Breaking ranks

Other countries, too, are breaking ranks on prohibition, leading some to claim that the entire edifice is crumbling. At the very least, New Zealand’s radical experiment could provide some answers to the long-running and bitter arguments about whether banning drugs prevents or causes terrible harm. If prohibition’s aim is to prevent people from taking drugs, it isn’t very successful. In 2011, an estimated 300 million people worldwide took illegal drugs, up 18 per cent on 2008. Even the world’s top drug enforcers struggle to put a positive spin on this number. “We have to admit that, globally, the demand for drugs has not been substantially reduced,” wrote Yury Fedotov, executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, in last year’s World Drug Report. Other figures are equally damning. According to some estimates, the US has spent $1 trillion on domestic drug law enforcement over the past 40 years, only to see a rise in drug use. Since 2006, 50,000 people have died in Mexico’s drug wars. To some, these failures simply demonstrate that prohibition hasn’t been pursued vigorously enough. Others, though, say that the entire philosophy is flawed. Like it or not, the demand for drugs cannot be stamped out, and there will always be people willing to supply. Where drugs are illegal, the suppliers will be criminals and the quality of their wares highly suspect. It is surely better, say the reformers, to set up a system that separates drugs from criminality and allows controlled access to compounds that are known to be relatively harmless. New Zealand’s radical new law will be the closest thing yet to a test of that claim. That’s not to say the country is deliberately setting up an experiment to answer the question. Its motive is largely pragmatic. Possibly because it is so far from major  drug trafficking routes, New Zealand  has a long-standing  problem with new psychoactive substances – commonly  called “designer drugs” or “legal highs”. One of the first to take off there was BZP (benzylpiperazine) in the late 1990s. Marketed as a safe and legal alternative to amphetamines, by 2008 over 5 per cent of adults reported taking it in the past year – more than twice as many as had used amphetamines. The New Zealand government initially turned a blind eye, but banned BZP in 2008 after reports of serious side effects. Other legal highs, however, quickly filled the gap, including mephedrone. It, too, was eventually banned – only to be replaced by a plethora of other still-legal drugs. That sequence is now routine: a new drug appears; it is sold legally until the authorities spot it and ban it; then another drug takes its place and the cycle starts over again. The game of cat-and-mouse is spiralling out of control. In 2009, European authorities reported 24 new synthetic drugs. In 2010 there were 41; in 2012, 73 (see graph, page 45). Similar figures are reported from around the world. These drugs cater to all sorts of tastes. Many are synthetic versions of cannabis. Others are amphetamine-like stimulants, ecstasy substitutes or hallucinogens. Some are herbal, others synthetic. A few are experimental pharmaceuticals that never made the grade. Some jurisdictions, including the UK, have tried to break the cycle by introducing “emergency scheduling”, which means  that  new drugs can be temporarily banned without recourse to the normal parliamentary rigmarole. Others, including Australia, have banned all “analogues” – any chemical that is structurally similar to an existing illegal drug. New Zealand tried both those approaches with little success, says James Dunne, a druglaw reform expert at New Zealand law firm Chen Palmer who has worked for legal high manufacturers. Emergency scheduling just accelerates  the cat-and-mouse game, he says. The result  is the sale of drugs that have barely been tested. “It sends the wrong incentives to manufacturers – develop something that’s hard to identify and sell as much of it as you can as fast as you can,” he says. Analogue laws, meanwhile, are “an invitation to chemists”, says Dunne. “When