Levine, Harry G. (2001),
The secret of world-wide drug prohibition: The varieties and uses of drug
prohibition. Hereinstead,
October 2001 On-line: http://www.hereinstead.com/sys-tmpl/worldwide/.
© Copyright 2001 Harry G. Levine.
All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the author.
The secret of world-wide drug prohibition
The varieties and uses of drug prohibition
Harry G. Levine
"What percentage of countries in the world have drug prohibition?
Is it 100 percent, 75 percent, 50 percent or 25 percent?"
I recently asked many people I know to guess the answer to this question.
Most people, especially avid readers and the political aware, guess 25
or 50 percent. More suspicious people sometimes guess 75 percent. The
correct answer is 100 percent, but nobody guesses that. Most readers
of this paragraph will not have previously heard that every country in
the world has drug prohibition. Unusual as it seems, almost nobody knows
about the existence of world-wide drug prohibition.
In the last decade of the 20th century, many people throughout the world
became aware of national drug prohibition. They came to understand
that the narcotic or drug policies of the United Sates and some other
countries are properly termed "drug prohibition." But even as this understanding
spread, the fact that drug prohibition covers the entire world remained
a kind of "hidden-in-plain-view" secret. Now, in the 21st century, that
too may be changing.
"Global drug prohibition" (the term was first used in 1990) has begun
losing some of its invisibility. And as it becomes more visible, it loses
some of its other powers. This article briefly describes the varieties
and uses of world-wide drug prohibition in the 20th century, and explores
its prospects in the 21st century.
Drug prohibition is a continuum: From heavily criminalized to decriminalized
Every country in the world has drug prohibition. Every country in the world criminalizes the production and sale of cannabis, cocaine and opiates. In addition, most countries criminalize the production and sale of some other psychoactive substances, and they make exceptions for limited medical purposes, especially morphine for pre- and post operative pain management. Most countries also criminalize simple possession of small amounts of some of the prohibited substances, usually an ounce (28 grams) or less.
In Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice, Craig Reinarman and I suggested that the varieties of drug prohibition can be seen as a long continuum. The continuum extends from the most criminalized and punitive forms of drug prohibition, such as the crack cocaine policy of the United States of America, to the most decriminalized and regulated forms of drug prohibition, such as the cannabis policy of the Netherlands. In this article I want to suggest that the most criminalized and punitive end of the drug prohibition continuum be called "criminalized drug prohibition" and the other end be termed "decriminalized drug prohibition."
Criminalized drug prohibition uses criminal laws, police, and imprisonment to punish people who use specific psychoactive substances, even in minute quantities. In the U.S., drug laws prohibit even supervised medical use of cannabis by terminally ill cancer and AIDS patients. U.S. drug prohibition gives long, mandatory prison sentences for possession, use, and small-scale distribution of forbidden drugs. U.S. drug laws require mandatory prison sentences that increase for repeated drug offenses. Most U.S. drug laws explicitly remove sentencing discretion from judges, and do not allow for probation or parole. The United States now has nearly half a million men and women in prison for violating its drug laws. Most of these people are poor and from racial minorities. Most of them have been imprisoned just for possessing an illicit drug, or "intending" to sell small amounts of it. The mandatory federal penalty for possessing five grams of crack cocaine, for a first offense, is five years in prison, with no possibility of parole. Criminalized prohibition is the harshest form of drug prohibition.
The cannabis policy of the Netherlands is the best known example of the other end of the drug prohibition spectrum — of a decriminalized and regulated form of drug prohibition. Several United Nations drug treaties — especially the "Single Convention on Narcotics" of 1961 — require the government of the Netherlands to have specific laws prohibiting the production and sale of particular drugs. Therefore Dutch law explicitly prohibits growing or selling cannabis. This is still formally drug prohibition, and the Netherlands does prosecute larger growers, dealers and importers (or smugglers) as required by the U.N. treaties. But in the Netherlands national legislation and policy limits the prosecution of certain cafes, snack bars and pubs (called "coffee shops") that are licensed to sell small quantities of cannabis for personal use. The coffee shops are permitted to operate as long as they are orderly and stay within well-defined limits that are monitored and enforced by the police. The coffee shops are not allow to advertise cannabis in any way, and they may sell only very small amounts to adults. Like other formally illegal activities, cannabis sales are not taxed. Without a change in the Single Convention and other international treaties, this is probably as far as any country can go within the current structures of world-wide drug prohibition.
