I am finding the smug moralising about cocaine in Ireland a little hard to take. I am not for an instant trying to detract from the tragedy of the recent drug related deaths. They are horrible and my heart goes out the families of those who died. What I find hard to stomach is the reaction to it. There is a broad consensus on a number of points, all of which need to be challenged and further examined. They are: 1) Taking cocaine is as dangerous as shooting yourself in the face 2) deaths from cocaine are the problem that needs tackling 3) the middle classes have just recently started taking drugs and cocaine is their drug of choice and 4) Tougher criminal sanctions are the way to solve the problem. Dear reader, here are my thoughts on each of these:
1) Undoubtedly taking cocaine is not good for you. The extent of its detrimental impact is however a subject of very widespread speculation, some of it totally misleading. Yes, it is possible to die the first time you take cocaine. This is also true of peanuts and strawberries. What is missed in all the hysteria is that the chances if dying the first time you take cocaine are inordinately slim and that everything in life involves some element of risk.
I'm not doubting the sincerity of those who propound the 'the first time you take cocaine could be the last thing you do' argument. I am however doubting how realistic this is. Apart from the statistical fudging involved in this line, it is ultimately extremely unhelpful. People who are never going to go anywhere near taking drugs in their life will hear arguments like this and be further reassured that the choices they have made in life are excellent. Fair play to them. People who are likely to take drugs, or are currently taking drugs and likely to develop a serious problem with them will blithely ignore ridiculous comments about how one line can kill you. Once people have had their first cocaine experience, this argument no longer applies to them. Those who are doing drugs regularly and are not seeing any immediate health effects are not going to be convinced to desist and, in fact, are quite likely to see it as evidence that the anti-drug lobby are all talking nonsense. We need to convince those at risk of developing an addiction to stop. Hysterical unrealistic rhetoric gets us nowhere.
2) While deaths from drugs get headlines, they are in reality only a very tiny part of the problem. For as long as we are focused on overdose deaths and 'gangland shootings', we are detracting attention from the problems of addiction that impact on a much wider number of people. Addiction causes serious health problems for many people but also depression, financial trouble, relationship breakdown etc etc etc. None of these things are quite as eye-catching as the death of someone young and beautiful, but this is the real, day to day, impact that drug use has on society.
The truth is that people who have never taken drugs or been anywhere near drug culture don't seem to understand that developing an addiction is rarely an instantaneous process. It's not as if someone shares a gram of cocaine with four friends on a Friday and is living in the gutter on a Monday morning. I would even go so far as to suggest that most people who take drugs for the first time are unlikely to end up with a severe habit down the line. I know very few people who haven't tried an illegal drug at least once and I only know a handful who are at any risk of forming an addiction. Can my experience really be all that unique?
The crucial question is how can we stop people from crossing that line from casual use into unhealthy addiction? Yes it would be lovely if people didn't take drugs, but they do, and every effort made to stop them, throughout the entire course of human history, has been an unmitigated failure. Focusing on that line between occasional drug use and addiction is the key to reducing the problems caused by drugs in society.
3) The middle classes have been using drugs for years. And yes, that includes heroin. I know of quite a few instances of people who had every advantage in life and still ended up as heroin addicts. It is very convenient to paint heroin as a poor person's drug, because that way we can ignore it in the same way that we ignore everything to do with poor people. (And no, I'm not going to use some patronising term like 'disadvantaged'; being poor is extremely unpleasant and euphemisms only serve to disguise the problem.)
Even leaving heroin aside, I know for a fact that all the posh south Dublin schools had an ample supply of drugs during the 1990s. I know this because I attended one during that period. Granted, cocaine was a little out of reach at the time, but cannabis and ecstasy were freely available. I'm sure most of us remember the moral panic about ecstasy about 12-13 years ago. A lot of this latest debate is beginning to sound a bit familiar. So yes, while the middle classes in Ireland are now taking cocaine, that does not mean they haven't had their fair share of drug abuse for donkey's years (and that's without even mentioning alcohol).
4) The law and order approach to drug addiction is preposterous. The same people who know nothing about drug use and spout forth on how one line can kill your are invariably the same people who call for tougher sentences more enforcement and so on and so forth. They don't like it and they want it gone. They see law enforcement as a sort of eradication technique. This fundamentally misunderstands the limits of the law. Politicians worldwide and Irish politicians in particular have a preposterous habit of promising legislation every time something goes wrong. It makes them seem powerful and relevant but it is often a waste of time. Does anybody remember the Irish ASBO legislation? It still hasn't been used over a year later.
There are things that the law is good at and things that it is bad at. Bringing about a fundamental shift in behaviour across an entire society is not one of its strong suits. The assumption that tougher sentences will impact on the activities of people at the upper echelons of the drug trade is patently absurd. As the hysterical set keep reminding us, these people are shooting each other on a weekly basis. If the risk of getting murdered is not deterring drug dealers from their chosen line of work, what chance has a minimum ten year sentence got? The deterrent effect of prison on drug dealers is a myth without any factual basis.
As with the 'one line will kill you' argument, the tougher penalties point is not merely unproductive, it is counter-productive. Putting people in prison costs a huge amount of money. The amount of residential detox care for drug addicts in Ireland is embarrassingly small. More resources for prisons means less resources for taking people out of addiction.
It is clear that Ireland has a drug problem. No one with any sense would deny that. However, the nature of the problem and the most effective response to it are far from clear and there is a lot of misunderstanding about the situation. I am not going to re-rehearse the trite arguments about how drugs should be legalised here, although I do agree with them in principle. I would however make two points about the legalisation debate. First, as much as it is true to say that it is illogical to make alcohol legal and criminalise other drugs, it is simply not feasible for Ireland to act alone. We have gone too far down the road of globalisation to be the only country in the world where all recreational drugs are available legally. The fallout for our society would be appalling. However, since we are members of the EU, it is certainly worth using the justice and home affairs pillar as a mechanism for floating the idea of an EU-wide legalisation.
Secondly, it is often suggested that drugs should remain illegal because of the inherent danger they pose to society. This argument is fatuous and unimaginative. It is fatuous because many many many things are dangerous and they are not illegal (hang gliding jumps instantly into my mind). The argument is unimaginative because there is more than one way of dealing with something that is a danger to society. Take contract law for example. If there was no confidence in the enforceability of contracts, the entire world economy would collapse overnight. However, breaking a contract is not a crime. Yes the law permits an aggrieved party to take a private claim in such a situation, but there is no role for the criminal law. Why should it be assumed that criminalisation is the only way to deal with drugs?
Irish society has changed very dramatically in the past 15-20 years. But even despite that change, our long history of alcohol abuse and alcoholism is indicative of something in our community that has a propensity for substance addiction. Perhaps we have a spiritual deficit; this could be why we latched onto Catholicism so aggressively for so long. Perhaps we are just not very good at being happy with things as they are and so we search for external factors to make us happier. Whatever the underlying malaise in Irish society is, it is this unhappiness that is as the root of all our addiction problems and our recent frisson with cocaine. This is a monumentally difficult issue to address, but getting started on it would be far more helpful than all the trite lecturing that has been passing for a debate on the subject in recent weeks.
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