It has certainly been a busy couple of weeks for the Drugs Squad. 50 kilos of hash seized in a Galway car park a fortnight ago (the largest cannabis haul in the west since 20 million euros worth was discovered on a boat in Ballyconneely in the early 1990’s). A massive search operation conducted in Limerick – of an entire housing estate, no less! And sundry other busts and seizures. All of which were duly reported in the media, and will undoubtedly look pretty impressive in the Garda Annual Report.

The question is, aside from costing an enormous amount of tax-payers’ money and criminalising a lot of otherwise law-abiding citizens, where is all of this law and order getting us?
Last year, a survey commissioned by the National Advisory Committee on Drugs and by the North’s Drug and Alcohol Information and Research Unit found that up to 112,000 adults in Ireland are regularly using illegal drugs, and that 20% of people – that’s one in five for the mathematically challenged – have used illegal drugs at some stage. For the study, 8442 people aged between 15 and 65 were surveyed between October 2002 and April 2003.
The survey found that, throughout the 32 counties, cannabis was by far the most commonly used illegal drug, with at least twice the prevalence rate of the next most common. The other main drugs highlighted were ecstasy, cocaine, amphetamines, magic mushrooms and heroin. The survey also revealed that drug-use is not confined to major cities, and is an issue for all rural and urban communities.
That’s at least 112,000 Irish citizens breaking the law on a regular basis in every city, town and village in the country. The real figure is probably higher. We don’t have enough courts to prosecute them nor enough cells to imprison them.
In his superb analysis of the roots of this country’s crime problems, Criminal Chaos, the leading Irish criminologist Paul O’Mahony identifies the four main effects of the prohibitionist law and order approach to the drugs trade.
They are (1) It hyper-inflates the value of the forbidden substance, (2) It places the trade firmly into criminal hands, (3) It eliminates all possibility of quality control of the prohibited substances, and of monitoring and regulation of how they are used, and (4) It generates a climate of “them and us”, where many drug-users – in particular opiate users – become alienated and detached from mainstream society.
According to O’Mahony, they then become “criminalised, acquiescent and subservient collaborators of the criminal gangs, whose main objective is to control and gain from the trade in illegal drugs.” In other words, many of them start thieving, smuggling or dealing to support their habits. A lesser number become even more heavily criminalised. By all accounts, you can buy a life – or rather a death – on the streets of Dublin for an ounce of coke these days. It’s that bad.
I’ve said it many times before and I’ll say it again now – there are very obvious parallels between the current system of criminalisation and the failed 1920 to 1933 prohibition of alcohol in the United States. During the US prohibition, vast criminal gangs and networks were built up on the back of supplying illegal alcohol to thirsty Americans – many of which are still thriving in other areas of criminal enterprise today. It’s now widely accepted that the alcohol prohibition was utterly misguided and inflicted far more damage on American society than it ever prevented.
While there may appear to be good reasons to continue the outlawing of certain drugs, it has to be asked whether the current drug prohibition is having a similarly negative effect on Irish society. And it has to be answered with a resounding – “yes it is!”
Each drug requires a separate policy, but this is especially true in the case of cannabis. Although countless millions are being made by Irish criminal gangs from the heroin, ecstasy and heroin trades, the mainstay of the illegal drugs market here is cannabis – a relatively benign substance, considered by many to be far less harmful than legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco (lest we forget, in January 2004 the British government downgraded cannabis to a Class C drug).
While Customs and Drug Squad seizures may periodically disrupt supply, the fact remains that with a core market of (at least) 112,000 drug-using Irish citizens, there will always be sufficient demand to make it worth somebody’s while bringing drugs into this country. So why not legalise the trade, and take it out of criminal hands?
While this may appear to be a controversial idea (yawn), it’s actually just common sense. Certainly, legalisation would be preferable to the current misguided approach. There’s a growing recognition of the fact that the problem is the policy.
Put it this way. Let’s say you had a leaking pipe in your home and tried to fix it by belting it hard with a sledgehammer. If the leak got worse and the hole got bigger, would you hit it again? And again? And again? Of course you wouldn’t! You’d realise you were making it worse and look for a new solution. Unfortunately, our legislators have been applying the same sledgehammer solution to the drug “problem” for the past thirty years, and that leak has now become a flood. How many Irish illegal drug-users were there in 1975? Or in 1985? Certainly not 112,000!
Writing in the academic journal of the Royal College of Defence, the former Assistant Chief Constable of Hampshire wrote: “Those responsible [for WW1 tactics] have been accused of almost criminal complacency and incompetence as strategists and policy makers. Future generations may level the same charges at those responsible for present drug policies.”
If Minister McDowell or any of his Department of Justice colleagues can explain why they’re continuing to use strategies that not only don’t work but actually significantly worsen the problem, I’d love to hear it.