by Bruce K. ALEXANDER

CANADA - Instructor in the Department of Criminology of Montreal University, government advisor

ABSTRACT: The "drug problem" springs from deep social troubles that cannot be resolved with the belligerent solutions society now offers. The author advocates local regulation rather than tough state prohibition, distribution of honest and complete information rather than alarmist propaganda and finally, the modification of our way of life as a society rather than the forced treatment of the so-called diseased.

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

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

In Canada and the U.S. there have been three phases of alcohol regulation. In the first phase, which lasted from the earliest European settlements until about 1840, alcohol was considered a beneficial commodity. Its use was regulated primarily by individual conscience and local custom. Consumption was high by modern standards. In the second phase, beginning around 1840, alcohol came to be viewed as "demon rum" that was said to cause most of the social problems of the 19th century. This phase culminated in violent national prohibition of alcohol in both countries around the time of the First World War. The third phase began with the failure and repeal of prohibition and continues into the present.

The third phase is not simply a return to the first phase. Instead, individual conscience and local customs are now bolstered with local regulation of the sale of liquor backed by federal control over manufacturing, advertising, and distribution systems. The third phase is not utopia, but its benefits are dramatic relative to the other two-people drink, and excess and violence are minimised.

The regulation of other psycho-active drugs seems to be following a similar course in North America, and perhaps in Europe as well. Currently, we have reached the violent climax of the second, prohibition phase. This current phase has three conspicuous elements: Severe drug prohibition laws, incessant propaganda (often called "drug education") that legitimatises these laws, and professional treatment that is imposed upon people who use drugs. These three elements have grown to such extremes of unreason and violence that the hackneyed phrase, "War on Drugs", has become all too appropriate.

The laws, propaganda, and professional treatment have all failed. I will not review the evidence of failure here, for this work has already been done by admirable scholars, many of whom are attending this conference.

Within North America, public debate on drug policy seems to be stuck on the futile topic of whether or not drug law enforcement should be de-emphasised in favour of "drug education" and professional treatment. But all three of these approaches have been tried extensively over the last century and have shown they cannot succeed, in spite of the genuine concern and zeal of their proponents. All three are based on the same false assumptions. All three must be replaced.

I will discuss alternatives to each of the three elements of the War on Drugs. My main thesis is that the most promising alternatives are found by looking upon problems associated with drugs as ordinary social problems, rather than extraordinary ones that require violent intervention.

I must caution the audience not to expect too much. In the first place, nothing that I will propose is original. On the contrary, the essential point is that drug problems call for familiar, ordinary measures rather than extraordinary and/or warlike ones. Many people around the world are actively utilising ordinary alternatives now and documenting their effectiveness. Although their visions for ameliorating social problems may seem plain, they will return far more in the long run than the impossible promises of the drug warriors.

I can provide only a few examples of alternatives in this brief presentation. However, I have prepared a longer written form of this address, with more examples and fuller documentation, which is available on request.

A final caution is this: some of the alternatives I will propose may not make sense in Europe. Drug use is a matter of life-style, morality, and taste. In such matters, sensible attitudes and policies must be local, not imposed by the United States, the United Nations, the European Parliament, and, surely, not by Canada. Nonetheless, I will attempt to state some general principles that may have widespread application.

PROHIBITION. The alternative to universal prohibition is not the universal "legalisation" that supporters of the drug war fear. Rather, the key alternative is a return to local controls, both legal and social, so that municipalities, provinces, and nations can develop methods to control drug use that suit their own tastes and aversions and their own traditions of personal freedom.

Local drug control can be effective if it reflects the sentiments of the community concerned, rather than distant, arbitrary authority. It can be readily changed should it prove unworkable, because the machinery of change is far less ponderous in local communities than in nations or international bodies. The punishments that community control entails are necessarily milder than those that characterise the current "War on Drugs" because local authorities do not have massive force at their disposal.

The advantage of local control over total legalisation is that local control acknowledges the inescapable fact that human society everywhere exercises some control over the life-style of individuals. Notwithstanding the romance of libertarian philosophy, society does not exist without exerting some control over life-style.