The prohibition policies of all other western countries fall in between the heavily criminalized crack cocaine policies of the U.S. and the decriminalized and regulated cannabis prohibition of the Netherlands. No western country, nor most third world countries, have ever had forms of drug prohibition as criminalized and punitive as the United States. And in the last five to ten years, drug policy in Europe, Canada, Australia and elsewhere appears to be shifting even further away from the criminalized end of the prohibition continuum. But all these countries are required by international treaties to have — and still do have — real, formal, legal, national drug prohibition.
Drug prohibition has been adopted throughout the world
Drug prohibition is a world-wide system of state power. Global drug prohibition is a "social fact," it is a "thing" (to use the terms of the great sociologist Emile Durkheim). Drug prohibition exists whether or not we recognize it, and it has real effects, real consequences.
For many decades, public officials, journalists and academics rarely identified any form of U.S. drug law as "prohibition." Instead, public officials, journalists, and academics referred to a national and international "narcotics policy." The international organization that created and still runs global drug prohibition is called the "International Narcotics Control Board."
National drug prohibition began in the 1920s in the United States as a subset of national alcohol prohibition. The first U.S. drug prohibition enforcement agents were alcohol prohibition agents assigned to handle "narcotics." American prohibitionists had always worked hard to convince other nations to adopt alcohol prohibition laws; during the 1920s, some savvy prohibitionists (notably an obscure U.S. Prohibition Commissioner named Harry A. Anslinger) realized that the success of U.S. alcohol prohibition depended on support from other countries. However, the campaign to spread American alcohol prohibition to other nations was an utter failure. In 1933, the U.S. repealed its own national alcohol prohibition laws — the 18th Amendment to the Constitution and the Volstead Act — and returned the question of alcohol policy to state and local governments to do with as they wished.
The story of drug prohibition took an entirely different course. Since the early 20th century, the U.S. had found European governments far more willing to consider anti-narcotics legislation than anti-alcohol laws. The founding Convenant of the League of Nations explicitly mentioned the control of "dangerous drugs" as one of the organization's concerns. In 1930, the U.S. Congress separated drug prohibition from the increasingly disreputable alcohol prohibition and created a new federal drug prohibition agency: the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, headed by the committed alcohol prohibitionist Harry A. Anslinger. In the 1930s, the U.S. helped write and gain acceptance for two international anti-drug conventions or treaties aimed at "suppressing" narcotics and "dangerous drugs." In 1948, the new United Nations made drug prohibition one of its priorities, and the U.N. Single Convention of 1961, and a series of subsequent anti-drug treaties, established the current system of global drug prohibition.
In the last eighty years, nearly every political persuasion and type of government has endorsed drug prohibition. Capitalist democracies took up drug prohibition, and so did authoritarian governments. German Nazis and Italian Fascists embraced drug prohibition, just as American politicians had. Various Soviet regimes enforced drug prohibition, as have its successors. In China, mandarins, militarists, capitalists, and communists all enforced drug prohibition regimes. Populist generals in Latin American and anti-colonialist intellectuals in Africa embraced drug prohibition. Over the course of the 20th century, drug prohibition was supported by liberal prime ministers, moderate monarchs, military strongmen, and Maoists. It was supported by prominent archbishops and radical priests, by nationalist heroes and imperialist puppets, by labor union leaders and sweat shop owners, by socialists, social workers, social scientists, and socialites — by all varieties of politicians, practicing all brands of politics, in all political systems.
Over the last eighty years, every government in the world eventually adopted drug prohibition. National drug prohibition was one of the most widely accepted, reputable, legitimate government policies of the entire 20th century. Why? Why should this be so?
Drug prohibition is useful to all types of governments
There is no doubt that governments throughout the world have accepted drug prohibition because of enormous pressure from the United States government and a few powerful allies. But U.S. power alone cannot explain the global acceptance of drug prohibition. Governments of all types, all over the world, have also found drug prohibition useful for their own purposes. There are several reasons for this.
The police and military powers of drug prohibition
Drug prohibition has given all kinds of governments additional police and military powers that they have been freer to deploy than other kinds of police powers. Police and military narcotics units can legitimately go undercover anywhere and investigate anyone — anybody could be in the drug business. Most of the undercover police in the United States are in narcotics squads (no other crimes require so much undercover manpower). The CIA can only legally operate beyond U.S. borders, and the FBI only within the U.S., but the DEA (the Drug Enforcement Administration) is free to independently stage covert operations domestically and in other counties. Anti-drug units within city, county and state police departments have unparalleled freedom of movement. Police anti-drug units have regular contact with informers and spies; they can make secret recordings and photographs of anyone, and they have cash for buying drugs and information. In the United States, police anti-drug units are sometimes allowed to keep money, cars, houses and other property they seize. Top politicians and government officials in many countries may have believed deeply in the cause of drug prohibition. But other health-oriented causes could not have produced for them so much police, coast guard and military power.
