Why Left Unity passed a policy in favour of decriminalising all drugs
Left Unity conference made the right decision in saying no to the war on drugs, writes Simon Hardy
At its November 2014 conference, Left Unity passed a position (proposed by my branch, Lambeth) on legalising cannabis and decriminalising all other drugs.
The policy of Left Unity – compared to the moralist panic-stricken reaction to drugs by mainstream parties and the media – sends a clear signal that we consider drug abuse to be a medical issue, not simply a criminal issue.
The ‘war on drugs’, launched in 1971 by US president Richard Nixon, has been a disaster. Since being launched the war on drugs has aimed to beat the problem of drug addiction and social problems associated with it by criminalising drug use, drug production and selling. The war on drugs from its inception was aimed disproportionately in the West at Black communities. It resulted in a dramatic increase in the prison population in several countries as young people were sent to prison for decades for being involved in the drug trade, or even just possessing drugs for personal consumption.
In an October poll, 84% agreed that the ‘war on drugs has failed’. Yet we live in a political culture where drug experts like Professor Nutt are forced to resign, as he was in 2009, for pointing out that based on the evidence LSD was less harmful on society than drinking alcohol. When his committee advised the home secretary at the time – Labour’s Alan Johnson – to reclassify Ecstasy from a Class A to a Class B drug, it was vetoed for no other reason that it wouldn’t look good in the press. The fact is that Professor Nutt was sacked for telling the truth about illegal drugs: that most are less harmful than alcohol and it does not make sense to criminalise everyone who takes them.
Some people might support the war on drugs because of the negative impact that they are having on their communities. It is true that drug abuse can lead to all manner of personal and social problems, including a rise in crime as addicts commit crimes to pay for drugs, and drug gangs organise and carry out violence to protect their profits.
But the way to deal with these social problems is not to criminalise people. Indeed, many of the social problems have come about precisely because drugs are illegal and a lucrative black market has sprung up around them. With an estimated two million people taking ecstasy or MDMA every weekend, let alone the vast numbers of people who smoke cannabis, it is clear that making them illegal has not prevented their consumption.
The war on drugs is also an international issue. It has led to the militarisation of parts of South America, notably Colombia and Mexico. The drug cartels armed themselves and effectively became outside the law, so governments acted increasingly outside the law to fight them. The war on drugs has led to a spiral of violence and conflict that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of people.
Most recently mass protests have broken out in Mexico over the massacre of students who were protesting against drug cartels and gangs. The police arrested them and then handed them over to the gangs to be executed. Why? No doubt it is down to the corruption and complicity between the police and the drug gangs they are meant to be fighting, due to an informal relationship of mutual financially beneficial bribery.
We don’t want this country to be part of an international policy with such spectacularly disastrous results.
Now there are a growing number of countries where drugs have been decriminalised and the outcome has been much better for society. Portugal decriminalised drugs in 2002, Washington state now taxes and regulates marijuana, Colorado has decriminalised cannabis and Uruguay now has a state run market for marijuana. In 2014 the World Health Organisation called for the decriminalisation of drug use to aid the fight against HIV and other diseases spread through needle-sharing.
Decriminalising drugs and regulating them takes them out of the hands of the drug dealers and criminals and ensures that people with addictions do not need to fear getting help. It would undercut a lot of the street violence and open up doors and avenues into places that had previously been shut off for fear of the authorities.
That is why Left Unity supports this policy and why you should too.
7 comments
7 responses to “Why Left Unity passed a policy in favour of decriminalising all drugs”
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While I understand the logic behind decriminalising drugs what I did not like at conference was the way this item was slipped in with a raft of other additions in the same amendment. Delegates might have supported making police more accountable and not the decriminalisation of drugs, or vice versa. Having said that there are time constraints, as proved by the endless debate and speeches on supporting and arming Kurds which went on so long it pushed out the equally important, for some of us more important, debate on the western-funded genocide in Eastern Ukraine. I don’t know the answer. People have opinions and want to see them expressed. I don’t know whether I imagined this but there seemed to be significantly more floor-space given to London than elsewhere (I was only there on Saturday) but in the provinces we’re used to the dictats from Westminster. Peace.
Hi John,
I totally agree it wasn’t ideal. What we actually needed was an hour long session on the issue – indeed on many of the issues! I hope now we have got most of the policy agreed we can return to key issues at next conference and debate the matters there in more detail. Certainly there was a terrible rush to push through motions and amendments to get positions on key things but the sacrifice was over the time needed to properly absorb the issue and debate it thoroughly.
