Contributions to the discussion on drug legalization, decriminalization and decriminalization (II)

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By Jorge Rolón Luna*

The use of con­scious­ness-al­ter­ing sub­stances should be a health is­sue. And this, it should be added, when such use is con­sid­ered “prob­lem­atic”. Drug use does not al­ways have that char­ac­ter; in other words, it does not al­ways af­fect a per­son’s func­tion­al­ity, gen­er­ate ad­dic­tion, de­te­ri­o­ra­tion of health or be­hav­ioral dis­or­ders. As a health prob­lem, it can be com­pared to can­cer, di­a­betes, de­gen­er­a­tive dis­eases, heart dis­ease or al­co­holism, and should there­fore be ap­proached as these cases. This should be qual­i­fied, ob­vi­ously, given a cer­tain re­la­tion­ship be­tween the use of some drugs and the com­mis­sion of pun­ish­able acts (crack and opi­ates, es­pe­cially), a link that de­rives, in turn, from the way in which States deal with this health prob­lem, crim­i­nal­iz­ing users, thus con­tribut­ing to their en­try into the world of crime.

The his­tory of the re­la­tion­ship be­tween these sub­stances and the hu­man be­ing is re­mote, but it was not un­til re­cently that it be­came a na­tional in­ter­est is­sue and, at the same time, a health prob­lem. The use of mar­i­juana is a cou­ple of thou­sand years old, al­though it is in re­cent times that the way hu­man be­ings re­late to cer­tain sub­stances has changed. It is not very far back in time, con­sid­er­ing pre­his­tory and hu­man his­tory, that ex­per­i­men­ta­tion with the recre­ational use of drugs, such as co­caine, can be ob­served at the be­gin­ning of the 20th cen­tury. The Chi­nese elite had be­come com­pul­sive opium users in the 19th cen­tury, which was the kick-off for the use of this sub­stance to slowly be­come an epi­demic of enor­mous pro­por­tions af­fect­ing all lev­els of Chi­nese so­ci­ety. Mas­sive – and prob­lem­atic – mor­phine use was also ob­served among vet­er­ans of the Amer­i­can Civil War af­ter that con­fla­gra­tion.

In more re­cent times, the emer­gence of the “drug cul­ture” in the 1960s shaped the role of sub­stances in post­moder­nity and gave rise to the “war on drugs,” ini­ti­ated dur­ing the Richard Nixon ad­min­is­tra­tion in 1971.

The para­dox is that the avail­abil­ity of new sub­stances, which are at the ba­sis of the cur­rent phe­nom­e­non of mas­sive and prob­lem­atic con­sump­tion, comes from coun­tries that joined with en­thu­si­asm wor­thy of the best cause the pro­hi­bi­tion­ism -in al­co­hol and sub­stances- that arose in the 19th cen­tury, and the war on drugs in the 20th cen­tury, as we have just pointed out.

The al­ka­loid de­rived from the coca leaf, co­caine, was iso­lated in 1859 by the Ger­man chemist Al­bert Nie­mann and mar­keted as a drug in the United States in 1882. Heroin, in turn (di­acetyl­mor­phine), was syn­the­sized in 1874 by the chemist Alder Wright, of St. Mary’s Hos­pi­tal Med­ical School in Lon­don. Am­phet­a­mine, a sub­stance syn­the­sized in 1887 by Japan­ese chemist Na­gayoshi Na­gai and Smith Kline and French Lab­o­ra­to­ries and mar­keted for in­hala­tion use as a nasal de­con­ges­tant. A typ­i­cal de­signer drug, ec­stasy (meth­yl­ene­dioxymetham­phet­a­mine), was syn­the­sized in 1914 in the Ger­man Merck lab­o­ra­to­ries, with uses against anorexia, al­though it was never com­mer­cial­ized. De­spite this, it was used for re­search pur­poses by the US Navy be­tween the 1950s and 1960s to fa­cil­i­tate com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween the ther­a­pist (in­ter­roga­tor?) and the pa­tient (pris­oner?). A lit­tle later, in 1962, ke­t­a­mine was syn­the­sized by Parke-Davis, the old­est phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pany in the United States, founded in 1860 and taken over by Waner-Lam­bert in 1970, in turn taken over by Pfizer in 2000.

