Unleash the dogs of criminalisation.

The history of criminalisation is one of casting first stones, scapegoating and of tribes seeking safety in convention. It is an entirely understandable and necessary social reflex, but possibly the most abused of all. Much of criminalisation is indefensible by almost any moral standard; from the spuriously sadistic retributions threatened by the great religions, via heresy to witch burning, to castration of young inmates of church-run boarding schools (recently revealed to have taken place in the Netherlands in the '50s). And then there is the one recent example of potential decriminalisation that beats them all: the Moroccan law that allows a rapist to marry his victim in order to save her honour (sic). Yet, my friends from LEAP, who have spent much of their lives at the sharp end of criminalisation, have explained to me just how little time the average law enforcement officer gets to spend on dealing with "proper" crime, like murder, rape and arson, and how much time goes into controlling kids with "substances" in their pockets, never mind harassing respectable housewives with substances. Which must be one of the reasons why the US has the largest prison population in the world: a quarter of the world's prisoners for 5% of the world's population - more than China - and a rate seven times higher than Europe.

But we Europeans like to learn from our American friends: the recent violent life and death of Mohammed Merah, in France, has prompted President (and candidate) Sarkozy to promise criminalisation of such things as visiting Jihad web sites, going to areas like eastern Afghanistan for no good reason , etc. Law enforcement officers and judges take note: when that woman from Médecins sans Frontières with the North African features (because her Algerian grandfather fought in the French army) checks into Charles de Gaulle  off a flight from Kabul, pull her out of the queue.  OK, it's election time, but we already have crazy laws, like the one making it an offence to deny the holocaust. Not that I believe denial of historical facts should be encouraged, but the holocaust is one of history's most documented and undisputed facts, and those who do deny it are usually so implausible (or mad) that they strengthen the holocaust case every time they open their mouths. I also get this queasy feelings sometimes about the 900,000 or so Germans who died in the allied bombing of their cities in WW II, most of them civilians, their memory unprotected by laws criminalising denial or even trivialisation of what happened to them.

The act of criminalisation always raises the issue of what is permissible in lawmaking when judging those who are not like yourself. "Otherness" (l'altérité" in french) is a familiar concept in sociology and anthropology. It is the mainspring of tribal and racial conflict which can lead to the sort of massacres I have mentioned. It was probably the greatest single factor in anti-semitism throughout the ages (that and owing money to Jews). It is one of the toxic by-products of immigration, not because immigrants are bad, but because today many (European) host countries  park their immigrant communities in no-hope housing with no-hope education, keeping them quiet with welfare but making it extremely difficult for them to belong, even if they do get through the social barriers. This doesn't justify shooting Jewish school kids or former soldiers, nor for that matter, cutting Theo van Gogh's throat or planting bombs on the London tube, but it should warn us that this may have to be dealt with in other ways than criminalisation. Killing people is already a crime.

THE INCB's CLOTHES

The International Narcotics Control Board has now repeatedly attacked Bolivia since it denounced the 1961 Convention, indicating its intention to re-accede with a reservation allowing for the traditional use of coca leaf. Bolivia has been acting within the normal procedures of international law and its own constitution on this matter. The squeals of protest it has met with from its European, American, and other "friends" have contained little in the way of argument other than INCB's recent contention that "the integrity of the international drug control system would be undermined".

It is interesting to see a body like the INCB overstepping the mark of its own powers under the UN treaties by playing God, with little regard for the inviolability of the national laws and cultures that are the bedrock of the UN system. “The INCB response is another clear sign that the UN drug control regime is under strain and that the cracks in the so-called ‘Vienna consensus’ are approaching a breaking point,” according to TNI’s Martin Jelsma. “It is a sign that its principal guardian, the INCB, is in distress and no longer capable of responding to challenges in a rational manner.”