Government officials throughout the world have used anti-drug squads to conduct surveillance operations and military raids that they would not otherwise have been able to justify. Many times these anti-drug forces have been deployed against targets other than drug dealers and users — as was the case with U.S. President Richard Nixon's own special White House anti-drug team, led by former CIA agents, which later became famous as the Watergate burglars. Nixon was brought down by his squad's mistakes. But over the years, government anti-drug forces all over the world have carried out countless successful non-drug operations.
Sometimes this use of "anti-drug" justifications for diverse military and police activities has been fairly obvious. The U.S. has long justified the military support provided to anti-democratic governments and factions it favored in Latin America by asserting that the military hardware was being given to "fight drugs." Nearly everyone who writes seriously about U.S. foreign policy takes it for granted that the "anti-drug" justifications have been transparent but politically useful cover stories.
The usefulness of drug demonization and of anti-drug messages
Drug prohibition has also been useful for governments and politicians of all types because it has required at least some anti-drug crusades and what is properly called drug demonization. Anti-drug crusades articulate a moral ideology that depicts "drugs" as extremely dangerous and destructive substances. Under drug prohibition, police, the media, and religious and health authorities tend to describe the risks and problems of drug use in extreme and exaggerated terms. "Drugs" are dangerous enemies. "Drugs" are called evil, vile, threatening, and powerfully addicting. Politicians and governments crusade against them, declare war on them, and blame them for many unhappy conditions and events. Anti-drug crusades and drug scares popularize images of "drugs" as highly contagious invading evils. Words like plague, epidemic, scourge, and pestilence are used to describe psychoactive substances, drug use, and moderate, recreational drug users.
Government officials, politicians, the media and other authorities have found that the enemies described in the language of drug demonization can be very useful. These enemies can be blamed by almost anyone at any time for long-standing problems, recent problems, and the worsening of almost anything. Theft, robbery, rape, malingering, fraud, corruption, physical violence against men, women or children, disrespect, juvenile delinquency, sloth, sloppiness, sexual promiscuity, low productivity, and all around irresponsibility — anything at all — can be and has been blamed on "drugs." Almost any social problem is said to be made worse — often much worse — by "drugs."
Consider the case of crack cocaine and the still active U.S. "War on Drugs." In the 1980s, the Reagan and Bush administrations helped popularize the image of crack cocaine as "the most addicting drug known to man." They then used that image to explain the deteriorating conditions in America's impoverished city neighborhoods and schools, and they warned that crack addiction was rapidly spreading to the suburbs. In effect, Presidents Reagan and Bush said: "Our economic and social policies did not make those urban problems worse, addiction to crack cocaine did, and now crack is spreading to young people in the suburbs." Democrats in Congress happily joined with Republicans and voted major increases in funding for police, prisons, and military to fight the War on Drugs.
Even if crack was as bad as Republicans, Democrats, and the media said, it probably still could not have caused all the enduring problems they blamed on it. But the truth about crack cocaine is even more startling than the myths. Crack cocaine, "the most addicting drug known to man," turned out to be a drug that almost nobody liked to keep using. Many Americans tried crack, but very few people continued using it heavily for a long time. Mainly this is because most people cannot physically tolerate, much less enjoy, frequent encounters with crack's brutally brief, extreme up and down effects. Crack use in America is now so low that the U.S. government does not even include crack use in its press releases about the prevalence of drug use. Nor has crack become popular anywhere in the world. Heavy, long-term crack smoking appeals only to a small number of deeply troubled people, most of whom are also impoverished. Because frequent bingeing on the drug is so unappealing, there was never any danger of an epidemic of crack addiction spreading across America, especially not to middle-class families in the suburbs.
Nonetheless, the contradictions between the drug war's myths about crack and the reality of crack cocaine's very limited appeal have not affected the credibility and legitimacy of the War on Drugs. Most politicians have not regretted spending hundreds of billions of dollars to save America's children from addiction to crack cocaine and other drugs by running an expensive, punitive, utopian crusade to make America "drug free." In the presidential election of 2000, both George W. Bush and Al Gore promised more funding and more prisons to make America "drug free." Here in the 21st century, U.S. politicians continue to justify the enormous expenditures and imprisonment; they still insist that less criminalized and punitive drug policies will lead to a mass epidemic of drug addiction and substantially increase every social and economic problem. In this respect, drug war propaganda is like the propaganda from other wars: many otherwise reasonable people continue to believe in it even when the drug demonization and pro-drug war claims are patently false, or do not make logical sense.
