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

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”.