Letter: Drugs, cash and crime (1976)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Drugs, cash and crime

In a socialist society would cannabis and other soft drugs be legal or illegal, or would it be free access as with other goods? If the latter, how would you deal with those who misuse them?

If a racist party of about ten years can field 300 candidates in the next election as stated in a recent News of the World article, why can’t the SPGB of 72 years field fifty candidates and get five minutes’ air time? The SPGB would succeed with its policies if they were known more and it is the ideal party policy-wise to combat racism.

I understand that under Socialism there would be no prisons. I realize that due to free access there would be no need to steal. As one who has been in jail and met some real bad people, how would Socialism stop these people committing murders and arson? When I have stolen it has been through necessity. I like most things I read in the Standard I have seen, but the above is one point that bothers me.

I would like to learn more of the SPGB. Would the fact that I have stolen in the past stop me becoming a member in the future?

D. R. Broadbent,

Wakefield

Reply:

We have put your three letters together, and numbered the answers to your questions.

1. The words “legal” and “illegal” will have no application in Socialism, since they represent the rule of one class over another. “Misuse” is itself a controversial term, since practically all of the substances taken as drugs have medical or everyday uses. In some people’s view “misuse”, of many things besides drugs, means letting the working class at large have them. Aldous Huxley, who wrote about his aesthetic experiences with drugs, was of that opinion: “I think the matter should be discussed, and the investigations described, in the relative privacy of learned journals, the decent obscurity of moderately high-brow books and articles.” (Letters, 1969, p.803).

On the other hand, the medical possibilities pointed out by Huxley have overtones of keeping obstreperous workers quiet: “A group of psychologists and social workers in Vancouver and Seattle have developed techniques for using mescaline therapeutically . . . Delinquent boys have been totally transformed in a single sitting.” (Ibid., p.720).

In this capitalist society it is impossible to evaluate sensibly and say what are beneficial uses and what are misuses. A large amount of drug-taking — including aspirin, alcohol, etc. — is to relieve or escape from the worries and harassments of life today, and will not be sought by people in Socialism. If it can be shown that a drug has no application other than giving harmless pleasure, we may still have to consider whether resources can be given over to producing it; but that will be for society as a whole to decide.

2. The number of SPGB candidates in parliamentary elections reflects our resources in funds and membership, and to have fifty would require far more money than we have or could raise at the present stage. Our income is made up of members’ subscriptions and donations; the Socialist Standard is sold at a loss, and consumes funds all the year round. Other political parties do not make their finances and all their transactions open as we do, so we cannot say how a particular one manages to put up a large number of candidates.

Most organizations depend on wealthy supporters. In the case of the Labour Party the supporter is the trade-union movement. In other cases, the supporters may be capitalists who think particular interests of theirs will be furthered if the organization gets political power or is successful in its reform demands. That in itself should explain why we do not get offers of such support. However, it is also true that the Socialist Party does not accept donations “with strings” which would give the donor special influence on our policies.

What will enable us to have more candidates is, therefore, a larger membership and bigger sales of the Socialist Standard.

3. Murderers are a microscopic proportion of the population. Many commit their crimes in the course of robberies or otherwise for money. Some murders are the results of a belief in causes, or antagonism to a particular section of people. Arson is an offence against property. On the other hand, you may join the armed forces and kill people and set fire to buildings; this is held to be not criminal but heroic. Look at what society makes of people and clear your head of nonsense about “bad individuals”.

4. The condition of membership of the Socialist Party is understanding and acceptance of its Object and Principles.

C. Brinton (Harwich): We are pleased to learn you propose to examine the Socialist case seriously, and look forward to hearing from you in due course.

Several letters have had to be held over because of pressure on space. We assure correspondents they will all be dealt with as soon as possible.

Editorial Committee.

50 Years Ago: Drugs and the Death Penalty (2006)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard 

While the controversy about the abolition of hanging has been causing such a furore in this country, a significant change in the American law recently has passed by almost without comment. This is the passing by Congress of the Bill aimed at the drug traffic in the United States, which includes in its provisions increased penalties for trafficking in drugs and, in particular, the death penalty for those found guilty of selling heroin to young people under 18. The background of the Bill, the drug traffic,was recently reported on by a US correspondent of the Economist (14th July, 1956). The picture is horrifying.

 According to the Economist’s correspondent the United States is said to have more drug addicts that all the other Western nations combined, and the authorities are engaged in a constant battle against the traffic. The main impetus to it is given by the needs of 60,000 addicts who are prepared to spend anything from $10 to $100 a day to satisfy their craving. To get this money, many of them resort to crime, and it has been said that about half of the crimes committed in large cities and about a quarter of crimes in the US are the result of this drive to get drugs.

The police seem to be able to do little more than hold their own. Smuggling is fairly easy, and rife. The product is small and expensive, and profits are huge – nine ounces of uncut heroin can earn $50,000 when diluted for retail sale. New pedlars soon step in to take the places of those arrested and put in gaol.

 Apart from the sale of such vicious drugs as heroin, there is a large business done in other less dangerous drugs, much of it barely legal. In the words of the Economist :-

“But the narcotics problem extends beyond the underworld; it reaches on to the counters of unscrupulous chemists. Housewives eager to lose weight take amphetamines and do not realise that they have become addicts until it is too late. Officials are also worried about the widespread use of barbiturates (sleeping pills). In theory these are obtainable only with a physician’s prescription; in fact many chemists will sell them and users do not realise that addiction leads to grave dangers to mental health”. 

Altogether a terrible story. And made even more dreadful by the extension of the death penalty to try to deal with it.

(Article by S. H., Socialist Standard, August 1956).

Voice From The Back: Thought for food (1998)

The Voice From The Back Column from the February 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Thought for food

Back in the summer, the weather expert in the Guardian chatted about global warming and came to the conclusion that it was capitalism that would cause the problems, not carbon dioxide. She or he said: “[A] Deep Truth about world food supply . . . has been clear since the Science Policy Research Unit made an in depth analysis of climate and world food in the 1970s. There is no difficulty in growing enough food to feed even the increased population of the globe in the 21st century, however the climate changes. The reason why there are famines now, and will be in the future, is that food is not distributed evenly. On many scenarios, the overall effect of global warming will be to increase world food supply. But the haves are likely to have even more, while the have nots experience the droughts and famines. People starve because of politics, not because of the weather.”