Drug demonization also endures because it is useful to at least some important individuals and institutions. In a war on "drugs," as in other wars, defining the enemy necessarily involves defining and teaching about morality, ethics, and the good things to be defended. This content varies somewhat by place and time, but in the U.S. anti-drug messages, especially those aimed at children and their parents, have recognizable themes. Currently these include messages about: individual responsibility for health and economic success, respect for police, the value of providing the police with information about drugs, resisting peer-group pressure, sexual abstinence outside of marriage for health reasons, the value of God or a higher power in recovering from drug abuse, parents knowing where their children are, sports and exercise as alternatives to drug use, why sports heroes should be drug tested, low grades as evidence of behavioral problems including drug use, and parents setting good examples for their children. Almost anyone can find some value that can be defended or taught while attacking "drugs."
In the U.S., newspapers, magazines and other media have long found that supporting anti-drug campaigns is good for public relations; they have also found that anti-drug stories are good for their business -- they attract customers. The media regularly editorially endorse government anti-drug campaigns and favorably cover anti-drug efforts as a "public service." For doing so, they are praised by government officials and prominent organizations. There is no doubt that many U.S. publishers and editors have believed in the War on Drugs and in defending the criminalized, prison-centered tradition of U.S. drug policies. But only some of the causes that people in the media believe in can be shaped into compelling "read all about it" and "more details at eleven" type news stories. Only some causes can be turned into scary front page stories that are simultaneously good for public relations and very good for business.
For many decades, the top editors in the news media have clearly recognized, as an economic fact of their business, that a scary front page drug story will increase sales of magazines and newspapers — especially when it is about a potential drug epidemic threatening to destroy middle-class teenagers, families and neighborhoods. Editors know that a scary story about a new, tempting, addicting drug attracts more TV viewers and radio listeners than most other kinds of news stories, including non-scary drug stories. In short, whatever their personal values, publishers, editors and journalists give prominent space to frightening drug articles because they know the stories attract customers.
When one demon drug loses its ability to scare people, then politicians, the media, and drug enforcement agencies shift to another. At this moment (the spring and summer of 2001), they are focusing on prescription narcotics, methamphetamine, and ecstasy. Each demon drug comes with its own distinctive story about the ruin it causes including brain damage, psychological destruction, moral collapse, and sometimes death. The many anti-drug news stories and public education campaigns implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) suggest that nearly all social problems can be reduced at least somewhat by attacking "drugs." And to a remarkable extent, pro-drug war politicians in the U.S. have an easier time getting elected, and expensive anti-drug programs pass without much debate. In the U.S., during economic good times and bad, funding grows for "anti-drug" courts, police, prisons, and military operations, while schools, housing, medical care, and other social services are under-funded or cut back.
Because U.S.-style criminalized prohibition is so extreme, it allows us to see the continuing political usefulness and viability of prohibitionist policies and anti-drug campaigns for governments in third world countries, and for many governments in Western democracies (including currently for Blair, Clinton and Gore "third way" politicians). Drug prohibition has powerful sources of support because of its usefulness to politicians, to the media, and to many other important institutions and constituencies. As a result, in the coming years, "drugs" will continue to be attacked with guns, soldiers, police, courts, and prisons in the U.S. and many other countries. "Drugs" will also be attacked with words, pictures, grave commentary, editorials, and uncountable anti-drug stories and ads on TV and radio, in newspapers and magazines, and in videos, movie trailers, and glossy booklets taught to children in school. All of this will further help justify drug prohibition, and help maintain public support, especially for the more criminalized and punitive varieties of drug prohibition.
Additional political and ideological support for drug prohibition
In many countries, popular support for drug prohibition also has been rooted in the uniquely 20th-century faith in the capacity of the state to penetrate and benevolently control many aspects of daily life for the "common good." The hope of global drug prohibition, of the people who created the system, was the hope of using the powers of a nearly omnipotent state to do good and suppress evil. This romantic vision itself was very much part of a distinctly 20th century utopian hope or dream. Unlike, say, the "founding fathers" who wrote the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, and unlike many political movements in the 19th century, in the 20th century liberals, conservatives, fascists, communists, socialists, populists, right-wingers and left-wingers usually shared this romantic vision of the benevolent state. Twentieth-century political movements disagreed violently about how the state should be used. Drug prohibition was one of the few things they could all agree upon. Drug prohibition was part of what I think it is appropriate to call the 20th century's "romance with the state."
