Call to Regulate Drug Use

Val Aldridge Meets A Drugs Expert Who Hates Cannabis, Yet Who Has A Compelling Argument For Why Recreational Drugs Should Be Regulated, Not Prohibited

RECREATIONAL drug use is here to stay and we need to get our heads around this and stop thinking about prohibiting drugs. Regulation and education is what is needed, not prohibition, says Peter Cohen, sociologist and associate Professor at the Centre for Drug Research at the University of Amsterdam, as he eschews a cup of coffee for a glass of sparkling mineral water.

Prohibition never worked with alcohol, he says, neither will it work with drugs. Dr Cohen, an international drug expert who "hates cannabis" (he says he belongs to that group which years ago, had fun using it and then left it behind) is careful about his coffee intake, and says his drug of choice is alcohol ("I love New Zealand wines"). And no, he doesn't smoke tobacco.

It's perhaps an unspoken nod to his research which he says demonstrates that drugs, of all sorts, are part of everyday life and, for most users, can be controlled.

Dr Cohen is in Wellington at the invitation of the Coalition for Cannabis Law Reform to make a submission to the health select committee's cannabis inquiry. He says: "For the bulk of drug users -- and this is what I learned in my research into amphetamine, cocaine and cannabis -- use is within our normal integrated lifestyle and I didn't know that when I started this research . . . how much it is like integrated alcohol use."

Dr Cohen, 60, has spent 20 years researching drug use, the careers of drug users, the drug policies and histories of a number of countries and the methodology of drug use research.

He is an adviser to the Dutch Government for the design and development of the European monitoring centre for drugs and drug addiction in the European Union and was an adviser to the World Health Organisation global cocaine project.

He says that whatever politicians might think, whether they favour prohibition or legalisation, drug policy will not keep people off drugs. It's a message that politicians will find difficult to swallow, says Dr Cohen, "because they think what they say has an influence in people's drug use".

And that, he says, is as naive as it is ridiculous.

Prohibition thinking clouds the truth about real drug use and "forces us to amplify our frightening images even more". Drug policy, in the end, has little effect. Research has shown that what are relevant are a society's cultural factors, economic factors, fashions and levels of urbanisation. These are what determine the proportion of the population that will use drugs.

He says there is no country that has stopped the normalisation of drug use among its population. Drugs that were meant to be kept out of society have more or less captured the cultural imagination and come in, despite prohibition.

"My focus is, don't go on trying to do the impossible. Try to regulate the use of drugs as we have done with alcohol." He says many countries did not follow the United States example of trying to prohibit alcohol. "Wisely so. Instead, they put quality controls on age limits, access, opening hours of pubs . . . there are all sorts of regulations around alcohol. That doesn't mean alcohol isn't sometimes a disturbing factor in our lives . . . but then so is marriage."

Prohibition, he says, was a US invention and was a catastrophe. It didn't work and was discontinued for alcohol, yet it was retained for all other drugs.

The US, he says, "is the Taleban of prohibition; the fundamentalists of drug prohibition". And it was as a result of severe US pressure that the global treaties on drugs evolved. But he says the treaties are toothless, used as an excuse not to progress in drug reform and neglected when they don't suit a country's interests.

Dr Cohen believes the world is gradually turning its back on prohibition. Europe, he says, is clearly going the other way. Germany, France and now Britain are easing drug laws.

He says his interest in drug research arose out of studying how societies, during their historical cultural development, create and construct problems.

TODAY'S "problem", says Dr Cohen, is recreational drug use. In the past it has been the problems of religion, homosexuality, alcohol, each of which has been dealt with. Now, he says, Western man is slowly deconstructing the drug problem just as in most countries it has deconstructed the homosexuality problem, taking it out of penal law and bringing it into the range of human freedoms.

The same has been done with religion: "Religious freedom is a very young freedom in Europe. Before the 19th century there were state religions where you were killed if you did not profess, or in later history, you didn't get the good jobs."

People tend to be educated into a series of assumptions and quasi-knowledge about drugs which are wrong, he says. In fact, most people will use some sort of drug within their dominant lifestyles.

He says it is a myth to think that cocaine or cannabis or amphetamines cannot be controlled by users.

Two long studies of cocaine users -- in 1985 and 1991, and a big study of cannabis users -- showed that use only continued for a certain period.