It’s a business

As the law stands, dealers in illegal drugs can register their trade for tax purposes and tax officials will protect their identify from the police and other government agencies . . . A spokesman for the Inland Revenue said: “Tax law does not discriminate between profits made from illegal or legal activities. We only report taxpayers to the police if we suspect they are involved in murder” (Independent on Sunday, 16 November)

It’s a crime!

Magistrates in Wales have fined a woman £200 for possessing a tiny piece of cannabis with an estimated street value of 50p. The 23-year-old single mother pleaded guilty to have 0.2 grammes of cannabis at her home in Cernarth, Dyfed, and on top of the fine was order to pay £40 costs. Her solicitor, Mr Alan Lewis, said. “The drug seized was no more than the size of a grain of rice, barely enough to smoke. It was so small she could have brushed it off the table and no one would have known” (Independent on Sunday, 16 November).

New sweatshops

Automatic all distribution (ACD) and information and communication technology (ICT) have enabled call centres to become hugely powerful business machines, and the UK has proudly assumed the mantle of Europe’s “call centre capital”. With more than 250,000 people already employed in call centres, and around 1 million expected to join them by the end of the decade, it is the fastest growing employment sector of the economy . . . Call centres are all about cost reduction. If companies learned one lesson from the recession it was from Direct Line founder Peter Wood’s brainwave: slashing wage bills by replacing hundreds of high street outlets with a shed full of telephones . . . In several of the largest call centres, operators are virtually chained to their desks, even having to ask permission for toilet breaks . . . John Orsmond, chairman of Advertising Research Marketing, which advises advertisers on how to use call centres, says he knows of employers in Scotland paying rates as low as £2.35 an hour.

A grateful nation

An 81-year-old crippled war veteran who was refused a place in a care home by his local authority, threw himself under a train after his pleas for help were ignored, a Northern Ireland inquest heard yesterday . . . Mr McLarnon has been taunted by youths for being an ex-soldier, the court heard. On the day he died, he had visited his local British Legion club—as he usually did—and asked friends for help. He had only 63p in his bank book and did not have enough for his bus fare home. Elizabeth Thompson, nursing manager of the Somme home for ex-soldiers in Belfast, said she had recommended Mr McLarnon’s admittance but the health board has refused to fund it. Health chiefs had been “irate” about the pressure being put on them (Guardian, 13 November).

Giving thanks

As the service of thanksgiving for the life of billionaire Sir James Goldsmith entered its second hour at St John’s in London’s Smith Square on Thursday, the first of the 700-plus congregation began to leave. Baroness Thatcher, who was due at another memorial service, for Viscount Tonypandy, was followed by GEC boss Lord Weinstock and the Earl of Suffolk. In the event the celebration lasted more than two hours, something of a shock for Goldsmith’s widow lady Annabel . . . (Mail on Sunday, 16 November).

Voice From The Back: Business ethics (2000)

The Voice From The Back Column from the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard  

Business ethics 1 

Hundreds of Western firms are courting Saddam Hussein’s regime in the hope of contracts if the embargo imposed after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 is lifted soon. Scores of deals have been struck, aiming to take advantage of possible waivers of sanctions on certain goods . . . The courting of Baghdad, which has the second largest oil reserves in the world, surprises few experts. “Iraq is the big prize,” said Lowell Feld, of the US Department of Energy, who wrote a recent report on Iraq’s oil industry. “There are dozens of firms out there salivating, ready to move in as soon as the UN gives the go-ahead.” Observer, 26 December.

Business ethics 2 

A United Nations embargo on all diamond exports from Liberia, a high level commission of enquiry into the links between organised crime and the Belgian diamond industry, and a new International Diamond Standards Commission under the UN are urged in a new report on the disintegrating society of Sierra Leone. The report, released in Canada and launched by a former foreign minister, Flora MacDonald yesterday, is critical of De Beers, the dominant player in the world’s diamond industry. It set a challenge to the UN to take decisive action on one of the motors of war across a swath of west and central Africa. The diamond trade, most of it illegal, plays a major part in the wars or shaky peace in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola and Congo, but the actors reach far beyond west Africa. Guardian, 13 January.

For our safety 

The United States stored 12,000 nuclear weapons and components in at least 23 countries and five American territories during the cold war—including Morocco, Japan, Iceland, Puerto Rico and Cuba—according to an article based on a recently declassified document. The document, a secret study written by the Defense Department and titled “History of the Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons: July 1945 through September 1977”, is described in the November/December issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. New York Times, 20 October.

Competition—great! 

The relentless factory-like drive to produce the perfect 40mph racing machine results in the mass slaughter of 20-30,000 greyhounds each year. These make way for the next 20-30,000 which are bred each year in the UK and Ireland. Only a small number of them make it to the betting tracks. The rest is “wastage”. Despite attempts by the industry to prevent the slaughter, some trainers and owners prefer the cheaper option of killing dogs to paying between £20-30 for them to be humanely put down by a vet. Unwanted greyhounds have been found starved, clubbed, electrocuted and injected with petrol. Some are flung from speeding cars, sold to vivisection labs or hung from trees. Corpses have been dragged up from the sea with rocks tied to their legs. Big Issue, 12-23 January.

Care in the community 

The government is to net a £4 million windfall after the West Midlands NHS Executive sold off a slice of the former Rubery Hill [mental] Hospital site for a new pub and lodge. Evening Mail, 13 January.

The rule of law 

“If there is indeed a ‘war on drugs’ it is not being won; drugs are demonstrably cheaper and more easily available than ever before. The same picture can be seen in the USA and elsewhere . . . If a significantly large, and apparently growing, part of the population chooses to ignore the law for whatever reason, then that law becomes unenforceable. A modern western democracy, based on policing by consent and the rule of law may find itself powerless to prevent illegal activity—in this case the importation and use of controlled drugs . . . The best example of this is cannabis—the UK has the highest rate of cannabis use in Europe, higher even than in the Netherlands which has a tolerance policy . . . If prohibition does not work, then either the consequences of this have to be accepted, or an alternative approach must be found. The most obvious alternative approach is the legalisation and subsequent regulation of some or all drugs.” Richard Brundstrom, former Assistant Chief Constable, from a report published by Cleveland Police.

