Call to legalise Ice
‘Let’s legalise, regulate and tax all drugs – including ice’, was the message brought to Sydney last week by Dr Norm Stamper, retired Police Chief of San Diego and Seattle in the US.
“Since Richard Nixon declared drugs to be public enemy No 1 and declared all-out war in 1971, we have caused more harm than good,” he said at a meeting in Parliament House.
“The US spends $69–70 billion each year on a war which has caused tens of millions of Americans to be incarcerated for non-violent drug offences. The War on Drugs is really a war on people.” There were 40,000 arrests for simple possession last year in New York alone, he said. Most of them were black and Hispanic, even though Caucasians had higher rates of use for most drugs.
“Drugs are more readily available today, at higher potencies and lower prices – the mission is not accomplished. The Drug War is a failure.”
Dr Stamper, an articulate, silver-haired Ph.D, represents a new breed of advocates against the War on Drugs. He is an advisor to Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), a fast-growing group of 16,000 criminal justice professionals in the US who have realised first-hand that prohibition does not work.
While prohibitionists pour billions into demonising drugs, exaggerating their harms and urging governments to get even tougher on drugs, Dr Stamper explains how the harms of prohibition are in fact worse than those of the drugs.
“When was the last time you saw a Budweiser truck driver having a public shootout with his rival from another company?” he asked, referring to the days of alcohol prohibition when such scenes were common. His point is that making alcohol legal and regulated made only a minor difference to the amount consumed but greatly reduced the violence caused by having forced it underground into the hands of gangsters.
Today we see exactly the same patterns. While Australia has its own prohibition-related violence – drive-by shootings, bikie wars and gangland executions – it pales compared to that in Mexico, a major source of cannabis and cocaine to the huge US market.
Poorly paid police in Mexico are given a choice by drug cartels: plata o ploma – ‘silver or lead’. In other words, ‘take our bribes or get shot, along with your family’. Some who don’t co-operate are not only shot but tortured and beheaded. The heads are then rolled like bowling balls into public venues as a graphic warning to others.
The global illicit drug industry is worth around $500 bn annually, and enjoys a 17,000 per cent profit margin, said Dr Stamper, so it has the money to finance violence and corruption.
“Every police scandal in my country in the last 30–40 years has been traceable to drugs, with a few footnoted exceptions that prove the rule,” he said.
“There is not a city or town that has escaped a drug-related scandal.”
That’s all very well. But legalising something like ice?
Dr Stamper told of a person he met who had been an ice addict for ten years before getting clean, and who was horrified at the prospect of legalising it. He replied by asking where had the addict obtained his drugs every day for ten years, and pointing out that this continuous availability showed prohibition had failed. The man hadn’t thought of it that way.
As Dr Stamper pointed out, “It doesn’t matter what the drug, the principle is the same.”
His legalisation model includes strict regulation and a ban on advertising, which he says could make drugs harder to get for young people. He was brought to Australia by the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation.
by Michael Gormly
