Drugs

Most of the time the most lunatic examples of Drug War mania, at least in the English-speaking world, come from the United States. but not always! Today's villains are Canadian. Chris Snowdon has the details of the murderous contempt police in British Columbia have for their citizens. It seems there is a batch of contaminated Ecstasy on sale in western Canada. Five people have been killed. The police know what colour of pills are likely to have caused these deaths and they know what stamps are on the pills. So what are they doing? Nothing at all.

As legal entertainments go Man facing jail after reporting his cannabis plants stolen is a pretty good one. The Edinburgh Evening News reports: Police were called to David Williamson's home to investigate reports that he had been assaulted and robbed. But after Williamson volunteered that it was two of his prized cannabis plants which had been stolen, suspicious officers got a warrant to search the 34-year-old's Edinburgh home and discovered a further 20 plants. Williamson was immediately arrested. The case caused barely disguised mirth among lawyers and officials at Edinburgh Sheriff Court today, when Williamson admitted producing a controlled drug at his Sighthill home in May this year. So far, so mirthful.

It's New Jersey so nothing should surprise anyone. Still, it turns out that the problem is that the cocaine has been cut with levamisole, a drug traditionally used to deworm livestock. So caveat coker if you're in America this summer. Also, of course, one of the problems with illegal but popular markets is that the people who run them are so often so dashed unscrupulous...

It seems that, in cycling as everything else, when the facts become intolerable it's no longer credible to insist upon them. That being the case it's not, perhaps, a great surprise that the Facts for Lance website appears to have disappeared. In one sense the question of whether or not Lance Armstrong ever took illegal performance-enhancing drugs is immaterial. He cannot prove a negative but nor do all those negative tests establish his innocence either. The difficulty for Armstrong and his legion of admirers is that the circumstantial evidence against him has become so substantial that you need to be unusually credulous to suppose that none of it can be true or that all of it is motivated by greed, dishonesty or personal issues.

John Rentoul's column in the Independent on Sunday this week was uncharacteristically unpersuasive. His text was Mencken's aphorism that "There is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong" and Mr Rentoul suggested the Cardoso Commission's report on drug legalisation is an example of this approach. Well, perhaps. But I think "neat, plausible, and wrong" actually better characterises the Drug Warriors mania for prohibition. To which one might add "ineffective" too. Most advocates* of decriminalisation or legalisation (as Rentoul says, two different approaches) concede that these alternatives will not eradicate all of the problems associated with drug use but argue instead that they will make it easier to deal with the consequences of drug use.

It's not that I disagree with this post by Blair Gibbs, nor that I don't think he makes a number of reasonable points. There's clearly a problem with drugs in prison even if it it's not, one supposes, on anything like the same level as the Cousins' difficulties in that area. Nevertheless, surely the most obvious point to make is that if we cannot keep illegal drugs out of prison at what point do even prohibitionists recognise that the War on Drugs can't be won*? Ah, they say, sure, perhaps it can't be, you know, won but that doesn't mean it's not worth fighting! Maybe. But at what point is reality allowed to intrude upon this fantastical approach to serious public policy?