SPAIN - Philosopher and lead-writer with "El Pais" - SPAIN

ABSTRACT: The author shows how the various arguments presented by supporters of drug prohibition spring from an almost mythical view of reality. Our culture, like all others, use psycho-active drugs which should, first and foremost, be considered as accessories in our quest for more happiness and less hardship.

("THE COST OF PROHIBITION ON DRUGS", Papers of the International

Anti-prohibitionism Forum, Brussels 28th september - 1st october 1988; Ed. Radical Party)

My aim here will be to encourage necessary institutional debate on the so-called "drug problem". Up to now, we have witnessed only the hysterical desire to punish with the resulting transformation of chemical products and people into 'bogey-men', a pathological misinformation and the invention of shamelessly pseudo-scientific fairy-tales.

The current mythical conjecture can be summed up as follows : "the drug problem, or drugs, as it is generally called, is the evil creation of an unscrupulous international Mafia in order to accumulate immense profits, enslave youth, and physically and morally corrupt human-kind. In the face of a similar threat, the only appropriate action is an energetic policy of repression, at all levels, of everything related to it - from the simple "joint" to the vast cocaine plantations in the Bolivian jungles. Only when the last important drug dealer has been captured will Man will be safe from the drug menace".

In those hackneyed phrases, facts and prejudices are confused; effects presented as if they were causes, with the result that the real bases of the problem are skilfully dodged. In reality, a political, expiatory plot is afoot, the usefulness of which - and to whom it is useful - is obvious. It is the execution of an excellent business venture; somebody else's wretchedness is being used to salve bad consciences and the assuming of the practical and juridical responsibilities of a truly modern state is being shirked.

The fact that even so-called "left-wing' intellectuals adhere unanimously - through their actions and their silences - to this obscurantism, illustrates (as if it were necessary) that the problem of the intellectual today is not his "recycling" into the service of power (those insisting on remaining in the Winter Palace for fear of the cold outside believe), or his lack of a global view of the world (as the new 'priests' maintain), but his everlasting lack of valid opinions when faced with the very specific problems of today's society.

What is presented here is no more than a reference to the socio-political aspects of the issue - those generally, and with impunity, called "ethical" aspects, only because a vestige of religious belief remains.

In other words, the really important aspects of the drug problem are not being discussed; their potential as a source of pleasure, a remedy to pain, or a creative stimulant. In a word, their use as a valid aid to human life, is one to which drugs have been put for thousands of years, and will continue. But that aspect would have to be included in a more detailed survey than the one being presented today.

The use of drugs - i.e. the use of substances or physical practices which alter the normal perception of reality - exists in all societies. Drugs have been used extensively and sometimes in the context of religious rites. They have been adored and feared, and on occasion abused.

The history of drugs is as rich and varied as the history of mankind itself, running parallel to it. The way to achieving awareness begins with the desire to experiment.

Contemporary society exalts the individual, his complex and realised personal freedom - freedom of political convictions, freedom of expression, the right to information and quest, artistic, religious or sexual expression, etc., are the bases of modern democracy.

Totalitarianism, on the other hand, is nothing more than the subordination of the individual to society - society characterised by wardens of the common good - in the form of a nations, a States, political dogma, or life styles at odds with the interests and tastes of the individual. The writ of "Habeas Corpus" should be extended to include all aspects of the individual's free use of his own body, his energies, his search for pleasure or enlightenment, his experiments on himself (human life is not, or should not, be other than a great experiment), even if the results of those should be his own destruction.

Prohibition of drugs in our society is as unjust as the prohibition of pornography, religious or political persecution, or persecution for erotic deviation or dietary preferences. It is also just as useless and harmful as any other type of prohibition - something which should, by now, be obvious. It is clearly taken for granted that we live in a Clinical State - in other words, the State has still has unlimited rights to decide what is best in the interests of our health, when it no longer has the power to brand us for our political, religious artistic or dietary options.