The average age in The Netherlands of a cannabis user is from 19 (from 24 for cocaine) to 35. During this period there are times of lighter use, heavy use and also abstinence. The same is true of alcohol.

There will always be those who over-use drugs, just like those who over-reach themselves in sport and ruin their bodies. "There is always this irrational aspect but we can regulate the bulk of human behaviour into nice lanes," he says.

Truthful education about drugs and their risks is a much more productive approach than prohibition, he says. So which country has got it right? None, in his view. Not Sweden or Australia and certainly not The Netherlands. He calls Dutch policy schizophrenic because it only decriminalised demand "but the supply was not decriminalised so the wholesale production and importation of marijuana is still a criminal offence. If you allow the population access to drugs, then allow people to trade it."

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Cannabis Ban Pointless - Experts

Attempting to control cannabis use by making it illegal is a costly and futile exercise that breeds corruption and more crime.

That's the view of Peter Cohen, director of the Centre for Drug Research at the University of Amsterdam, and Alex Wodak, director of the alcohol and drug service at Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital and president of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation.

Drs Cohen and Wodak today gave submissions, at the invitation of the Coalition for Cannabis Law Reform, to Parliament's health select committee on the last day of hearings into the legal status of cannabis in New Zealand. The committee received more than 400 submissions and started hearings on May 30.

Dr Cohen told The Evening Post yesterday that society had to accept that people would make different choices.

"What is good for people and what is bad for people may change over time. For instance, we had a time when divorce was considered bad for people and we tried to express those values by legislation."

Dr Wodak said the Western world had experienced between 50 and 75 years of cannabis prohibition. It was easy to identify problems with cannabis use, such as crime.

"That's the cost side and we also know that there are often serious problems with widespread police corruption, but on the benefit side it is very difficult to identify benefits.

"It does not seem to reduce demand and it does not seem to reduce supply, but what it does do is hand over a significant part of the economy - 1 percent of Australian GDP - to criminals and corrupt police."

Dr Cohen said cannabis use was surrounded with myths. The harm that cannabis was alleged to do to people from indigenous groups was due to the criminality of its possession rather than the drug itself. Dr Wodak said Australia tried prohibiting Aborigines from using alcohol from 1837 to 1975 and it was a total failure.

Dr Cohen said cannabis use had increased slowly in the Netherlands, where it was legalised 30 years ago, but no faster than in neighbouring countries. Even in Sweden, which rigorously enforced anti-cannabis laws, cannabis consumption had increased. Dr Wodak said cannabis should be regulated and taxed.

"The cannabis industry is a significant component of the economy. In Australia, it is three-quarters the size of the beer industry and two times the size of the wine industry."

Legalisation would also allow those who believed they were using too much cannabis to seek treatment. Taxes could be used to fund prevention programmes in the same way that alcohol taxes funded the Alcohol Liquor Advisory Council.

Dr Cohen said a government's role was to minimise harm.

"People make their own choices and you have to respect these choices and it does not matter that I think cannabis is good or bad . . . Do not ask me if it is a good choice to use cannabis. I would say that people have to decide it for themselves."

Dr Wodak said all the evidence pointed to far more harm being caused to society from alcohol and tobacco.

Dr Cohen said most people, including up to half of New Zealanders who had tried the drug, were light users.

"Most people do not like heavy use because it makes them too stoned. They do not like heavy use of caffeine because it makes them jittery and they do not like heavy use of alcohol because it makes them drunk. Most people have a lifestyle in which occasional use fits and heavy use does not."

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NZ's cannabis laws "stone age"

NZ's cannabis laws have been condemned as stone age policies by a visiting drug researcher giving evidence to the select committee inquiry into cannabis.

The inquiry is looking at whether to change the drug's legal status and how to minimise the harm associated with cannabis use.

Peter Cohen heads Amsterdam University's Centre for Drug Research and has been brought to New Zealand by supporters of drug law reform.

Doctor Cohen says legalising cannabis in the Netherlands has not opened the flood gates to drug use.

He says the drug is not harmful to health except when used excessively and people who do smoke cannabis quickly learn when and how much use is appropriate.

He says if the laws were changed people who wanted to find out about smoking cannabis, regardless of age, would be able to do so to find their limits with the drug.