Because politicians in many countries, from one end of the political spectrum to the other, shared this positive, romantic view of the powerful, state, they could agree on drug prohibition as good non-partisan government policy. In the U.S. during the 1980s and the 1990s, Democrats feared and detested Presidents Reagan and Bush, and Republicans feared and detested President Clinton, but the parties united to fight the "War on Drugs." They even competed to enact more punitive anti-drug laws, build more prisons, hire more drug police, expand anti-drug military forces, and fund many more government sponsored anti-drug messages and "drug-free" crusades. Opposing political parties around the world have fought about many things, but until recently they have often endorsed efforts to fight "drugs."
Finally, drug prohibition has enjoyed widespread support and legitimacy because the United States has used the United Nations as the international agency to create, spread, and supervise world-wide prohibition. Other than the government of the U.S., the U.N. has done more to defend and extend drug prohibition than any other organization in the world. The U.N. currently identifies the goal of its anti-drug efforts as "a drug-free world."
The spread of drug prohibition in the 20th century
In the 20th century, drug prohibition spread from the U.S. to every country in the world. I have suggested a number of reasons this. First, drug prohibition has spread so successfully because of the enormous political influence and economic power of the United States. Second, many different kinds of governments throughout the world have supported drug prohibition because they have found that drug prohibition's covert and open police and military powers can be used for many non-drug related activities. Third, drug prohibition has also gained substantial popular support in many countries because its drug demonization crusades and anti-drug ideology have been rhetorically, politically and even financially useful to many politicians, the media, schools, the police, the military, religious institutions, and some elements of the medical profession. Fourth, the spread of drug prohibition has been aided by the 20th century's romantic or utopian ideologies about coercive state power, making the fight against "drugs" the one topic about which politicians of all stripes could usually agree. Finally, drug prohibition has gained great legitimacy throughout the world because it is seen as project of the United Nations.
All forms of drug prohibition, from the most criminalized to the most decriminalized, have probably involved at least some explicit drug demonizing. In general, drug demonization and drug prohibition reinforce each other. But it is important to recognize that drug demonization existed before global drug prohibition, and drug demonization will certainly continue long after world-wide drug prohibition has passed away.
The place of harm reduction within drug prohibition
Since the early 1980s, harm reduction workers and activists in Europe, and increasingly throughout the world, have sought to provide drug users and addicts with a range of services aimed at reducing the harmful effects of drug use. In the U.S., conservative pundits and liberal journalists have accused harm reduction advocates of being "drug legalizers" in disguise. But in most other countries, many prominent politicians, public health professionals, and police officials who are strong defenders of drug prohibition have also supported harm reduction programs as practical public health policies. Even the United Nations agencies that supervise world-wide drug prohibition have come to recognize the public health benefits of harm reduction services within current drug prohibition regimes.
A better understanding of the varieties and scope of world-wide drug prohibition helps us to better see the place of the "harm reduction movement" within the history of drug prohibition. I want to suggest that harm reduction is a movement within drug prohibition that shifts drug polices from the criminalized and punitive end to the more decriminalized and openly regulated end of the drug policy continuum. Harm reduction is the name of the movement within drug prohibition that in effect (though not always in intent) moves drug policies away from punishment, coercion, and repression, and toward tolerance, regulation and public health. Harm reduction is not inherently an enemy of drug prohibition. However, in the course of pursuing public health, harm reduction necessarily seeks to reduce the criminalized and punitive character of U.S.-style drug prohibition.
Consider the many programs identified as part of harm reduction: needle exchange and distribution, methadone maintenance, injection rooms, prescription heroin, medical use of marijuana, especially by cancer and AIDS patients, truthful drug education aimed at users, drug testing services at raves, and so on. Harm reduction programs have pursued all these to increase public health and to help users reduce the harms of drug use. In order to carry out their stated objectives, harm reduction programs have often required laws, policies, or funding that in effect quite clearly also reduce the harshness of drug prohibition. Harm reduction programs can be said to reduce the punitive character of drug prohibition without necessarily challenging drug prohibition itself.
