Monday morning's headlines after SSY's legalise cannabis march
Every human society since we first evolved has experimented with drugs, pyschoactive substances, and altered states of consciousness.
Many leading psychologists and anthropologists believe that this is a normal part of human life, and experimenting with substances like cannabis or magic mushrooms has actually played a role in the evolution of modern, intelligent humans.
But in the last 200 years human society has changed dramatically. With the arrival of capitalism came the rise of modern states, with their borders, armies and police forces. As the technology to control their own people developed, states have had an ever increasing urge to monitor and discipline their populations.
One of the ways they have done this is implement a worldwide system of prohibition of drugs. While the two biggest drug killers, alcohol and tobacco, remain legal billion pound industries, relatively harmless drugs like cannabis and ecstasy remain the target of expensive police operations, and users are turned into criminals who can face imprisonment for doing nothing but experimenting with their own bodies.
The drugs laws we have in Britain and throughout the developed world have never borne any relation to real medical or scientific information, but instead have been shaped by the prejudices and scapegoats created by elites to divide and control the people. One of the main ways they have done this is to use racism, associating certain substances with foreigners or ethnic minorities.
Now, in the 21st century, many countries around the world are finally beginning to wake up to the fact that prohibition has been a costly disaster that has caused untold misery across the planet. The time has at last come to begin treating drugs as a health and social issue, not a criminal one, and base our drugs policies on real scientific evidence, not prejudice and racism.
The head of the Royal College of Nursing has backed the idea of clean pharmaceutical heroin being made available on prescription to addicts, an idea the SSP has campaigned in favour of for years.
Peter Carter was speaking as the RCN discussed the results of pilot studies conducted last year in London, Darlington and Brighton. The schemes allowed heroin users to inject under supervision in special consumption rooms. The studies found, as several previous schemes have already, that heroin on prescription means users can break away from using illegal dealers, and cut the huge cost of their problem. This in turn cuts crime in the local area massively, as people with drug problems are no longer forced to steal to feed their problem. The amount of crime committed by addicts in the areas being studied was cut by two thirds. Participants in the study were found to have cut the amount they were spending on heroin from £300 a week to £50.
The provision of consumption rooms also reduces the risk of overdoses, and of transmission of diseases like hepatitis or HIV, as their is always access to clean needles. Once users are are taking part in a medical programme their prescription can be gradually reduced to help break their addictions.
Dr. Carter said:
“Addicts can take the drugs there [in consumption rooms] rather than go to school playgrounds or the stairwells of flats. Critics say that you are encouraging drug addiction but the reality is that these people are addicts and they are going to do it anyway. I do believe in heroin prescribing. The fact is heroin is very addictive. People who are addicted so often resort to crime, to steal to buy the heroin. This obviates the need for them to steal.
It might take a few years but I think people will understand. If you are going to get people off heroin then in the initial stages we have to have proper heroin prescribing services.”
A consumption room, where addicts can inject with medical supervision
The idea has traditionally been opposed by those who object to addicts being given heroin at public expense, however, these studies are just the latest that show heroin on prescription can play a major role in ending the huge problems caused by addiction. It’s time to recognise that heroin users are people with serious health problems, and usually have reached addiction as a result of abuse, poverty and hopelessness. Drug addiction is a problem of society, and the war on drugs approach of pretending that it is just an individual choice has clearly failed. Putting the blame on individuals for their own problems simply fails to understand how they have come about, and what can be done to help end them. Treating people with health problems as criminals just makes the situation worse. Heroin on prescription on the other hand is a real step towards helping people end the nightmare of addiction.
The SSP has always stood for what will actually help reduce the harm caused by drugs, rather than blaming individuals for what are social problems. Yet again, study has shown that heroin on prescription will protect health and reduce crime. Reducing the huge profits made from the international heroin trade will also go a huge way to helping undermine the basis of warlords’ power in Afghanistan. It’s time that this SSP policy was implemented in Scotland and beyond.
When people were protesting against the war in Iraq, “No war for oil!” was one of the main slogans around the world. Of course it’s easy to see that at a simple level the reason why Britain and America invaded Iraq was to do with oil.
But things are rarely simple and straight forward when it comes to the operation of big, nuclear armed empires trying to control the world. For example, as much as the war in Iraq was about American control and access to Iraq’s oil fields, it was also about making sure that when that oil was bought and sold on the world market it was done in dollars, not euros.
The same is true of the long, and escalating, war in Afghanistan. On one level the reason British and American soldiers are killing and dying there is clearly to do with oil pipelines, and keeping strategic control over Asia in a battle for world domination. These big reasons why the war grinds on are about to be explained in an upcoming SSY pamphlet looking a bit deeper into why we should campaign for an immediate withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.
But in any big war operation like this, there are secondary reasons why the governments of NATO are willing to commit lives and huge amounts of money. Something that’s been overlooked as a reason motivating the war in Afghanistan is the global importance of the heroin economy.
Estimates put the value of the global heroin trade at more than $64.82 billion per year. Today, over 90% of that product originates in Afghanistan. Only a small proportion of these massive profits can be held in cash or recycled through unofficial banks. The vast majority has to be laundered through the global financial system. In other words, the drug trade contributes billions of dollars a year to the revenues of major global banks.
