol, politicians need it in great measure to do what they do and also the tax revenues generated are highly addictive too. The alcohol industry employs folks who look like us and are probably people like us. I would hence invite you to imagine what would be our reaction if the same alcohol industry was based in Afghanistan or Colombia. Would we treat such exports just as well?
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