I can’t comment on the floorspace from London! I didn’t notice but then I am from London so perhaps I was less likely to notice.
Hi Simon,
Yes, let’s hope so. Policy, I think, is an ever-changing beast that has to keep up with an ever-changing world. Let’s hope now like you say there is a policy framework within which we can work together to iron out minor hiccups.
Other things went very well. The venue was fine. Could perhaps have done with coffee and tea-urns for people to help themselves. But all in all a great event. And thanks to whoever it was who baked the birthday cake.
I may well be an old neo stalinist fogie on this one , but count me out on this particular LU new poicy.
I really don’t think this policy has been thought through. I don’t for a minute deny that many “hard” illegal drugs are “no worse” for people than excessive alcohol consumption. But then excessive alcohol consumption is of course an absolute deeply damaging scourge in our society, and many, many others ( A large number on the radical left for instance have always been near or actual alcoholics I would say, based on my 43 odd years of association with this particular social cohort).
So to add unrestricted access to extremely addictive “hard” drugs like crack cocaine to everyone – and presumably handing its supply over to the major “legitimate” corporations, (Virgin Crack Cocaine ?) rather than its current gangster suppliers, may well get rid of the organised crime side of the drugs industry – but will it be good for society as a whole for very addictive drugs like heroin and cocaine to be freely available ? I think not.
One of the fundamental reasons for the huge supply of currently illegal, “hard” highly addictive drugs, on the streets of most Western countries is the all pervasive corruption of the anti drug enforcement agencies. A serious “war on drugs” , without this corruption could have broken the gangs a long time ago . It is not difficult for a serious police force to track back from the street suppliers to the “Mr Bigs” – IF the will is there. It seldom has been.
As a socialist I find it very hard to believe, given the damage both excessive alcohol use and hard drug use does to those who fall under their spell, that a socialist workers state would adopt the liberarian attitude to hard drug supply and use that the old hippies who make up a significant proportion of our LU membership, so recklessly decided on at the London Conference.
John Penney I think it is possibly you who has not thought through this particular stance of yours. As outlined in the recent study that our current government refuses to acknowledge and wishes did not exist is the evidence of the failed ‘war on drugs’. It proves unequivocally that prohibiting substances does little to nothing to prevent their usage whilst also maximising the potential for harm to the users health and also to their future by potentially branding them a criminal for no more than ingesting a substance that may or may not be harmful to themselves.
Much like we know junk food is addictive and harmful, and yet funnily enough we continue to allow responsible people to make their own decisions when it comes to this, even though we know it is responsible for hundreds of thousands of cases of premature death. So why not ban sugar, fat and salt?
We can also see from the evidence that punishing users has next to no effect on the rates of usage. People love to bring up draconian regimes such as in Singapore, which has a record of human rights abuse, as a nice example of how zero tolerance supposedly works. Often negating to mention the amount of corruption and fixing of figures that happens there as well as the fact that if capital punishment was an effective deterrent why do people continue to be put to death? As is the case in most countries that claim to have solved the drugs issue by this means there is a high level of corruption which basically means the rich get away with taking these substances whilst the poor are the ones who get made an example of. Sound familiar?
You are however right about alcohol as it is one of the biggest killers in the world, and yet it is available in almost every shop you enter nowadays. If we were actually serious about protecting people’s health the first act would be to get a grip on the alcohol industries monopoly (which they have undoubtedly paid very good money over the years to gain) and bring them in line with our drugs policy, which would ultimately mean alcohol being classed as A on our current scale. If that happened I’d bet my bottom dollar that scale of harm would not be used to prejudge users and class them as criminals.
The hypocrisy of those that see little to no issue with the use and abuse of alcohol whilst attacking illegal drug users is outstandingly ignorant, but thanks to years of lies and propaganda spewed forth from our insidious media (who have a close ‘relationship’ with the alcohol industry) people have been brainwashed into believing that somehow those who enjoy a spliff are many times worse than those necking several pints.
Problematic drug use is an issue. Not all drug use, including alcohol, is problematic. Currently it is viewed that having such a vice is not to be tolerated in any shape or form (unless of course it is alcohol…then fill your boots) and you are to be classed as either an addict or a criminal when you choose to put something that may or may not be harmful into your own person that has been deemed ‘bad and ‘naughty’ by our leaders.
What right does the government or the UN have to determine when such an occurrence becomes a criminal one? At best it should be a matter for the health system. And if you remove the criminal element from the supply chain by properly (very important) controlling and regulating these substances to responsibly maximise harm reduction and overall usage I really do not see how anybody would be against this. Unless they had a reason to ignore the evidence that is, like our current government who have a close ‘relationship’ with those who stand to lose a great deal from a more robust, responsible, harm reducing and logical system based on evidence and science and not prejudice and hysteria, mainly used to rile up the voters.