The drug problem is the problem of drug persecution. The use of drugs is not a danger which can be simply or easily eradicated. The 'danger', if it exists, resides in the prohibition or adulteration of drugs, the lack of information on the various drugs, their preparation and the reactions they produce in conventional society, the gangsterism surrounding that use, the obsession with 'curing' those who need them, or provide them, etc. It is also, and above all, a question of a right which must be defended.

Drug persecution is a descendant of religious persecution. Nowadays, physical health is the lay substitute for spiritual salvation. Drugs have also been persecuted for religious reasons, but in the past that was because of their orgiastic effects - in other words, the disturbance they caused in the soul and in morals. Today, they are persecuted for the effect they have on the body - illness and the reduced productivity they cause in the work environment (which is referred to as "public health").

Of course, there are drugs which can be dangerous (the way mountain-climbing, car racing or mining can be dangerous), and harmful (the way sexual excess, dancing or political credulity can be harmful), but never to the extent that war is dangerous or harmful. There are people who have died, and will die, as a result of taking drugs. But remember:

a) that the life lost belonged to an individual, not to the State or the Community, and

b) that death can be the result not so much to the substance itself, which the individual wished to take, but to its adulteration, or to the lack of available information and training in handling it, or the underworld setting in which the sale of drugs takes place because it is prohibited by law, etc., etc.

Drug addicts who wish to break the habit (we all have habits, or manias, which we keep until we realise that they are harmful and decide ourselves to rid ourselves of them) obviously have the right to social aid in doing so. They have the same right to social aid as someone seeking a divorce, changing their creed, or their sex, or renouncing terrorism. Society exists to help individuals, as far as possible, to satisfy their desires, rectify their errors: It does not exist to punish them in sacrifice to the deities of the tribe.

Rehabilitation costs money, but society also profits by the work of each of its members. We all attempt to comply, assuming that the common wealth is there precisely to mitigate the effects of accident - whether natural or due to negligence - affecting members of society as they go about their individual lives.

There are also work-related accidents; however, to my knowledge, no one has as yet proposed the prohibition of work or the prohibition of wheeled vehicles because of road accidents. In any case, although losses in this sense are justified by the fact that what is produced is considered to be necessary, what is merely consumed for pleasure cannot be justified by society because it is prodigiously gratuitous. Nothing could be more rigidly totalitarian or anti-democratic. In this way, guilty public hostility is expressed towards individuality which should be the justification for collective existence.

The decriminalisation of drugs is sometimes considered as equivalent to the legalisation of crime. Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth, because crime is damage to another for the benefit of the perpetrator, whereas no drug in itself is evil or it becomes thus as a result of the circumstances of its use. It would appear that the issue of decriminalisation is held to be a worse offence to society than suicide, abortion, divorce, homosexuality, and so on. In other words it is a raising of barriers which impede the individual's conscious free enjoyment of his own body. It is difficult to understand - and explanations are not forthcoming - why the supporters of juridical recognition of those other forms of emancipation can oppose the liberalisation of drugs. This is an attempt to solve the problem by attempting to identify its true nature. The process of decriminalisation, if it is to be truly efficient, will have to be on as international a level as possible.

And international forums and meetings are not lacking for discussing this problem rationally, instead of simply intensifying the persecution of dealers, which only serves to raise the price of drugs. At any rate, the situation is similar to that of the partisans of unilateral disarmament when they recommend that their countries adopt positions which they consider just, accepting the risks involved, in the conviction that their attitude will convince other countries to follow the same policy.

Damage to public health is presently the main argument against drugs, stressing deaths from overdose, hours of work lost and the costs to the State for rehabilitating drug addicts. Thus, the rigidly moral, orgiastic and opposing reasons which have, for centuries, motivated persecution become of secondary importance. As regards the cost of drug addiction, I refer back to what I mentioned previously. I should just like to add that adequate taxes imposed on products which today are included in the black market and thus unregulated, could cover those costs through a redistributing of the profits presently lining the pockets of the very few.

The political benefits derived from a similar crusade must also not be overlooked. If before the war, the health of the State was a consideration, today health might be considered the main issue raised in the war of the State. The result of which is the impression of active political effort in that area which is unanimously feared, which will not be lacking in demagogic encouragement. To what better cause could First Ladies devote their time and efforts - after all, kissing strange children in public places could bring them face to face with AIDS.