The causes of war are . . . 

Three days after raising its flag in Grozny’s last rebel stronghold, Russia is claiming the richest prize of the war: Chechnya’s potential as a conduit for the vast oil reserves of the Caspian basin . . . As one export put it yesterday: “Access to the Caspian has historically been the reason for Chechnya’s importance. Why else did Hitler try so hard to conquer it?” Times, 10 February.

It all depends . . . 

Death in Britain is not an equitable business. Nor is health. People in Springburn, Glasgow, suffer a rate of chronic illness of 155 per 1,000. In Wokingham, Berkshire, the rate is 36. There are 67.9 deaths per 10,000 live births in Springburn but only 53.2 in Wokingham. Our environment can kill, in other words. But not at the same rate. Observer, 13 February.

Which way euphoria? (1983)

From the February 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Twenty years after it was first discerned as a threat to what are still known as civilised standards, the black image of drugs persists. There are still nightmares about heroin-crazed addicts terrorising the land in a frantic search for their next fix. Anxious parents watch their composed, ambitious children for the first signs of descent into the pit of addiction from which the only escape is premature death.

What substance is there to these fears? Some drug addicts do lead excessively unhappy and disordered lives, inflicting on themselves awful illnesses like hepatitis, septicaemia or gangrene and losing parts of their limbs. Very often they resort to crime to raise the money for their drugs and their very recklessness leads to a high death rate. Heroin addicts are 30 times more likely to die than anyone else in a comparable age group.

But it must also be said that too often the debate on the issue is heavily misinformed. For example there is the myth of the instant and progressive addiction, the dread process by which the first whiff of cannabis fumes leads inexorably to the syringe surging with heroin. It is truer to say that those who pass from soft drugs to hard do so because the soft ones are unable to answer their demands. In fact, for most people the first experience of a drug like heroin is very unpleasant, like being sick after the first few cigarettes. Immediate addiction happens very rarely, if at all; as one addict put it, “You have to work at it".

Of course the addicts’ self-image is anything but black; to them drugs offer an ecstatic release. One describes using heroin as like “golden fire running through your veins”, another exults "This is what men go to prison for and it’s worth it”. The opiates, especially heroin, act on the central nervous system to blot out stress and anxiety and replace it with euphoria. A doctor’s description is: "The addict feels he has eaten to his heart’s content, experienced full sexual satisfaction and eliminated all anxieties . . " It is reasonable to ask why relief and pleasure should be regarded as a threat to society and be subject to heavy legal penalties.

The answer of the everyday, law-abiding, hard-working traveller on the Clapham omnibus is, of course, that drug addiction is unhealthy and there is plenty of evidence which apparently supports that opinion. But it is arguable that the more degraded aspects of the addict's life are caused by the social reaction against drugs rather than by the substances themselves. Up to a point heroin in itself need do little organic harm to the body; much of the damage commonly associated with it is due to the context in which it is used — the dirty, sometimes communally used needles, the dilution with water from the bowls of public lavatories, the adulteration which illicit supplies are vulnerable to, the malnutrition caused by the high prices for drugs on the streets. None of these factors would operate, were the drug not legally controlled and restricted. Not all heroin users descend into filthy, shambling addicts; in the House of Lords on 13 December 1955 Lord Amulree confessed: “I like my little drop of heroin: it works very well for me. I have taken it for 25 or 30 years but have not yet become an addict".

Addictive drugs have existed for a very long time but it is only comparatively recently that they have been defined as the cause of social problems. Morphine was first isolated from opium in 1804 and was widely used as a painkiller and in patent medicines. Heroin, a derivative of morphine, was discovered in 1874, when it was hailed as a new wonder medicine, non-habit forming and free of morphine’s undesirable side-effects. Amphetamine was first produced at the end of the 19th century. During the war the stimulant benzedrine was supplied to both German and British troops; 72 million tablets of it were issued to the British forces to be taken, according to the official instructions, when the men were “. . . markedly fatigued physically or mentally, in circumstances calling for a special effort”. In Japan the widespread use of stimulants during the war led to a serious post-war problem of dependence. Cannabis — not addictive and a very different substance to the opiates and amphetamines — has been known medicinally for thousands of years although its uses were not opened to the western world until 1839. It was a popular medicine for the wounded during the Crimean War. In 1933 the effects of marijuana on American troops in the Panama Canal Zone were assessed, with the official conclusion that “. . . no recommendations to prevent the sale or use of marijuana are deemed advisable”.

The Pharmacy Act of 1868 laid it down that opium and its derivatives, on which Victorian medicine heavily depended, were poisons and must be controlled. The Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920 took this a step further, defining heroin as illegal unless prescribed by a qualified doctor. In 1925 the Geneva Convention internationally outlawed the non-medical use of cannabis, morphine, heroin and cocaine. Heroin came under further threat in 1955, when Health Minister Ian Macleod announced his intention of prohibiting its manufacture. This provoked stormy opposition from the doctors, who were commonly prescribing the drug to case the discomfort of terminally ill people. The government backed down, as governments usually do when they are in conflict with the medical profession, and there the matter rested for a while. There were then few known addicts — about 300 or 400 — and most of them were either elderly people who had formed the habit through medical treatment or nurses and doctors whose addiction originated in their working association with drugs. The situation was controlled with regular prescriptions; the Brain Committee on Drug Addiction produced in 1961 a reassuring report.

