Drugs: gambling with legalisation
Mike Beranek opposes proposals to legitimise drug production and sale
Quaker Action on Alcohol and Drugs (QAAD) held a lively discussion this year at Westminster Meeting House on the idea of drug ‘decriminalisation’. My experience, as a former cannabis addict and sufferer of mental illness, leads me to oppose proposals to legitimise drug production and sale for the sake, especially, of those fortunate not to have been exposed, young and old.
Following the event, an article in the publication QAADRANT (Summer 2013) asked us to consider ‘how some of the options taken by other countries would play out in our own’. An answer to this question was to be seen in a BBC television programme broadcast in August, This World: America’s Stoned Kids, presented by clinical psychologist John Marsden. The programme portrayed the early results of an experiment in Colorado in which cannabis was decriminalised; first, for ‘medical’ use, and then, in a second stage, for recreational use by adults. John Marsden explored the phenomenon of local, commercially produced, ‘clinical cannabis’ falling into the hands of young people. At the moment, in Europe under prohibition, cannabis use is now declining in young people. In Colorado, in an alarming contrast, high school educators express concern about drug-related antisocial behaviour rising by three hundred per cent.
There is a myth put about that says cannabis is harmless. For me, personally, regular use amounted to insidious brain damage: profound amnesia, spatial disorientation and emotional dysregulation, not to mention social phobia. Scientific reports list a litany of pathological effects as cannabis sequesters in the nervous system. John Marsden spoke with a New Zealand brain researcher who looked at rapidly growing young brains. He also considered the measurable deficits in intelligence quotient (IQ) in adolescents using cannabis.
Some believe that the social problems around drug use – gangs, reckless trafficking and raids – are to do with the laws. I believe it is the substance that robs people of their lives. I see the same folly here as that over alcohol-related violence and ‘binge drinking’, and about gambling. Diabolical alliances were formed between the well meaning, who were suspicious of legislation, and profiteers, who saw a new market to exploit. Did all-night drinking licences ease the disorder in our inner cities at night? Did taking ‘gaming’ out of smoke-filled rooms and onto television, smartphones, online and other outlets do anything to take the sting out of these established addictions? Only if you think more state revenue compensates for increased human misery.
Legislators in the American experiment use specious arguments. Those who lobby for a ‘Yes’ vote to legalisation cite three points. First, consumer choice: but choices have to be well informed and everyone is vulnerable from a product that, itself, impairs the capacity to form sound judgements. Second, state income – taxation on products, licences for shops, clubs and so on: but there is not much point in having brand new classrooms if young minds are blunted by drugs. Public services risk becomes hostage to unethical income – as our National Lottery, to an increasing extent, already does. Third, product safety – no more adulteration, a trade standard: but genetic stock manipulation makes cannabis not safer, but more potent. Colorado producers refine the drug for a maximal ‘hit’. They even lace innocent looking smoothies and wholegrain bars – with each delivering a punch equivalent to several traditional ‘joints’ of cannabis.
The criminal justice system is playing a positive role. Quakers are involved in Britain in vital court-directed treatment programmes. Legal deterrence is a powerful way of transmitting signals about behaviour that can improve society. Thousands of preventable road deaths were only saved in Britain when the compulsory use of seatbelts was made law. The signal, I think, should stay red. If, sadly, British society becomes seduced by legalisation, I hope a concession is won for a major increase in funds for public information, particularly in the media and in schools – and, as for the excess morbidity, in help for the people we will have failed.
