Conclusion

‘After writing about drugs for the last 20 years, my conclusion is that the only way worldwide drug use will be eliminated is if Earth gets whacked by a colossal meteor. In the meantime, it’s time to do away with the myths and hyperbole so often used when talking about drugs. Drugs can be fun. They can also be dangerous. What is for sure is that they are not going away.’

MAX DALY, VICE, 20181

In a world awash with drugs, it’s worth looking at Iceland. With a population of just under 340,000 people, it’s a country that could teach the rest of us a few things about taming excessive drug use.

In 1992, teenagers in Iceland filled out a survey about their experiences with alcohol and drugs. Over 40 per cent had been recently drunk, and 25 per cent smoked daily. Today, however, those figures have radically changed, and the nation’s teens are the most drug- and alcohol-free on the European continent. The percentage of 15- and 16-year-olds who had drunk alcohol fell from 42 per cent in 1998 to 5 per cent in 2016. Cannabis use dived from 17 per cent to 7 per cent, and cigarette smokers also fell from 23 per cent to 3 per cent.

American psychologist Harvey Milkman was recruited to help Iceland in 1991. An American psychology professor, Milkman knew that children started using drugs and alcohol to fill an emotional void, so he posited that they could be stimulated by alternatives such as music, dance, hip-hop, art, and martial arts. He had opened a centre in Denver where he had seen dramatic results. Iceland also introduced a plan called Youth in Iceland, which restricted access to tobacco and alcohol, imposed night curfews on young teenagers, and encouraged greater interaction between parents and their children. The state even gave families a leisure card to spend on activities.2

The results were dramatic. Between 1997 and 2012, children played much more organised sport and doubled the time they spent with their parents. Cannabis use, drinking, and nicotine use all dropped. Although Iceland took major steps that many other nations would not (including a large role for the state and a form of social engineering), it’s hard to argue with the outcome. Iceland isn’t the answer to the world’s drug problems — it’s a tiny nation whose experiences can’t be simply copied in other cultures and places with bigger populations — but it’s worth investigating how it works.

This is a more positive side of the drug story that too rarely makes the news. This book is full of horror stories from across the globe, about how the darkest fantasies of prohibitionists have turned the world into a charnel house. Stopping the carnage will take a monumental effort on the part of politicians and the public. Although there are some positive signs that a few leaders are now listening — legalising and regulating cannabis is a strong first step — the vast bulk of the drug war involves other, harder drugs. These substances remain illegal and are consumed by millions; the result is a drug supply-chain that enriches a minority at the expense of a majority who toil for little reward.

The most pessimistic view of the coming decades is expressed in apocalyptic terms. Think of ever-worsening crime wars waged by drug cartels, terrorists, gangs, and mafias with overwhelming military-grade firepower. Narco-cities are already increasingly common in Mexico and Brazil, operating parallel governments that solely exist to grow a drug economy. This toxic cocktail causes huge refugee movements, insecurity, and violence in the Middle East, Central Asia, sub-Saharan North Africa, and Central and South America.3 With a fragmenting global order, and no central authority or power willing or able to resolve conflicts, these trends are set to continue. Maintaining strict prohibitionist policies, while demand for drugs continues, only exacerbates the problems.

Famed US historian Alfred McCoy, one of the world’s experts on the drug war, predicts that China will overtake the US by 2030 to become the globe’s leading hegemon with the most powerful economy.4 What this means for drug policy is unclear, although it’s hard to be overly optimistic. Although Washington may no longer have the interest or ability to police and dictate prohibitionist policies that have been the mainstay of drug-war architecture for more than half a century, Beijing is hardly a liberal reformer. China executes more people than any other nation on the planet, often for drug dealing, and punishment can be a harsh drug-rehabilitation facility. If these policies are forced on other countries, like the US has done for decades, legalising and regulating drugs will be even more difficult to achieve.

Travelling across the world for the last four years and seeing the devastating effects of the drug war has been a powerful reminder to me that business as usual must end. The stories I heard in Honduras, the Philippines, Guinea-Bissau, the UK, the US, and Australia were often from individuals caught up in a war that they didn’t understand and had no ability to change. Small-time dealers, farmers, fishermen, and users weren’t interested in fighting a war against drugs. For them, it was just an economic lifeline.

Let’s end the negative judgements around drug use and abuse. It achieves nothing other than making necessary policy change more difficult. But perhaps even more importantly, attitudes need to change towards those who take drugs. As a journalist, I know the damage that my profession has contributed to these false stereotypes. Enough.

In terms of dangers to society, alcohol is undeniably more harmful — the World Health Organisation found in 2018 that alcohol was responsible for more than 5 per cent of global deaths every year, or around three million people — and yet it receives far less media, political, and public concern. This doesn’t have to be a permanent state of affairs — both alcohol and drugs should be better regulated in a healthy society — and yet it is cannabis, heroin, ecstasy, and all the others that are often demonised as moral abominations.