I am suggesting that harm reduction's stance toward drug prohibition is exactly the same as its stance toward drug use. Harm reduction seeks to reduce the harmful effects of drug use without requiring users to be drug free. Harm reduction also seeks to reduce the harmful effects of drug prohibition without requiring governments to be prohibition free. Harm reduction organizations say to drug users: "we are not asking you to give up drug use; we just ask you to do some things (like use clean syringes) to reduce the harmfulness of drug use (including the spread of AIDS) to you and the people close to you." In precisely the same way, harm reduction organizations say to governments: "we are not asking you to give up drug prohibition; we just ask you to do some things (like make clean syringes and methadone available) to reduce the harmfulness of drug prohibition."
Harm reduction offers a radically tolerant and pragmatic approach to both drug use and drug prohibition. It assumes that neither are going away anytime soon and suggests therefore that reasonable and responsible people try to persuade those who use drugs, and those who use drug prohibition, to minimize the harms that their activities produce.
The critics of global drug prohibition
As noted earlier, U.S. federal drug prohibition began in 1920 as a part of U.S. federal alcohol prohibition. U.S. alcohol prohibition lasted as national policy for only fourteen years. U.S. drug prohibition quickly became far more acceptable than alcohol prohibition ever was, and it has now lasted over eighty years, growing ever bigger, more criminalized, and more powerful.
In many countries increasing numbers of knowledgeable people — physicians, lawyers, judges, journalists, scientists, public health officials, teachers, religious leaders, social workers, drug users and drug addicts — now openly criticize the more extreme, punitive, and criminalized forms of drug prohibition. Harm reduction is a major part of that critical tradition. Indeed, harm reduction is the first popular, international movement to openly challenge drug demonization and the more criminalized forms of drug prohibition. As even the defenders of criminalized drug prohibition recognize, the drug policy reformers have changed the debate. For example, in the summer of 2001, the mainstream Canadian newspaper, the Toronto Globe (August 20 & 21), wrote a two part editorial strongly endorsing decriminalization, and the British business magazine The Economist (July 26) devoted an entire issue to drug policy, endorsing decriminalization and harm reduction. However, all of this is fairly recent.
For much of its history, national and global drug prohibition has had very few critics. Even today, despite the impressive growth of the harm reduction movement, and of drug policy reform activities in many countries, the regime of world-wide drug prohibition still has very few explicit opponents.
One reason for the lack of organized opposition to global drug prohibition is that very few people actually know that it exists. In effect, global drug prohibition has operated for many years as a kind of official secret. Its existence was on a "need to know basis," and most people, it seems, did not need to know. This is why for most of its history drug prohibition has rarely been called "drug prohibition." This non-use of the phrase "drug prohibition" has occurred even though (and perhaps because) "alcohol prohibition" was always called "prohibition," especially by the people in favor of it. Sometimes, perhaps often, this prohibition on the use of the phrase "drug prohibition" has been explicitly enforced by prominent publications and government agencies who tell contributors and grant recipients that they may not use the term "drug prohibition."
Since almost nobody yet knows that global drug prohibition exists, of course almost nobody yet opposes it. Furthermore, even fewer people currently understand that by ending or even modifying the Single Convention of 1961, the question of national drug policy could be returned to individual countries, and then to local governments, to do with as they wished. Defenders of global drug prohibition like to evoke an international conspiracy of what they call "drug legalizers." But nobody thus far has tried to launch even a half-baked international campaign with slogans like "Repeal the Single Convention" or "End Global Drug Prohibition."
Yet it may well be that the Single Convention stands in much the same relationship to world-wide drug prohibition that the 18th Amendment to the Constitution and the Volstead Act stood in relation to U.S alcohol prohibition. Repeal of prohibition did not "legalize" the sale of alcoholic beverages — it turned the question back to the states. Once the 18th Amendment was gone, state and local governments were free to create their own alcohol policy at the local level. Similarly, once the Single Convention is gone, or even modified, national governments around the world will be free (or freer) to create drug laws and policies geared to their own conditions — including prohibition if they should so desire.
This is precisely what happened in the United States when the 18th Amendment was repealed in December of 1933. Within a year, most states had adopted one form or another of legalized and controlled sale of beer, wine and distilled liquor, but Mississippi and Kansas kept state-wide prohibition. Further, from 1934 on, in all states with an alcohol control system regulating legal sale, county and local governments also enacted their own forms of restrictions on the sale of alcohol. Today, as in the 1930s, these local policies range from local prohibition of any sale at all, to no bars or "on-premises' consumption and sale only at "package stores," to wine and beer for on-premises consumption but hard liquor only at liquor stores. These taken-for-granted patterns continue to this day and as a result some large amount of the land area of the U.S. continues under one form of local alcohol prohibition or another. It seems likely that this kind of local variation is what will eventually happen with drug policy in most parts of the world.
