by Power, Mike
However, since mephedrone was banned in the UK and China in 2010, use has increased by twenty per cent and prices have doubled, and a torrent of new, legal drugs has emerged, each new ban prompting innovation from manufacturers keen to cash in on the legal highs craze. Banning a drug does not eliminate it from dealers’ repertoires – instead, the range of drugs they offer simply expands. And in a classic piece of geographical displacement, whereby pressure to limit production in one country merely sees the trade shift to another nation, India now produces much of the UK’s illegally imported mephedrone.
SOCA did, though, close down over 120 UK-based websites that continued to advertise controlled drugs,12 but many of them simply reopened under different names, selling legal compounds.
It’s highly likely that the flood of new chemicals will continue unabated. Alexander Shulgin has published a new book, The Shulgin Index, Volume 1: Psychedelic Phenethylamines and Related Compounds. It is the culmination of his life’s work, and behind its sober, leather-bound cover lies more chemical data than most people could read in a lifetime. It covers over 1,300 compounds. It is, says its American publisher, ‘an invaluable resource for researchers, physicians, chemists, and law enforcement’. It costs US$150, but its pages are available for free online, where volunteers are participating in a group edit and annotation. Volume 2, covering hundreds of new tryptamines, will be published within the next few years.13
British drug strategy was reviewed in May 2012, bringing together figures from the political establishment, harm reduction workers, scientists, teachers, frontline staff in hospital rehab units, celebrities, media commentators, entrepreneurs and some of the most senior police officers in the country. Members of the Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC), which is is appointed by the House of Commons to examine the policy, administration and expenditure of the Department of Health and its associated bodies, visited drug-producing countries such as Afghanistan and Colombia, and investigated the links between drugs and crime and disorder. It represented the highest-level mainstream political debate on drugs that has been seen in the UK for over a decade.
The home secretary, Theresa May, in a letter to the ACMD’s Professor Les Iversen, acknowledged the thorniness of the problem:
With the pace with which we are seeing new substances becoming available in the UK and, in addition to the more traditional routes of supply, with the internet playing a critical role by increasing the ways in which it is possible to buy NPS [novel psychoactive substances], the challenges to the Government, law enforcement and the forensic community are considerable.14
The announcement of the HASC’s intention to open a debate around drugs policy was made at the same time that a series of influential international figures went public for the first time with their belief that the war on traditional drugs was not working, and that a new approach was needed. These included the presidents of Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia, all of whom have experienced events that, if replicated on the streets of Europe and the US, would be deemed unacceptable. Some 100,000 Mexicans have died in the last nine years as the country’s criminal gangs supplied the US – the world’s richest and greediest consumer of drugs – with cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine.
Guatemala’s president wrote in the Guardian that it was time for his country, as a key trans-shipment point for the drugs trade, to consider legalization. ‘Guatemala will not fail to honour any of its international commitments to fighting drug trafficking. But nor are we willing to continue as dumb witnesses to a global self-deceit,’ he wrote.15
Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos, similarly called for new thinking on the drugs trade in 2011: ‘The world needs to discuss new approaches … we are basically still thinking within the same framework as we have done for the last forty years.’ He went further, and said his country, the world’s biggest producer of cocaine, would consider full legalization: ‘If that means legalizing, and the world thinks that’s the solution, I will welcome it. I’m not against it,’ he told journalist John Mulholland.16
Public opinion has, in recent years, softened towards the idea of decriminalization of drugs – whose legal status I would contend has encouraged a growth in often-dangerous legal alternatives – or is at least more open to a debate around the topic. A few hardliners remain. I emailed Kathy Gyngell of the Centre for Policy Studies, who contributed to the HASC debate, to ask what her response to the increasingly dangerous legal highs market might be. She equated those buying and selling legal drugs on the internet with those who sexually abuse children. ‘We do not stop pursuing crime or enforcing the law because crime persists or because the technology they use changes, whether the internet or not. If you took that view you might give up on tracking down paedophiles who have come to operate, as many criminals do, through the internet,’ she said. However, the market in legal highs is currently, and rather self-evidently, legal in the UK, Europe and the US, and much of the rest of world. The sexual abuse of children by adults is not.
Gyngell offered commentary to the HASC together with boisterous right-wing media commentator Peter Hitchens. He cast the use of drugs, as the churchmen in 1920s America once did, in a moral light. ‘I think that taking drugs is a wrong thing to do. I think there is a good reason for there being a law against it, and if people do it they should be punished according to the law. If we had held to that, then we would still have the levels of drug use which we had before the 1971 Act, which were minimal,’ he said, citing no evidence whatsoever.
Hitchens declared that the rule of law, if properly and zealously applied, was in itself enough to dissuade young people from taking drugs: ‘I think if you have a properly enforced law, where cannabis possession, which is illegal, is punished when detected, then one of the most important things you will do is you will armour people, who are under strong peer pressure from their school fellows to take drugs, against that … They can turn around and say, “No, I will not do that. I don’t want to risk having a criminal record. I don’t want to risk never being able to travel to the United States for the rest of my life. I don’t think it’s worth it.”’
