The ‘War on Drugs’ is, In Fact, an Actual Conspiracy
Consciousness changing substances such as cacti, fermented fruits (alcohol), mushrooms and plants have been used by humans from at least the time of the first known civilisations, but in all probability since not long after Homo sapiens first started to roam the plains of Africa. More recently lab-synthesised chemicals have been added to the list. The line between use and misuse and fun and addiction can be very fine and varies according to individuals, substances used, and cultural norms. A nondogmatic and evidence-based approach is, therefore, an absolute necessity.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines drugs thus: 1. A medicine or other substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body. 2. A substance taken for its narcotic or stimulant effect, often illegally. Drugs are not, however, a homogeneous group. Moreover, they are highly dose dependent, and their effects are extremely contextual.
The prohibition of certain drugs, most notably cannabis, has been arbitrary and has a long history of being subject to political expediency that is often racist in origin. On what basis was the decision to make cannabis illegal in most countries around the world but not alcohol and/or tobacco? The decision certainly could not have rested on the harm caused because based on evidence, cannabis has been shown to cause substantially less harm individually and to societies than do tobacco or alcohol. Drugs outlawed by the state, often under the influence of special interest groups with an agenda rather than evidence, are used primarily as not just a means of social control, but also to create profits for arms dealers and companies supplying the police with equipment and/or building prisons. Moreover, quality control of products is often very limited or simply does not occur, and many people are forced into, or slip into, destructive patterns of behaviour in order to obtain money to feed their habit, such as theft and prostitution.
With respect to ‘The War on Drugs,’ and ‘The War on Terror,’ you might as well have ‘The War on Bananas’ or ‘The War on Bamboozlement’ or ‘The War on Backache’ because it isn’t going to succeed. Of course, that assumes that your ‘War on Whatever’ is actually meant to succeed rather than being an excuse to incarcerate people and a smokescreen for setting up a police state by stealth and artificially stimulate the arms industry. Many news agencies take these declared wars at face-value however, which is a shame when you think about it: CNN, Fox, BBC and a multitude of other news agencies report on ‛liberation’ or ‛terrorism’ and rarely, if ever, on the production, selling and buying of arms.
What was the real agenda when President Nixon announced the so-called “War on Drugs” in 1971? Was it a genuinely altruistic attempt to free addicts from the shackles of addiction? Or did it have a covert agenda to stimulate the arms trade, bolster the power of unsavoury dictators allied to United States interests, and stimulate the criminal justice system and the for-profit prison-industrial-complex to imprison millions of people (and disproportionately, black American men) in order to boost the private prison industry? If we are to judge by the results then there can be no doubt that the evidence indicates it was the second, whether deliberately or inadvertently. Given that this goes unrecognised by the UN and every US administration since Nixon, we can accurately and evidentially describe this as a (Machiavellian) conspiracy at the highest levels of the economic pyramid. Or am I missing something? Dr Gabor Maté makes these observations about the “War on Drugs,”
If the goal of the War on Drugs is to discourage or prevent drug use, it has failed. Among young people in North America drug use has reached unprecedented levels and enjoys unprecedented tolerance…If the War’s aim is to end or even curtail the international drug trade, it has failed there, too. If it is to suppress the cultivation of plants from which the major substances of abuse are derived: once again, abject failure…The economic burden imposed by the War on Drugs is difficult to estimate, but most authorities agree that in the U.S. it’s in the range of tens of billions of dollars annually. Gary Becker, Professor of Economics and Sociology of Business, has calculated $100 billion per year as a minimum figure…Quite apart from the multiple billions squandered on this futile war, the economic burdens of criminalization are incalculable.
Hitting the nail on the head, he concludes by saying,
Undeterred by the miserable failure of its War on Drugs, the U.S. administration has taken upon itself to oppose decriminalization and harm reduction programs anywhere on the globe…The War on Drugs fails, and is doomed to perpetual failure, because it is directed not against the root causes of drug addiction and of the international black market in drugs, but only against some drug producers, traffickers and users. More fundamentally, the War is doomed because neither the methods of war nor the war metaphor itself is appropriate to a complex social problem that calls for compassion, self-searching insight and factually researched scientific understanding [emphasis added].
