Frontlines: The dangerous futility of the war on drugs

Some of the world’s foremost experts on drug decriminalisation gathered in Galway recently for a conference organised by Students for Sensible Drugs Policy. One of the keynote addresses was by Dr. Paul O’Mahony, a renowned criminologist and forensic psychologist. He has written six books on Irish criminal justice policy and is a founder member of the Irish Penal Reform Trust and the Drug Policy Action Group. His take on drugs is straightforward: prohibition hasn’t worked – so let’s start looking at alternatives.

HOT PRESS: You’re an advocate for the full legalisation of all drugs, including heroin, cocaine and crack. Can you explain why?

PAUL O’MAHONY: Well, it’s a long and complicated argument, but it’s about the damage that prohibition does, the failure of prohibition to prevent the things it’s intended to prevent. It’s about human rights. It’s about human nature. The underlying reality that people have a predisposition to use things that make life a little better for them, if only for a few hours. Life is hard, life is boring, and you need these things to make life a bit more palatable. The fact that we are supposedly growing a culture of human rights that respects the autonomy of the individual and tries to maximise it within a system where the person is not doing any third party harm: that system should clearly respect ownership of your own consciousness, your own choice about what you’re doing to your consciousness and your bodily integrity, etc. So it’s contradictory to attempt to regulate that the way prohibition does.

You think there is any possibility of legalisation happening in Ireland?

Not outside of a global movement. Prohibition is a global movement, aside from the small signs of countries like Portugal or Holland or Uruguay making changes in the direction of abolishing prohibition, though usually focussing on cannabis only. However, the global, UN-backed position is that we designate certain drugs as illegal and we do everything possible to eliminate their use. That’s the philosophy and that’s what they’re sticking with for the moment. But it’s irrational and long term you would have to hope that people will see that it does more harm than good, and then stop doing it, but it requires a huge shift in perspective.

You recently retired. Do you feel frustrated at having spent your career arguing quite rational points that the authorities have largely ignored?

I feel frustrated about a lot of things and dispirited, disheartened. I’ve actually spent as much time, if not more, writing about and researching the prison system, and that’s a disaster area. I don’t see things that I have been writing since the early ‘80s having any effect whatsoever on policy or the rationality of policy. It just hasn’t happened. You just have hard-line views prevailing everywhere, to no good effect. In the prison system, we had a fairly enlightened report by Ken Whittaker and his group in ’85 that pictured an appalling future, the worst scenario as it were – and actually that has in fact come to pass in the last 30 years because the advice given then by people like me and others has been totally ignored. It’s a similar story with drugs and prohibition.

Your book The Irish War On Drugs is subtitled The Seductive Folly Of Prohibition. Can you explain why it’s seductive?

One of the things I do in my book, which is not normally done in books on this area, is explain why prohibition perseveres – and is still supported despite all these dreadful consequences and contrary evidence – and what the psychology behind that is at the collective level. Often collectives persist in failing policies almost because of the history of failure. It’s almost too much to admit to. So much has been committed to this one approach that it becomes an impossibility to turn around and say, “We’ve been wrong all along, we shouldn’t have done this, we should have been going the other direction.” So it becomes very, very hard to break from that. But that’s one of quite a few reasons, and many of them are to do with people misconstruing the facts and misconstruing the arguments.

If legalisation does ever happen, you’re not in favour of the medical establishment being involved.

No, I don’t believe that’s the solution. I’m not a believer in the medical establishment having influence over people’s lives, even health-wise. I think they’ve done a disastrous job. I was in hospital just two weeks ago – in A&E with a relative who had been poisoned in a club with a spiked drink and hadn’t recovered as she should have, over a few hours. So we took her in and we were there eight hours and eventually left. It was 3am and we were still being told that there were so many people in the queue ahead of us. We’d been there all night to no good effect; they weren’t even doing a toxicology analysis. You just despair. It’s just an appalling system.

So you’re against medicalisation?

Medicalisation does easily as much harm as good. I think it is a kind of immature response. If you are saying this is a matter of personal responsibility then you make it a matter of personal responsibility. That’s the only way you can develop a propaganda base that’s honest, frank and will be listened to. If you confuse matters by saying “Ok, you can have cannabis – but it has to be prescription cannabis,” it’s all about some other authority, an authority that has a huge record of infantilizing people and leading them up the garden path. The criminal aspect is not going to be taken out of this unless drugs are freely available to everyone. Obviously you need regulation and to be careful around children and all of that – but if you create any kind of scarcity or risk around it, or barriers, then you still have criminal involvement and it’s the criminal involvement which is the most serious aspect of the whole thing.