WORKERS SOLIDARITY Paper of the Irish anarchist group, Workers Solidarity Movement No 43 Autumn 1994 (electronic addition) Part 3 (Drugs) 16k In this section Legalise it The heroin menace *************************** LEGALISE IT! THE LEGALISATION OF CANNABIS is now being debated openly by sections of the European ruling class. In localised areas like Amsterdam they have been conducting a 20 year experiment into the effects of legalisation. In Switzerland they are experimenting with the de-criminalisation of small quantities of heroin. According to the British Guardian one well-known brewery, Carlsberg-Tetley, has been investigating the hash cafes of Amsterdam with a view to running similar establishments in Britain. In Italy a referendum in March of 1993 ended the obligatory penal sentence for cannabis possession and in Germany earlier this year the Supreme Court suggested personal possession of drugs should not be prosecuted. Even senior police are getting in on the act, Raymond Kendall (head of Interpol) and Commander John Grieve of Scotland Yard have both recently suggested it's time to legalise at least some drugs. Best of all perhaps was Keith Hellawell's (Chief Constable of West Yorkshire) appearance on Panorama when he said "people are not being honest about the positive side of drugs, that drugs do give people a good feeling. A 'buzz' they call it" By contrast in the US the administration has created a 'War on Drugs' that echos the Prohibition (alcohol ban) of the 1920's. Instead of moonshine and speakeasy's this time it's cocaine and crack houses. The jails have been filled with 'drug offenders' and repressive laws introduced Some US states give longer mandatory sentences for the possession of marijuana than for rape or even murder. Forfeiture laws allow the confiscation of property that is in any way related to drugs and last year more property was seized by this method than was stolen in burglary in the whole of the US. Recently a law was being introduced that would mean possession of huge quantities of marijuana (60,000 Kg) would carry the death penalty! In the US, the War on Drugs (WoD) plays a considerable number of other functions. It is used as a pretext for invasions and interference in other countries, most notably the invasion of Panama. It is used to explain away inner city poverty, unemployment and homelessness as being the fault of those effected. It's a mechanism for official racism, such laws are enforced disproportionately against Blacks. Drugs with a higher ratio of Black users receive mandatory sentences for far smaller amounts. The Crack/Cocaine ratio, for instance, is 1:100. It has seen the introduction of some of the most draconian police powers and many deaths due to police raids, sometimes of 'innocent' people in cases of mistaken identity. FUN & PLAY Drugs are a leisure activity, nothing more and nothing less. Some people like football, some drinking, some smoking hash and many a combination. If a newspaper ran an article discussing whether football made you a worse person we'd all get a good laugh. But it's not funny, huge numbers of mostly young, mostly working class people are criminalised and even jailed every year for engaging in this leisure time activity. Many more are harassed by the police on the same pretext, drugs are on par with 'terrorism' when it comes to giving the police extra powers to stop, search and question you. But drugs are bad for you, don't they kill people and lead to crime? The accompanying table shows Marijuana which is very illegal was not credited with causing one death in the U.S. in 1990. Of course the fact that it is illegal makes it more difficult to measure indirect deaths due to cancers than for tobacco but most medical research seems to indicate that the health effects of hash smoking come well behind alcohol or tobacco. Hash is the soft end of the argument, other drugs do kill people. MDMA (Ecstasy) has recently been the source of many scare stories. People have died in Britain and Ireland from heat exhaustion or hypoallergenic responses to MDMA. But again let us consider that we are talking about a leisure activity. Rock climbing which involves far smaller numbers of people, thousands rather than millions, has killed a comparable amount in the same time period. Yet as far as I know no-one has called for the police to arrest rock climbers and raid sporting shops. Indeed the emphasis is on making this leisure activity safer, making sure people are prepared and improving the equipment. One of the major problems with MDMA is one of quality control, because it's illegal you don't know what exactly you are buying. There is a list of similar drugs which have led directly or indirectly to deaths or other serious medical problems including LSD and speed. Our attitude to them should be shaped in a similar way. DR DEATH Finally there are those drugs that at the moment are the cause of enormous amounts of suffering and deaths. In Ireland heroin is the only significant one of these and it is dealt with elsewhere in this issue. Heroin is different not just because of the suffering junkies inflict on themselves but also because of the suffering they inflict on their local community as they rob and mug to obtain money. We are not going