It soon became clear, however, that the Brain Committee had misread the situation. At the very time they were sitting an unprecedented boom in drugs was in existence. Its origins are obscure; one investigator traced it to a burglary of opiates from a pharmacy in 1951, others thought the immigration of the 1950s brought a lot of regular users into the country, or that the stringent anti-drug laws introduced by the Canadian government in 1958 caused a flight of addicts to England's easier legal climate. Whatever the truth, it was clear that a new element had come on the scene — the non-medical use of drugs, by young people, for pleasure. Officially the demand for drugs was still catered for through GPs but such was the demand that a black market flourished as addicts discovered that prescriptions were more readily obtainable from a few pliant doctors who were prepared to sell them to their clamouring patients. These doctors became publicised as the heartless, avaricious villains of the drugs boom; some of them flavoured the media hacks' outpourings of righteous indignation by having foreign-sounding names like Petro and Frankau. They were hounded, prosecuted. struck off, imprisoned. One of them is now in Broadmoor.

The Brain Committee, having got its breath back, reported again in 1965, by which time the number of known opiate addicts had risen to 927. A new Dangerous Drugs Act came into operation in 1968 which drastically changed the scene. Drugs such as heroin could now no longer be prescribed by GPs but only by specially licensed doctors mainly operating in drugs clinics attached to hospitals. These doctors were often qualified psychiatrists, which implied a secondary function that they would treat the addict out of dependence. In most cases the clinics attempted to supplant heroin with methadone, a synthetic opiate which has an active span of 24-36 hours (in contrast to heroin’s 8 hours) which in theory allows the user to function in a more stable way — in other words go to work, pay the bills and so on. Some doctors became very enthusiastic about methadone and there was a boom in it during the 70s. as the patients wheedled for an over-prescription which they could sell so that they could buy illegal heroin.

Another requirement of the 1968 Act was that doctors had to notify the Home Office of all addicts of drugs like cocaine and heroin who came to their notice — an enforced breach of medical confidentiality which had hitherto been applied only in the case of contagious diseases. For the first five years of the Act’s operation the numbers of known addicts hovered around 3000. From 1973 it began to climb steadily until 1978, when it really took off:

1973 1974 1975 1970 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981

3023 3252 3425 3474 3605 4116 4787 5107 6157

For a number of reasons, these figures do not give a true picture. Many addicts are not known as such to their GP and they avoid contact with the clinics, preferring to hustle for illegal supplies or to wheedle prescriptions for drugs like diconal from doctors who are prepared to “treat" them as private patients in need of a sedative. The physical consequences of injecting diconal can be horrible — limbs swollen like purple balloons, massive fiery ulcers and sometimes death. This is the reality behind such estimates as that of the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence, that the official figure of known addicts in 1981 of 6157 masks a true figure of about 30,000.

In such ways are the pronounced intentions of Acts of Parliament frustrated. Such laws are formed on the assumption that a problem can be easily defined by legal draftsmen and a gaggle of MPs in a debate. It can then be controlled, equally simply, by prescribing punishments for anyone who steps outside the law. But the definitions, the prescriptions — and the problem which starts it all — are not immutable. Fashions in drug abuse change in response to influences like availability. The end of Prohibition in America led to the outlawing of the social use of marijuana, as the liquor interests feared the effects of the drug on what they hoped would be a post-Prohibition boom in sales of drink. The people who were prosecuted in the famous Operation Julie had been occupied in making a lot of very pure LSD. The Customs and Excise recently said (Guardian, 6 January 1983) that a lot of high grade heroin is now on sale in this country, which cuts down the risk of illness and death because it is pure enough to be sniffed or smoked rather than injected.

Cohorts of psychiatrists and social workers probe and worry about the cause of drug addiction. Most of them agree that the addict has a personality inadequate to cope with everyday crises. As the first experiments happen typically in adolescence, the observers are able comfortably to ascribe it all to the rebelliousness of puberty, to an immature desire to shock parents, teachers, bosses. Well, the function of psychiatry and social work is to patch up casualties, not to prevent war; they leave untouched the vital questions of why personalities are deemed inadequate and why the adequate (which of course includes the psychiatrists and social workers) are expected to cope. Commando-like, with persistent crises. They pay no heed to the structure and the role of the family, school and the employing class.

A more useful approach recognises that the casualties in the drugs world come from the casualty class in society. The recent Pullitzer divorce case in America showed that the other class can easily support a drugs habit without spiralling into ragged destitution. The same applies to this country. Standing outside a picturesque village in Southern England, in acres of lush meadows and barbered gardens, is a large medieval manor house where anyone who can afford the mountainous fees can take their addiction to be expensively hidden, soothed and nursed. Any worker who is mistakenly accepted there is rapidly diagnosed as untreatably psychopathic and discharged to the nearest NIIS hospital.

What hope is there, in this sorry situation, from the addicts? Some of them pretend to some insight into their difficulties, offering “social pressures" or some other easily available cliche. But what is this “insight" worth? The great amphetamine boom of the 60s and 70s was a pathetic attempt by youngsters who hated their job or were bored at school to prolong their leisure time by staying awake — which obscured the fact that the real, accessible problem was in the fact that they needed to be employed and to be trained for employment. The disarray of capitalism is not to be seduced into order through any pill or syringe. Capitalism devotes an enormously disproportionate effort to stamp out the illicit, uncontrolled use of drugs and it does so because it is determined that workers shall experience euphoria only on capitalism’s terms, as the reward for constructing a secure job, a modest mortgaged home, a regulated, aseptic nuclear family.

As a social system it rests on a leucotomiscd acceptance of the disciplines of wage-slavery. It can be ended, and social euphoria achieved, only as the work of brains which are free of any kind of junk.

Ivan

Snorts of derision (2019)

From the July 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month the papers had a field day with Michael Gove’s scandalous confession (forced by a new tell-all book) that he had done multiple lines of coke while as a journalist writing an article demanding tougher laws to stop the cocaine trade. The sheer Class A hypocrisy of this got right up everybody’s nose, as you would expect, so it seemed like poetic justice that he should be hoist on his own petard. It is truly a shocking thing to discover that politicians say one thing and do another. Who would have guessed?

But soon it emerged that virtually all of the Tory leadership frontrunners had indulged in one or more illicit drugs. Bojo snorted coke, but said he thought it might be icing sugar (imagine having a Prime Minister with his hands on nuclear codes who can’t even tell cocaine from icing sugar). Matt Hancock, Esther McVey, Andrea Leadsom and Dominic Raab all smoked weed although presumably not all at the same orgy. Jeremy Hunt had a cannabis lassi (jeez, what Indian restaurant does he go to and how can we book?). Not to be outdone on the exotic stakes, Rory Stewart smoked opium at an Iranian wedding. Most people would have settled for a slice of cake, Rory.