However, the hundreds of legal chemicals now available as replacements for cannabis are far more harmful than the illegal drug itself, as was noted by the drugs’ inventor, John William Huffman. They may be smoked by any young person without fear of prosecution, or a criminal record, or the loss of travel rights, but they bring far more serious health consequences than marijuana. If what Hitchens and other prohibitionists say about peer pressure is true – that it can be dismissed with arguments around legality – then the smoking of these substances becomes infinitely more attractive to young first-time users.
Moderate commentators who sound a note of caution over the availability of new drugs do exist. Oxford-educated consultant Kevin Sabet, who advocates more drug control, has advised three American presidents – Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama – on drug policy, and is a leading voice in the US on the topic. He was one of three main writers of President Obama’s first National Drug Control Strategy, and he led the office’s efforts on marijuana policy, legalization issues and emerging synthetic drug policy. Sabet agrees that legal highs present a major dilemma for law enforcement and legislators worldwide, but he says that simply outlawing these substances one by one is not a sustainable long-term strategy, and will not stop these drugs from being imported, produced or consumed. ‘What needs to happen is the passing of legislation and laws that prohibit the sales, manufacture and consumption of whole classes of drugs – with the exception of drugs manufactured for medical or scientific purposes,’ he told me.
He went on, ‘I don’t think legalization is the answer, since we know that making any drug legal lowers its price and increases its consumption and availability. We already have legal alcohol, tobacco and prescription drugs, and they are used at a much higher rate than illegal ones. Decriminalizing or legalizing these drugs would also increase their social acceptability. What we need is educat
ion combined with interventions that work to get users to stop using.’
How, though, can we explain from this perspective the drop in cigarette smoking witnessed in the US in the last sixty years? Today, 19.3 per cent of Americans smoke, but in the 1940s, it was around triple that figure.17 Nicotine, as any smoker will tell you, is highly addictive and ruinously unhealthy. Yet public health information campaigns have massively reduced the prevalence of smoking in a generation, even in private spaces.
Frontline drug worker Mark Dunn works at the UK’s first dedicated Club Drugs Clinic, part of the London Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. His branch of medicine treats what it terms ‘problematic’ users of club drugs, legal highs and other chemicals, whereas most drugs services focus on crack and heroin users. The clinic has been open eighteen months and staff have treated 250 patients, the majority of them gay men. Mephedrone is a major cause of concern for the clients Dunn sees, with some users now injecting the drug obsessively, chasing its short-lived and intensely euphoric high. ‘Mephedrone is way, way up there; people are bingeing and having horrific comedowns and paranoia. They have to reinject and this causes serious damage to veins, along with abscesses. They become psychotic and unwell, some have been sectioned. Then they use again and they become unwell again very quickly. One patient had no previous psychiatric history, and he has been sectioned four times in the last year. It has destroyed his life,’ he told me.
The last equally significant turning point in British drug culture, the rise of Ecstasy from 1988 onwards, was documented by journalist Sheryl Garrett in her 1999 book Adventures in Wonderland.18 At the time, Garrett was the editor of the style, music and design magazine The Face and was an early adopter of MDMA. She now has mixed feelings about the way the drugs market has changed in recent years, and she cites bingeing as a phenomenon that has challenged her long-held beliefs over drug use. ‘I was very pro-legalization and decriminalization, and used to cite arguments around historical prohibition. You know, “Banning drugs doesn’t stop anyone taking them or making them and we’re just funding organized crime, etc.” Legalization would mean you would be able to buy pure drugs and that would be accompanied by a huge health information campaign. But the risk is that we are bingers in Britain. The first time I went to Ibiza the atmosphere was really relaxed, and people were taking one or two pills a night – not twenty. But that binge culture has also now spread worldwide. I see it everywhere I go now, and that scares me a bit.’
The binge culture also concerns Dr Adam Winstock, who as well as working as a consultant in addictions, is also the creator and managing director of the Global Drug Survey, the world’s largest research project involving users. ‘Any discussion of decriminalization, or even legalization, where products are sold with accurate labelling and dosage information sounds like a good idea, but proponents presume an adult population making informed decisions. I’m not sure the UK could handle that, as users here tend not to be restrained. Holland has a moderate and informed adult population. The UK does not do moderation,’ he said.
Of course, it would be naïve to imagine that any moves towards a more liberal worldwide drug regime would be ushered in without complaint, however logical they might be. Matthew Collin, author of the 1998 book Altered State, the definitive history of Acid House and Ecstasy use in the UK and beyond,19 says the debate around decriminalization demands political context. He believes realpolitik dictates that the legal situation in most countries is unlikely to be greatly transformed by developments in the research chemical market. ‘A politician running for office is still open to attack from electoral enemies if he or she is seen to be “soft on drugs”, while for a government in power, the rhetoric of the War on Drugs is still more easily comprehensible and reassuring, despite its cost, than a step into the unknown whose outcome might appear unpredictable and potentially frightening,’ he said. ‘Prohibition may not have worked, but in countries like the US in particular it’s hard to see any political leader running on a legalization platform and having any chance of getting elected; the candidate would be ripped to pieces by attack advertisements during the campaign. And even if he or she made it into office, getting such a policy into the statute book would appear impossible. Look at the fierce resistance to Barack Obama’s attempt to reform the American healthcare system – and then imagine if he was trying to convince Congress and the House of Representatives to legalize cocaine and heroin.’