The role of federal governments in a system of local control would be limited to functions that could not be carried out locally, for example imposing standards of quality for imported drugs, regulating advertising, or defining minimum constitutional freedoms that could not be impinged even by local ordinance.

Such federally guaranteed freedoms might include, for example, the freedom to manufacture alcoholic beverages and other drugs at home for personal consumption, depending on the values and traditions of the nation involved.

The virtues of legalisation can be illustrated by the marijuana legalisation in the American state of Alaska, which is adjacent to the Canadian province of British Columbia, where I live. Alaska replaced marijuana prohibition with legal regulation in 1975.

Alaska is the only American state in which possession of up to 4 ounces of marijuana and cultivation for personal use carries no legal punishment. Possession of larger amounts remains illegal although penalties for conviction are relatively mild by American standards.

Although this policy is viewed with alarm by American proponents of the war on drugs, it seems to be working well, and the Alaska legislature has not voted to reinstate drug prohibition since 1975, in spite of annual committee hearings on the situation. Even the Alaska state police, in their submission to the most recent hearings, saw little problem with the status quo.

The police submission was that they would not oppose making marijuana illegal again to bring the state's laws into accord with the other American states, but they would not feel justified in enforcing a marijuana prohibition law if it were passed because they could not see that marijuana use posed a police problem (Funk, 1988, personal communication).

There has been no evidence of an influx of people from other jurisdictions immigrating to Alaska to take advantage of the availability of marijuana.

Statewide legalisation of marijuana for personal use is accompanied by prohibition of the sale of alcohol in some counties (Zeese, 1987). Only time will reveal how well this unusual arrangement serves the needs of Alaskans, in their unique environment.

If it does not serve well, local voters are liable to change it quickly. Naturally, it is just as reasonable for counties to ban the sale of marijuana and allow alcohol, provided it is done in the same spirit of making sure the laws change quickly if they do not work.

PROPAGANDA. Changes in drug prohibition laws cannot occur unless they are preceded by some change in the massive outpouring of drug war propaganda. The alternative to the current drug propaganda is undistorted information.

This necessarily means the whole truth: the benefits of drugs as well as their costs and dangers; the fact that the majority of people use drugs moderately and only a minority uses them addictively; the conditions under which drug use is relatively safe as well as the conditions under which it is risky.

Most important, the whole truth would discredit the current groundless assumption that drugs are an important cause of society's problems.

People can be expected to function optimally when they have the greatest amount of valid information to guide their decisions. Whereas the value of accurate information is unquestioned in most spheres, the prohibition mentality has now progressed to the point that telling people the truth about drugs has come to seem dangerous and subversive.

It is the responsibility of those who can see the falsity of the propaganda to insist on the right to disseminate the truth. In particular, the responsibility for the current state of public misinformation falls most heavily on academics, media people, and politicians who have the resources to know the truth and the credibility to spread it. Many will not pay the price of speaking out. However, those who do speak out may hope to find more and more listeners as the public wearies of banal propaganda.

Eighteen years of teaching a university course on Canadian drug policy at Simon Fraser University has served me as a personal experiment on the question of how people respond to undistorted information on drugs. I have based my lectures strictly on the standard academic literature in history, medicine, law, and psychology, but I have never hesitated to throw established facts in the face of the prevailing doctrine of the War on Drugs.

Most of the students were shocked at first, but later expressed appreciation that they could understand drugs in a new and more productive way when normally hidden facts were brought to light. Many students expressed indignation at the smoke-screen of propaganda that previously had blocked their view of this crucial topic. Only a small number of students over the years have rejected my course as dangerous and seditious.

Students in my drug course do not develop drug addiction or other depravities as a result of being exposed to new ideas. Whereas I have collected no systematic data on this, Arnold Trebach has investigated the effects of his own university course - which is similar in content to mine. Responses to his questionnaires indicated that most of his students' personal drug use was unaffected by his course. Of those who reported an effect, 2.8% reported increased drug use and 11.3% reported decreased use. In two cases Trebach's course, in conjunction with some personal advice, seems to have helped students control serious drug problems.