Why this persistent refusal on the part of the multilateral system of drugs control to enter into a meaningful dialogue on reform of the Conventions? A South American diplomat recently put in the following terms: back in the 16th century, when the Catholic church was no longer capable of reform, it spawned the Reformation and lost its monopoly over Christianity. Without dramatising current events, the multilateral drug control system is showing its age and revealing the sclerosis of the institutions created to implement it. The tabloid tone of the INCB's latest report is a sign of this.

Last December, Presidents and other political leaders of ten Latin American countries from the so called Tuxtla Mechanism for Dialogue effectively called on the rich drug consumer markets, primarily the US and Europe, to begin with experimenting regulation models for what we still call illicit drugs. US and European media largely ignored this declaration. These countries made this call because they are being destroyed by organised crime. The UN Drug Conventions have not created this crime, but they have created a global framework in which it prospers almost by default. The struggle against such crime is turning into a slaughter house for ordinary people, particularly in Central America, with no end in sight.

If the church will not reform then let us put our faith in a reformation and support the Tuxtla appeal. As a European, I hope that Europe will not yet again be trumped by the Americans in getting us out of a hole. It may not look likely at the moment, but 16 US states have enacted laws that allow for the sale of "medical marijuana, and at least there is a lively debate going on there, whereas EU leaders are firmly looking the other way and the Brussels administration has quite lost its way. Sooner or later though, our governments will have to grasp the nettle of organising this regulated market. If there is one lesson to be learned from the tobacco and alcohol models it is that it should not be left to purely commercial interests.

Watch this space.

Wasting the citizen's time

In English law there is a criminal offence known as "wasting police time". I wonder if this applies in other countries. It covers things like knowingly making a false report that creates apprehension for the safety of any person or property. A good thing then that the INCB and the UNODC are based in Vienna and not in  London. Except of course that the UK is one of the 144 or so signatories to the single convention. So that's all right then. The police can waste citizens' time. It is quite common in London for a young person to get stopped for a routine drug search. It happens regularly to the student son of a friend of mine, who is a member of the House of Lords. We can all feel safe knowing that young aristocrats are being kept on a short leash these days.

"Towards a stronger European response to drugs" - third and last post.

The original EU text can be found at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2011:0689:FIN:EN:PDF

In the previous two posts I have tried to demonstrate that this policy announcement by the EU Commission has more to do with political testosterone than with a sensible assessment of the past. This is certainly true for the tired old penal and prohibitionist ideas that dominate this paper. The merit of Commissioner Reding's predecessors responsible for drug policy was that they at least understood the need to submit law enforcement to some form of assessment. At the moment, we don't know how successful the world's police forces and judiciaries are in fighting drug crime. If this is what "success" looks like, heaven preserve us from failure. The development by the Commission of "key indicators" to measure drugs markets and drug supply reduction (para 2) is a welcome initiative; it was however started before Mrs Reding was appointed and has consistently met with a very unenthusiastic response from law enforcement and judiciary circles in the EU, so we are still years away from an assessment as to whether our money is being wasted or not by running after drug criminals who are usually a few steps ahead of the law and doing very well. And if one day we have these key indicators worked out and adopted across the EU, imagine the task of getting precise data on national law enforcement performance out of the 27 Home Affairs ministries across the EU.

Although we should welcome anything in this Communication that at least tries to hold up the balanced approach that used to be the Commission's hallmark on drug policy, no specific policy measures are announced beyond supporting measures to reduce health and social harms. The demand reduction part of the Communication (para 6) reflects ongoing health initiatives on HIV/AIDS and various existing funding programmes. It fails to mention that the Commission's current Drug Prevention and Information (funding)  Programme is destined to become a pure "justice" programme in 2013 and will loose its demand reduction and wider policy aspects. Mrs Reding is on record as saying that health aspects are not a Commission competence under the EU Treaty and that she leaves that up to Member States. So much for the balanced approach.

The initiative on "drugged driving" has been in the making for some years. It is a promising initiative.... in the field of road safety, not drug policy.

