1. SMH, 3/11/95 | 2. SMH, 22/5/97

1.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Legal, high-quality drug supplies,
not moral fervour, will save our children,” The Sydney
Morning Herald, November 3, 1995, p. 12.

The drugs battle is not being won, it is being lost. The recent tragic death of a teenage girl who took the “designer” drug ecstasy at a dance party aroused the familiar exploitative response, with much plucking of the heartstrings of the community and ranting from those who think that there are easy solutions to complex problems. But that story, and the clear evidence that such drugs, as well as amphetamines and LSD (acid), are easily available to young people, surely shows that the policies of prohibition and heavy penalties simply do not work.

So does the evidence at the NSW Police Royal Commission. That demonstrates the truism that when a business is highly profitable, and one in which a significant number of people are eager consumers, prohibition only leads to a thriving underground market and a corrupt police force.

It is clear to anyone who wants to investigate that many young people these days, like the young at all times of disillusion with the parental generation, do not believe the propaganda they get through official channels. The use of both legal and illegal drugs among the young seems to be increasing. The deliberate confusion by many propagandists of legal drugs, like alcohol and tobacco, with illegal drugs directly contributes to the casualty rate from illegal drugs. Those who equate the two in the term “substance abuse” are culpable, since they thereby minimise the dangers of the illegal drugs in relative terms.

Very few drugs are harmful if taken moderately and in full knowledge of their strength and contraindications. Even when they are harmful in some respects, there are compensations which even a person fully cognisant of harmful effects can rationally opt for. Alcohol has its uses, even in more than healthy quantities, as does nicotine. To deny that there are real benefits and pleasures from both, even if they should have adverse health effects, is merely dishonest. But the great difference with alcohol and tobacco is that they are subject to very strict quality control in their production, and fairly precisely measured dosages. The move to giving more information as to alcohol content and numbers of “standard drinks” per bottle is a valuable addition to the protection of consumers.

But the problem with the dance party drugs, as well as with drugs like heroin and cocaine, is that their illegality means there is no consumer protection. This has been the cause of recent deaths in Canberra. In fact, heroin is a drug which taken in appropriate quantities and uncontaminated by other substances is almost totally harmless. It is highly addictive for a proportion of the population, and that is the source of most of the social disasters which it produces.

Such people, if they could obtain properly made heroin in standard dosage at low prices, would suffer little or no harm at all. The majority of heroin users, as everyone who takes the trouble to find out knows, can take it or leave it alone. Much the same applies, of course, to alcohol and even nicotine. Crack cocaine may be a more difficult problem, but there has not been a great deal of calm analysis of its pharmacology or addictiveness. It is clearly extremely harmful as used at present. Marijuana probably is harmful, too, but not in small quantities. Purer forms, like hashish, are sometimes dangerous because they are cut or adulterated with other drugs, even opium.

The point is that apart from apocalyptic fears of a society addicted to drugs and plunged into mindless reveries, the arguments against drug use are pretty weak. They are a matter of moralism and fear of abuse.

The prohibitionists have one valid point — it is true that the consumption of alcohol dropped in the United States during the prohibition era. But the harm done to those who did consume, and the accompanying social abuses and crime, hardly justified this. If addiction is a problem, the solution is far more research devoted to the nature of addiction, and to the development of drugs which deliver the same gratifications but without resulting addiction or aggressively anti-social behaviour.

However, it is clear that many critics of drug use are motivated primarily by moral distaste for the pleasures to be derived from them. They would rather mass corruption and crime than give up their superior moral stance.

There is, too, a tendency for relatively harmless drugs to be made illegal simply because they can be abused. Amphetamines are valuable for some purposes, and the majority of people could be left to control their own usage. Again, the problem is one of impurities and unexpected allergic reactions from home-made supplies.

Not surprisingly, the criminal dealers in illegal drugs do not want the trade legalised. Their enormous profits would disappear. The market is not going to go away just because puritans dislike it, any more than prostitution will ever disappear. If we want fewer tragedies like recent ones, we are going to have to accept that human beings want and need artificial stimulants, sedatives and psychotropic substances, and they will obtain them legally or illegally. Better that it be legal.

Paranoid fantasies about the role played by pharmaceutical manufacturers, who are allegedly trying to block Canberra’s proposed experiment in controlled heroin use by threatening Tasmania’s legal opium poppy industry, are unconvincing. The real allies of the drug trade are the hysterical moralists who do not at all care about workable social policy. A thriving legal trade in all drugs is the only way to rid ourselves of the criminal aspects of the industry.

