Face the Facts -- and End the War on Drugs

Johann Hari
HuffPost

The proponents of the ‘war on drugs’ are well-intentioned people who believe they are saving people from the nightmare of drug addiction and making the world safer. But this self-image has turned into a faith – and like all faiths, it can only be maintained by cultivating a deliberate blindness to the evidence. The recent furor about the British government’s decision to fire its chief scientific advisor on drugs, Professor David Nutt, missed the point. Yes, it is shocking that he was ditched for pointing out the mathematical truth that taking ecstasy is less dangerous than horse-riding and smoking cannabis is less harmful than drinking alcohol. But this is how the war on drugs has to be fought. The unofficial slogan of the prohibitionists for decades has been: The facts will only undermine the war, so invent some that show how successful we are, fast.

Look at the United States, the country that pioneered the drug war, and still uses its military and diplomatic might to demand the rest of the world cracks down. In 1998, the Office of National Drug Policy (ONDP) was ordered by Congress to stop funding any scientific research that might give the impression that we should redirect funding from anti-trafficking busts into medical treatment of addicts, or that there is any argument to legalize, regulate or medicalize drug use. It’s Nutt cubed: only tell us what we want to hear. So, to give a small example, the ONDP spent $14 billion on anti-cannabis ads aimed at teenagers, and $43 million to find out if the ads worked. They discovered that kids who saw the ads were more likely afterwards to get stoned, so the evidence was suppressed, and the ad campaign marched on.

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