Para 8 - on International Cooperation - is again the usual line-up of supply reduction-related measures. There is a passage on the "comprehensive" nature of external EU policy, and on the (major) effort by the Commission in terms of providing alternative livelihoods in production and transit countries. This is of course the work of the Commission's EU External Action Service now and the Commission's Directorate General for Development. The former is in disarray and has just had a written warning from 14 EU Foreign Ministers to pull its socks up; the latter has no mandate on drugs policy but will implement policy directives on this from Brussels.

Conclusion

Evaluations made at the request of the Commission in recent years (particularly the so called Reuter/Trautmann report:  http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/doc_centre/drugs/studies/doc_drugs_studies_en.htm, a joint publication by Rand and the Trimbos Institute) clearly suggest that the punitive, law enforcement driven approach of the world's current multilateral control system has not led to a reduction in use or trafficking, and that demand rarely responds to arrests and punishment. What we do know is that harm reduction and treatment strategies reduce crime and other social problems and reduce public health problems too.

This Commission announcement seems to ignore the lessons of the past 15 years, lessons which are not crackpot ideas from extreme pro-drugs groups, but evidence-based conclusions from its own services, from most Member States, and from serious bodies financed by the European Commission itself, such as the EU's  drugs monitoring agency, the EMCDDA.

It also comes at a rather odd moment: i.e. before the Commission's own services have completed their evaluation of the EU Drugs Srategy 2004-2012, and before the Commission's Civil Society Forum on Drugs has had the time to table its recommendations for the next Drugs Strategy.

Europe has had a bad year on the world stage. It's credibility is at a low ebb while that same world is loosing the battle against illicit drugs because the system the Western countries put into place 50 years ago in the form of UN Conventions and institutions have failed. Today, they are little more than a dysfunctional, scandal-ridden irrelevance, but capable of supporting extreme levels of violence against populations in the weaker countries. Presidents from a number of Latin American states, including Mexico and Colombia, have recently signed the Tuxtla Declaration, calling on  drug consuming countries to explore "all possible options, including market alternatives", i.e. forms of legalisation or regulation. The recently retired Secretary-General of the Council of Ministers and EU High Representative for the EU's external and security policy, Xavier Solana, is a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which is calling for the same thing. The global drugs problem has reached a stage where serious and difficult policy changes are being debated. Not, it would seem, in the European Commission.

The Commission's policy statement is an embarrassment to intelligent European policy makers and people working in this field. It is also a comfort to the enemy, i.e. the criminals who makes a profit out of the huge illegal market the system provides them with. It is however also a comfort to those individuals, organisations, and countries - from dodgy bible-thumping preachers to the Kingdom of Sweden - who want to stick with the current  prohibitionist system if it kills them. The problem is, it just might, but do we want to go down with them?

Good luck

“Towards a stronger European approach to drugs Part II” – More on the EU Commission’s Communication on drug policy.

As we saw in the last post, this Communication ( http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2011:0689:FIN:EN:PDF ) quickly homes in on supply reduction and control issues. In fact, they make up the bulk of the text in a way that I had hoped we would not see in Europe again, not after more than a decade of groping our way towards an evidence-based understanding of the futility of non-smart law-enforcement approaches, and the growing – if politically incorrect – doubt about the effectiveness of a punitive control system in the first place. 

Parts two to five: drug trafficking, drug (chemical) precursors, confiscation and recovery of criminal assets, and new psychoactive substances.

The measures proposed by the Commission under these four headings all suffer from the same flaw: they admit that the illicit drugs trade has been too clever and adaptable for EU justice and law enforcement agencies to have any real effect on the flow of drugs into Europe. Some singularly ineffectual “pacts” against drug trafficking – little known beyond surreal debates in Brussels – are quoted. The fact that existing EU rules on the definition of sanctions have been largely ignored by the member states is correctly identified. Yet no conclusions are drawn from any of this other than that tougher rules in the same vein are needed.

