An ill-waged war against the war on drugs

Since drugs became popular, there have been countless books on what to do with them. The most interesting are those of a creative kind by high-profile writers: De Quincey, Baudelaire, Aldous Huxley, Henri Michaux, William Burroughs, Carlos Castaneda. The most useful, so far as social policy is concerned, are those by low-profile operators in the field: scientists, doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, police.

The least interesting or useful prove to have been the polemical books in neither category, so I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of this one, written by a political journalist, and hyped by Elton John, Noam Chomsky, Stephen Fry and Naomi Klein. My unease was aroused, but not because Johann Hari is of the left — I’d be equally suspicious of a book on drugs by Paul Johnson endorsed by Cliff Richard and the Vatican.

My generation in the 1960s used drugs in pursuit of pleasure, adventure and escape from cultural inhibition. There were casualties, of course, but they did not define the phenomenon. Hari’s focus, however, is on the negative aspects of prohibitions against marijuana, heroin and cocaine/crack. His main target is Washington’s anti-drug policy, initiated in 1914, and its adoption by other western nations, for which he blames the global spread of addiction and criminal violence, especially among the poor. But the policy is not American; it became a UN convention in 1961, updated in 1988.

I was confused by his lumping together issues surrounding hard and soft drugs, and decriminalisation or legalisation (not the same). But he is right about some bogus myths of addiction. Addiction is not a sudden hijack, it has to be organised; and addictions are not uniformly strong. Opium is an obvious example. The decline of the relatively harmless opium den has seen a rise in addiction to opium’s hard derivatives, heroin and morphine.