Zero 'drug' tolerance, high alcohol tolerance

The self-styled liberals of the Progressive Democrats missed two great chances to prove their worth in recent weeks.

Instead, its two Government ministers, Michael McDowell and Mary Harney, exercised their powers in traditional, conservative fashion, reducing the right of citizens to make their personal choices, be they right or wrong, and ignoring the potential for rectifying failed solutions to old problems.

The first was McDowell's exploding of Garda plans to treat first-time possession of cannabis as a matter better subject to a caution than prosecution. The second was Harney's decision to add magic mushrooms to a long list of prohibited narcotics.

First to McDowell's decision, which interfered with the well-formed intention of the gardaí: first he was against, then he was suddenly understanding but quickly the gardaí were taking the idea off the table themselves. It seemed that McDowell did not want to give the impression of being soft on the use of any illegal drugs, even if the various drug rehabilitation experts tell him that concentrating on heroin and cocaine use is far more important and profitable than targeting less harmful cannabis.

And here's where the difficulty involved in differentiating between cautions and charges gets worse.
Whatever the health risks involved in cannabis, and there is no doubt but that they exist, the user is most unlikely to be aggressive to others. A user of alcohol, as a legal product, is far more likely to be involved in violence, either on the street or at home, but a drunk and disorderly person can now be sent home with a Garda caution.

Admittedly, a cannabis user who drives could be a danger to others because of impaired judgment but it is almost impossible to test for use of the drug unless he has been drinking alcohol too. So breath tests are useless for catching drug drivers, but are essential for drink drivers.

McDowell could have freed valuable Garda time by agreeing to the idea of cautions for cannabis users. Harney has now added to the Garda burden by classifying the possession and/or sale of magic mushrooms as illegal too.
There is no doubt that magic mushrooms are dangerous to the health of whoever consumes them. The Minister for Health was made aware of this recently following a meeting with the family of a 33-year-old man who had eaten some (as well as drinking alcohol) before jumping off the top of an apartment block and dying. She acted within days (of intense radio coverage). It looked as if she were acting strongly and compassionately in the public interest.

If only it were that simple. People will still consume magic mushrooms. They may find it harder to access them but they will and the idea that banning something will reduce consumption is a nonsense. If users don't want to search the country's fields and golf courses they'll get their drug of choice from the type of people who supply existing illegal narcotics such as cannabis, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and LSD. Gardaí will lack the resources to police possession and use; indeed, its burden in drug control has now increased.

Personal choice has been curtailed because of one story, undoubtedly tragic, that reportedly caused the Tánaiste to cry. So what next in the crackdown by the nanny-state? Is alcohol to be banned? Should the sale of over-the-counter (OTC) medications, including paracetamol, be banned? Alcohol misuse leads to hundreds of deaths on our roads each year, to badly damaged physical and mental health, to violence in the home and on the streets. OTC medicines, if taken in the wrong quantities, can kill.

The Government's response to this – as articulated by the Minister for Drugs Noel Ahern when I put this to him last week – is that alcohol use is regulated and controlled, as to the amount of alcohol in a drink and the situations in which it can be consumed. Exactly.

There are many people, respectable people among them, who regard the campaign to stop the consumption of illegal drugs as doomed to failure. They would like drug consumption and distribution to be made legal, taken away from criminal gangs, where it can be controlled to a reasonable, if not perfect, degree. The State would also tax the products and get money that can be used for dealing with the health and social issues that arise from drug use.

Instead of banning magic mushrooms, Harney should have investigated whether the quasi-legal system of distributing and selling the product was actually helping in ensuring that excessive quantities are not being consumed and that people eat safer varieties than the unknown ones that can be picked in the fields.

She should have examined the potential for dealing with cannabis, which will be consumed no matter what dangers are involved, in the same way. She has applied the failed methods of dealing with heroin, cocaine and other drugs to the less dangerous magic mushrooms.  By criminalising possession and consumption immediately, she lost an opportunity for an imaginative examination of alternatives to failed anti-drugs policies. That's not liberalism, but unimaginative conservatism.