There is no sign that the poor record of control and interdiction of drug trafficking into the EU (or into any other region for that matter) has been subjected to any objective analysis, as was called for by the Commission’s own mid-term evaluation of the current EU Drug Strategy in 2008. The good news is that the Commission, with Europol and the EMCDDA, will provide key indicators for the monitoring of drug markets, drug-related crime, and drug supply reduction. We also know that a Commission evaluation of EU drug markets, carried out by Rand/Trimbos/King’s College is still in the making. The bad news remains that it would surely have been more logical to have waited for the results of these initiatives and to have analysed first the actual performance of European law enforcement and justice systems in the drugs field before rushing into this macho legislative programme.

What we see here, then, is conviction politics of the worst order. I strongly object to naming names in these discussions, but Mrs. Reding, the member of the EU Commission responsible for (civil and criminal) justice, is not a civil servant but fills a political appointment and – like all Commission members – has her own web site. Let me quote then what she said before the House of Lords Select Committee on the European Union, last November: “I am more an action person than a strategy person. If necessary, I can also propose a strategy, but that will not prevent me from taking action, because actions are what is needed”.  Are we to understand that she will not be hampered by analysis but will run up a strategy for us if we really insist?

At one point she gets surprisingly close to evidence-based policy, when she refers to the Rand/Trimbos report on global drug markets, saying that it identified “…a lack of evidence that controls can reduce total global production. The same applies to trafficking”. She doesn’t follow this up however, nor does it seem at all incompatible to her with the course the Commission, under her leadership, is now following.

When asked what she thinks about the report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy or the debate on reviewing the conventions she literally refuses to answer the question and says so. (The transcript can be found on http://www.parliament.uk/documents/lords-committees/eu-sub-com-f/EU%20DS/ucEUF28.11.11ev7.pdf )

The stricter control of trade in chemical precursors (also) used for making drugs, and the proposals for more effective criminal asset recovery should be given a chance to show what they’re worth. Crime has to be fought and the encroachment of the black economy on the "white" economy is a serious issue. In the next post we will look at the remaining parts of this Communication (demand reduction, drugged driving, and international cooperation), and we will try to draw some conclusions as to where all this leaves the European debate on drug policy.

Good luck

"Towards a stronger European response to drugs” - Reflections on the latest European Commission Communication to the European Parliament and the Council “

The title doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, and I advise all non-specialists in drug policy to wait for the movie. For the brave however, this is important in the wider context of developing civilised and effective drug policy, and if you want to check this out, the text I’m commenting can be found by Googling Com (2011)689 final or by clicking on:

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2011:0689:FIN:EN:PDF 

First of all, it should be understood that a Commission Communication is a statement of intent as to the sort of action or legislative proposals the EU Commission will put forward in the near-ish future. It has no legal value and does not have to be approved by the Council or European Parliament. It does however give an idea as to the political thinking that goes on inside the Commission on a particular subject. Wise Commissioners also use it as a sounding board to test the temperature in the other Institutions and in the Member States.

So what does the latest Communication on drugs tell us, beyond the rather bullish rhetoric that is now apparently in vogue in Brussels?

1. The youth and health arguments.

Part 1 gives an almost tabloid picture of alarm: “Illicit drugs are a major threat to health and safety…”, “Europe’s drug problem is evolving rapidly”. Drugs, it says, particularly affect young people and are “one of the most important causes of avoidable deaths among young people”. The trouble is  that this is not borne out by other EU sources.

Thus, the greatest killers in our society are heart disease and accidents. If heart disease tends to spare the young, road accidents do not. The ETSC (European Transport Safety Council), in its press release of 29 November 2011, states that the proportion of people dying on the roads aged between 15 and 30 is 69 percent higher than the corresponding figure for people of all other age groups. In 2010 alone, around 10.000 young people died in road accidents in the EU.

Eurostat, in its “Causes of deaths statistics (September 2011)” gives bar graphs of 17 of the most significant causes of mortality across the EU per 100.000 inhabitants - from heart disease to drug dependence. Drug dependence is by far the least significant cause of death.