The fact that to date eight out of ten Tory leadership candidates had done illicit drugs tells you everything you need to know about how the ‘war on drugs’ is really progressing. Nobody, not the press, not the police, not even the Tory bigwigs who have imposed it on the rest of us, takes it seriously anymore.

Of course they all swore they hated the experience and that it was a terrible mistake. But this is surely wrong. Taking a drug is just a lifestyle choice. Taking a drug and then turning into Boris Johnson, now that’s a mistake. But then again, just look at the politicians who (claim they) haven’t taken drugs. Mark Harper anyone? Who he, you ask? Exactly. Sajid Javid? Well, the mesmerizingly handsome Home Secretary will only admit to the odd cigarette, but nobody could be that urbane, charming and charismatic and not be on something. Nigel Farage? He’s enough to make you take drugs.

When rapper Professor Green went to the House of Commons for a BBC documentary and asked former LibDem leader Nick Clegg why politicians never wanted to discuss drugs and legalisation, Clegg responded that the matter wasn’t deemed important enough (LINK). Doubtless the LibDems didn’t think it was important either but, desperate for any stray votes, Clegg happily spoke in favour of legalisation. Now that they’ve had something of a renaissance in the Euroelections owing to being the worst major political party in the UK apart from all the others, they might decide to roll back on that particular commitment.

Nowadays you can hardly walk through any inner-city street in the UK and not smell weed blowing in the wind. This will be all the young people trying to get high and forget how their future is being wrecked before their very eyes. Or else it’s young people doing what it takes to be the next local Tory candidate. Skin up, anyone?

PJS

Street Legal (2019)

1972 theatrical release poster

From the April 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Marihuana is… a violent narcotic – an unspeakable scourge – The Real Public Enemy Number One! Its first effect is sudden, violent, uncontrollable laughter; then come dangerous hallucinations… fixed ideas come next, conjuring up monstrous extravagances – followed by emotional disturbances, the total inability to direct thoughts, the loss of all power to resist physical emotions… leading finally to acts of shocking violence… ending often in incurable insanity. Something must be done to wipe out this ghastly menace…’ (Opening foreword to the 1936 film Reefer Madness).

​Now that the prohibition against cannabis has been officially overturned in Canada and Uruguay and the smart money predicts a domino-like cascade as other governments follow suit, hindsight will draw its own conclusions about this whole bizarre era. Historians may well look back at the epoch of cannabis prohibition and conclude that there really was a kind of reefer madness going on, only it wasn’t the pot smokers who were suffering from it.

​Marxist theorists, unlike conspiracy theorists, do recognise that things happen by accident. Not everything has an intention and purpose, and while capitalism has its own internal logic, the human participants in it sometimes ignore that logic and instead follow the volatile whims of cultural prejudice and supposed moral imperative. When you take a walk past the history of drugs prohibition, you smell a powerful whiff of paternalism, racism and class condescension.

Cannabis through history

​Cannabis was familiar to ancient societies from Scythia and Assyria to Greece and Rome, but almost forgotten in the West until reintroduced via the good offices of the Nineteenth Century East India Company, that paragon of capitalism whose enforced China opium trade on behalf of the British government is too well known to revisit here. Cannabis became popular among upper-class bohemian types on private incomes, but like cocaine and opium it was expensive and hard to get, and thus there was no move to ban it. Indeed the Victorians were avid fans of unregulated free markets, so that cocaine and opium were being enthusiastically shoved into everything from ladies’ tonics to baby teething ointments.

​But it was another matter when the workers started getting hold of cannabis. Then it was a case of moral panic. For, as everyone knew, the ‘worker’ was little better than a beast and everything must be done to avoid arousing their basest urges, lest they fall into unchristian vileness (e.g. murder each other or, more to the point, fail to turn up for work).

​There is a long history of attempts to prohibit everything poor people might enjoy. Easily persuaded of their own moral, cultural and genetic superiority, the European ruling classes for centuries have had a condescending and paternalistic attitude to the labouring classes. For some reason that was obvious to them but never explained to anyone else, the same self-indulgence which made them the cultured and refined jewels of polite society would turn workers into stampeding swine if they ever got their hands on it.

​Thus the anti-gin campaigns against ‘Mother’s Ruin’ in the Eighteenth Century. Music and dancing had earlier been banned by the Puritans. And it wasn’t just drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Sex too (known as ‘lewdness’) was considered a corrupting influence, so that the erotic artwork excavated from Pompeii was kept in a ‘secret museum’ in Naples to which only ‘gentlemen’ had access (this exhibition only became permanently open to the public in 2000, albeit still age-restricted).

​What made cannabis even worse was that it was seen as a ‘black’ drug. Coming from the colonies, it became associated in Britain with Asian sailors and black denizens of the demi-monde including actors and prostitutes, and later in the USA with Mexicans who started bringing it across the border. The mix of class condescension and white racism made for a poisonous cocktail.

​So it was that Britain started banning cannabis in its colonies from the 1840s onwards, and the process of creeping prohibition spread. It was one thing to sponsor an opium trade in China, after all, but quite another to have stoned workers in one’s own factories.​

The First World War saw a further moral panic (largely imagined) about drugs in the trenches. This led to a British ban on opium, cocaine and cannabis in 1916, and propaganda-fuelled legislation followed in the 1920s. The post-war mood became more hard-line. Temperance had long been in the air, and wartime propaganda had portrayed the Germans as boozy-beer-barrels-on-legs. Now the opprobrium extended to other drugs. The Versailles treaty stipulated, among other things, a considerable reduction in Britain’s continued involvement in the international opium trade.

The rest was laziness. It was easier to blame drugs for social ills rather than look at the social ills themselves. Thus drugs came to be seen as everything that was wrong with society and especially with its disaffected youth. The transcendental evil of illegal narcotics was dinned into the public consciousness by increasingly hysterical propaganda, including the preposterous (and later cult) cinema classics Reefer Madness (1936) and Assassin of Youth (1937).