to call for the de- criminalisation of heroin dealing any more than other anti-social crimes like arson or rape. But don't think the police are the answer, their main role is controlling rather than protecting ordinary people and in Dublin, at least, they have worked with big dealers in the past. There was almost no police response to the heroin epidemic of the early 1980's until the formation of Concerned Parents Against Drugs. This despite the fact that the main dealers, the Dunnes, were referred to in the evening papers. When CPAD evicted one of the big dealers, 'Ma Baker' it was claimed that they found an address book with home phone numbers of Drug Squad detectives in it. On top of this, even when the police are (selectively) serious it has disastrous consequences. In the U.S. the attempt by the state to ban all drugs has pushed profits up for criminals to the point where vicious wars are being fought over controlling the supply. In Washington which has the highest murder rate it's estimated that 80% of murders are related to drugs. Possession of small amounts of all drugs should be de-criminalised. Anti- social drugs like heroin should be available on prescription from doctors at low cost to prevent junkies turning to crime to finance their habit. What is needed is a real debate on the control of the other drugs. It seems reasonable to say that the maximum of restrictions should be similar to those applying in relation to drink or tobacco and this should be medically based and enforced rather than state controlled. We need to wake up to the fact that the current state ban on certain drugs in unacceptable. Even in relation to truly dangerous drugs it is counter- productive. There is no room for moralism on this as the drug bans are serious attacks on people and destroy many lives, either directly through criminalisation or indirectly through drug ban related crime. The future society we are seeking to create will, I hope, have a bit more to offer than an evangelical heaven of socialist hymn singing and hard work. Joe Black U.S. SURGEON GENERAL'S ACTUARIAL INFORMATION This is a list of deaths by substance for 1990 Tobacco................360,000 [legal] Alcohol................130,000 [legal] Prescribed drugs......18,675 [legal] Caffeine.................5,800 [legal] Cocaine..................2,390 [illegal] Heroin...................2,147 [illegal] Aspirin....................986 [legal] Marijuana..................0 [illegal] ***************** THE HEROIN MENACE DUBLIN is currently experiencing a heroin epidemic similar to the one that hit the north and south inner-city in the late 1970s. That epidemic left hundreds of young people hooked on heroin and dozens of them have since died of AIDS and AIDS related diseases. Some big criminals made fortunes out of it. The Dunnes managed to stay at large long enough to cause devastation in the tightly knit working class communities of the north and south inner city. People in these areas were already devastated by high rates of unemployment, bad housing rampant crime and a decaying environment. = Less than half a mile from the fancy hotels and shops of the city centre, people lived and still live in poverty and often in despair. The massive working class bias of heroin worldwide makes it stand apart from all other drugs whatever about its addictive quality. The lives of a whole generation of inner city youth was blighted by the heroin epidemic of the late 70s and early 1980s. Today young people are dying with frightening regularity in these communities, sometimes leaving young kids to be reared by their grandparents. This is the ultimate in capitalist logic - young kids turning to a killer drug in their hundreds to lessen the despair of their hopeless futures in this society. In the early 80s, the official response to the heroin crisis was muddled and ineffective. After all it was only the communities of the inner city that were effected and we all know that no-one important lives there. The community response however was much more decisive. Concerned Parents Against Drugs (CPAD) was set up and quickly gained support in both the north and south inner city and Ballymun where some of the pushers had moved. CPAD marched on the houses of known pushers and sometimes forcibly evicted them. Pushers were denounced at public meetings and ordered to leave the community. From the beginning there was hassle between the CPAD and the cops. This culminated in the arrest of John Whacker Humphreys and others who were tried in the Special Criminal Court where there is no jury and he was sentenced to prison and taken to Portlaoise. This hassle was partly because Sinn Fein was closely associated with the CPAD in some areas but also because they were challenging the authority of the cops and therefore the state in enforcing the law by doing what the cops wouldn't or couldn't do. However, there were problems with CPAD in some areas. One example was in Crumlin where they de-generated quickly into vigilantes who took to hassling anyone in the community who was different or lived any kind of an alternative life-style. There was also the problem that often all they were doing was moving the pushers from on area to another. The biggest problem was that, in the beginning