There is, I suppose, absolutely no chance that the world leaders currently in New York be exposed to the gamma rays from a neutron bomb of common sense? Thus liberated from the century-and-a-half of cretinous prohibitionism, they could agree as one: The War Against Drugs Is Lost. It is time to bring home the troops, disband the drugs squads, and agree terms of surrender useful to all.
But that would be too much to expect. Instead, at best we can hope for a lot of pious blather about protecting our young, safeguarding our future, never surrendering to the evil godfathers of the drugs industry, et, as they say, cetera.
The demonisation of private drugs consumption is a relatively new phenomenon. After all, Coleridge was interrupted by the visitor from Porlock, not the drugs squad. The American criminalisation of the drugs trade began with US missionaries trying to stamp out opiate abuse in the process of Christianising the Chinese people 150 years ago. Though they succeeded in neither ambition, they became so convinced of the righteousness of their anti-narcotic crusade that they demanded that opiate drugs be banned in the US.
Treaty of Versailles
Such drugs were still available from Hayes Conyngham and Robinson in this country in 1900. Coca Cola initially contained coca, the raw material of cocaine. What internationalised the prohibition on narcotics was the Treaty of Versailles. The US insisted that its criminalisation of opium derivatives (except, for some reason, codeine) be incorporated into the codicil of the treaty, obliging all signatories to domestically outlaw the consumption of such drugs. Otherwise, the US warned, it would refuse to sign the treaty. So everybody signed it; and even though the US then refused to ratify it, the codicils against narcotics passed into law across the world.
This is an antique piece of legislation, as pertinent to our modern world as Model-T Fords, Sopwith Camels and the ocean-going liners. It is also thoroughly American: it reeks of the heedless optimism of the American people, the can-do culture which put men on the moon, which broke the Soviet Empire, which created the first and only superpower, and which once promised (in the words of an American missionary) to raise Shanghai up, until it was just like Kansas City.
Regardless of the all the evidence available to their senses, Americans like to believe that all earthly goals are attainable. So even though every single statistic tells them that the war against personal drugs use is not merely futile, but is wreaking terrible social damage to the fabric of their society, imprisoning consenting adults for their private behaviour, and ejecting them from the centre of a law-abiding community into the criminal wastelands beyond, it makes no difference. The war must be fought. No surrender, no parley, no ceasefire, no peace: war to the end.
Poor peasants
War to the end is now spreading to South America, where last week Bill Clinton armed his clients in Colombia with an array of weaponry, gunships, herbicides and, I dare say, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all, to destroy the coca crops (and in effect the wretchedly poor peasants who depend on them for a living), rather in the way that President Kennedy armed the South Vietnamese - and what a triumph that was.
Look, you don't have to be Colm McCarthy or Paul Tansey to understand the bit that follows. If you cut back at source the supply of a commodity in demand - and the market never lies: people want cocaine - the price of that commodity will rise in the marketplace and other suppliers will take over from the source which has been stopped.
So Clinton debauches the Colombian government with a $1.3 billion bribe to close down its cocaine industry. Excellent. But will that stop the rebels who control much of the coca-growing areas of Colombia? Hardly. And will it stop nearby Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador or Venezuela from nurturing coca plants and poppies, with an eye on the fatly insatiable US drugs market? And then what about - here's a laugh - Africa?
Criminalisation of drugs puts criminals in charge of the entire drugs trade and drives prices up. High prices trigger high crime rates as addicts try to meet those prices. The cycle is under way: full steam around! Moreover, criminalisation exempts governments from their duty to regulate and to tax the drugs their electorates consume, as they do - and very profitably do - alcohol, paracetamol and aspirin. Governments have thus created - and protect by force of arms - a global monopoly for criminal cartels over perhaps the largest (and certainly the fastest-growing) industry in the world.
Organised stupidity
It is all humbug, and one which one day might lead to a continent-wide war in South America as US client-governments try to impose their will on narcotics-harvesting natives. Who in Europe will have the nerve to remove a twiglet from this logjam of organised stupidity? For if we, in the homogenous and tiny island of Ireland cannot even keep drugs out of well-guarded, high-walled Mountjoy Prison, how can the Americans keep drugs out of an entire continent avid for them?
They can't. All they can do is lay waste to millions of acres in South America, and drive peasants from their ancestral lands. Is the EU so lost to all common sense that it cannot urge the US to abandon a policy of rank, worldwide idiocy, which is corrupting societies everywhere? Will even a French voice be raised in New York urging governments to abandon this unwinnable war?
There follows a highly ingenious anagram conveying the francophone answer. Nno.