Uncovered
The War on Drugs was a phrase, or policy, coined by Richard Nixon in 1971 during his first term as President, as a conscious echo of Lyndon B Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’. Never in the history of warfare has a campaign been waged for so long with so few tangible results. Just look at the example of Colombia: it’s estimated that between 2000 and 2006, the US government invested $4.7bn on Plan Colombia, a joint US-Colombian project to eliminate coca production in the global capital of cocaine. The net result was that, although production was dispersed to more remote areas of the country, cultivated acreage remained the same.
At the same time, the illicit trade in cocaine funded the Farc guerrillas, renowned for their kidnappings. Similarly in Afghanistan, the Taliban have lucratively exploited the heroin trade, which has dramatically expanded in the years since American intervention. It’s no exaggeration to say that the War on Drugs sustains the very people identified as enemies in the ‘War on Terror’.
Taking all of these contradictions into account, it’s perhaps no surprise that no coherent vision exists of our relationship with drugs. Rather than challenge global policy, we’ve settled for a more flexible pick-and-mix approach to questions of morality and personal pleasure.
The truth is that very few consumers stop and wonder about the effects of cash crops on developing-world societies when they purchase coffee, and there’s no reason to believe drug consumers are any different.
Leaving aside the ethics and economics of drugs, another area of worthwhile inquiry is definition. What makes a substance a drug? Which is to say, why are some drugs proscribed and others prescribed?
One of the most popular recreational drugs of the past decade is completely legal, although in theory available only on prescription. The drug is known to have side effects, including, in rare cases, hearing loss, stroke, hypotension and heart attack, and more commonly, headache, dyspepsia and impaired vision.
Yet millions of pills of sildenafil citrate are sold each year. The drug is also increasingly popular on the club scene, where it is often mixed with cocaine or ecstasy. Its best-known trade name is Viagra.
Perhaps the most obvious reason why Viagra is legal and, say, cocaine is not is that the former, notwithstanding the stated side effects, is deemed to be safe, while cocaine is deemed to be unsafe. In fact they both place stress on the heart, albeit in different ways and to varying degrees, but whereas Viagra was subject to extensive and exacting medical trials before it gained a licence, cocaine has enjoyed no such scientific scrutiny.
Cocaine’s physiological effects are known mostly as a result of coming to medical attention. So, by definition, it is the excessive and even lethal aspects of cocaine experiences that have gained the focus of scientific study. Of the many millions of comparatively harmless examples of cocaine ingestion, there are limited data. If nothing else, it does not make for a sensible basis for risk analysis.
However, perhaps the key distinction between cocaine and sildenafil citrate is that they primarily affect different organs. It’s drugs that influence behaviour, rather than ability, that really concern the authorities.
You can see why. If someone is passive, law-abiding and responsible in normal circumstances, but becomes violent, reckless and irrational having taken a certain drug, then it has potentially far-reaching social implications that require a social, or political, response. The problem is, though, different drugs affect different people in different ways. Some perfectly pleasant people become obnoxious and aggressive after a couple of drinks, but on the whole we don’t define alcohol in terms of this minority experience. In this matter, more than most, it is a question of perception.
