Drug Law Reform Shafted: Prohibition 2.0 (part four)
Following on from part one, two and three Núria Calzada continues her conversation with retired Professor Julian Buchanan in New Zealand, they explore cannabis laws in New Zealand, drug checking, and the drift towards Prohibition 2.0. This interview was originally published in the Cañamo Magazine.
Q. What are the cannabis laws in New Zealand? Can you go to jail for using it?
Yes you can still go to prison, although the police have been given discretion as to whether to arrest you or recommend you to a detox program if they see fit. It is important to realise that in Aotearoa New Zealand 15% of the population are Māori — the indigenous Polynesian people, but a shameful 51% of the prison population are Māori illustrating the long standing institutional racism in the country that has its origins in colonialism. So giving police discretion will inevitably mean that drug laws disproportionately impact people of colour, indigenous and minority ethnic groups, people with alternative lifestyles, whereas people like me, white and middle-aged, will benefit from police discretion.
Medical cannabis is regulated and legally available by prescription only, but it is very expensive, because there is no prescription subsidy. So most of the ordinary people can’t afford regular cannabis treatment and the law prohibits people from growing it.
Q. And, as in other countries, does being arrested for cannabis carry a criminal record with an impact for the rest of your life?
Yes, that’s how it is. This is why I mentioned earlier that the referendum on cannabis should have been discussing the benefits or disadvantages of prohibition, because that is what we should have voted on. We shouldn’t talk about the pros and cons of cannabis, because people will use it anyway. We should talk about the pros and cons of the ban, and the downside of the ban is that it can harm a young person’s life opportunities and chances of employment, make it difficult to access housing or limit their opportunities to travel. These are problems that are not caused by drug use, but by criminalization. In fact, in 2011, the NZ Law Commission, a conservative group of people who were appointed to review the NZ Misuse of Drugs Law, published a report that they worked on for three years and in which they proposed rescinding the Misuse of Drugs Act. They made many proposals for radical reform, but no progressive reforms were adopted.
New Zealand has legalized drug testing, becoming the first country to explicitly regulate it. In the images, Know Your Stuff (“Know Your Material”), an organization formed by volunteers that offers drug testing services at events held in New Zealand
Q. New Zealand recently legalized drug testing, becoming the first country to explicitly regulate it. Is it great news or is it another fiasco, like the regulation of new psychoactive substances?
It’s great news. Thirty years ago we were the first country in the world to introduce a national needle exchange programs, and this year we are the first country in the world to introduce a national drug checking scheme. This is great news and is the fruit of several years of work and activism by Wendy Allison, Director of Know Your Stuff, and her team. Among other actions, they carried out research with the University of Victoria to provide supporting evidence. It is a law that stops the fear of the promoters of being prosecuted for having drug checking going on at their festivals and, stops the fear of those who come to analyze their substances from being arrested. This new law is a wonderful example of what bottom-up activism can achieve. The Know Your Stuff team pushed hard for what they believed in, they took risks, didn’t compromise the truth, or the evidence to appease prohibitionists. In my opinion this is the only way to achieve real changes in drug laws.
While I’m all for drug checking, it’s important to note that drug prohibition has always been geared to target people of colour, Hispanics, indigenous or minority communities, so when it comes to drug reform we see few legislative changes that will directly these groups. However, laws like drug checking receive more traction and support because they will largely benefit the privileged and white populations caught up by drug law enforcement harms. It is precisely in those areas that affect the privileged classes, such as medical cannabis, drug testing or the use of psychedelics in mental health where we will continue to see more drugs reforms Often these reform still punish the poor by regulations that make it impossible for them to grow cannabis or impossible for them to afford cannabis.
Q. At the same time that the government announced the pioneering substance testing law, the future tobacco ban in New Zealand was announced. Tell us what this ban proposal consists of and what you think about it.
This country has long had the goal of becoming a smoke and drug free Aotearoa. This idea of a smoke-free New Zealand has been around for a long time and has its roots in the same prohibition propaganda that calls for a drug-free world. So a Smoke Free Aotearoa makes no sense. It’s crazy. To achieve a smoke-free country by 2025, they propose to ban tobacco consumption for people born after 2008. They say it will be illegal to supply or sell tobacco, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it eventually possession becomes illegal too. We already know that young people are more interested in what they are not allowed to do — the attraction of the forbidden fruit. In fact, wherever cannabis is legalized, it is often seen that it becomes less popular with young people once it is regulated!
I have always opposed smoke-free NZ because I believe that everyone should have the right to do with their body what they want. It’s your body, it’s your choice, and I don’t see how we can mandate against personal decisions unless they’re causing serious harm to others. I do not think that if you are smoking in your garden you are causing serious harm to anyone. The diesel truck that comes by our property to pick up the rubbish is doing a lot more damage than someone smoking a cigarette. Also I don’t see how we can mandate against personal decisions unless they are causing serious harm to others — it’s a breach of Human Right over bodily autonomy.
Intervention on human rights to end the global problem of drug policies and avoid prohibition 2.0, at the Hit Hot Topics Conference 2018.
Q. You have been retired since 2016, but your activism on the blog and social networks is admirable. You’ve already mentioned it, but I’d like to know more about what you call “Prohibition 2.0”.
We need progressive drug reform to restore the Human Rights of people using drugs that not only government refused to regulate — but they punish and incarcerate people for their preference. We don’t need some human rights compromise. If I can use an analogy. When African Americans were fighting against slavery in the United States, they were given the Jim Crow law of segregation. This meant there were nice movie theatre seats where everyone could go, but the so called ‘coloured people’ sat in the poor seats in the back, same on the buses, same with housing. This is what Prohibition 2.0 will deliver.
