The ACT should resist any bullying by the United States over the proposed heroin trial. The Federal, Victorian and NSW Governments should also ignore any US threat to Tasmania’s $80 million poppy industry which supplies the US legal drug market, though to date it has only been suggested as a possibility.
For a very long time the United States has taken the prohibition, criminal-justice approach to drugs. It has demonstrably failed. It failed with respect to alcohol between 1918 and 1933. Prohibition resulted in organised crime and corruption while consumption abounded. It has failed with respect to narcotics. It has caused organised crime and corruption, and addiction continues.
The US has pushed for international treaties not only to get other countries to cooperate in preventing drugs from entering the US, but also to get other countries to follow the prohibition route by calling for harsh jail terms. Its elected politicians and appointed officials have engaged in an inexplicable crusade for a policy that does not work.
Perhaps drug-enforcement bureaucracies see the pursuit of a ever-failing policy is a way of guaranteeing self-perpetuation. They do not want a sensible health-based solution. In that they have something in common with the heads of organised crime who draw such large profits from prohibition. These policies are supported by campaigns of fear and misinformation which are so convincing that nearly all politicians (with notable exceptions like many in the ACT Legislative Assembly, especially Michael Moore) are too scared to do look at a more balanced policy.
But when they leave politics, freed of the effects of fear campaigns, some former politicians reveal the poverty of prohibition … the policy they actively supported or were even responsible for running.
One such former politician is the Secretary of the Treasury in the Nixon Administration, George Shultz. Dr Shultz is no woolly headed, bleeding-heart liberal. He was in charge of customs and drew up and worked hard on a prohibition policy. He also worked in the Reagan administration.
In 1990 he recanted on drugs. He said, “”What we have before us now is essentially the same program but with more resources ploughed into all the efforts to enforce and control. These efforts wind up creating a market where the price vastly exceeds the cost. With these incentives, demand creates its own supply and a criminal network along with it. It seems to me we are not really going to get anywhere until we can take the criminality out of it. Frankly, the only way I can think of to accomplish this is to make it possible for addicts to buy drugs at some regulated place at a price that approximates their cost. When you do that you wipe out the criminal incentive, including, I might say, the incentive that the drug pushers have to go around and get kids addicted so that they create a market for themselves. . . . We need at least to consider and examine forms of controlled legalisation of drugs.”
He is quite right. The ACT trial should go ahead. The US should look at its own history and the change of heart of one of its key drug enforcers and ensure its officials do not engage in heavy-handed trade threats to stymie the trial. President Clinton should not to inhale the self-serving dangerous smoke-screen being put to him by the prohibitionists.