The 'War on Drugs' Doesn't Work. It's Time for a Grown-Up Conversation

By Alan D. Miller, Guardian UK

04 December 16

People will always take drugs, regardless of personal risk and the legality of it. Our laws should be amended to reflect that

eople have always consumed psychoactive substances, risking harm.” This is the opening sentence of a recent article by Fiona Godlee and Richard Hurley in the British Medical Journal, which goes on to state that around one in 20 adults worldwide are thought to have taken an illegal drug in 2014.

Is it immoral to ingest substances that alter our consciousness? Is it nirvana we are seeking, or are we drowning in the ocean of the lonely crowd, yearning for a connection to something greater than ourselves? Or do we simply like getting high now and again?

When I was growing up, advertisements scared us with images of emaciated heroin addicts telling us, “I could give up tomorrow … couldn’t I?” The “just say no” campaign was linked firmly to the international war on drugs, which was at its height in the 1980s and predated the health-focused warnings linked to HIV and Aids. Yet prohibition is seen by drugs experts as a failure, is estimated to cost around $100bn annually and has “failed to curb either supply or demand, reduce addiction, or minimise harm”, in the words of the BMJ.

I must declare that I have a horse in this race. As chairman of the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA) I represent venues and operators across the UK – and have spent my adult life running dance music events around the world. In Britain over the past decade we have seen a huge decrease in the number of nightclubs and one of the main reasons has been a new approach, by police and local authorities, who now seek to hold premises responsible for the behaviour of their customers.

In London, Fabric was closed pending a hearing where its licence was revoked due to the death of two adults over a nine-week period over the summer. There had been six deaths in total over four years due to the consumption of MDMA, the club had a zero-tolerance policy towards drugs, more security per person than any other UK club and a raft of surveillance and safety measures. Yet it took a major campaign to persuade Islington council to let the club reopen under still more stringent conditions. Across the country, club owners are petrified that anything that happens in or near their venue could mean last orders for ever.

Fortunately there are alternatives to this punitive approach both to businesses and individuals, vast numbers of whom are incarcerated around the world for the non-violent crime of ingesting a controlled substance. Fiona Measham, a professor of criminology at Durham University, is a co-director of the Loop, a non-profit organisation that offers people the chance to test drugs before they take them. The Loop has worked with police and operators in Manchester and at festivals including Secret Garden Party, where up to 25% of festival goers were reported to have handed in drugs that did not contain what they thought.

Measham believes drug-testing booths in city centres would help protect the public, as by the time people get to a nightclub it is sometimes too late. But such “harm reduction” measures struggle to gain support from police as well as nightclub operators, who fear they will be accused of promoting drug use rather than simply recognising that it takes place.

It is 55 years since the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs sought to prohibit the non-medical use of narcotics globally. Since then the world has changed enormously. Uruguay legalised the possession of all drugs in 1974 and in 2014 allowed the production of marijuana by all citizens too. In the United States, on the same day Donald Trump was elected, several states legalised or decriminalised the use of cannabis partly in recognition of the enormous social harm and injustice of mass incarceration. Meanwhile in Portugal, which decriminalised the use of drugs in 2001, there are three deaths per million from drug overdoses, while the average across the EU is 17.3.

With the police facing increasing pressures to tackle cybercrime, terrorism and sex offences, all while dealing with cuts, it is time to decide whether enforcing drugs laws is the best use of resources. Legalisation and licensed sale of currently illegal substances would also generate enormous tax revenues for HM Treasury.

Recent footage from Pentonville prison showed drones being used to fly in drugs. How can it be fair to punish nightclubs and bars for failing to enforce rules that are flouted even in the most fortified buildings we have? A change in the law would make the public safer and diminish the influence of organised crime. It is time to have an honest, grown-up conversation about drugs in Britain.

This Is Why Everything You've Read About the Wars in Syria and Iraq Could Be Wrong

By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent

04 December 16

It is too dangerous for journalists to operate in rebel-held areas of Aleppo and Mosul. But there is a tremendous hunger for news from the Middle East, so the temptation is for the media give credence to information they get second hand

he Iraqi army, backed by US-led airstrikes, is trying to capture east Mosul at the same time as the Syrian army and its Shia paramilitary allies are fighting their way into east Aleppo. An estimated 300 civilians have been killed in Aleppo by government artillery and bombing in the last fortnight, and in Mosul there are reportedly some 600 civilian dead over a month.

Despite these similarities, the reporting by the international media of these two sieges is radically different.

In Mosul, civilian loss of life is blamed on Isis, with its indiscriminate use of mortars and suicide bombers, while the Iraqi army and their air support are largely given a free pass. Isis is accused of preventing civilians from leaving the city so they can be used as human shields.