Poppies being grown for heroin production in Afghanistan
Just because something is illegal doesn’t mean that when it’s traded for huge profits it isn’t a vital part of the world economy. The story of the growth of the heroin trade since the 60’s is one that’s inextricably linked with the history of US imperialism and its wars around the world. There’s a long and well documented history of the involvement of US government agencies like the CIA in the drug trade. During the US wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, American support was given to anti-communist rebels that used heroin production to fund their operations with the support and approval of the CIA. The areas where the drugs were produced were known as ‘The Golden Triangle.’
Later persistent allegations surfaced that in the 1980s the CIA collaborated in assisting the Contra rebels (who were waging war against the left wing government in Nicaragua) in selling crack cocaine into the US. This was uncovered by investigative journalist Gary Webb. The point of the operation was to generate a stream of profits through the drug trade that provided the money to sustain the Contras’ war. If the CIA has asked the US Congress for this funding they would have had to justify its use, but crack money provided funds whose use they weren’t answerable for.
With black communities across the US flooded with crack cocaine, many affected by the resulting wave of social disruption blamed the CIA and US foreign policy. By 1996 CIA Director John Deutch was forced to appear at a public meeting in Watts, Los Angeles to answer to the allegations. Despite his denials of CIA involvement in the drug trade, he was confronted by a former LAPD Narcotics Officer turned independent investigator, Mike Ruppert, who told the meeting he had direct evidence of CIA involvement in trafficking crack.
The point of all this background history is to show that the CIA and other US government and military agencies have long had involvement in the highly profitable global drug trade. The profits from this trade have helped to provide funding for secret military operations not subject to any kind of democratic scrutiny.
Beginning in 1978 the CIA embarked on its biggest operation ever, which was to fund and arm warlords and Islamic fundamentalists to make war against the Soviet-backed left wing government of Afghanistan. They worked hand-in-glove with the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency This war dragged on throughout the 80s, draining lives and resources from the USSR, and contributing greatly to its final collapse. The mujahideen rebels, equipped by American arms and money, were eventually able to drive the Soviet armies out, and then depose the government.
In the chaos of the war and its aftermath Afghanistan became the world’s leading supplier of heroin. As you might expect, very little of the profits are made by the actual farmers. The money is made by government officials, police, warlords and power brokers. Indeed, the western-backed President Hamid Karzai’s own family have been implicated in the drug trade.
Of course, when the mainstream media reports on the Afghan heroin trade, they usually do so to imply that it provides funding to the Taliban and al Qaeda. However, the truth is that the vast majority of the profit goes to NATO allies, people who our forces maintain in power. Many of these same forces work with figures in the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment, providing a major source of income to Pakistani state (another US ally.)
In fact, in 2000, before the American invasion and while they were still in power, the Taliban actually banned the growing of poppies needed to produce heroin. The Afghan heroin trade temporarily collapsed in value, cutting off a massive source of revenue for the Pakistani state. And ultimately, the impact was felt on the profits of western banks through which the money would have been laundered.
When the US and its allies invaded in 2001, revival of the heroin trade proved to be one of the main ways to finance the operations of the Northern Alliance, the western backed gang of brutal warlords now in power in many parts of Afghanistan. Some of the warlords have become millionaires as a result.
In addition, there is a significant profit being made by someone in the marketing of the chemical precursors needed to manufacture heroin in Afghanistan. Acetic anhydride, a chemical needed as part of the process, is regularly intercepted being smuggled into Afghanistan. The trade in this chemical is thought to be worth $45 million. A portion of that money makes its way back to western chemical corporations as profits.
There are an estimated 16 million opiate users worldwide, and the main market is in Europe, where the annual profits are estimated to be around $20 billion. One of the main ways that peace could perhaps be achieved in Afghanistan would be to do something to curb the demand for illegally produced heroin in Europe.
In Scotland, the SSP and SSY has campaigned for years in favour of a system of clean, pharmaceutical heroin being prescribed to addicts via the NHS. We’ve been villified, even effectively being called drug dealers by the Daily Record. But the fact remains that heroin on prescription is a safer way to help people with an addiction than the current system of blanket prescribing methadone. In a pilot scheme in the English town of Widnes where this was tried the effect was a drop to virtually zero levels of acquisitive crime by drug users, as well as new infection rates for HIV.
Pharmaceutical heroin
The urgency of removing the need for Scotland’s 50,000+ heroin users to buy from the illegal market was illustrated graphically last year. At least 9 people were killed after using heroin that was contaminated with anthrax.
But at least part of the reason that the pilot scheme in Widnes was shut down was that it threatened the profits of pharmaceutical companies manufacturing methadone. And at least part of the reason that NATO forces remain entangled in the Afghan war is that our allies rely on the heroin trade, which in turn produces a tidy profit for western banks. In the wake of the economic collapse of 2008, banks are now less keen than ever to ask too many questions about where their money is coming from. As UN drug official Antonio Mario Costa puts it:
“Interbank loans were funded by money that originated from drug trade and other illegal activities, and there were signs that some banks were rescued in that way. . .At a time of major bank failures, money doesn’t smell, bankers seem to believe.”
What all this shows is that the fight against the war in Afghanistan is inextricably linked to the fight to change society here. Their problems are largely a result of our governments’ policies. A socialist drug policy in Scotland would go a long way to ending the misery caused by illegal heroin in Scottish communities. But it would also go a long way to pulling the fuel from the fire of the war in Afghanistan, giving the Afghan people a chance at last to have peace and determine their own future.
When people were protesting against the war in Iraq, “No war for oil!” was one of the main slogans around the world. Of course it’s easy to see that at a simple level the reason why Britain and America invaded Iraq was to do with oil.
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