Focus in fight on drugs has gone to pot

A few weeks ago I talked to several drug addicts in Dublin and to people involved in the treatment of drug addicts. All of them concurred that there was more heroin available on the streets of Dublin now then there has ever been. They acknowledged that there had been a drought over a few weeks last March but that now Dublin was awash with heroin. The drought had been caused, apparently, by the capture of a large consignment of heroin but, happily (as one of the addicts said), there had been no further major seizures, certainly none of such significance as to interrupt the supply even for a day.

One might wonder how this could be so, given the high-profile success of the Garda and the Criminal Assets Bureau in targeting the drug barons and putting so many of them in jail in the last year. The answer is, regrettably, that the success is largely illusory. And for a few reasons.

The first is that for so long as there is a frenetic demand for hard drugs, there will be supply. There is simply too much money to be made from the trade and such a relatively small chance of being caught. The prize is well worth the risk.

There is such relatively little chance of being caught in drug criminality for the simple reason that those who are harmed by the crime are themselves implicated in it. This is quite unlike any other crime, where the person harmed has a real motive to seek retribution, for instance, someone who has been robbed or assaulted.

Anyway, what this means is that even if all the main drug barons were put away, new ones would quickly take their place because of the net incentive: the money minus the risk of being caught.

The second reason for the illusion of success against the drug trade is that the Garda has targeted, in the main, not the hard drugs business but the soft drugs business. And to illustrate this point I am obliged to resort to the annual report of the Garda Siochana for 1996. This acknowledges (page 62): "Cannabis resin was involved in approximately half of controlled drug offences" (in 1996). Ecstasy accounted for a further 12 per cent and heroin for only 15 per cent.

The report continues: "Cannabis was involved in 62 per cent of the cases where controlled drugs were seized and analysed during 1996" (page 63).

The report shows that there were 3,412 cases of cannabis and cannabis resin seizures in 1996, involving a total of 1,935 kg. This compares with just 664 cases of seizures of heroin (one-fifth of the cannabis seizures).

Several of the highest-profile arrests of so-called drug barons, such as Patrick Holland, concern people allegedly involved, not in hard drugs but in cannabis.

In May the Ministerial Task Force on drugs, chaired by Pat Rabbitte, produced its second report. This dealt, in part, with the use of soft drugs. In a section dealing with the effects of cannabis (page 39) it stated that "cannabis is not usually considered to produce physical dependence" but went on: "Psychological dependence has been noted in some users."

It noted "cannabis increases the workload of the heart" and people who have some forms of mental illness may suffer a relapse if they take cannabis.

That was all they could come up with. Some people have a psychological dependence on cannabis (like some people have a psychological dependence on Coronation Street) and in the cases of some people it is bad for their heart and nerves (like the Progressive Democrats are bad for the heart and nerves of some people?).

The task force was similarly unimpressive on the harmful effects of ecstasy use.

That second report avoided a piece of silliness in the first, published in October 1996. This described cannabis as a gateway to hard drugs. They thought better, apparently, of this line of argument by the time they got to their second report seven months later. And they were right.

The first report on the use of hard drugs showed clearly and graphically that hard drug use is concentrated almost exclusively in the deprived urban areas of our cities, notably Dublin. The gateway to hard drugs is clearly deprivation, and any suggested link with soft drugs is, at least in our circumstances, nonsense.

The case for the decriminalisation of the sale, supply and possession of these drugs is overwhelming, but that is not the point here. The point here is that massive Garda effort and resources have gone into the detection and prevention of the crimes associated with cannabis and that this is a thorough waste of time. If all that Patrick Holland et al did was to supply and sell cannabis and ecstasy, they would be hardly deserving of the slightest censure, let alone prosecution and imprisonment.

In the absence of the decriminalisation of the supply and sale of cannabis and ecstasy, the Garda should treat lightly crimes associated with these, as they do such infractions as being in public houses after closing time, driving without wearing seat belts and brothel-keeping. We need wide tolerance, not zero tolerance.

There would be a positive benefit to this, apart from that of saving Garda time and resources as well as the resources of the prosecution service and courts. This would be to remove the trade in soft drugs from the hardened criminal fraternity, undermining their profits and their livelihoods.

The recently published report of the Steering Group on the Efficiency and Effectiveness of the Garda Siochana (which, incidentally shows that Ireland has by far the lowest incidence of crime per 1,000 population of countries selected for comparison) avoids this issue entirely.

But surely, central to the role of the Garda should be an identification of the social harms that are appropriate for a police force to monitor and prevent and their withdrawal from those areas of activity that relate to behaviour that causes no social harm or minimal social harm or where policing is inappropriate?

A great deal of social harm is caused by those who misappropriate public resources (e.g. unpaid taxes) or abuse the environment, and yet the focus of the Garda is hardly directed at all at these. Surely policing in such areas is entirely appropriate? It is significant, for instance, that the crime of tax-evasion is not even listed among the catalogue of crimes in the annual Garda reports.

In the meantime, the Garda would do well to forget about cannabis, unless of course their Minister drives them to pot.