This blanket declaration of war in 1971 (the year in which the author of this book was born) has had many extremely negative externalities, a huge rise in violent crime being the most glaringly obvious. It necessitated criminals acquiring guns for protection from each other and the police. In consequence, the police and armed services required a greater level of lethal force, which created a feedback loop of ever-increasing levels of force, a negative externality of the illegality of the drugs trade if ever there was one. The drug trade helped cement the power and influence of the arms lobby over money politics. It also bolstered the power of ruthlessly violent criminal drug cartels worldwide but most especially in Mexico and Columbia. There is no doubt that political expediency, economic interests and power politics were the driving forces of the so-called War on Drugs. The continuation of the War on Drugs bolsters the power of organised crime, the prison-industrial-complex and the military-industrial-complex and yet it carries on unquestioned at the highest levels of government. This can accurately be described as a conspiracy.
Ordinary people, for example, casual pot-smokers, occasional ravers, students requiring study stimulants, long distance lorry drivers needing ‘uppers’ to stay awake, were criminalised on a mass scale and forced to associate with hardcore criminals when they otherwise wouldn’t have. But the desire to get high in one manner or another is, for many people, a basic human drive, not dissimilar to the sex drive. And like the sex drive, it needs to be handled with intelligence, care, joy, passion and sensitivity. Herein lies the heart of the matter: The contextual nature of drugs and the ‘get-high drive’ can be used by individuals and societies to relax, socialise, enjoy themselves, manage stress and/or discover who they are. Although it is unlikely that there will ever be a zero level of harm caused by drugs, evidence from Holland and Portugal and research by Dr David Nutt in the UK suggest approaches that are based on criminal justice cause the most harm, while approaches based on harm-reduction and health are the most conducive for more harmonious communities. We humans need an unambiguous universal human right: The Right to Cognitive Freedom.
Let me state now and for the record before anyone accuses me of promoting mass indiscriminate drug use, I absolutely do not recommend ingesting large quantities, or even moderate quantities for that matter, of LSD (Lysergic Acid), MDMA/MDA (Ecstasy), Magic (Psilocybin) Mushrooms or N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) as part of some sort of tripped-out-spazzy-free-for-all. At the same time, I do not recommend that adult humans not experiment with these psychoactive fungi, cacti, plants, and chemicals. An informed adult human should be able to make his or her own informed choices about ingesting, or not, psychoactive substances and altering his or her consciousness within a safe protected environment, free from governmental or societal interference. The sovereign right of well-informed conscious free-thinking adult humans to choose whether to ingest psychoactive substances and alter their consciousness is fundamentally a human rights issue. Care is always needed because context and dosage can be the difference between a meeting with Jesus or (metaphorically) visiting Guantanamo Bay. Just say know to drugs.
The right to choose to experiment with changing one’s own consciousness through ingesting narcotics of one sort or another is a human rights issue. Just as consenting adult homosexuals once had their human rights curtailed and often trampled upon, so too, have long-term psychonauts, casual/occasional users and those who experiment half a dozen times in their lives. If adult humans have apprised themselves of the requisite information, spoken with people who have experience of the substance in question, and set up safe environments at a particular times and locations, why should they not experiment with LSD, magic mushrooms, Ayahuasca, peyote, coca leaf, opium or cannabis? It is a matter of historical record that the alcohol prohibition in 1920s America was an abject failure and, indeed, so has the ongoing so-called War on Drugs. In most countries of the world drug laws are a dismal failure on almost any measure. Time for a change.
But narcotics do require some form of regulation as a ‘tripped-out-spazzy-free-for-all’ being carried out willy-nilly can lead to some very negative consequences. Although any substance can become habit-forming, some are intrinsically more addictive, opiates being the most obvious, and need extreme care if one is not to become an addict. Psychoactive substances, such as LSD, if taken too frequently by people suffering with unaddressed emotional or mental-health problems, can lead to temporary, or sometimes long-term, psychosis. These are the victims of a consumerist approach to sacred medicine. In respect of sacred medicines, the indigenous shamanic cultures of the non-Western world (most especially in parts of north and South America) and their lineage of ingestion within a safe, protected and guided environments are far ahead of the Western cultures where Shamanism has been totally wiped out or assimilated by the emergent Catholic Church. Societies still exist today that practise shamanism with entheogens, and they have done so within a safe and protected manner for thousands of years. The Western consumerist approach has much to learn from them.
