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Briefing:

Drugs

An expensive habit

From Socialist Review, No. 183, February 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

• Britain’s drug laws criminalise individuals for using certain types of drugs while ignoring some much more dangerous ones. The control of drugs is rooted in Britain’s imperial past, when huge profits were made out of drug trafficking in, for example, the opium trade with China.
   
• Today the drug laws are about social control and whipping up racism. The tabloid press and politicians are fond of raising the spectre of drug crazed criminals on the rampage to make their own political agendas more acceptable.
   
• In 1992, a total of 7,000 people took part in the British Crime Survey. Less than 17 percent said they had ever taken any drugs ‘which people are not supposed to take without a prescription’. Less than 6 percent said they had taken them in 1991. Some 24 percent of 16 to 29 year olds said they had taken cannabis, 9 percent had taken amphetamines, 9 percent had taken ecstasy and 3 percent had taken cocaine. Less than 1 percent of those surveyed had taken heroin or crack.
   
• Cannabis is prohibited under the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act because it has ‘no legitimate therapeutic use’. In fact, there is a wealth of medical evidence that cannabis can alleviate nausea, and help treat glaucoma, multiple sclerosis and period pains. The yearly rate for deaths caused by cannabis is zero.
   
• Every year 160 people die from taking heroin. The yearly rate for deaths caused by smoking the legal drug tobacco is 110,000 – 20 percent of all deaths. Smoking costs the NHS £155 million every year. War on Want estimates that 10 million working days a year in Third World countries are spent on producing tobacco.
   
• In Britain those under 16 years old spend around £60 million every year on cigarettes. The government makes £4,200 million every year by taxing tobacco. Tobacco companies are among the largest donors to Tory Party funds. The government has so far resisted all pressure to ban tobacco advertising.
   
• Every year 25,000 people die from the effects of the legal drug alcohol. Deaths from cirrhosis of the liver have more than doubled in the last 20 years. Every year £147.1 million is spent advertising alcohol. Every year alcohol costs the NHS £51 million, and the state £64 million to police and punish alcohol related incidents. The government makes around £5,000 million a year by taxing alcohol.
   
• The Misuse of Drugs Act gives the police enormous powers. They can stop and question you without consent on grounds of ‘reasonable suspicion’. They have extensive powers to enter and search premises. They can arrest you and hold you without charge on suspicion of a minor offence for up to 24 hours and for up to 96 hours on suspicion of a serious offence. About 90 percent of arrests for offences under the Misuse of Drugs Act (MDA) are for the possession of cannabis.
   
• The Thames Regional Drugs Database survey of the Greater London area for the year April 1991 to March 1992 showed that 80 percent of the total number of persons who go to drugs services are white. Despite this, the targets of police powers under the MDA are overwhelmingly black.
   
• Combating drugs is a common justification for harassment of black youngsters. Police abuse of their powers contributed to inner city riots in the early 1980s. Stoke Newington police officers were recently investigated for abusing their powers under the MDA – they wanted to influence and control the illicit drugs trade in north London.
   
• The Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence estimates that Britain spends £500 million per year in response to drugs. In 1992–3 out of £509 million spent, only £55 million was spent on treatment. The rest went on ‘enforcement’, ‘deterrence and domestic control’ and ‘international response’.
   
• The Release National Drugs Survey 1994 found ‘little change in the overall availability and price of street drugs in any parts of the country. This clearly indicates that supply interdiction efforts by police and customs are having little impact on the amount of drugs getting through to users.’
   
• It is estimated that only one fifth of heroin users are registered, because fear of police harassment and lack of NHS support discourage registration. Contaminated needles and adulterated drugs are the main dangers heroin users face.
   
• Release has reported that some GPs are refusing to treat drug users because of current funding arrangements. Heroin users who buy drugs illegally spend between £13,000 and £17,000 a year funding their habit. Unless they are wealthy, addicts are forced to fund their habit by illegal methods.
   
• In the 1980s the Dutch government decriminalised soft drugs. Over 100 cafes in Amsterdam sell soft drugs and pay taxes on them. Soft drug dealers sell ‘clean’ drugs at half London street prices. There has been no increase in addiction levels to hard drugs in Holland, which completely exposes the myth that soft drugs lead to hard drugs.
   
• The prohibition of drugs has not stopped drug use, it simply means that to obtain drugs users risk breaking the law, becoming involved with crime and exposing themselves to the dangers of ‘dirty’ drugs. Just as alcohol prohibition in the US in the 1920s founded the fortunes of organised crime in America, Britain’s drug laws have helped build an illicit market worth about £3 billion a year.

 
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