The role of concerned academics is perfectly clear - we must forever insist on exploring truths and provoking young minds with socially unconventional ideas. This tradition is too strong to be taken away without objection - but academics are capable of quietly letting it slip away for petty gains.

Of course, universities cannot by themselves restore rationality to this topic. The mass media are said to be the ultimate determinant of public opinion. In North America, they seem committed to the War on Drugs mentality. Obviously, the War on Drugs cannot end until the mass media change their line. At this point, those who hope to end the War on Drugs must resist despair, for the mass media appear to be controlled in a bureaucratic stratosphere that ordinary mortals cannot penetrate.

It may be, however, that the beginnings of a change in North America are appearing in the most unlikely portion of the newspapers - the comics. Recent themes in American comic strips, such as Doonesbury, Bloom County, Kudzu, and Tank MacNamara, illustrate that it is becoming possible to publicly laugh at the War on Drugs in North America. At this stage, humour may be the only avenue of mass communication open to those who hope to discredit the War on Drugs propaganda.

PROFESSIONAL TREATMENT. Currently, large numbers of people who use illegal drugs are being forced or persuaded into treatment. Some of the professional "treatments" are essentially behaviour control programs disguised as therapy and others are more conventional and intended to be helpful. However, statistical evidence strongly indicates that neither sort is effective.

The main reason for that ineffectiveness is that even severely addicted people are not sick, but rather adapting to desperately painful situations in the best way they can. Obviously, people who are adapting with the best means at their disposal cannot be cured, for they are not sick. This "adaptive" view of addiction has been developed recently by a number of scholars, including Herbert Fingarette, Allan Marlatt, Stanton Peele, Isidor Chein, R. K. Merton, and Edward Khantzian, as well as my colleagues and myself in Canada.

The alternatives to professional treatment require a re-channelling of the efforts of professionals. Although it is impossible for them to cure people who are not ill, they can help people to understand that they must face up to the ordinary problems of life with renewed energy if they are to reduce their drug use to levels that are not harmful either to themselves or to society. More importantly, they can help to design and implement social changes to make institutions and communities more habitable, so that fewer people will find excessive drug use to be their most attractive alternative. Many professionals and community groups in Canada and throughout the world are currently working towards that goal.

I will present three examples from Canada. One involves a national volunteer organisation of professionals, another is a health promotion movement, and the third is the response of a native Indian band to its chronic alcoholism.

The Canadian Intramural Recreation Association (CIRA) has begun a national program to expand participation in intramural sports in Canada. Recognising that sports contribute considerably to the development of health, confidence and competence, CIRA addressing the problem that traditional school athletics exclude - even from intramural sports - the majority of school children, who cannot perform at superior levels.

CIRA has developed a teachers training program designed to encourage the development of student leaders who will organise intramural sports that place less emphasis on competition and focus more attention on maximum participation, exercise, and fun (CIRA, 1985). Since its introduction in 1985, this program has been highly successful in increasing student participation, both in leadership and sports. Over a thousand Canadian schools are involved. Although specific attention is not focused on drugs in this program, its potential for reducing drug use and addiction is obvious, despite the constraints imposed by the War on Drugs mentality.

However, CIRA receives only minimal support from the federal government. It relies on volunteer professionals and support from corporate sponsors to carry on its work. The cruel irony is that the Canadian government pours hundreds of millions of dollars into futile drug war measures, while it fails to support existing programs that could genuinely ameliorate those same problems that the War on Drugs is intended to solve.

A more profound analysis must be made if the issue is to be effectively faced. Harmful use of drugs is not entirely a problem of the individual. The people who get into trouble with drugs are made vulnerable by severe malaise and discontent originating from their inability to handle certain difficulties alone.

Healthy bodies and socially acceptable behaviour come naturally to people living in physically and emotionally wholesome surroundings. For those not living in similar surroundings, it is another story.

