Karyn Smith and Patricia Cahill are, of course, our enemies. All drug dealers are our enemies. That’s the point of the war against drugs. So of course these two young women deserve all the abuse that has been heaped upon them – even if one of them does turn out to be innocent, even if the other one is guilty of nothing more than daftness, and even if they were both exploited first by the dealers who set them up and then by the avaricious officials who made money out of them on the other side of the world. That’s war. That’s collateral damage.
And it has been a lovely war – so clear in its rights and wrongs, so widely supported, so thoroughly well financed and equipped. Since it was formally declared by Mrs Thatcher, its soldiers have gone from strength to strength – hundreds more customs officers with millions more in their budget, specialist police squads all over the country, a new national intelligence unit, liaison officers around the world. It is a glorious story.
Not quite. Drugs in general and heroin in particular have an extraordinary ability to persuade people to grab the wrong the end of the stick and then refuse to let it go. Politicians, lawyers, doctors, journalists get stoned on rhetoric (they try it once and then they can’t stop) and simply lose the ability to distinguish what is real from what is merely fantasy. Take the essential point about heroin – the ultimate horror in our enemy’s arsenal. How dangerous is it?
The US Supreme Court handed down a cogent version of the official line. “To be a confirmed heroin addict is to be one of the walking dead… The teeth have rotted out, the appetite is lost and the stomach and intestines don’t function properly. The gall bladder becomes inflamed; eyes and skin turn a bilious yellow. Breathing is difficult. Sex organs become affected. Nerves snap, vicious twitching develops. Imaginary and fantastic fears blight the mind and sometimes complete insanity results.”
Powerful stuff, but it happens be wrong. Compare it with the results of the biggest study of opiate abuse – conducted in Philadelphia in the 1920s – which concluded that even long-term addicts suffer no physical harm of any kind, or with the later conclusion of the assistant surgeon general of the US Public Health Service, Lawrence Kolb: “That individuals may take morphine or some other opiate for 20 years or more without showing intellectual or moral deterioration is a common experience of every physician who has studied the subject.” Think of Enid Bagnold, who wrote National Velvet: she was what the drug warriors call a junkie for most of her life.
The great truth which was the first casualty of this war is that the horrible suffering which is associated with heroin is the result not of the drug but of the blackmarket. If addicts die or become ill, it is because they have contracted hepatitis or AIDS from dirty needles or shot their veins full of chalk or bath-scourer or any of the other substitutes that dealers use to dilute their little packages. The heroin itself is no more toxic than aspirin. If addicts lose weight and become dangerously thin, it is not because their insides have been rotted by heroin but simply because they have spent everything they have on their habit and so they can’t afford to eat.
If addicts do not work, it is not because they are incapable (I know a BBC producer who has been an addict for years) but because they spend all their time – literally all of it – hassling for heroin. If they commit crime, it is not because heroin has killed their conscience but because the blackmarket is so expensive that once they have sold everything they own, they have to steal.
This is not to say that heroin is grand stuff. It is very addictive, probably even worse than tobacco though it is hard to quantify. Arnold Trebach, the great American heroin expert – and one of the very few who has ever bothered to go out on the streets and actually talk to addicts – puts it like this: “Nothing is wrong and much is right about trying to ban all drugs, legal or illegal, from one’s own life; everything is wrong with trying to impose such a personal philosophy on the rest of the world.”
Ten years into the holy war on drugs, all this sounds like heresy but there was a time when it was commonplace. That was back in the 1950s and 60s when the “British System” for handling heroin was a model for the world. Spelled out by the 1924 Rolleston Committee, the system simply allowed all doctors to prescribe heroin to addicts and provided for tribunals to punish any doctor who exploited his power for profit. Heroin was a safe drug. There was no blackmarket. There was no problem.
The system disintegrated more or less by default: the tribunals lapsed because they were not used; a few doctors started to break the rules; the 1965 Brain Committee misread the problem and tried to cure it by restricting the prescription of heroin to specialist centres; a three-year gap then followed before the new Drug Dependancy Units came on stream and during those three years, the blackmarket was born in the Chinese community of Soho; it grew slowly, boosted first by Vietnam and then by the Iranian revolution; in the late 1970s, the Government misread the problem again and ordered the DDUs to cut back on their supply of heroin addicts; the blackmarket boomed and so the war began.
The war has no chance of succeeding anymore than the prohibition of alcohol did in the 1920s or the prohibition of coffee here in the sixteenth century. We are losing. The best irony is that if we gave up, we would win: if we returned to the old British System, the gangsters would be out of work just as quickly as the drug warriors, the blackmarket would wither, and we could stop trying to pretend that it is righteous and good to lock up teenagers for 25 years at a time. It is time for an armistice.
