THIS space dealt with the issue of drugs a month ago and, apart from a nice letter from a doctor in complete agreement with what I was saying, I have had no response at all. Let me urge both readers now: pay attention. This is serious. So forgive me for going back to something the pair of you read four weeks ago.
I return to the ill founded, idiotic ban on drugs because four of my friends have had bikes stolen in a week. Bike theft is so common in Dublin, yet it is unreported because it is uninvestigated. Bike owners take the crime for granted. Nobody has the least idea how many bikes are stolen in Dublin every year. Nobody does anything to check on secondhand bicycle shops to ensure that they handle only lawfully acquired bikes. I suspect that bikes are the single most stolen object in the capital city most street crime in the city is to do with the acquisition of other people's bikes.
As a bike owner who has lost half a dozen bikes, I do not exactly approve of this. As a bike owner, I would love to see a single prosecution just one dear Lord, just one - of a bike thief. I know none will occur. I know that nobody places any value on the property of bike owners. Has any Minister for Justice or Garda Commissioner ever instructed that the Garda Siochana take the matter seriously?
Serious Stuff
It is serious. Very serious. My friends bikes cost £1,000 between them. One has to earn about £540 to spend £250 on a bike. No doubt the State is so content that it has acquired over half of a person's income at source to worry too much about the theft of the remainder. Since all bicycle owners expect to have a bike stolen every three years or so, and since there must be 200,000 hike owners in Dublin, that rounds out at about £50 million worth of theft over a three year span. No matter. Cycle theft necessarily is from cycle owners, a politically insubstantial species.
Since we can expect neither the State nor the police of the State to take the matter seriously, perhaps we might, as a disregarded sector, seek common ground with other victims of theft, the more important ones, crimes against property - which are investigated. And what unites us all is that we are all victims of this futile war against drugs. Most bike thieves steal to pay for drugs.
This issue is not whether we approve of drugs, just as it is not a matter of whether one approves of the Khmer Rouge. The issue is whether it is possible to wage a successful war against illegal drug taking. Every society has found the one answer: it is not.
The Americans led the way here. Indeed, they actually invented the war. Opiate taking was not illegal in Victorian times; one could acquire laud anum and cocaine, unprescribed by a doctor, in a score or more of patent medicines. It was the Americans, convulsed by a missionary puritanism a century ago, made drug taking a criminal matter. Later they did the same with alcohol, with quite splendidly successful results.
Prohibition Persists
And, of course, alcohol prohibition collapsed. Drug prohibition has not. It was put into the general accords of the Treaty of Versailles; and, though virtually all else from that deplorable treaty has withered, the general accord against drug taking has remained. It is the last remnant of State nannyism, in which the State deploys the criminal law to control an individual's personal behaviour.
Why? Why should the State insist that those who take drugs for their personal pleasure automatically become criminals? Though I think heroin use is perfectly idiotic, why should I criminalise it? There are many things I think idiotic motor cycle races, sex with barristers, women's tennis; but I do not think the forces of the State should repress them by use of the criminal law. This is what has happened with drugs; and, predictably, it has, failed completely.
Why? Because the State is not very good at regulating individual behaviour. We know this from the inglorious history of totalitarianism which, like the criminalisation of drugs, is another invention of the 20th century; indeed, the two are probably related, both being predicated on notions of the individual perfectability of the human species.
Human beings are not perfect. Half an hour in the newsroom of The Irish Times will tell you that. An even shorter amount of time in an American police station will confirm it, in spades. Pun intended. Something like 40 per cent of American black males under the age of 30 have done time or have been on probation; and almost solely because of drug taking, and the criminality which results from it.
Half a million Americans are in jail because of drugs. The American war against narcotics costs $75 billion a year in law enforcement, with some $10 billion stolen every year. Some 400,000 police officers fight the drugs war, and with as much glorious success as 400,000 Americans had in the war in Indo China.
What has been achieved? Nothing, other than the creation of vast fortunes for the staggeringly wicked people who run the drugs cartels, who will not be beaten, ever. The simple truth is that criminalisation of the drugs trade has handed it on a plate to the criminal cartels.
Biggest industry
Narcotics are now probably the single biggest consumer industry in America, are totally unregulated and are run by a narcotics conspiracy which yields vast fortunes to the crime monopoly, costs the state a fortune and yields not a brass cent to the central treasury. If that doesn't define failure, what does?
Europe has not yet learned this simple lesson - worse, the Netherlands has recently been pressured by France to tighten up on its liberal laws on drugs. One country acting alone merely attracts junkies. If we wait for America to take the lead, we wait for peaches to grow in the Arctic. It is time for Europe, the continent of Versailles, to undo the last strands of that wretched treaty and finally make Dublin safe for cyclists.