Dealers who profit from the sale of banned drugs can have a clearer view of the problems of legalization than many other commentators. I conducted an in-depth interview with one of the most popular vendors of MDMA on the Silk Road, discussing the legalization of drugs across an encrypted email connection. ‘The biggest issue I have with legalization is quantifying the pros and cons, what information do you base your decision on? Which metric is most important? Is it addiction rates, acute risk, economic cost, family breakdown, crime rates? It’s easy to look at the gruesome prohibition-fueled civil war in Mexico, the private prison industry in the US, the gang-fighting over drugs that goes on in every city and draw the conclusion that legalization is the only humane and reasonable alternative, because all of those injustices are blatant and gruesome. It’s harder to weigh the less apparent consequences, the subtle personal issues that easy access to drugs brings,’ he said.
‘As a dealer/vendor I get to see a much closer view of these problems, both in myself and others, and frankly it often upsets me. Many times I’ve had to stop selling to clients because they developed serious addiction issues. I know people who use MDMA every week and suffer serious memory and cognitive problems because of it; people who can’t stop using coke despite not even enjoying it any more, people who have to pop Oxycodone just to make it through the day. Seeing it really wears me down. How many more people would there be like that if they could pop down to the convenience store and pick up an eight-ball of cocaine? Would they ultimately be better off if given access to whatever they wanted along with subsidized harm reduction and treatment programmes if needed? It’s not an easy question to answer at all. I used to think that people should ultimately have agency over their own bodies and what they put in them, that the world was overwhelmingly worse off with prohibition than without it. I still feel that way, but over the past few years my view has become much more conflicted.’
In Europe, only Portugal has dared to experiment with radical moves towards decriminalization – of drugs far more harmful and addictive than the most popular recreational drugs whose effects many research chemicals and legal highs seek to emulate. Before 2001, heroin use in Portugal was rife. There were over 100,000 intravenous drug addicts in the country, and open-air drugs markets were commonplace. In 2001, the government decriminalized the possession and personal use of all drugs, including heroin and cocaine, and compelled users caught with banned substances to appear in front of special addiction panels, making drug use a health matter, rather than a crime.
‘The changes that were made in Portugal provide an interesting before-and-after study on the possible effects of decriminalization,’ the EMCDDA said.20
And indeed they do. In 2011, Joao Goulao, President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction told journalists that the number of problem drug users had halved.21 The rate of injectors also halved to about half a per cent of the population, below the levels seen in Britain and Italy. New HIV cases also dropped; in 2002, half of all new cases of the disease were injectors; today, that figure is 17.5 per cent.
Dr Adam Winstock says the UK missed a chance to institute a fresh approach to drugs policy when it banned mephedrone. ‘The appearance of research chemicals like mephedrone in mainstream markets gave governments an opportunity to do something different. It’s difficult for governments to retrospectively amend laws around existing substances, and mephedrone did offer a chance to use consumer or medicinal product regulations rather than the Misuse of Drugs Act. We missed that opportunity. Widespread use was initially reduced, but the drug migrated to stree
t dealers, the price went up and many users thought that purity fell,’ he told me.
Toxicologist John Ramsey says doing nothing is not an option. ‘In terms of control, we have to do something in case some horrendous compound comes along. It’s almost inevitable, just a matter of time. There is the potential for someone to drop dead the first time they take it. When you’re tinkering with molecules you can get things wrong and there are surprises,’ he warns.
But Ramsey is, like many since the legal high and research chemical market ballooned, conflicted over what to do now. Most feel legalization is also not an option, since many of the drugs are harmful, while leaving the industry unregulated is equally unsatisfactory. ‘Why tolerate a lower standard of safety for recreational drugs than you do for pharmaceuticals?’ Ramsey asked. ‘The pharmaceutical argument is a risk/benefit one. If you have a tablet for headaches, you won’t put up with one that has many side effects; it’s easier to put up with the headache. If you have cancer, the chemotherapy will make you sick, impotent and will make your hair drop out, but you take it because if you don’t, you’ll die. The difficulty with recreational drugs is how do you make that call? The only positive effect of taking recreational drugs is pleasure, so how many side effects should we tolerate for a pleasurable drug?’
Other legal measures that may be considered in the UK are generic or analogue controls to update the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. These kinds of laws seek to ban entire categories of drugs and have been in place in the US since 1986, to little effect. While the government’s chief advisors have recommended further study in this area, experts at the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD) and the UK Drug Policy Commission argue that the courts could become filled with judicial claims against such a complex area of law. The ISCD said in a report citing recent admissions by the US that its own analogue laws were flawed:
