Smoke Without Fire

Although bestselling American author and journalist Doug Fine has the utmost respect for his country’s law enforcement agencies, he knows that they’re totally wasting their time – and billions of tax dollars – attempting to enforce the failed cannabis prohibition.

“I’m a law enforcement supporter,” he stresses, speaking down the line from his New Mexico home. “I’m grateful that we have police who protect society. I think most law enforcers, even on the narcotics side, are just out there trying to do their jobs, but every single one of them knows that there’s no question of winning this war. 100 million Americans have used cannabis, including the last three Presidents, and I’d imagine it’s not very different in Ireland.
“It’s a popular plant,” he continues. “I mean humans have evolved with it. And there’s this game that goes on with law enforcement – we have a massive budget devoted to, essentially, losing this war. Huge amounts of money thrown at a problem that’s not a problem, and it’s not doing anything to soften that problem, but the war keeps being fought, and budgets become dependent on it.”
He uses African wildebeest as a metaphor for the current situation.
“We watch these nature specials where 500,000 wildebeest have to cross this stream under migration, and there are nine crocodiles in the stream. Statistically, all 500,000 wildebeest, minus nine, are going to get across, but the crocodiles can all go home and say that they caught a wildebeest today. They did their job; they ate a wildebeest.
“Narcotics enforcement is like those crocodiles. They can say, ‘Look at this, we seized this much cannabis today’. And it represents only one per cent, maybe.”
Published last year, Fine’s third book, Too High To Fail: Cannabis And The New Green Economic Revolution, humorously examines how the American public have borne the massive economic and social expenditures of the failed War On Drugs.
“In North America, cannabis is the number one cash crop, and 40 years of ‘Drug War’ has not changed that,” he asserts. “If anything, cannabis is more popular than ever. Knowing that cannabis is less dangerous than alcohol and could be safely regulated the way alcohol is, I went and researched the actual industry in the U.S, specifically in Northern California where it had been locally legalised. For a year I followed cannabis farmers and one plant from the farm to the patient, because in California it’s just legalised for medicinal use, unlike in other states that have fully legalised adult social use of cannabis, such as Colorado and Washington.
“And what I found was that the plant can be grown in an environmentally stable way. It, when regulated, lowers crime and increases municipal revenue. There was almost no argument that I could see for continuing the ban on a relatively benign plant that humans have used for 8,000-10,000 years. The only thing that the prohibition of cannabis does is create profits for organised crime.”
Fine fully expects cannabis to be completely legal in the US within the next few years.
“It’s an unstoppable train at this point,” he declares. “Polls nationwide show close to 60% of Americans wanting to end the war on cannabis, even in very conservative places. Arizona is a conservative state, but 57% in the most recent poll want to regulate cannabis like alcohol. In Kentucky, in the deep South, a majority want to at least institute medical cannabis. The train has left the station and there’s no going back now, mainly because the truth is out. The same old lies that started cannabis prohibition are not working on a new generation.”

Too High To Fail is published by Gotham. www.dougfine.com