Contrast this with Western media descriptions of the inhuman savagery of President Assad’s forces indiscriminately slaughtering civilians regardless of whether they stay or try to flee. The UN chief of humanitarian affairs, Stephen O’Brien, suggested this week that the rebels in east Aleppo were stopping civilians departing – but unlike Mosul, the issue gets little coverage.

One factor making the sieges of east Aleppo and east Mosul so similar, and different, from past sieges in the Middle East, such as the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982 or of Gaza in 2014, is that there are no independent foreign journalists present. They are not there for the very good reason that Isis imprisons and beheads foreigners while Jabhat al-Nusra, until recently the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, is only a shade less bloodthirsty and generally holds them for ransom. 

These are the two groups that dominate the armed opposition in Syria as a whole. In Aleppo, though only about 20 per cent of the 10,000 fighters are Nusra, it is they – along with their allies in Ahrar al-Sham – who are leading the resistance.

Unsurprisingly, foreign journalists covering developments in east Aleppo and rebel-held areas of Syria overwhelmingly do so from Lebanon or Turkey. A number of intrepid correspondents who tried to do eyewitness reporting from rebel-held areas swiftly found themselves tipped into the boots of cars or otherwise incarcerated.

Experience shows that foreign reporters are quite right not to trust their lives even to the most moderate of the armed opposition inside Syria. But, strangely enough, the same media organisations continue to put their trust in the veracity of information coming out of areas under the control of these same potential kidnappers and hostage takers. They would probably defend themselves by saying they rely on non-partisan activists, but all the evidence is that these can only operate in east Aleppo under license from the al-Qaeda-type groups.

It is inevitable that an opposition movement fighting for its life in wartime will only produce, or allow to be produced by others, information that is essentially propaganda for its own side. The fault lies not with them but a media that allows itself to be spoon-fed with dubious or one-sided stories.

For instance, the film coming out of east Aleppo in recent weeks focuses almost exclusively on heartrending scenes of human tragedy such as the death or maiming of civilians. One seldom sees shots of the 10,000 fighters, whether they are wounded or alive and well.

None of this is new. The present wars in the Middle East started with the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 which was justified by the supposed threat from Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Western journalists largely went along with this thesis, happily citing evidence from the Iraqi opposition who predictably confirmed the existence of WMD.

Some of those who produced these stories later had the gall to criticise the Iraqi opposition for misleading them, as if they had any right to expect unbiased information from people who had dedicated their lives to overthrowing Saddam Hussein or, in this particular case, getting the Americans to do so for them.

Much the same self-serving media credulity was evident in Libya during the 2011 Nato-backed uprising against Muammar Gaddafi.

Atrocity stories emanating from the Libyan opposition, many of which were subsequently proved to be baseless by human rights organisations, were rapidly promoted to lead the news, however partial the source.

The Syrian war is especially difficult to report because Isis and various al-Qaeda clones made it too dangerous to report from within opposition-held areas. There is a tremendous hunger for news from just such places, so the temptation is for the media give credence to information they get second hand from people who could in practice only operate if they belong to or are in sympathy with the dominant jihadi opposition groups.

It is always a weakness of journalists that they pretend to excavate the truth when in fact they are the conduit rather than the originator of information produced by others in their own interests. Reporters learn early that people tell them things because they are promoting some cause which might be their own career or related to bureaucratic infighting or, just possibly, hatred of lies and injustice.

A word here in defence of the humble reporter in the field: usually, it is not he or she, but the home office or media herd instinct, that decides the story of the day. Those closest to the action may be dubious about some juicy tale which is heading the news, but there is not much they can do about it.

Thus, in 2002 and 2003, several New York Times journalists wrote stories casting doubt on WMD only to find them buried deep inside the newspaper which was led by articles proving that Saddam had WMD and was a threat to the world.

Journalists and public alike should regard all information about Syria and Iraq with reasoned scepticism. They should keep in mind the words of Lakhdar Brahimi, the former UN and Arab League Special Envoy to Syria. Speaking after he had resigned in frustration in 2014, he said that “everybody had their agenda and the interests of the Syrian people came second, third or not at all”.

The quote comes from The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East by Christopher Phillips, which is one of the best informed and non-partisan accounts of the Syrian tragedy yet published. He judiciously weighs the evidence for rival explanations for what happened and why. He understands the degree to which the agenda and pace events in Syria were determined externally by the intervention of foreign powers pursuing their own interests.

Overall, government experts did better than journalists, who bought into simple-minded explanations of developments, convinced that Assad was always on the verge of being overthrown.

Phillips records that at a high point of the popular uprising in July 2011, when the media was assuming that Assad was finished, that the long-serving British ambassador in Damascus, Simon Collis, wrote that “Assad can still probably count on the support of 30-40 per cent of the population.”

The French ambassador Eric Chevallier was similarly cautious, only to receive a classic rebuke from his masters in Paris who said: “Your information does not interest us. Bashar al-Assad must fall and will fall.”