WHAT have Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sherlock Holmes, Stephen Maturin, and Havelock Ellis got in common? They all took drugs which nowadays are illegal.
It is worth remembering - this fatuous war against the private use of drugs is an invention of the 20th century. Laudanum was sold openly in shops in Victorian times. Millions of Americans routinely took opiates in the 1860s. The criminalisation of drug consumption resulted from the American obsession with China - "We will raise Shanghai up and up, until it is just like Kansas City," as one missionary put it.
The Manchu government had tried to suppress opium consumption from the 1840s but it was beyond the powers of untotalitarian central government to prevent impoverished peasants indulging in such a pleasant drug. The American president, Teddy Roosevelt, as part of his mission to make China just like Kansas City internationalised the issue by calling The Hague convention on opium in 1912.
What was intended to suppress opiates in China ended up suppressing them throughout the world; opiate controls were slipped into the general accords at Versailles in 1919. Thus the treaty which led to the second World War also led to the far longer and infinitely more futile war against drugs.
Listen carefully. We have lost that war. Attempts to criminalise an individual's behaviour by corrupting the legal code have achieved little except amass vast fortunes for crime cartels.
Addictive
The issue is not whether one should approve of addictive drugs. We already do that - some people, including, I think, myself, are addicted to caffeine, and we do not criminalise that some people, including, I think, myself, are addicted to alcohol, and we do not criminalise that some people are addicted to nicotine, and we do not criminalise that some people are addicted to barbiturates, and we do not criminalise that, but pass over control of it to a medicalist monopoly, so as to enable its members enrich themselves.
So why do we criminalise recreational drug use? So as to protect children, I hear. Good argument. Look closely at your living room wall, a few inches above the ground. What do you see? You see electricity in a socket. Deadly stuff. Do you outlaw it? Do you criminalise its users? Do you prevent adults from turning on a light because afraid that one day a might have uninhibited access to the electrons within?
You do not. You control the supply - but you do not infantalise the entire population - by telling them whether or not they may turn on a light.
This does not stand as approval of drug taking. Far from it. I disapprove of drugs I disapprove of. I detest the notion of sticking a needle in my arm. The idea of cocaine blowing my brains out, causing habituation or even addiction, and eroding my nasal septum disgusts me no doubt as a Mormon is disgusted by my enthusiasm for caffeine and booze.
Love of freedom
Our attempts to govern the private behaviour of individuals, not just in narcotics, has failed. This is not because of some principled love of freedom of those individuals but because the State is extremely bad at coercing people into doing what they do not want to do, without, that is, employing draconian laws, batteries of police informers and the suspension of personal liberties.
And even then the State fails. It failed, as we know, in the Soviet Union. The ceaseless firing squads despatching thousands of wretches a year in China suggests that even that state cannot make people behave as it wants.
Even aside from the issue of personal liberty the right of every adult to make a choice about his or her life so long as it does not damage the lives of others the issue of the practicability of the laws, and the adverse consequences of those laws should cause us to wonder about legalisation of drugs.
Why on earth should I want to turn a heroin user into a criminal? Why? Though I might think heroin abuse is perfectly idiotic, what good reason is there to imprison an otherwise laudable person for that behaviour? And why should I force the price of intrinsically cheap heroin so high that he must turn to crime to support his habit?
Fill our jails
Is that sensible? Is that prudent? Is it in my interest to have a series of virtually unenforceable laws, the only outcome of which is to fill our jails and to make an extremely cheap drug extremely expensive? It is not.
I can look at it in a personal way - at the many, many attempts to steal my car, costing me a few hundred pounds. Unpleasant enough but not as unpleasant at what happened one day last week when four Mountjoy Jail prisoners died - three from Aids and one by his own hand. It does not take a particularly shrewd or acute eye to see here a self defeating policy in complete and utter ruins.
The ruins will get worse, as they have in America, where the futile war against personal drugs consumption costs $75 billion per year of public money, is the reason for the imprisonment of 500,000 Americans, leads to some $10 billion annually in robberies, and absorbs the energy of 400,000 policemen.
Serious crime in the USA is up fivefold from what it was 30 years ago - and not despite the vast battery of laws the Americans have introduced but be cause of them. And why? In order to prevent people self administering certain drugs the state disapproves of. The result? The price of drugs is increased fifty fold and the entire trade in them becomes a criminal monopoly.
This is stupid. The problem is that attempts to back out of this mess cannot be ours alone, otherwise every junkie and every spaced out crack addict will come trekking to Ireland and will fill our streets with snoozing derelicts. Europe should be grown and should treat adults as grown ups. Decriminalise drugs make them conform to safety standards, just like aspirin and paracetamol. And let people choose, otherwise we are engaged in a crusade which will be every bit as successful as the one to reclaim Jerusalem.