This is not to say that drug use and health concerns are not closely linked, and there is plenty of evidence that all drugs – licit and illicit - are bad for your health and that they affect adolescents in particular in specific ways, but youth mortality is a spurious motive for calling for a “stronger European response”. It is also questionable from an evidence base point of view. The same is true for the remark made in Part 5 of the Communication (which deals with new psychoactive substances) that “5 percent of young people interviewed (for a Eurobarometer poll) have used such substances”. Can we really take the result of a telephone straw poll as a reliable indication of drug use? If so, why bother to have a European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA)?

Back in Part 1 of the Communication it is already clear that the new policy line is about “justice” (understood in terms of the application of the law rather than what might be right or wrong). Trafficking and organised crime is what this document is really about. This is actually not unreasonable, coming from a Directorate-General for Justice, but whatever happened to the “comprehensive and balanced approach” which the Commission spent years developing, together with the Member States? To be fair, demand and health-related aspects are mentioned in this Communication, if you read past four other chapters on supply reduction, but  there is little doubt that Mrs. Reding’s heart is not in the soft stuff and that she has no ambition (nor would Mr Barroso let her) to coordinate the agenda for and the thinking on an overall European Drug policy which would avoid the “unintended consequences” that are so stretching the credibility of public authorities across the world.

Let's drill down further in the next post, in which we’ll cover the trafficking and organised crime aspects and try to give some modest and constructive pointers on how to avoid the anticlimax of continued failure in EU cooperation in those areas.

Good luck, and a happy new year.

Passengers on the Titanic to be charged for deck chairs.

European leaders took a decision this morning that effectively puts an end to the European dream. Not that the EU will cease to exist, on the contrary; after decades of inching towards greater sovereignty sharing through a slow but democratic process, most Member States will now sign up to an intergovernmental Treaty outside the EU legal framework which at a stroke places national budgetary competence in the hands of people outside national governments and parliaments. It may be the realisation of a federalist dream, but this was never the outcome sought by any civilised, democratic European federalist. It's the sort of thing King George's American subjects went to war over with England.

The result will be that when governments break the draconian new budget rules on deficits - and there are many reasons for doing so from time to time other than profligacy - they will have their noses rubbed into it by having to pay fines to Brussels. It has been tried before. It was called the Stability Pact. It was invoked twice, against France and Germany, who simply dismissed it. The EU Commission didn't have the guts to call them to account, which it had the powers to do.

I have been a European official for thirty years, I am an alumnus of the College of Europe, I believe a united Europe is the only way forward  in order for our continent and way of life to survive, and I say that this decision is madness. In years to come, every cut in public services, every tax rise, will be blamed on "Europe". A generation will grow up that will learn to loathe that word and dispise the Brussels system, which is in fact a semi-government with one of the best administrations in the world, but led by one of the worst sets of mediocre politicians we have seen since the 1930s and who are clearly in over their heads. The politics of the liberal capitalist counting house await the peoples of Europe.

In reality, the Greek problem has nothing to do with it, but it is has now become the justification to yank the entire European polity to the right. What was a European-minded Germany is creating a German Europe. France without the UK is too weak to stand up to this and has chosen the winning side for now. The irony is that what is making this possible is the pressure of the markets. The same markets that Germany considers itself to be immune to. Atavistic German phobia about inflation is stronger than economic analysis.

The Germans are spectacularly missing the point: this is a banking crisis, not a fiscal or budget crisis. Moderate inflation - something we have lived with on and off for decades - is essential for stimulating growth at the moment. A more active role on the part of the European Central Bank can mean the difference between private bankruptcy or survival for millions of Europeans in the years to come. This new German Europe will turn people not just against the whole idea of Europe but will awaken ancestral fears. Germany may now have postponed its return into the mainstream of popular European belief that she is a safe neighbour  for another couple of generations. It may also have set off yet another resurgence of nationalistic feelings in this part of the world.