In recent years, critics of criminalized drug policies in a number of countries have been discovering, much to their surprise, what I have been saying here. They have been learning that drug prohibition is a global system, a global regime; it is a Durkheimian social fact — and no nation in the world currently has the effective power to withdraw from it. Many people already understand that world-wide drug prohibition is not monolithic; increasingly they can see that it is a continuum extending from heavily criminalized drug war approaches to decriminalized and regulated forms of prohibition — with considerably autonomy at the local level. As a result, many nations (and many more regional or local governments) are independently reforming their drug prohibition laws and making them less criminalized.
However, because of the international treaties, especially the Single Convention, and because of the economic and political sanctions that bind nations to the treaties, no country in the world could formally end its national prohibition regime without facing massive, economic and political retribution. No country in the world — including the Netherlands or Switzerland — can at present, without changing the Single Convention, truly "legalize" the sale of any drug including marijuana. As many national and local governments throughout the world have shown, drug prohibition can be substantially reformed and modified at the local and national level. But as more and more people are coming to understand, at present no single country can "defect" from the world-wide prohibitionist regime.
In recent years, drug warriors around the world have also been discovering, much to their surprise, that they too are facing their own intractable Durkheimian social facts. Most alarming to them, they find that they cannot make the hundreds of millions of cannabis users in the world stop using the drug. They are also discovering that they cannot make the critics of criminalized prohibition go away either. In the reports of the U.N.'s International Narcotics Control Board, and in other publications, the most knowledgeable defenders of drug prohibition warn every year of the increasing growth of marijuana cultivation and use on every continent, and of the increasing legitimacy given to the critics of drug prohibition. These defenders of global drug prohibition recognize that the advocates of decriminalized drug prohibition — and the political, economic and cultural forces driving that opposition — are growing stronger all the time.
The future of global drug prohibition
Drug prohibition is in crisis. The fact that it is at long last becoming visible is one symptom of that crisis. In the long run, the more criminalized and punitive forms of drug prohibition are almost certainly doomed. In the short run, the ever-growing drug law and policy reform movements make it likely that criminalized drug prohibition will find itself confronted with new opponents. (This is already happening in Switzerland, Australia, Germany, Portugal, Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, the U.S., and other counties.)
In the 20th century, for specific practical and ideological reasons, the nations of the world constructed a global system of drug prohibition. In the 21st century, because of the spread of democracy and trade, and for other practical and ideological reasons, the peoples of the world will likely dismantle and end world-wide drug prohibition.
It is important to understand that this process of dismantling global drug prohibition will not end local drug prohibition. The end of global drug prohibition will not (and cannot) be the end of all national drug prohibition. Advocating the end of world-wide drug prohibition is not the same as advocating world-wide drug "legalization." Long after the demise of the U.N.'s "Single Convention," many small communities, larger regions, and some entire nations will choose, sometimes by large popular majorities, to retain forms of drug prohibition. Many places in the world will also continue to support vigorous anti-drug crusades.
However, as accurate knowledge about drug effects and drug policies becomes more widespread, most people in most countries of the world will likely choose not to retain full-scale criminalized drug prohibition. Most places will eventually develop their own varied local forms of regulated personal cultivation and use of the once prohibited plants and substances. Many places will also eventually allow some forms of commercial growing, production, and sale — first of all and above all of cannabis, which is by far the most widely grown, traded, sold, and used illegal drug in the world.
All of this will take time. Prohibitionists and drug warriors in every country will fight tenaciously to maintain their local regimes. And enormous power will be employed to prevent the Single Convention of 1961 and its related treaties from being repealed, or even modified. As a result, in coming years, all around the world, there will be even greater public discussion and debate about drug prohibition, about criminalized drug policies, and about the world-wide movement within drug prohibition to decriminalize the possession and use of cannabis, cocaine, heroin and other substances.
As part of that process of conversation and debate, many more people will discover — often with considerable astonishment — that they have lived for decades within a regime of world-wide drug prohibition. That growing understanding will itself push world-wide drug prohibition closer to its end. Here in the 21st century, it may turn out that the most powerful force holding global drug prohibition in place is the secret of its existence.
