An experiment with drugs has been going on in Australia for ninety years. Those doing the experiment have added more and more ingredients over the years, applied more and more potency to the catalysts, and poured greater amounts of money into it. But no matter, the experiment is not coming out the way its designers thought. In fact, the experiement is coming up with results exactly opposite from those intended.
The drug-prohibition experiment is not working and has never worked. An experiement designed to reduce drug use and to reduce the detriment it has on society is having exactly the opposite effect. Drug use is continuing and increasing. Worse, the prohibition policy means we now have two problems instead of one: not just a health problem from drug misuse, but a crime problem caused directly by the prohibition experiment.
Some misguided, naive parliamentarians imagined that if they made the possession of drugs illegal, they could change people’s behaviour. Moreover, they congratulated themselves in a self-validating way by saying they were stamping out an evil which obviously was an evil because it was against the law.
Herion, the great demon among drugs, was prohibited in Australia only in 1955. Before then, a much more intelligent and effective means to control its use were applied, at the same time keeping it available for its very useful role as a medicinal pain-killer.
At last a federal parliamentarian, Jom Snow, has called for the issue to be taken out of the too-hard basket. He told this week of how he had prescribed what are now illegal drugs as a pharmacist in the 1950s. The price was low, there was no black market and addicts could get slowly weaned off their addiction. Mr Snow and fellow MP Dr Ric Charlesworth have called for a change in the blanket prohibition policy. They want addictive drugs available on prescription at pharmacies in an attempt to control their use and prevent addicts from turning to crime.
Their call is welcome. It is about time Australia took its drug-health problem away from the back-street dealers, the break-and-enter, quick-fix merchants and the territorial gangsters and put it back into the hands of those with the knowledge and ethics to deal with it properly: the pharmacists and doctors.
When an experiment fails, the experimenters must acknowledge the failure and call the experiment off, especially when the experiment is causing such horrific crime and destruction.
Mr Snow will face great opposition. It will come from people with profound ignorance and, more sinisterly, from people with profound knowledge. The ignorant ones have be fed stereotypes until they believe in them. The knowledgable ones are those that know prohibition leads to a higher price for drugs and a higher price leads to higher profits. The last people in Australia who want the replacement of prohibition policies with controlled-use programs are the drug pushers: they have the most to lose.
Mr Snow must be encouranged to pursue his proposal and present it in greater detail to the Federal Parliament. Mr Snow can take heart in the fact that, in 1905, as the prohibitionists started their ill-fated experiement, the Member for Werriwa, Alfred Conroy, said that the Parliament was about to “”pass an Act for the prohibition of the opium traffic in the full belief that the evil will at once disappear. I veture to say that the evil, so far from disappearing, will become 10 times worse.” How true.