Prohibition: Not What You Think
What is the purpose of prohibition?
Photo by AJ Colores on Unsplash
We’re told it’s to protect us from ‘dangerous drugs’, but the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime recognises that despite over fifty years of Drug War, Prohibition has had no significant impact on the supply of prohibited drugs, nor has it reduced the demand for prohibited drugs.
So how can a policy so ineffective, so costly and so invasive, continue to receive so much support? Well truth be told, Prohibition was never about reducing the supply nor the demand for drugs. The real purpose of the Drug War was admitted by John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President Nixon for Domestic Affairs, who explained:
“[President Nixon] had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people… We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the [Vietnam] war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
On the 17th June 1971 US President Richard Nixon declared that drugs were “Public Enemy No.1” and announced a ‘War on Drugs’ a war based upon propaganda and deceit to serve other political agendas. That same year the UK introduced the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, and New Zealand followed suit in 1975 with very similar legislation.
Fifty years later, little has changed. The drug war continues to be sustained by propaganda, misinformation and data cherry picking; however, the Drug War industry has burgeoned and now has a vast array of committed stakeholders, all with a strong vested interest in maintaining the status quo. We’ve identified eighteen key stakeholders:
It provides the Banks with massive investments from money laundering.
It provides an attractive and unquestionable dogma for moral crusading groups to ‘say no’ to drugs, avoiding the complexities of science, reason and rationale, and indeed avoiding the contradiction in respect of other psychoactive substances sugar, caffeine, tobacco and alcohol.
It provides a much-needed distraction from the serious problems caused by the more harmful, addictive and culturally embedded legal drugs – alcohol, tobacco, sugar and pharmaceuticals.It provides the police with powers to easily stop, search, arrest, interrogate and prosecute almost anyone.
It protects the market share and status of the privileged, promoted and culturally embedded legal psychoactive drugs. Essentially ethanol; caffeine; tobacco; sugar and pharmaceuticals enjoy market protection.
It allows governments to deflect attention away from the key structural drivers behind most chronic addiction (inequality, stigma, exclusion, poverty and blocked opportunities) and instead, misleadingly shift attention towards the supposed devastating power of the illicit drug.
It provides politicians on both sides with a societal scapegoat, and the chance to rally support and votes by getting ‘tough’ on a socially constructed enemy within: the ‘addict’ hooked and controlled by the ‘demon drugs’.
It provides the news media, TV and film industry with easy, cheap sordid stories, dramas and images illustrating the horrors from ‘drugs’ – without ever questioning the social and political drivers for drug harm.
It provides excellent opportunities for the state to disproportionately target, monitor, control and punish the poor, indigenous people and minority ethnic groups.
It successfully attracts significant additional funding for police, armed services, customs officials and security services, and additional resources for the police/state through the seizure of assets.
It provides justification for military action, espionage and invasion of other countries.
It provides excellent business opportunities and a ready supply of victims for the ever-burgeoning penal industrial complex.
It provides opportunities for new technology development and sales, in the invasive and expanding drug testing industry.
It provides considerable opportunities for new technology development and sales, in the underground avoidance of drug detection industry.
It provides the drug rehabilitation business with an endless supply of illicit users, who are required to always abstain, and forever be in recovery.
Internationally, it rallies otherwise disparate nations together by finding common ground to fight a shared war against a global enemy, ‘drugs’.
It provides researchers and academics with a constant and reliable stream of funding sources for endless research to uphold prohibition propaganda - such as reefer madness, gateway theory, crack babies and krokodil.
It provides a lucrative illegal market that enables gangsters and drug cartels to make incredible untaxed profits.
It provides excellent careers for drug enforcement officials and drug policy entrepreneurs and careerists, facilitating debates, inquiries, international travel, networking and conference events, particularly via the United Nations.
It is clear there are a lot of groups that benefit from prohibition. Many of these groups have the power to influence public opinion, create laws and shape policies that bolster Nixon’s Drug War. Little wonder then, that not much has changed in 50 years despite a large and ever-growing body of evidence that shows that prohibition is the cause of widespread harm to individuals, families, communities and countries.
It’s time to call this what it is - a deliberate injustice perpetrated by the powerful to protect their vested interests.