​The absurdity was that, at that time, hardly anyone could get hold of these drugs anyway. But globalisation changed all that with a tidal wave of cheap product which provided a get-rich-quick scheme for the enterprising poor as well as fuelling an unprecedented addiction epidemic. Governments were slow to realise the extent of the underground drugs trade, and when they did they simply followed established procedure and enacted ever-more draconian criminal legislation. Arrests and prison sentences rocketed by orders of magnitude, but this only served to push up prices and make the mafia syndicates and cartels ever more powerful. The world sleepwalked into drug prohibition, and woke up to an organised crime economy that today is bigger than Google or Microsoft.

​A revolutionary socialist who wants to overthrow capitalism is not interested in advocating reforms within capitalism, or even expressing preferences about how capitalism ‘ought’ to be run. But it is merely stating the obvious to say that banning drugs, particularly popular ones like cannabis, has been a huge mistake. And it’s a mistake that’s cost the lives of countless thousands. The average life expectancy in Mexico has actually lowered due to the sheer number of drug-related murders (New Scientist, 9 April 2016).

A slice of the pie

​If the end is really in sight, there’s no great mystery why. What capitalist investor doesn’t want to get a piece of a half-trillion dollar pie? When money talks, lawyers listen. For governments too the logic is irresistible. In the UK alone the potential tax revenue is estimated at £1bn a year. And there are savings too. It costs around £50,000 a week to incarcerate a prisoner in the UK, and prisons are overcrowded. Locking up people for smoking weed – a victimless crime, after all – is simply throwing money away. That’s why around 50 percent of UK police authorities have given up prosecuting anyone for possession, and Durham Constabulary has taken the adventurous step of permitting ‘official’ local home-grower clubs, provided the weed is for personal use only (BBC documentary ‘Is it time to legalise weed?’, July 2017).

​Though now past its use-by date, the UK anti-weed propaganda machine grinds on (‘Father tries to murder baby son, judge blames cannabis’, BBC News, 8 November). UK politicians continue to fear the legalisation argument is a vote-loser. After a century of brainwashing against lifestyle drugs, the volte-face is still considered too hard a sell. And there are other problems. There’s no logic for legalising cannabis that doesn’t also apply to every other illegal drug. Most of them are cheap to make, and none of them are as dangerous as alcohol or tobacco. Furthermore, legalising weed alone may turn out to be a disastrous half-measure, like a farmer destroying one crop pest only to make room for another. If the bottom drops out of the weed market, UK growers on £7k a month won’t be resorting to welfare cheques. Instead they’ll be looking to start shifting other drugs in bulk.

From a socialist point of view, capitalism is a social system owned and ruled by the wealthy through their various puppet governments, with precious little real democracy and even less informed debate. Sure it’s unfair, but it’s also inefficient, incompetent and unresponsive. It’s as if the social train is empty because everybody apart from the guy in First Class has been made to get out in the snow and push. It’s not hard to see how mistakes are made, or why they take so long to correct, when only the prejudices of the rich elite are taken into account. If and when cannabis is legalised, it’s the corporations and investors who will be partying. Your daily life as an exploited worker is not going to change a whole heap just because you can walk down the street smoking a legal spliff.​

But there is a question for socialists, nonetheless. To be clear, socialism is a global system of democratic participation, common ownership and production for use, where property exchange and money will not exist. Think of it as a global volunteer collective. Whatever is done, is done free, and whatever is available, is freely available. Some people imagine this means having no restrictions of any kind. But you can easily see why this is wrong. People in socialism are not going to want stoned airline pilots or eye surgeons, or young children feasting on cocaine or heroin either. In practice some forms of restriction must surely be put in place, even in a society with more freedom than any in history. What these are and how they are implemented is a matter for discussion in socialism. It’s possible that, like that other opium of the people, religion, there may be a declining interest in psychoactive drugs when daily reality is no longer the heavy oppressive experience that capitalism offers. It may be that nobody will choose to spend their time making these drugs, given that there will be no ‘market’ for them anyway. But it seems unlikely that drugs will go out of style, given that they have been around since humans first learned how to knock two flints together. There’s no denying it, drugs can be fun, and that will be true in socialism too. This is just one of the issues a democratic society will have to deal with. But what it won’t do, and can’t do because nobody will have the right or the authority to do it, is ban them from the face of the Earth.

Paddy Shannon

(This article first appeared in Poliquads Magazine)

Letters: Hypocrisy about drugs (1993)

Letters to the Editors from the January 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hypocrisy about drugs

Dear Editors,

November saw what was billed as European Drug Prevention Week, yet another disingenuous smoke-screen perpetrated by governments and their statutory bodies. It will no doubt have had the effect of lowering any awareness of the genuine issues relating to excessive drug-use in society, whilst also diverting people from the social causes of drug-abuse.

A genuine drug-awareness week would have exposed the hypocrisy of the governments of the western world and their “War on Drugs” with which they target cocaine, opiates, marihuana and other recreational drugs. Simultaneously they support and protect the producers of alcohol and tobacco (the two biggest killers in Britain) and their markets. In return for this protection (subsidies to farmers, licences permitting the sale of products, etc.) they extort massive amounts of taxes. Protection rackets like these would be familiar to the Colombian cocaine cartels which have been so demonised by Kenneth Clarke and others.

Socialists should need little reminding that the moral values of a particular society often bear close relation to the economic interests of that society's ruling class. This is demonstrated by current attitudes in legal and governmental circles to illegal and legal drugs. However, perhaps we should expect some changes in coming years as western businessmen and women and their respective governments realize that there are certain profits and tax revenues for all who are in a position to stake a claim. These kind of changes remain unlikely whilst governments use drugs as a handy scapegoat for the problems obvious to all in our blighted inner-cities.

Drug Prevention Weeks and similar campaigns such as Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No!” offer nothing to disaffected youngsters facing a life on the dole, or years of tedious wage-slavery. Is it any wonder that whilst life on the capitalist treadmill offers us so little many workers find solace in drugs? Those who then develop drug problems such as physical or psychological addiction have insult added to physical injury by their treatment by the authorities. Rather than supportative and sympathetic treatment for what are medical problems, drug users are more likely to be castigated as social deviants, criminals and outcasts.

