NEWS | Wednesday, 15 April 2009

PRINT THIS ARTICLE

Harry Vassallo explores the arguments for and against legalisation of all drugs

What if drugs were not banned? What if it were perfectly legal to smoke cannabis, shoot heroin or snort cocaine? What would the social and economic consequences be? Would we lose more than we gain from the present ban?
These questions are never asked in Malta. Well, not out loud anyway. There seems to be a wide and solid consensus that the ban is justified, and that’s that. No policymaker can ever be so bold as to raise the issue in the face of an overwhelming majority. Legalization is effectively taboo.
That is what provokes me. All my adult life I have heard of drug related tragedies: young people dying of overdoses, families wrecked by the addiction of a family member, financially ruined, involved in crime and eventually imprisoned. There have been stories of successful rehabilitation but there seems to be no end to the struggle. We seem to be getting nowhere.
In making a first reconnaissance of the field my first impression was precisely that it is very hard to know the facts, to quantify the problems we face. More than that, resources are scarce and first priority is given to dealing with crushing workloads rather than to gathering scientific data. The various agencies at work in the field find it hard to assess their own performance, let alone to stand back and take in the whole picture together. Enforcement and rehabilitation seem to be on tangential trajectories each too engrossed in their own efforts to consider the other’s concerns and much less the wider concerns beyond their specific remits. Which government agency quantifies the life quality costs to people who suffer burglaries, robberies and muggings?
Elsewhere the debate has carried on for many years and is long past the stage where the case for legalization can be swiftly dismissed or the case for a ban asserted simply as a fact of nature. Economists, enforcement operators, policymakers, psychiatrists and therapists of considerable stature have come in on both sides of the argument. The jury is still out on this issue. In Malta it has never been engaged.

Cigarettes and alcohol
Very simplistically, those in favour of legalization argue that the costs of the ban by far outweigh the benefits to society while their opponents argue that the costs are high but any defaulting in the war on drugs would make them far higher.
Alcohol and nicotine addiction are now treated as such, and join psychotropic drugs in attracting their own therapies in the array provided by rehabilitation agencies such as Sedqa and Caritas. Still they are not banned substances but regulated substances. Why are they dealt with differently by the law?
In part historical reasons come into it. The consumption of alcohol has never been banned in Catholic countries where wine is consecrated in the Mass. It can hardly be demonised. Until fairly recently smoking was a stylish practice, the vice of film stars rather than the suicidal habit of the ignorant and the addict. In both cases excise tax was levied on the pleasure and formed one of the earliest sources of revenue of modern government. Both were carefully regulated, production being allowed only under license and cultivation of tobacco, perfectly possible in Malta, banned long before any ban was thought necessary on the cultivation of cannabis.
There is also the history of prohibition to consider. The experience of the 1920s in the United States makes governments wary of seeking to prohibit these known harmful substances since the result is likely to be not only a loss of revenue for government but a massive injection of funds into the coffers of smugglers and the purveyors of moonshine. The enforcement of such prohibition also meant the dedication of government resources human and economic to dealing with the problem. The social cost of turning ordinary people into criminals for consuming or providing these substances may never have been quantified but it was certainly a cost.
The pragmatic approach in the case of alcohol and tobacco has meant the development of other tactics to suppress their consumption such as the ban on advertising and the restrictions on consumption by age and location. Public education campaigns seem to be making headway in undoing the effect of decades of advertising.
When these examples are used by those in favour of legalization the response is a claim that there is a qualitative leap to be made from alcohol to heroin and other drugs which dramatically alter the behaviour of those who take them. Reference is made to the fact that the consumption of alcohol rose by 350% on the removal of prohibition. Who would want anything like that to happen with drugs?

Lethal because illegal?
On the other hand it is argued that alcohol addiction can wreck lives as effectively as any other addiction, while heroin reduces users to listless lumps but only produces constipation and sexual impotence as direct side effects. It becomes lethal because it is illegal: through the use of contaminated syringes causing the spread the of hepatitis and HIV as well as through overdosing thanks to basement apothecaries and soulless profiteers who add any white powder they can lay their hands on to the mix. The preventable deaths effectively caused by the ban are taken to be collateral damage and too easily discounted.
The big question is how many people would use drugs if they did not risk going to jail? As things stand the number of users kept down by the prohibition is already far more than the rehabilitation facilities can handle.
Would legalization allow Government to tax the presently illegal substances and multiply the service available? Another big question. Training social workers and other professionals cannot be done overnight and as things stand the right people cannot easily be found. It may not be just a matter of throwing money at the problem. Burnout in this sector is often rapid and it is not helped by the necessity of supporting clients who inevitably weave from one side of the law to another, their arduous climb out of addiction often defeated by a conviction taking place years after the fact.
If the prohibition is the cause of deaths and disease, lifting the ban and adding to the number of addicts would also increase the number of third party victims: principally the children of drug addicts who, if they escape the serious health threats are also heavily exposed to neglect, abuse and social disadvantage.
Nobody can quantify the effect on the country’s productivity if the ban were to be lifted and a policy decision taken to carry an enlarged number of drug and social welfare dependants. Nobody has shown a serious interest in quantifying the present cost either. How many chronically unemployed people are in fact addicts being carried by the system today?

