No Going Soft on Drugs

No Going Soft on Drugs.

That’s always a safe slogan for a politician. I’m not suggesting Simon Power, Minister of Justice, is manipulating public sentiment for his own ends. On the contrary, Power obviously believes what he is saying about the drug problem. Most New Zealanders share his view that flexibility on this issue is the road to uncertainty and even more serious problems. People want clarity. In support of Simon Power, Joanne Black in the Listener put it this way: “There is no question about how many grams of a class C drug a person might be allowed to carry or use: it’s none.”

So we all know where we stand and so we should. We’ve been standing in the same place with the tide creeping steadily up past our knees for fifty years. Where has the seriousness of the drug problem lessened in that time? Not America or England or Australia or most other countries including New Zealand. It is worse and will continue to get worse while we hold on to patently useless strategies to deal with the problem.  

It may be useful to consider what those problems are: In the Hollywood tradition we have visions of innocent young victims whose lives are ruined by horrible drug-pushers. True or false? I’m not sure about the innocent part because becoming an addict takes time and effort. Nevertheless, lives are ruined. But what of the many more young people who have tried drugs, have not become addicts and have gone on to have successful lives? And those horrible pushers: are they really any more horrible than alcohol pushers who have a hundred-fold more victims?  

Drug addiction leads to crime. Addicts cannot fund their habit in any other way. True, but how many drug addicted criminals already have a propensity for crime? My guess is that honest addicts who are merely immature rather criminal would eventually seek help. Addicts with a propensity for crime are unlikely to seriously consider an alternative lifestyle. In between, there are a variety of people whose lives revolve around drugs. Some are stupid and some intelligent, what they have in common is insufficient strength of character to change. We may sympathise, especially for the families of these individuals, but all we should be reasonably expected to provide for them is rehabilitation facilities.  

Drug addiction is a serious and costly individual and social problem. But first and foremost it is a health problem for which there is a cure for those who wish to avail themselves of rehabilitation. In other words it is a manageable problem.

What is clearly less manageable is corruption, not of young innocents but our institutions and society. The drugs trade provides criminal organisations with a product that returns unimaginably huge profits. Protected by gangs with the power and motivation to bribe, blackmail, intimidate, batter, torture and murder. You would have to be unforgivably naive to believe that our men and women customs, immigration, police officers and politicians are immune to fear and greed. 

New Zealand’s Canute-like laws on drugs have failed to stem the tide. Change will not come from more of the same. We have to grasp that painful nettle and admit it is the cure that is killing us. Yes, drugs are a curse, we don’t want them and wish they had never reached our shores, as we could say for alcohol. But when the sea is rising year by year, wishes are pointless distractions. Drugs are here to stay. Posturing about not going soft on drugs won’t change that. But it will allow criminal organisations to increase their power. We could cut the corrosive power of the gangs by taking over the drugs trade ourselves, as we did with liquor. 

Public control of the sale of alcohol through local community trusts was a compromise, a response to the powerful temperance movement’s demands for prohibition. It worked. If communities rather than criminals were in charge of the sale of drugs, rehabilitation centres would cost the taxpayer nothing, communities would have more money and society would be less in danger of corruption. But common sense does not necessarily a safe political slogan make.