Against the new prohibition

March 22, 2000
Issue 

Review by Sean Healy

Stopping Traffik: the war against the war on drugs
Directed by Jerry Thompson
SBS TV
Tuesday, April 4, 8.30pm.

There's a point in this Canadian documentary when you realise the devastating effect of governments' relentless war against drugs and drug users.

It's not in some cliched back-alley interview with an addict — it's when you hear a 50-something man, who has been hooked on heroin for 25 years, sitting in his comfy living room with his middle-aged wife, say that he lives a normal, happy life, all because a pilot program gives him free, prescribed heroin each day.

It becomes clear how much unnecessary suffering has been caused to those with a drug habit, who have been forced into crime, prison and an early death.

This documentary does not come over as a crusading piece of TV journalism. At times, it seems almost cringing in its need to rely on sources that right-wingers can trust. We hear from police officers past and present, city mayors, doctors, billionaire philanthropists (George Soros, no less) and even a conservative Republican who proudly shows off a photo taken with Ronald Reagan.

Nonetheless it is effective.

Vancouver cop Gil Puder argues that the criminalisation of drug use is the late 20th century's version of prohibition, when the US imposed a total ban on alcohol from 1920 to 1933.

"Drug prohibition does the very opposite of what it was intended to do. It creates more violence, it creates more addicts, it creates more dysfunction in society", Puder says. "If we want to stop the trafficking, take the money away".

Just as with prohibition in the US, drug prohibition creates a black market, pushes the price up (by 17,000%, according to one source in the documentary) and floods the industry with money. The world's illegal drug trade is currently worth $600 billion each year, enough to corrupt anything it touches, including and especially the police.

"In the drug war, cops are the gangsters", says Joe McNamara, a former police chief in three different cities. "Armed robbery, stealing drugs, selling drugs, committing murders, framing innocent people. It's not an aberration. That's the spin, but it's not."

The documentary offers some rational alternatives to the "war on drugs".

"John" receives his legal daily dose of heroin from a program in Liverpool, Britain. Since the early 1980s, a public health, harm-minimisation approach has resulted in the city's incidence of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis to be reduced to negligible levels. Drug-related crime has been drastically reduced. Addicts are given a chance for a decent life. Forty percent of those in the program are now working full-time, something they could not do before.

A similar program in 16 cities in Switzerland has also had dramatic results. Two participants speak of how the program has allowed them to have friends and a social life again.

Dirk Chase Eldridge, the Reaganite, speaks of how easy it would be to end the illegal trade in drugs, by legalising them. "The government could sell drugs themselves, undersell the dealers by half. If that doesn't work, it could undercut them further — and there would still be plenty of money for extensive education programs and research", he says.

So why don't governments adopt harm-minimisation or legalisation strategies, instead of continuing a patently lost war? This is where this documentary's limits are reached. Most of those we hear from put the war on drugs down to governmental irrationality.

McNamara goes further, arguing that it's because "we're thinking about this in religious terms ... and moral terms. When you get someone's version of sin put in the penal code, bad things happen." That's obviously partly true, too, as anyone who has listened to the Salvation Army's Brian Watters can tell you.

More needs to be explained and analysed, including why Reagan declared the war on drugs in 1982 in the first place (wasn't it to do with his larger war against foreign and domestic opposition to corporate rule?), why the US attempts to enforce anti-drugs policies on all countries (isn't that to do with US desire to maintain global hegemony?) and why states worldwide have come to rely far more on repression than welfare (isn't that to do with consciously defending growing inequality?).

Yes, the war on drugs has been devastating and tragic. Yes, it is irrational. But the governments who are fighting this war are fully aware of that. They use this war for entirely different purposes than those that they admit to. Those purposes need to be named if we're to understand what the war is all about.

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