The re­sound­ing fail­ure of this “war”, ini­ti­ated pre­cisely by those who in­vented it and are the most drug ad­dicted so­ci­eties in the world, de­mo­nized coun­tries that nei­ther in­vented these drugs, nor were their main or great­est de­man­ders. The re­sults of the war­like ap­proach cre­ated and en­cour­aged in other lat­i­tudes, have been a real tragedy for coun­tries like Paraguay, as we re­viewed in a pre­vi­ous ar­ti­cle, with­out for­get­ting that they have also built the stigma of the “Latin Amer­i­can drug traf­ficker”. “The fail­ure” through­out all this time of a “war” with null re­sults in terms of pre­vent­ing the sup­ply of pro­hib­ited drugs, should also be seen from an­other per­spec­tive, ac­cord­ing to which it has been a suc­cess, but for the “elites” as­so­ci­ated with this busi­ness. The Paraguayan case demon­strates this clearly.

Our coun­try, like oth­ers, to­day pays the price of moral­is­tic, re­li­gious and geopo­lit­i­cal in­ter­ests born in the most con­ser­v­a­tive spheres of other so­ci­eties, op­posed to ex­panded free­doms. That moral­is­tic ap­proach is to­day dele­git­imized by the fail­ure of the war on drugs.

When the then US Pres­i­dent Richard Nixon com­mis­sioned the so-called “Shafer Re­port” to the com­mis­sion known by the same name (ac­tu­ally, the Na­tional Com­mis­sion on Mar­i­huana and Drug Abuse) to an­a­lyze his coun­try’s anti-drug pol­icy, we al­ready had a sam­ple of the lack of ra­tio­nal­ity of “his war”. That 1972 re­port ar­gued flatly that there was no con­nec­tion be­tween cannabis use and crime, that al­co­hol was more dan­ger­ous than mar­i­juana, and that per­sonal use of the drug should be al­lowed. By all ac­counts, a fu­ri­ous Nixon de­clared the re­port “un-Amer­i­can” and that “all the bas­tards in fa­vor of le­gal­iz­ing mar­i­juana are Jews”.

Al­ready years into the “war on drugs”, in 2014, the British gov­ern­ment pub­lished a re­port en­ti­tled “Drugs, In­ter­na­tional Com­para­tors“, whose head was Nor­man Baker MP, which con­cluded that “hard” anti-drug poli­cies did not work in any of the coun­tries an­a­lyzed (13 in to­tal). This, Baker said of the re­port, should be the be­gin­ning of the end of the “mean­ing­less rhetoric” against drugs and should give way to an ap­proach based on pre­ven­tion and treat­ment as­pects. A lot of wa­ter has flowed un­der the bridge since that re­port and the same re­pres­sive poli­cies are still be­ing re­peated, which are ob­vi­ously bound to con­tinue to fail.

The resounding failure of this “war”, initiated precisely by those who invented it and are the most drug addicted societies in the world, demonized countries that neither invented these drugs, nor were their main or greatest demanders. The results of the warlike approach created and encouraged in other latitudes, have been a real tragedy for countries like Paraguay

The ques­tion we must ask our­selves is, in view of all this: how long will we be de­pen­dent on poli­cies not based on min­i­mal sci­en­tific and crim­i­no­log­i­cal ev­i­dence, while our so­ci­ety is ship­wrecked be­tween the vi­o­lence that drug traf­fick­ing gen­er­ates and its takeover of pol­i­tics and our re­pub­li­can in­sti­tu­tions?

Cover im­age: Milena Coral

*Lawyer, re­searcher, and for­mer di­rec­tor of the Se­cu­rity Ob­ser­va­tory of the Min­istry of the In­te­rior. Au­thor of the book of short sto­ries “Los sicar­ios”.