Whilst the establishment of a socialist society would not eradicate all drug problems it would certainly offer people opportunities to engage in cooperative. socially-useful work and foster feelings of social solidarity. Such a society would be far removed from the competitive, individualistic capitalism of today in which so many workers find solace in both legal and illegal drugs.

Peter Owen 

Llandudno

Socialism and Religion

Dear Editors,

Very interested to see your endorsement of Tory Michael Caine’s criticism of all religion as cant (Sting in the Tail, November).

Some of us are not only Christians but Socialists as well, opposing war as an immoral pointless means of defending markets and supplies.

Some of us are Christians who believe that capitalism equals exploitation, making the rich richer at the expense of the poor, and that Socialism is the answer to this injustice. Christian Socialists condemn injustice committed by Christian and non-Christian.

Tarring all Christians with the same brush is akin to equating all socialists with supporters of Stalinism.

Ken Cole 

Preston

We still see an inconsistency in being committed to the establishment of a free, socialist society through the democratic self-organisation of the working class without leaders and believing that humanity needs to be saved by some supernatural being who supposedly lived and died 2000 years ago and will return some day to establish his kingdom on Earth— Editors.

Drop the "Great"

Dear Editors,

From time to time readers write in to the Socialist Standard objecting to the “Great” in the Party’s full title, Socialist Party of Great Britain.

A few years ago you correctly pointed out to one such critic that you no more thought Britain was actually a “Great” country, as opposed to other capitalist nations (all of them that is) than you thought Clapham High Street was actually higher up than other streets.

Unfortunately there will always be a number of readers of socialist literature who feel irritated or offended by your use of “Great".

Since it does not matter. Great Britain and Britain being interchangeable terms, why not drop the “Great” from the Party’s title now?

R. Taylor

South Shields

In point of fact we now generally refer to ourselves simply as the Socialist Party, reserving our full title only in the international and historical contexts and for formal purposes— Editors.

Drugs and the Death Penalty. (1956)

From the August 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

While the controversy about the abolition of hanging has been causing such a furore in this country, a significant change in the American law recently has passed by almost without comment. This is the passing by Congress of the Bill aimed at the drug traffic in the United States, which includes in its provisions increased penalties for trafficking in drugs and, in particular, the death penalty for those found guilty of selling heroin to young people under 18. The background of the Bill, the drug traffic, was recently reported on by a U.S. correspondent of the Economist (14th July, 1956). The picture is horrifying.

According to the Economist’s correspondent the United States is said to have more drug addicts than all the other Western nations combined, and the authorities are engaged in a constant battle against the traffic. The main impetus to it is given by the needs of 60,000 addicts who are prepared to spend anything from $10 to $100 a day to satisfy their craving. To get this money, many of than resort to crime, and it has been said that about half of the crimes committed in large cities and about a quarter of crimes in the U.S., are the result of this drive to get drugs. 

The police seem to be able to do little more than hold their own. Smuggling is fairly easy, and rife. The product is small and expensive, and profits are huge—nine ounces of uncut heroin can earn $50,000 when diluted for retail sale. New pedlars soon step in to take the places of those arrested and put in gaol.

Apart from the sale of such vicious drugs as heroin, there is a large business done in other less dangerous drugs, much of it barely legal. In the words of the Economist: -

  “But the narcotics problem extends beyond the underworld; it reaches on to the counters of unscrupulous chemists. Housewives eager to lose weight take amphetamines and do not realise that they have become addicts until it is too late. Officials are also worried about the widespread use of barbiturates (sleeping pills). In theory these are obtainable only with a physician’s prescription; in fact many chemists will sell them and users do not realise that addiction leads to grave dangers to mental health.”

Altogether a terrible story. And made even more dreadful by the extension of the death penalty to try to deal with it.

Stan Hampson

Material World: Investors High on Pot (2018)

The Material World column from the February 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope'— Freewheelin' Franklin.

On 1 January, recreational use of marijuana became legal in California. The most populous state in the USA became the largest legal market for marijuana in the world. California adults over 21 can possess up to an ounce and grow up to six plants at home. They will be prohibited from consuming the drug in public places, within 1,000 feet of a school or while driving. Legalisation brings regulation and no crop will be more monitored and controlled than Californian marijuana. According to estimates, more than 400 businesses are licensed yet much of the state is still blocked from recreational sales because of the scarcity of licenses. 

Massachusetts will begin selling retail marijuana on 1 July. Maine has approved it, but there is no set date to begin sales. Other states that allow the sale of recreational marijuana are Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and Nevada. Despite this, the federal government still regards marijuana as illegal and California was the first to legalise marijuana for medical purposes. Now many states have followed that example. The pollsters Gallup found that 64 percent of all US adults back legalisation. There is good reason to believe support will keep rising. The Pew Research Center found that support has steadily grown among all generations, especially among younger groups, who will over time become a greater share of the voting population.

The legal cannabis sector is expected to generate $40 billion and more than 400,000 jobs by 2021 in the United States, according to one study. It is expected that $4 billion in taxes will be generated within three years. It is also expected to lead to the creation of nearly 100,000 cannabis industry jobs in California by 2021, about a third of the nationwide figure of 446,000 jobs overall. Another forecast suggests $50 billion by 2026. Pot is no longer the world of Cheech and Chong and the Furry Freak Brothers. The 'straights in suits' now prevail.

Marijuana stocks skyrocketed on the Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF). Companies in the cannabis industry have added nearly $2 billion in value since New Year’s Day. This is a multibillion-dollar industry that will seek to expand and grow, just as any other market does. While the other states who legalised are relatively small economies and, therefore, relatively small marijuana industries, California is huge. It is home to more than 39 million people and has a GDP of $2.5 trillion, more than twice as populous and wealthy as all the previous legal pot states combined. This may well be the game-changer.