Notes
This is a revised version of a talk first presented at the International Harm Reduction Association meetings in Paris in 1997. In the spring of 2001 it was rewritten for the Greek newspaper Eleftherotypia (which my friend Professor Yannis Gabriel says is "a serious newspaper of fairly wide circulation that is read by a wide range of Greek people, including intellectuals"). Needless to say, because of its length and topic, no prominent U.S. newspaper would yet publish this. It was revised again for the workshop on "Exploring Global Prohibition Regimes. The Case Of Dangerous Drugs" held in Oñati, Spain, June 2001.
I want to thank Drs. Ernest Drucker and Patrick O'Hare for first encouraging me to write this paper. I want to thank Professor Peter Cohen for teaching me again and again since 1989 how Dutch, American and world-wide drug prohibition has worked. I want to thank Professor Lynn Zimmer for coming up with the phrase "world-wide drug prohibition" and much else. I want to thank Professor Ethan Nadelmann, who, back in 1988, was the first person that I ever met who talked all the time about drug prohibition, and who himself coined the name "global drug prohibition." See: Ethan A. Nadelmann, "Global Prohibition Regimes: The Evolution of Norms in International Society," International Organization 44 (4), 1990. Finally, I want to thank Professor Craig Reinarman. Most of the ideas presented here were taken directly from him, developed together with him, or born in continuous conversation with him. Some of the sentences in this article come directly from our book. See: Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine, Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1997. Chapters 1, 15, 16, 17, and the epilogue.
I want to dedicate this paper to the memory of Kettel Bruun, and to Nils Christie. Years ago, in the very pro-drug war climate of Sweden, Norway and Finland, these two social scientists and citizens of the world courageously published a book about drug policy that they titled "The Suitable Enemy" or "The Good Enemy." They called for a fundamental reconsideration of the Scandinavian and Nordic approach to drugs. Their book was never published in English, and so I have never read it. But I met both Kettel and Nils, I have read other works of theirs, and like many people I have been inspired by both of them in more ways that I can say. To Kettel's spirit, which lives on within many people, and to Nils, who continues to say what is right and true, I give thanks for showing the way.
The best study by far of global drug prohibition in the 20th century is: David Bewley-Taylor, The United States and International Drug Control, 1907-1997, London and New York: Wellington House, 1999. Professor Bewley-Taylor correctly focuses on the League of Nations and especially the United Nations as the chief instruments developed by the United States and some allies for the construction and defense of international drug prohibition. He also identifies the Single Convention of 1961 as the central international treaty holding in place the current system of world-wide drug prohibition. David Bewley-Taylor's brilliant book is now the first essential source for understanding what, following Ethan A. Nadelmann, he rightly terms the "global drug prohibition regime."
Professor Peter Andreas, from Harvard University's Center for International Affairs, has summarized well why currently no country in the world can withdraw from global drug prohibition. Andreas writes:
Open defection from the drug prohibition regime would ... have severe consequences: it would place the defecting country in the category of a pariah "narcostate," generate material repercussions in the form of economic sanctions and aid cutoffs, and damage the country's moral standing in the international community.
Even if their control efforts have a limited impact on the drug trade, leaders across the globe repeatedly pledge their commitment to the battle against drugs. Regardless of whether they are "true believers" or simply trying to pacify international critics, for drug-exporting countries to openly defect by officially advocating drug legalization would be unthinkable, not only because it would draw the wrath off the United States but also because their advocation would be universally condemned and would openly violate their pledge to uphold UN-based anti-drug treaties.
This is from his chapter "When Policies Collide: Market Reform, Market Prohibition, and the Narcotization of the Mexican Economy." It appears in: H. Richard Friman and Peter Andreas, The Global Economy and State Power, New York: Roman & Littlefield, 1999, pp. 127-128.
The agency within the United Nations that imagined world-wide drug prohibition and the Single Convention — meaning one single drug prohibition law for the whole world — and then put it into effect, is the International Narcotics Control Board, the INCB. Recently the INCB has put many of their historic documents on the world-wide web. Now anyone with access to the internet can learn about the making of the Single Convention of 1961 and the growth and spread of global drug prohibition from the people who created it, and who to this day celebrate its successes and warn about its weaknesses. You can find most of the INCB's "Bulletins on Narcotics" from the first issue in 1949 to 1999 at http://www.undcp.org/bulletin_on_narcotics.html. Many other UN drug control publications can be found at: http://www.undcp.org/publications.html.
Harry G. Levine is Professor of Sociology at Queens College, City University of New York., and the author of many publications on alcohol and drug topics. His recent book, Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice, is published by the University of California Press. He can be reached by email at HGLevine@compuserve.com or at the Department of Sociology, Queens College, Flushing, New York, 11367 USA