Please do a little more research into why the war on drugs came about in the first place (here’s a clue….it wasn’t to protect people from harm). I highly recommend watching The House I Live In.
Au contraire, I can assure you that I have thought through the issue of supporting the unrestricted access to hard drugs in a society like ours, comrade handytrim, and see nothing but utter disaster resulting for any society which adopted such a policy.
Your comments on alcohol abuse seems a complete non sequiter, in relation to my argument – since I fully grasp the major scourge of excessive alcohol consumption in Britain – and the need to rein in the power of the drinks companies to flog ever greater amounts of their products to the public.
Our new drugs policy spookily mirrors the desire of the big capitalist corporations to get a slice of the mega profits action in the hard drugs business , currently being gobbled up by organised crime. Last year I remember the ghastly Richard Branson sounding off , as part of some commission he participated in on drug use and sanctions policy, on the need to abandon all legal sanctions on drug use “because they haven’t worked”. Branson was probably drooling at the thought of the profits to be made by Virgin in a newly legalised hard drugs industry.
It is no accident that there is a very longstanding tradition of opposition to both excessive, and indeed any, alcohol consumption within the socialist and Methodist inspired British Labour movement. Socialists long recognised that not only, to quote Marx, is religion the “opiate of the people” , but excessive alcohol consumption amongst the working class , is an “opiate of the people ” too, as is opium itself , and has always been seen as a destroyer of families and communities, and a barrier to the building of working class activism. And so it is with the scourge of hard drugs. One only has to have seen(as I have) the terrible impact of major drug abuse on communities in the old South Yorkshire coalfield communities, to understand that , particularly in a situation of social decay and despair, hard drugs are the enemy of working people and the socialist cause.
I have no problem with changing the situation currently where it is the unfortunate addicted users who the law usually prosecutes. The point is to concentrate on the suppliers with the full force of the law and state enforcement agencies.
The “War on Drugs” is only being lost because the ruling class is quite happy for the working class to be pacified by massive addictive drug use – rather than fighting to better their conditions, and because the supposed drug enforcement agencies are all too often in cahoots with the big scale suppliers – across the globe.
The adoption of as laisse faire blanket legalisation of all drugs line by Left Unity is just yet another example of how out of touch with our target working class audience too many in our small new party still are. If we ever become a significant sized party of the Left , responsive to a real mass working class audience, this daft drugs policy wouldn’t survive for five minutes.
I think decriminalising Maraijauna is fine because I can understand it being less damaging on society than alcohol. However I can not put my faith in a party who can also include Class A drugs in this blanket covering attempt to ‘wipe out black market crime’. One stance that has not been tackled here is underage drinking, and what will lead to underage substance abuse. For as young as fourteen it is very easy to get served drinks as strong as vodka from off licences all over the country. Furthermore if unsuccessful, it is easy enough to ask an older stranger to do it for them. I don’t know if people would differentiate between the power of alcohol, and Class A drugs and as a result – say yes to the first, and no to the second – however, over time as advertising may creep, and an advocation to permitting drug use more frequently on tv, the two may become equal. I am sure Heroin has much greater danger than vodka on the mind and life of a young person.
To prevent this, one would have to install greater surveillance of newsagents, and police would be more prevalent around social events and cornershops themselves. Immediately, when there is a rise in police presence there is an air of oppression, rather than a freer, democratic country like we have now. If in anyway the sale of these drugs that are now decriminalised is thwarted or slowed, people will capitalise and move towards the black market, never emerging out of the situation that we started in.
Also, children are less prepared to seek out drugs if they have to buy them from ‘criminals’ in dark alleys, or at night in parks. Seeing them being bought frequently by adults in lit newsagents or specialsed shops (I don’t know where one would want to sell these) – and they would be sold here because people will see oportunity for profit, whether it is morally correct or not – would be encouraging for youths so see all classes of drugs as ok and so readily available.
Lastly, on the point that ‘Professor Nutt was sacked for telling the truth about illegal drugs: that most are less harmful than alcohol’ – what kind of experiement and test he make this judgement from? Yes visually alcohol creates lots of disturbances in society as opposed to drugs, however that may be because drugs are criminialised and used more frequently at home – it is rarely seen to inject on the street. Also, I find it more harrowing to see a heroin addict than an alcoholic. To really determine which one was worse you would have to have clones, subject one to vodka and the other to heroin for example, and with no other factors, see who died first,