Regulated reality
The debate faces serious difficulties when we come to the idea of regulation. If drug taking became legal, the where, how and who would have to be regulated as it is for alcohol and nicotine. Can airline pilots be allowed to fly under the influence, and can they be allowed to fly at all if they are drug users? How about doctors and surgeons, the people who dose the water supply with chlorine and hundreds of other people with obscure but critical jobs? On the other hand prohibition ensures that we will never find out who of these people is suffering from an addiction until some disaster takes place. We could regulate to make jobs secure on condition that rehabilitation is successfully undertaken but at present divulging an addiction would mean even more than job loss – criminal proceedings and a possible jail term.
One argument in favour of legalization is that enforcement raises street prices becoming not a measure of success but a stimulus for the creation of the next generation of drugs, cheaper and more devastating: from cocaine to crack. The politics of drugs is very much like the politics of everything else. The right favours heavy enforcement: the bombing of cocaine plantations and the shooting down of planes suspected of smuggling while the left points out that such end-of-pipe actions only put more money into the hands of the cartels and stimulates further development of lethal recreational concoctions.
What is being done upstream? What prepares us to avoid addiction? What research is being done to relieve us from it once we are caught? What is there in our lifestyles that sets us up for it? Could it be that rehab efforts are undermined at both ends by disproportionate enforcement which submerges the reality to be dealt with and also by the promotion of impossible lifestyles depressing the masses by setting standards of youth, beauty, and instant gratification that cannot be achieved by anyone in the real world? Does anybody relate all this to the drug problem or are we focussed on jailing everyone associated with drugs or on rehabilitating those few of them who seek treatment?

Invisible economy
Has anybody seriously explored the volume of economic resources diverted into the drug economy? A syringe count, multiplied by the street price of heroin, could give us a serious shock and that would still give us no idea of what is levied by the crooks who push cocaine, crack, ecstasy and the latest brew. While the VAT Department and the Inland Revenue Department squeeze the last cent from people who fail to fill in their wretched forms, millions of euros in lost revenue pass them by in this invisible economy.
Granted that a legalized drugs market would be a fraction of the present illegal market in economic terms, it would still generate revenue and figure in our GDP statistics. It is one thing to buy drugs from a pharmacy that is bound to all the revenue burocracy and quite another to hand the money over to a pusher.
What of the cost of investigating, prosecuting and jailing drug users and pushers? Has anybody ventured a guess as to the proportion of petty crimes that are in fact drug related? What is the cost of investigating, prosecuting and punishing the perpetrators there? What is the opportunity cost from employing a very significant proportion of police resources in these activities? Has it crossed anybody’s mind to quantify the cost of police absence or neglect caused by their preoccupation with drug cases? Would it be possible to imagine a more tangible police presence in our towns and villages to deter non-drug related thefts and burglaries? How about the time consumed in court?
How about the cost to the country in judicial time? There must be an opportunity cost there too. How much of the delay inflicted on the parties to civil suits could be avoided or reduced?

Police resources
Health costs? Would the increase in the number of drug users due to legalization offset any saving through a reduction of the proportion of drug users admitted to hospital for emergency or other care? One must assume that drugs provided by reputable pharmaceutical firms would be clearly labelled and contain what they claim to contain in the stated dose. The chances of contracting hepatitis or HIV would be lower than the levels maintained at present through the free distribution of sterile syringes. Would it mean that a saving would be made or would more resources be available for non-drug dependant patients?
The reduction or even the elimination of drug related crime would do more than save on police resources. It would reduce the crime rate enhancing the safe haven image of the country touted on tourism brochures and significantly enhance the quality of life of those most vulnerable to muggings and robberies, principally senior citizens. I am quite sure than no statistics exist to document the devastating effect of even a minor robbery or mugging on the old and frail. Quite probably not even the incidence of such crimes is documented separately from the generality of burglaries, robberies and muggings. This is what economists would consider to be an externality: something far from easily quantifiable and therefore totally ignored.
What is the cost to society of rendering a significant portion of its youth cohort delinquent? Those who are caught and might somehow figure in statistics must be a mere sliver. Caught or not, a significant proportion step beyond the pale of the law because they use drugs illegally or commit other crimes to sustain their habit. Most of them would never have fallen foul of the law otherwise. They and their children are affected in one way or another. It is yet another externality, unquantified and ignored. Of those in the drug trade for the money, the international nature of the trade puts them in contact with international criminals and organized crime, another importation we could do without, yet another externality with unknown but painful costs.

Interdependency
The participation in international alliances for the suppression of the drug trade has to be another drug related cost to the state but let us ignore that aspect. Of far greater weight is the matter of existing in a drug infested world. Much of the present attitude to drugs is imported both from the drug culture aspect and from the combat/therapy aspects. If Malta were to legalize drugs unilaterally it would set teeth on edge among its current allies in the war on drugs and risk becoming a drugs tourism venue: both undesirable results. Is our policy determined by the policies of others? Are we over anxious to use other people’s thinking caps on such issues because they are bigger and wiser than us?
Any debate of this issue must necessarily raise more questions than answers. In exploring it I have convinced myself of just one matter: we must know more. Before any change to present policy can be contemplated we should have as much data as possible at our finger tips. Collecting it is never an extravagance. Above all we must know whether we are gaining or losing on the challenges we face. Right now nobody seems to know. Not knowing the challenge, not wanting to know can never justify any kind of action whether based on our present policy or on any other we may adopt.

PRINT THIS ARTICLE

Any comments?
If you wish your comments to be published in our Letters pages please click button below.
Please write a contact number and a postal address where you may be contacted.