Marijuana is still illegal under federal law. This conflict in state and federal laws means banks are hesitant in doing business with marijuana growers and retailers as the bank is essentially taking part in an illegal drug industry so it is cash only, no credit cards. Major stock exchanges won’t accept listings for businesses that are still technically deemed illegal. Nor are marijuana businesses eligible for a number of deductions that businesses are normally entitled to under the tax code so pushing their effective income tax rates as high as 70 percent. And there is a suspicion that some pot users might stick with the black market as buyers are subject to state, sales and municipal taxes that raise the price of your smoke.

There are also international ramifications to the  legalisation - the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961, the Convention on Psychotropic Drugs of 1971, and the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances of 1988. The treaties are absolutely clear that illicit drugs aren't to be allowed for recreational use. But ignoring its treaty obligations is something America does.

Politicians have come to understand that the State lost the 'war on drugs'. It was saying no to drugs yet a vast number of its citizens were saying yes. If prohibition didn't work, then an alternative strategy had to be found – making it legal. Capitalism belatedly recognises all those missed business opportunities, while the government discovers the uncollected tax revenue. Marijuana is just another commodity, another profit-source for investment capital in its endless task of making more capital. Mexican migrant workers who once picked tomatoes will now be toiling in the marijuana fields.

ALJO

Pathfinders: Socialism on drugs (2009)

The Pathfinders column from the May 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

When young people ask if there would be drugs in socialism, they don't have in mind things like Seroxat and Prozac, they mean Skunk and Poppers. We can't say these things would be 'legal' or 'illegal', because the status of 'law' in a cooperative stateless community remains to be debated. What we can say is, if people need a drug and there is no good, scientific reason for not manufacturing it, it will no doubt be produced.

Capitalism has a funny attitude to drugs, both the legal, medical kind and the illegal, recreational kind. Legal drugs with important medicinal properties are often not produced because there is no profit in doing so, often because the patents on them have expired and lie in the public domain. This is the problem facing the new 'Polypill', a cocktail of five very cheap drugs which evidence suggests may halve the rate of strokes and heart attacks in middle-aged people ('The polypill: Medicine's magic bullet', Independent, 31 March). It works, but it won't be produced because it doesn't make money. Much the same can be said of many other cheap, unexploitable drugs which would save millions of lives in developing countries yet can't turn enough bucks for the big boys. Instead the drug companies concentrate on research into diseases of rich, white Westerners, such as obesity and skin cancer.

Where there's a wallet, there's a way, but even if you accept capitalism's own profit-oriented logic, its attitude to illegal recreational drugs still fails to make any kind of sense. From Al Capone to Afghanistan, the history of drug prohibition by capitalism continues to represent one of the most bizarrely stupid aspects of a social system never notable for its good judgment. The lesson of America's prohibition period should have taught the world that if you banned coffee today, you would create a coffee mafia tomorrow, in the process creating an unnecessary and, from the ruling class point of view, expensive 'war on coffee' simply to deprive people of something harmless that they like. We would also see a crime problem at every scale from coffee barons and their private armies to burglaries and back-alley shootings over a jar of Maxwell House in Manchester.

Most of the arguments against illicit drugs are bogus, unscientific and politically oriented. In particular, the idea that legalisation would create a massive social problem of a drug-crazed free-for-all is not borne out by the experience of Holland, or more recently of Portugal, which decriminalised illicit drugs in 2001. There, it turns out, drug usage and associated behavioural pathologies are among the lowest in all the EU countries, especially when compared to those countries with very restrictive drug laws (Cato Institute White Paper, 2 April).

While the drugs 'problem' is not a make or break issue for socialists, it does illustrate how capitalism tends to operate in defiance of any logic, even its own. Even leaving aside more pressing issues like poverty, war or climate change, it ought to be obvious from this that it is simply not clever to leave major decisions about production and supply in the hands of an unelected and uncontrollable minority. The capitalist ruling class are making the whole planet ill, and there's no magic pill for that.

Arthouse socialism
One accessibility issue about which there would be no question whatever in socialism is that of copyright, so the young Swedes recently convicted of copyright infringement over their Pirate Bay file-sharing site would have no case to answer in a society of common ownership ('Court jails Pirate Bay founders', BBC Online, 17 April). Their defence, that their web server did not contain illicit material, was always a long shot. True, they weren't handling 'stolen' goods themselves, but the court took the view that they were doing the equivalent of standing outside a house full of silverware and directing passers-by towards the open windows.

Socialists, as indeed many workers, have little sympathy for the fat cats of Hollywood and the music industry. Most writers, actors and musicians make no money out of their creativity anyway, so the property laws do nothing for them. Indeed, by giving workers so little respite from wage-slavery, it could be argued that capitalism prevents much art and science from ever being born in the first place, as well as narrowing the full spectrum of human creativity to a thin channel of bland commercial profitability. Who can say how many Mozarts, Mendels or Modiglianis the world has killed or incapacitated through poverty, wars or sheer overwork?

The Swedish defendants are probably too busy organising their appeal to note an amusing story in the British papers which shows that even the police don't take music copyright seriously. The Wiltshire police have just had a £32,000 bill from the Performing Rights Society for the playing of music in Wiltshire nicks ('Music bill forces police off beat', BBC Online, 17 April). Now the boys in blue are banned from their boogie boxes. Presumably now they'll just have to use their whistles.

No-spam socialism
Trivial point maybe, but socialism wouldn't see much in the way of spam, the background white noise of online capitalism, since commercial advertising of products wouldn't exist, nor any dodgy Nigerian money scams. So most emails would presumably be legitimate, apart possibly from those tedious 'Hey, this is hilarious, send it on!' posts which in any case only prove that workers under capitalism will resort to any tactic to waste their bosses' time at work. The environmental significance of this irritating feature of cyber-capitalism has now been highlighted by a new report which for the first time relates spam to carbon emissions. Every year, says the report, 62 trillion spam messages are sent globally, representing 33 billion kilowatt hours of energy and 17 million tonnes of CO2 emissions (BBC Online, 16 April). When a spam site was recently closed, the resulting 70 percent drop in global spam was equivalent to taking 2.2 million cars off the road, according to the antivirus company McAfee. Next day, of course, another site was up and running instead. On with the show.

Paddy Shannon