Professor David Nutt, the former chairman of the UK Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) makes the following observations in his article Hypothesising an Alternative: Applying the Scientific Process to Drug Policy,
I strongly believe that we should focus on public health approaches to the drug problem, and decriminalise the possession of drugs for personal use, for the following simple reason; ‒ If users are addicted then they are ill, and criminal sanctions are an inappropriate way to deal with an illness. If they are not addicted then criminalisation will almost always lead to greater harms to the user than the effects of the drug… There is good evidence that decriminalisation does not radically increase drug use and can reduce some measures of harm, as shown by a balanced review of the first ten years of the Portugal experience of decriminalisation.
Nutt further goes on to say,
…Remarkably, young people who have grown up in the Netherlands, where cannabis use is decriminalised, are less likely to be users of the drug than young people in Britain, the US and many other countries which criminalise young users. Perhaps the cachet of illegality here promotes some use…An increase in the availability of some drugs may actually lead to a reduction in the use of other more harmful drugs, so reducing net harms to society…Regulating access to drugs such as cannabis as in the Dutch model reduces the need for users to go to dealers. So it minimises their exposure to people whose main goal is to get their clients onto the most addictive substances such as heroin and crack…
He concludes by saying,
… Approaches which explicitly reject an evidence-based public health approach, but instead focus on incarceration and criminalisation of addicts, continue to utterly fail, at enormous financial and human cost [emphasis added] … Criminal networks coalesce around drug supply; America in the era of alcohol prohibition was the heyday of organised crime. The lack of quality control in illegal drug markets leads to wholly unnecessary harms like deadly outbreaks of anthrax in heroin injectors. Dealers with concerns only for their profits adulterate and mis-describe drugs, for example selling the much more potent and riskier drug PMMA as the less risky ecstasy.
Narcotic usage requires some form of regulation, but this must be evidence based and not stem from ignorance, prejudice, or a politician’s knee-jerk reaction. Opiates require a greater level of control than does alcohol because opiates are by their very nature intrinsically physically addictive in a way that alcohol is not, or at least not for the majority of people. Alcohol consumption requires rules both concerning harming oneself and family through excessive use and for performing various tasks, most obviously driving a car. Cannabis also requires a different set of regulations; again, the Dutch and Portuguese models are two of the most effective European strategies from the post WWII period, as cannabis is intrinsically non-physically addictive and has no overdose level. Legalised/decriminalised, such as in Thailand, cannabis or other recreational narcotics can also create employment and provide tax-income for state services.
Regulations regarding the use of narcotics should be evidence driven, taking into account the addictiveness of the substance, the possibility of causing mental/emotional problems, the difference between effective level and LD-50 level, local patterns of historical usage, and the appropriateness of the substance in the local environment. Those individuals who are genetically predisposed to addiction might well merit different sets of regulations, or at the very least more education and counselling than the general population.
Sustainability of manufacturing a particular drug is also worth considering because the production of cocaine and crack from the coca leaf requires the clearing of rainforests and the poisoning of the environment. In other words, while there could conceivably be ‘fair-trade Cannabis’ or ‛fair-trade opium,’ unless there are new modes of production, there cannot be ‘fair-trade cocaine’; it cannot currently be produced in a non-polluting, environment-friendly manner. Therefore, while there is a case for legalising, decriminalising and regulating the trade in coca-leaf or pharmaceutical amphetamine sulphate, as an ‘upper’ alternative to cocaine, there can be no credible case for legalising cocaine or crack under current cultivation methods in any sustainable paradigm. Different cultivation and processing procedures might be sustainable if they were legal.
In addition to the libertarian aspect of a radical rethinking of narcotic regulation, there is also an extremely large therapeutic side to many substances and practices. In the Shamanic traditions of North and South America, Central and Northern Eurasia, and some parts of Africa (The Gabon for example), various types of psychoactive mushroom, cacti and plants containing DMT or similar compounds are used to heal trauma and/or gain direct access to normally inaccessible information. Psychoactive substances such as ergot (active compound Lysergic Acid), Ayahuasca (DMT), Iboga and Magic Mushrooms have been part of human culture since before the rise of Sumer (30,000+ years). Shamanism, scientific in that it involves experimentation, observation, repetition, and conclusions based on an evaluation of evidence, has long been vilified in the European tradition, first by the Romans and later the Catholic Church. However, any one of The Beatles, Aldous Huxley, Dale Pendell, or Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis would be able to testify to the positive inspirational qualities of the entheogenic experience; indeed, they have all left a body of work that would be substantially less impressive had they not experimented with psychoactive substances. The so-called “War on Drugs” is an abject failure, and it must end.
