We urgently need to be paying more attention to the recent escalation in the "War on Drugs" across the pond in England. Otherwise, the U.S. could find itself in a similar position in the future. Given that we ourselves have an impending election, and that the UK's call for a blanket ban on psychoactive substances coincided with their own crushing Conservative victory, we must pay attention to ceding any ground to conservatives and their deleterious policy choices.
Ian Dunt, the editor for politics.co.uk and a supporter of Liberal Democrats, writes an excellent piece called "The Government Just Banned Everything" about the UK’s wide-ranging blanket ban on "drugs," which are itemized (in the ban) as pertaining to any psychoactive substance, and yes, there are outrageous deficits of logic to this ban because, in part, “psychoactive substance” is a farcically broad term and in part because such a ban will not help anyone and, moreover, it will only harm the concept of a free and just society.
Let me discuss the implications of this ban in a moment, under the swirling orange tracer… "Oh wow, man, that's psychedelic!!!"
First, Dunt points out:
Even by the standards of modern legislation, the psychoactive substances bill is startlingly inane. It seems to ban any substance which can cause a mental or emotional reaction. As must be obvious, that's almost everything in the world. Did this taste remind you of your mother's cooking? It's a psychoactive substance. Did it bring you a moment of happiness? It's a psychoactive substance. The government is about to ban almost everything.
Similarly, the World Health Organization (WHO) notes the broad definition of what a psychoactive substance is as well:
"Psychoactive substances are substances that, when taken in or administered into one's system, affect mental processes, e.g. cognition or affect."
Dunt notes that psychoactive substances – which everyone consumes advertently and inadvertently on a daily basis, ban or no ban -- are, in effect,
everything and anything. In fact, one might ask, what is not psychoactive under the new UK bill?
Well, it exempts a few things like alcohol, tobacco, medicine, and foodstuffs. After all, the bill’s basic goal is to avoid designer drugs that change molecules more quickly than the laws can keep up with. However, even that idea is highly problematic, especially when one decides to address it by simply banning everything that might possibly make a human being feel good. In addition, this serves no one but global capitalism by restricting the market on “feel good” substances with a deftly dystopian level of calculation and a side of conservative chutzpah. This ban on “psychoactive substances” is capitalist cynicism, personified. If the ban were in earnest, it would ban not only drugs but “sex and Rock and Roll” as well. However, the ban is not in earnest; it’s the desperate thrashing of a conservative struggle for power.
To continue with Dunt's line of thinking:
So existing illegal drugs are exempt. So are existing mind-altering drugs which are legal, such as alcohol. Food is exempt, which gets rid of our 'mum's food' example above. And so is caffeine, although it seems that whoever wrote it did not know that theobromine has a stimulant effect on the brain and is found in tea and chocolate. Chocolate will be OK because of the exemption on food, but hot chocolate won't. So that might need fixing before they end up criminalising half the country.
...The food exemption also raises the question of what you do about people who cook legal-high versions of cannabis into cakes or biscuits. Professor David Nutt's plans for a safer version of alcohol, which could save millions of lives, would be illegal right off the bat. In fact, it's worth considering for a moment how far-reaching these plans are. The world is now illegal until proven otherwise.
At first this had very little impact on me. "Don't we have more pressing issues at hand than pot brownies?" I pondered, as well as "Who cares what happens in England anyways?" Then I realized that we have seen more and more of this sort of thing in the United States, under the rubric of the same "war on drugs" that have criminalized entire generations of people from Nixon on down the line for decades upon decades, and which have most certainly contributed to the recent rash -- parse it as ongoing, if you would prefer -- of officer-involved fatalities of the mentally ill and of people of color. One of the very rationales for the bloating of the police state in the U.S. is, of course, the phony war on drugs. Reefer Madness! Of course, rather than netting drug addicts, the police, all giddy and armed to the gills, seem to spend a lot of money and time
tasing stroke victims and
grandmothers, shooting young children like
12-year old Tamir Rice or
13-year old Andy Lopez, or
throwing around very pregnant women. Moreover, Dunt's final point about the world being “illegal until proven otherwise” smacks of our own NSA-style, hyper-surveillance state American hijinks. As he points out:
It is the great achievement of British society: the idea that the people are free and the government must justify its intrusions, not the other way around.
His observation reads like a conservative’s day dream at is worst, and that's because, indeed, it is conservatism at its worst, a conservatism which UK Democrats and Liberals tried very hard to oppose. As was pointed out, this bill was a result of conservative campaign promises, made good:
It is of note that "the packed agenda of 26 bills - plus one in draft form - aims to enact many of the promises made by Conservatives during the general election campaign, and Mr. Cameron made no secret of the fact that the absolute majority secured on May 7 allows him to press ahead with Tory measures previously blocked by the Liberal Democrats."
Dunt aside, here are my thoughts on this issue, in no particular order:
This ban holds the potential to return the drug trade back to the streets since so much of it has become a net-based war, at least on the post-production side. When most of us think of "drug trade," in fact, I would suggest that we think of shady alley ways and equally shady characters lurking there. We think of scoring a bag of whatever on Haight-Ashbury or in some Hell’s Angel’s bar. After all, why else are law enforcement so well-armed if there aren’t actually that many bad guys lurking around out there? But nowadays, it is simply not the case that the drug trade, let alone the putative drug war, are in any way waged on the streets. Most drug deals are done on the dark web, the part of the internet that is unsearchable and which accounts for the VAST MAJORITY of all websites. When you purchase drugs nowadays, the likelihood is that they would be from a username using a bit coin, and you would simply receive a sterile, non-genetically contaminated package, vacuum-sealed, at your front door. At least, so I gather from trying to watch the first episode of Game of Thrones, Season Five and a lot of reading online. It all gets curiouser and curiouser...
More pressingly, if the goal of this ban is actually harm reduction, then we already know that it's far better to go the way of Portugal where drugs were decriminalized fifteen years ago, in 2000, because, with 1% of the Portuguese population addicted to heroin:
The prime minister and the leader of the opposition got together and did something really bold: They said, 'Look, we've been trying the American way. Every year, we crack down, we put more people in prison, and every year the problem gets worse. Let's do this differently.'
Portugal decided to decriminalize all drugs in 2000. In the nearly 15 years since, the country has seen drug abuse drop by half. Government officials are thrilled with the results.
P.S. in case you were wondering, Portugal's government has been Left/Liberal since 1975.
Okay, so we have a choice, and yes, it will be partially determined by our next election as well as all of our elections, and whether we continue with this asinine war-on-drugs, which is paradoxically a war-on-harm-reduction -- or whether we actually care about the things that the United States, and presumably the UK, -- care about like FREEDOM, like LIBERTY, like NOT CRIMINALIZING HUMAN BEINGS TO BENEFIT CAPITALIST POWER TRIPS, like NOT ARMING POLICE TO THE GILLs TO KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE (especially those who tend to be more not white and more neurocognitively different), and like THE IDEA OF PROGRESS… IF NOT ACTUAL PROGRESS ITSELF.
If we want those things, we should really pay careful attention to how the UK’s blanket ban on so-called psychoactive substances plays out, and how it would play out in the United States, where our police are armed like militias and wired like zombified raptors. In the meantime, I predict far more violence to emerge in Britain, for if there’s one thing that is known, it’s that human desire to use substances to feel good (a desire so primal that even elephants and monkeys act on said urge) has nothing to do with the law, and this ban is about to split wide open and spill a contained industry out onto the streets all over again.
There will be blood. And it will be on the hands of conservatives.