***
2.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “A view from the moral low ground,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, May 22, 1997, p. 15.

One of the fundamental problems in social policy making is the confusion between morality and moralism. While there is no argument about the desirability of sound moral standards in the community and within government and the bureaucracy, good social policy is impossible without taking moralism out of the picture.

Moralising is, of course, about judging other people’s behaviour from a supposedly moral standpoint, whether the object of the moralising accepts that standpoint or not. It seems to be the preferred activity of many people these days to moralise about other people’s use of drugs, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and food; whereas once it was common to moralise about people’s sexual preferences and behaviour, it is no longer acceptable in polite circles to do so.

There are the best of intentions behind all these manifestations of moralism. It is true that people harm themselves by smoking, by excessive use of alcohol and so on. But although this is true, it is only the beginning of a basis for the formulation of social policy. The real question at issue is the degree to which people should be permitted to take responsibility for their own unhealthy habits; and, indeed, as many of the class actions in the United States have demonstrated, the degree to which they are prepared to accept that their habits are their own responsibility, not those of advertisers or producers of unhealthy substances.

There is no simple answer to the allocation of responsibility. What is clear is that ordinary fallible human beings are, and always have been, prone to the use of drugs, to vices such as gambling, as well as sexual behaviour not suitable to Sunday school, and no social measures will ever overcome this. Thus the issue is how to lesson the damage. Yet the moralistic approach is to condemn people for their behaviour and fence them round with restrictions, prohibitions and penalties. This is the essence of the recently adopted NSW Government policy on smoking in public places. It is also the basis of the general international and Australian approach to the problem of hard drugs.

The fundamental problem with experimenting with the use of “shooting galleries” provided by government, as with the issue of needles to addicts, and especially experiments with supply of heroin to addicts as proposed in the ACT, is that fear of possible consequences — what happens if we open the floodgates? — is mixed up with moralism about the use of drugs. This makes any sensible political response to reform even more difficult. While the NSW Premier, Bob Carr, may be wrong about the need to continue strict prohibition on hard drugs, he is perfectly correct in fearing that the moralistic high ground will be seized by the Opposition and used against him. In refusing to take political risks on drug policy, therefore, he is simply being realistic about political possibilities. If the Opposition is genuine about reform, let it make the first concessions.

That said, the harmfulness of much of the moralism ought to be recognised. There is some controversy about the actual harm done by the use of heroin, but there is clearly a substantial majority of users who are neither addicted not affected in their functioning. The great harm done by heroin is to the minority, perhaps a potential 5 per cent of the population, who become hopelessly addicted. It ought to be clear that there needs to be a great deal of research into finding relatively harmless substitutes for heroin which offer the same gratifications and escape from reality. The same goes for alcohol and nicotine, as well as other hard drugs.

If harmless substitutes are discovered, and an effective means of reversing addiction without pain, where are the social problems in supplying heroin, cocaine, etc to the community generally at much the same price and availability as aspirin, and so getting rid of the criminal milieu which flourishes as a result of the drugs illegality and scarcity? Such a line of argument is unacceptable to the moralists. What do they fear? In part, it might seem that traditional religion and its New Age versions fear alternatives to their own role as opiates of the people.

It is not for nothing that the great solution proposed for addiction and vice is faith in God. But many of the irreligious see the possibility of a society in which great numbers of people might seek solace in drunkenness, gambling or mind-altered state induced by more exotic drugs, as one which would be unacceptable. Hogarth’s depiction of Gin Lane are supposed to be a warning against the free availability of cheap spirits.

The fantasy entertained by those who would oppose the use of a form of heroin (or cocaine, LSD, ecstasy, etc) which was cheap, non-addictive and harmless is of the community as a kind of large-scale Gin Lane. The same notion appears in Huxley’s Brave New World, which anticipated so much of our modern political correctness in the form of Malthusian drill, approved sexual promiscuity and the drug soma (Prozac and its equivalents).

Perhaps there is a case against the widespread persuasive advertising of drugs and gambling. Especially of gambling, since drugs provide genuine satisfactions while gambling preys on the common human inability to calculate odds or estimate risk. Certainly a community which entertains a widespread advertising of lotteries cannot convincingly moralise against casinos.

But it is clear that the only really effective policy against the use of drugs and against vices like gambling is one which is based on an analysis of the reasons why people seek them out, and the provision of effective and powerful substitutes. Not religion.