Another example would be homosexuality. In many countries homosexuality was an illegal act and people were arrested and imprisoned for being homosexual or for being caught participating in a homosexual act. Activists fought the criminalisation of homosexuality, but they went from considering homosexuality as a criminal issue to framing homosexuality as a medical issue, and that led to compulsory treatment and conversion therapies. Another example of how drug reform could end up as Prohibition 2.0. When activists who represent the affected communities in any type of human rights negotiation become increasing familiar and resemble the people with whom they negotiate, they begin to speak their language and adopt their discourses. The risk is they then compromise and perpetuate a softer form of oppression.
We must understand the issue of prohibition as a form of oppression and learn from the oppression suffered by the Black community, women, homosexuals or people with disabilities, where the processes of prejudice, stereotypes, labelling and misinformation are very similar. It’s happening with ‘drugs’. It is common to hear that drug use is not a criminal problem but a health problem. And drug use is not a health issue. Maybe addiction can be a medical problem, but still, I’d say it’s not. It is more of a psychosocial condition, so I’m not really comfortable with medicalizing addiction either. But there are those who are satisfied with swapping drug criminalisation for drug medicalisation. In my view this is Prohibition 2.0 — the oppression continues.
Q. In your blog you have an article about seventy-five fallacies that support drug policy. Can you highlight the three most important fallacies.
The first is that we all talk about ‘drugs’ as if it were some kind of pharmacological definition, but when we talk about drugs we exclude a range of psychoactive drugs; coffee, tea, Red Bull, Valium, whisky, beer or tobacco. By using the term ‘drugs’ and excluding state approved psychoactive drugs, we are perpetuating a paradigm that prevents us from thinking outside of that discourse, thus contributing to reinforcing a misleading and deceptive social construction. People who use legal drugs refuse to believe that they are drug users and, furthermore, no one refers to them as such. We all use drugs.
Q. And the second fallacy?
The second is that there is a war on drugs — there isn’t! There is a war on people who use prohibited substances, or rather a war on certain people who use particular drugs. In fact, on dates like New Year’s Eve we see governments and televisions encouraging people to go out and celebrate the last night of the year and you can even hear the presenter on duty saying: “Since it’s not yet midnight and I still know what I’m saying”, assuming that alcohol intoxication is a normal situation. But nobody sees that we are all taking drugs or promoting them.
And finally, the third fallacy confuses use and addiction. Ninety percent of people who use drugs, whether it’s caffeine or alcohol, whether it’s cannabis or methamphetamine, have no problem at all and only around ten percent have problems. Of those ten percent who have problems, the majority can manage to recover without professional help. Only a tiny percent develop chronic addiction and will need professional help. These people who struggle with enduring chronic addiction issues often have had a very difficult, painful and disadvantaged life, with many serious unmet needs. We are talking about situations of child sexual abuse or violence, about poverty, learning difficulties or mental health problems.
What I am saying is that those who are chronically addicted and need professional help, already needed serious help before drugs ever became a problem. It’s not even true to suggest to them that drugs have ruined their lives, because in most cases they were pretty much ruined before. those who are chronically addicted and need help already needed it before drugs became a problem.
Q. And it is not easy to help someone who suffers from addiction within the prohibitionist framework.
Many of the people I’ve met who struggled with addiction were broken because the system had damaged them terribly. Most damage is caused by prohibition not by drugs. Drug users, especially those who buy into the discourse of abstinence, internalize the arguments of prohibition and think that they are dirty, that they are not clean. Prohibition fuels stigma and self hate. I often felt so saddened whenever a client genuinely thanked me, without any irony, for treating them like a human being. It’s crazy, you’re a human being, why on earth do you think you don’t deserve to be treated like a human being? Everybody deserves to be treated like a human being!
Prohibition has not only damaged people’s lives because of the opportunities it has stolen from them but also prohibition has spawned dodgy treatment and distorted understanding of drugs and addiction. There is a thing called addiction, yes, there are people who lose control and get into a mess. But the entire framework of understanding needed to address the problem has been poisoned by the prohibitionist treatment model. Prevention, treatment, education — everything has been spoiled it.
Q. Recommend us a book.
Everybody recommends books that have just been published but I’ll recommend a book that was ahead of its time and hugely influential on me at the time Living with Drugs , by Michael Gossop (1987). Still relevant today I believe.
Q. Future plans?
On a personal level, I am retired and I feel very lucky because I live in a beautiful country, I can go running or walking and I have fun with my grandchildren. I hope to continue enjoying my time and the freedom to do what I really like. But while I feel I still have something worthwhile to contribute to drug policy I’ll continue, because it’s such a Human Rights travesty and it’s primarily to poor and powerless suffering most.
Q. And what do you think will happen to drugs in the next decade?
In terms of drug policy, realistically, I suspect what will happen is that cannabis will be invited to the top table of prohibition, where the other privileged drugs sit. The cannabis will become the drug of choice for many people. But, basically, we will continue to have the same prohibition paradigm, where cannabis will occupy a place at the table of privileged drugs that enjoy a monopoly and that are culturally not only approved, but also promoted. The rest of the psychoactive drugs will remain prohibited. So the same arbitrary unscientific bifurcation of drugs will carry on and the drug apartheid will continue.
In the next decade we may see some loopholes in the system to alleviate the impact of prohibition enforcement on the privileged classes, such as the use of psychedelic drugs in mental health treatment. There will be advances in the medicinal use of drugs, but not in terms of recreational drugs use and the freedom to take whatever drug you choose, because there are few people who are really challenging the paradigm of prohibition.
Follow him: @julianbuchanan / https://julianbuchanan.wordpress.com