These facts were central ones at the First International Conference on Health Promotion in the Industrialised Countries, held in Ottawa late in 1986. That conference, sponsored by the World Health Organisation, Health and Welfare Canada, and the Canadian Public Health Association, was based on the proposition that the essential requirements for health (including responsible use of drugs) include peace, shelter, food, income, a stable eco-system, sustainable resources, social justice and equity.

Of course, it is terribly difficult to solve these problems. However, from the point of view of health promotion, drug addiction and many other interrelated health problems could be at least ameliorated by diverting the money wasted on the futile War on Drugs to programs that prevent the excessive use of drugs - raising the level of literacy, providing shelter for homeless juveniles, providing school lunches for children who are too hungry to learn, settling the land claims that are keeping the social and economic development of many native communities in limbo, providing valid work opportunities for teenagers, supporting community economic development programs, etc.

The day that this piece was being written, the "Vancouver Sun" reported that the city of Vancouver had turned down a motion to provide funds for lunches in the city's schools, even though an estimated 600 children there go to school hungry every day (Cox, 1988). Funding was also vetoed by provincial and federal governments, apparently, in both cases, on the grounds that responsibility should be taken by the other level of government - or by the (needy) parents. Meanwhile, the 600 children remain hungry and the probability that they will acquire the academic and social skills required to achieve personal and social integration remains unlikely. Correspondingly, the probability that they will turn to deviance or addiction as a substitute remains likely.

The best example that I know of an effective community response to addiction came from the Indian reservation at Alkalai Lake in British Columbia. There, a mixture of local initiatives, self-help groups, and locally-controlled professional interventions, spanning the period from the early 1970s to the present, brought sobriety and harmony to a community where alcoholism, violence, child abuse, sexual abuse, accidents, and illness had been rampant. The campaign included organised social support for people who gave up drinking, providing residences for members of the Indian band who decided to continue their schooling, reintroducing traditional native spiritual practices such as the sweat lodges, reintroducing the band's language in the schools, withholding welfare cheques of alcoholics and issuing vouchers in their place which could not be exchanged for alcohol, offering petty offenders a choice between ceasing to be alcoholics and facing legal charges, charging bootleggers, creating employment by opening a

local logging operation and a store on the reserve, and organising support groups for victims of physical and sexual abuse, caring for the families and fixing up the homes of people who left the reserve for professional treatment, and establishing Alcoholics Anonymous groups and social skills training programs on the reserve.

All of these efforts were included in a matrix of native spiritualism and tradition that provided an indigenous explanatory scheme. Professionals and law enforcement officers were involved, but they worked in collaboration with the band, rather than as representatives of autonomous institutions. All indications are that alcoholism and violence have been reduced, from problems affecting almost every adult to rare occurrences affecting less than 5% of the population.

Some of the measures introduced at Alkalai Lake were coercive, but when introduced on an emergency basis with the support of a local community in distress, they were accepted by the people. The methods used at Alkalai Lake are obviously not universally applicable, however they do illustrate that communities can make their own decisions about social problems and drug issues, without outside interference and also that in a similar context, professionals can have a useful function.

CONCLUSION. The best a government can do to control drug-related problems is to govern well, in the interests of all the people. The best parents and citizens can to is to try to satisfy the wholesome needs of their children, their community, and themselves. Institutional forms of social control, like drug laws and professional treatment can only help if they are locally supervised and mild in their application. Propaganda is of no use at all.

Does it seem naive to attempt to confront the dreaded "drug epidemic" with such ordinary tools - local ordinances, free dissemination of information, and attention to the origins of everyday misery? It should not. Only these ordinary approaches address the full implications of what is superficially referred to as the "drug problem". That problem in reality arises from mistrust, alienation, and misery. People cannot be forced into behaving moderately in a hostile world - people who are struggling to survive will use whatever drugs they find helpful; people attempting to escape unbearable pain will obliterate that pain chemically rather than yielding to incapacitating despair and the lure of suicide.

The real naivete of the this past century has been the conviction that there are simple warlike solutions to deep structural problems.