Social and Legal Limits of Drug Law Reform (USP)
Nietzsche and History
Death, Guilt, and Accountability
There are drug deaths and there are prohibition deaths. Gang war deaths are often prohibition deaths.
Death of a London girl: Tanesha Melbourne (17). Article in The Guardian April 2018 about her death and the immediate suspect.
Was she involved in drug dealing? Mistaken identity? The suspect is 30 years old. Drug dealing might be involved.
Is there a responsibility for her death beyond the immediate perpetrator's?
Suspect 1:
- The first thing David Lammy (MP for London-Tottenham, where the incident took place) wants us to understand is the blameless ease with which a child who goes home to an empty council estate flat because his mum can’t afford childcare while she’s at work, can become a gang member. All it takes is a gift of new trainers, he says, for which in return the child is soon asked to carry a little package round the corner, and before long, the 12-year-old is earning more in one week than his parents make in a year. The white middle-class market for cocaine is booming, Lammy says, citing reports by Interpol and Europol, and he has seen for himself how easy it is to service because dealers in Tottenham have shown him. “People are ordering drugs on WhatsApp, Snapchat. It’s easy.” One young constituent was caught selling cocaine in Aberdeen: dealers in London now operate what are known as “county lines”, supplying cocaine to every region of the country. Do middle- class customers safe in neighbourhoods far away from Tottenham’s turf wars have blood on their hands? For a moment he pauses. -
The argument runs as follows: drug use is against the law, it creates the market, the violence, and therefore, it is responsible. All users are responsible. - They are the REAL culprits. Someone who does blame drug users for drug related killings is Captain Nascimento, protagonist of the movie Tropa de Elite (28'-34'). Without drug users there would be no market, no violent competition for markets, no violence between gangs and police.
But what if they have a right to use drugs? (Douglas Husak). In that case, the law would have to allow drug use and drug commerce. How would that affect violence?
Suspect 2: Prohibition of goods and services creates a black market, which in turn creates structures and profits for organized crime. Lack of access to legal conflict regulation leads to violent ionternal sanctions as well as turf wars for domination and demarcation of markets.
Suspect 3: Legislators responsible for law-making. Legal reform could re-create more peaceful conditions. It is their responsibility to do something. But why don't they?
Suspect 4: The public does not demand legalisation. So is it the people's own fault?
Suspect 5: Political parties and governments are responsible for informing the public, organising inquiries, initiate discusssions about various policy alternatives. The government keeps silent, though. Why? It's a vicious circle.
Drug Policy: Prohibitionism and Alternatives
1. Why is drug policy a topic - or better: why should it be?
The world is suffering from an absurd over-incarceration. In the United States. In Brazil. In the Philippines. Single cases: Kenya. One of the main factors responsible for this tragic situation is our drug policy.
The world is suffering from an absurd return to the Middle Ages in terms of punishments. Things that belonged to pre-modern times such as torture and the death penalty had been on the way out for something like 200 years - the gallows and the sword was replaced by the prison and rehabilitation, expressed in what Amnesty International called an irreversible worldwide trend towards the abolition of the death penalty. This trend has been reversed - over the last decades, more and more countries have decided to introduce the death penalty or to re-introduce it even for non-violent offenses. What are these offenses? Drug offenses. Drug policy is responsible for this trend.
The world is suffering from seismic changes in the relation between individual and state rights. Individual rights have been reduced, state rights have been extended so there is less autonomy and more subordination. This is the case in criminal procedure especially in terrorism cases and in drug cases. In both cases, there is no doubt that enemy criminal law has replaced citizens' criminal law. While terrorist legislation has been important, drug legislation has been first to pave the way and to organise consensus for this development. Drug policy is responsible for the erosion of citizenship and the unhealthy growth of police powers.
The world is suffering from ever more terrible infringements of human rights like torture and extrajudicial killings. This cannot only be attributed to the "dark side" of the war on terror. It also ahs to do with the war on drugs - and again, many of the barbaric practices in the war on terror were just copies of the models developed in the war on drugs. The militarization and barbarization of crime control is a central element of a larger process that we are witnessing today. We can call it the process of de-civilization or of the re-barbarization of the world. Drug policy is a central element of this process. And if we do not re-think and re-organize drug policy from scrap, nothing will be able to stop that.
Does drug policy work? Is it effective? Is it efficient?
1. Drug Prohibition is a Real Prohibition Maybe even "the" real Prohibition - because alcohol prohibition in the US was limited to one drug only and very soft on consumers.
2. Drug Prohibition is Much Worse than You Think It's not only about having to hide your marihuana and to deny use and transactions when talking with the outside world. It's not only about the anxiety to be discovered and entering the criminal justice system.
It is also about gangs of the black markets, about no access to law for dispute solution. It is also about weapons, bloody feuds, bloody encounters with law enforcement, and police corruption.
It is about militarisation and competing orders of violence challenging and permeating state powers.
It is also about massacres and the disintegration of institutions. Mexico. And Institutional Anomie Theory.
It is also about the hidden police state - and the hidden state revealing itself in slums in Rio. Drug policy serves as a pretext for continuing coronelismo, dictatorship, überflüssige werden diszipliniert. Ex-Slaveholder-Countries are worse off than others.
3. Drug Prohibition does not influence what it should influence (indifference, Werb 2013)
4. Drug Prohibition affects the very social life (it is supposed to protect): Philippines and Brazil as extremes for youth risk, USA too.
5. Drug Prohibition destroys the fabric of legality - failure does not lead to reform, but to more of the same: earlier intervention, precursors, follow-up phenomena, higher sentences etc.
6. At the Root of the Problem: the International Drug Conventions. They must be introduced and explained shortly and precisely. The incompetence of the governing bodies. The problem of lacking exits. Stifling reform (Jamaica). What hinders countries to just leave by denouncing the treaties?
7. The legal options - why they do not work.
8. What about the Dutch Way?
9. What about the Portuguese Way?
10. What about California and other US states?
11. What about Uruguay?
12. Nothing makes sense if the drug problem is not solved.
Contents: Conventions, injustice and idiocy, how to get out: legal options and impediments, social options (Uruguay) and impediments (good people dirty work).