The Global Commission on Drugs, composed of former leaders from Africa, South America, and Europe, released a report in 2018 that keeps up the pressure on prohibitionist bodies to reverse course. ‘The legal regulation of drugs is rapidly moving from the theoretical to the practical domain’, it began. ‘This report addresses the reality that over 250 million people around the world are taking risks by consuming currently prohibited drugs. Accepting this reality and putting in place an effective regulatory strategy to manage it is neither admitting defeat nor condoning drug use. It is part of a responsible, evidence-based approach that deals with the world as it is in contrast with ideologically driven and ultimately counterproductive attempts to create a ‘drug-free world.”’5

This was a direct challenge to the US-led approach to drugs. President Donald Trump had ramped up his rhetoric on the drug war, especially in Washington’s sphere of influence, and supported a militarised response that has devastated vast parts of Latin and South America in the past. Nonetheless, hard-line supporters of the drug war would have been disappointed by figures released by Harm Reduction International in 2019 that showed a massive drop in known state executions globally for drug offences (91 known deaths in 2018, compared to 755 in 2015). According to the group, at least 7,000 people remain on death row worldwide for drug offences.

As this book has shown, logic rarely enters drug policy when criminalisation is a far easier solution. And yet facts have an uncomfortable tendency to get in the way. The International Drug Policy Consortium, a global network of 175 NGOs, released a ground-breaking study in 2018 that analysed the previous ten years of the drug war. Its conclusions were shocking yet unsurprising. With nearly half a million deaths every year, an explosion in opium and coca production, a 31 per cent increase in drug use, and increasingly dangerous drugs being consumed without any safeguards, the war on drugs had caused unprecedented upheaval. And yet when was the last time you read these statistics in the media? It’s a war that impacts millions of people, and yet they’re not important enough to warrant sustained attention.6 This book is, hopefully, a corrective to this wilful blindness.

I remain haunted by the stories I saw and heard across the globe, and it’s hard not to conclude that the drug war continues because some lives matter more than others. A white opioid user in the US warrants sympathy, but a black drug dealer deserves prison. A poor man in Manila is killed in cold blood, and yet many of his fellow citizens support it. Families weep in Honduras as loved ones are murdered, while the Trump administration backs its corrupt government. Drug abuse in Britain has never been worse, but most of the media ignore it. Australians could be saved by pill testing at music festivals, but many politicians refuse to even consider it. Cocaine use soars in the West, while low-level traffickers toil for little reward but big risk.

This is what the war on drugs looks like on the ground in every corner of the globe, and it will never end until African, South American, and Asian lives matter as much as white lives in the Western heartland. There are viable alternatives to this reality if we want to see them.

Over the past century, the drug war has been a convenient justification to ostracise, demonise, imprison, ignore, or kill the most marginalised. And yet drugs have never been more widely available, so those ideas have failed. What replaces them is yet to be seen, although I hope this book shows a way forward, in listening to those most affected by the war and imagining a world where a person using heroin or snorting cocaine isn’t deemed unimportant or expendable. I hope readers listen to them, and encourage policy-makers to stop blaming the victim and wishing for a world where illicit substances have disappeared. That’s the kind of fantasy thinking that created the war on drugs in the first place.

There is nothing inevitable about the drug war ending. As this book has shown, it serves and enriches many people and institutions around the world. Look at the rise of nationalism, hard borders, and the repression of refugees — policies pushed by Trump and many European leaders. The idea held by many progressives that the world would increasingly embrace the outsider has been mugged by reality, and sounds like a naïve wish today. Likewise with the war on drugs: it will take years more of campaigning and fighting back against the wrong-headed though politically powerful messages that have sustained it for so long. The drug war is both real and fake, sustained by fear, effective propaganda, and extreme violence. One can’t operate without the other.

As journalist Max Daly wrote for Vice, the public conversation around drugs has remained myopic. ‘In reality most people use drugs because they are fun, or an escape, not because they are morally corrupt’, he explained. ‘Drug addiction and street drug selling is a symptom of inequality and lack of hope, not of people simply being lazy or evil. If those who use drugs continue to be treated as criminals before they are seen as people, the need for open, honest reporting on this subject is paramount. It’s time to bury the caricatures of pushers selling drugs to kids outside the school gates, zombie junkies, and instantaneous addiction. Now is the time for reality to be represented.’7

After working on this book for years, I’ve come to realise that the required action to stop or avert the drug war isn’t going to come in radical waves, as much as I wish it would. The world won’t suddenly legalise and regulate drugs. It’ll be a messy collection of nations and states experimenting with various forms of legalisation and decriminalisation. Public acceptance of cannabis is a positive step, but will it lead to all drugs being similarly taxed and available? After witnessing the damage that prohibition causes, from Honduras to Australia, I support the complete legalisation and regulation of all drugs, so long as that is accompanied by appropriate safeguards. I hope that at least one of the Latin American nations that has gained nothing but trouble from criminalisation manages to legalise cocaine and show the world how it could be done. That’s the ultimate good example, and the best way to reject Washington’s disastrous lead.8

As with climate change, small incremental shifts won’t ultimately suffice to address the drug war. There is a need, as Canadian writer Naomi Klein explains, to fundamentally reorient our societies away from capitalist growth. Similarly, if you consume drugs, it’s not enough to become more ethical in drug taking — by all means, consider the source of your drugs, and avoid worsening the lives of the supply chain’s most vulnerable victims — in the hope that this will provide a clear path to ending the war on drugs. It may make you feel good, but will do little to help the millions of dealers, drug takers, farmers, and couriers who are caught in this self-defeating war.

For those who believe that the war on drugs has failed, and will always fail, it is time to imagine and work towards a different future.