But I am not convinced that the motivation here is compassion for the deaths or the pain of others. First of all, because the majority of drugs do not kill, and many of them suppress more pain than they cause (in a final analysis, what is more painful for the alcoholic - cirrhosis of the liver or all the private pain that a few drinks help him, and millions like him, to live through?)

Secondly, death from drugs is more often caused by their adulteration or the illicit circumstances in which they are used (ignorance of dosing, contaminated needles) than their inherent potential to harm. If the various governments are so preoccupied with death and suffering caused by drugs, they should hasten to decriminalise their use. What is certain is that, beneath all the clinical rationalisations, the old envy of unshared and non-productive enjoyment will continue to encourage prohibition and the hysterical desire to punish.

The great Macaulay, in his "History of England", stated that "Puritans do not hate the hunting of bears with dogs because of the damage done to the animals, but because it gives pleasure to the spectator". I fear that there are some similarities implicit in the present situation.

Another important argument against drugs in favour of more energetic persecution, is the incidence among the young, especially in the less privileged social classes. In the first place, it should be pointed out that the cause of the increase in the use of drugs among the young in those social strata is prohibition and the trafficking it generates. Dealers are motivated to seek new clients among the more ingenuous, who are willing to resort to anything in order to obtain the enormous sums of money needed for purchasing drugs. The sale of heroin at the entrances of schools, or in gathering places of the young, is being discussed. The sale of gin or pornographic magazines, however, is not. And gin and pornography, because they are readily available, do not produce the same level of profit. Unemployment and alienation in large sectors of youth encourages various kinds of delinquency and violence.

Mythical drugs give rise to speculation that they cause juvenile ills that are, in reality, caused by social environment. The obvious fact that children and adolescents must be protected from unscrupulous speculation in no way justifies the unscrupulous treatment of the entire population as if it were a kindergarten.

We are assured that drugs are the cause of the moral degradation of the population. The description of what that degradation actually consists of ranges from the vacuous to moralistic rhetoric - "At present, there is no greater threat than drugs - with the sole exception of nuclear war - for the human soul, to the immature and sensitive individual in modern society at a time when disorder and moral decadence are spreading everywhere," we are assured by Dr. Francisco Llavero, in "El Pais" (May 11, 1987). I do not know which is more interesting; the idea that nuclear war is a danger to the human soul, Dr. Llavero's idea of a society formed by mature, ascetic individuals, or a recent article denouncing drug traffic promoted by the police in order to attenuate the violence and revolutionary potential of young Basques.

Such moralism demonstrate a common and limitless contempt for that human freedom which is the basis of human dignity. The only way, according to these individuals, to guarantee moral rectitude is to remove the opportunity to sin. The basis of any moral proposal based on self-control for them is not worth considering; we are conditioned by the irresistible nature of evil. However, going back to moral heteronomy - which poor Kant considered obsolete already in the 18th century - the line of an ethic of autonomy taken on the issue of drugs could not be better expressed than Gabriel Matzneff's comment, "Hashish, love and wine can give rise to the best or the worst. It all depends on how we use them. So, it is not abstinence which must be taught, but self-mastery" ("Le Taureau de Phalaris").

In conclusion, the contrived myth described in the introduction might be substituted by the following : our culture, like all other cultures, is familiar with drugs, uses them and searches them out. The education, anxieties and ambitions of each individual decide which drugs he will use and how.

The State's role in all this must be no more than furnishing the most complete and rational information about each substance, regulating their manufacture and quality, and aiding both those wishing to use them as well as those who feel threatened by this social freedom. Naturally, given the present political climate of the frenzied persecution of drugs - at least as seen from the outside, by ingenuous public opinion - a phase of re-adaptation is necessary before the final phase of decriminalised normality can be reached.

It will also be necessary to transmit, through the media, that attitude of legal tolerance and unified action. As there is no doubt as to the urgent importance of achieving this objective, highest priority should be given as soon as possible. That has been the point and aim of this presentation.