anyway, they did not differentiate between pushers and addicts. People did not know as much about heroin addiction then and certainly not as much about AIDS, and there were practically no treatment programmes in existence for addicts. CPAD sometimes did not distinguish between hard and soft drugs either. People were harassed for smoking dope in some areas. However, despite its very real faults, CPAD was a progressive response to the heroin epidemic at that time. The present situation is very different. AIDS and H.I.V. are the main reasons that it is so different. So many families in the inner city have had someone either die of AIDS or become H.I.V. positive that it is now part of the community. In this situation people are reluctant to go for the tactics of the CPAD again because it is their own brothers and sisters and sons and daughters that would be targeted. A revival of CPAD-type organisation seems to be happening in the south inner city at the moment where there was a recent march to "keep our communities free from drugs". People do need to organise to defend their communities from heroin, AIDS and drugs wars. However this time around there needs to a clear distinction made between pushers and addicts. The recent survey of H.I.V. positive people in Dublin [Building Positively published by the Round Tower Housing Association, February 1994] shows that a very high proportion of them are either homeless or in very bad privately rented flats, and that the biggest single reason why they are in that state was that they had been harassed out of their homes by vigilantes because of their drug use and because they were H.I.V positive. The Corporation now will not house people defined as anti-social and a lot of drug users get defined in this way. People who are often very sick and dying in some cases are being harassed out of their homes because they are addicted to heroin. There is no easy solution because addicts sometimes push drugs and sometimes are into theft to pay for their addiction and they can make terrible neighbours. But simply throwing them out of their homes and communities and not calling for treatment programmes, and that means needle exchanges and methadone maintenance centres in the area where they live, is not acceptable to anarchists. Heroin addicts are victims of capitalism and should not be made scapegoats. People need to focus on the lousy conditions that create heroin addiction and to fight and organise around them. Anarchists believe that heroin should be decriminalised and available to addicts on prescription. Heroin is different to most other drugs because it is used intravenously and has led, though sharing needles, to users becoming HIV+. The distinction between "hard" and "soft" drugs changes all the time with the arrival of new kinds of drugs. As anarchists the distinction we make is between drugs that have a bad effect on users and the wider community, and those that don't. Heroin addiction leads to crime and violence, and it is working class communities who have to bear the brunt of it. It also leads to HIV infection and AIDS. It kills people. This makes it an anti-social drug. We are not in favour of more punitive legislation as a response. That has changed nothing. One only has to look at the number of junkies who go into Mountjoy jail and come out still addicted. Indeed many young prisoners have gone in never having used heroin but come out addicted. The state has been more concerned with appearing to do something rather than actually doing it. It has been a case of scapegoats rather than solutions. Anarchists are fighting for the sort of world where nobody will 'need' to escape from reality through self-destructive addiction. Until this is achieved we will support communities who want to defend themselves from heroin pushers and anti- social behaviour. Patricia McCarthy ************************ Part 1 (Intro & Shorts) Socialism & freedom 10 years of the WSM Thats Capitalism World Unemployment Revolutionaries letter from Serbia Part 2 (Ireland & Imperialism) It was always time to go..Troops out now! When British army chiefs refused to obey orders Nationalism...No Thanks When the Falls & the Shankill fought together Part 4 (Campaigns & Struggle in Ireland) TEAM workers told not to expect a decent job Lets get together Anti-Water charges campaign gets off ground Reasons to bin the bill Part 5 (A rotten world) Interview with Italian anarchist Ireland..The land of a 1000 welcomes? Hicksons chemical spill 37% illegally underpaid *********************** Workers Solidarity currently comes out four times a year. For subscription details write to WSM, PO Box 1528, Dublin 8, Ireland. Also appearing in the near future will be a theoretical magazine called Red and Black Revolution. ***************** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The Workers Solidarity Movement can be contacted at PO Box 1528, Dublin 8, Ireland or by anonymous e-mail to an64739@anon.penet.fi Some of our material is available via the Spunk press electronic archive by FTP to etext.archive.umich.edu or 141.211.164.18 or by gopher ("gopher etext.archive.umich.edu") or WWW at http://www.cwi.nl/cwi/people/Jack.Jansen/spunk/Spunk_Home.html in the directory /pub/Politics/Spunk/texts/groups/WSM