💾 Archived View for gemini.spam.works › mirrors › textfiles › politics › SPUNK › sp000419.txt captured on 2022-03-01 at 16:22:16.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
WORKERS SOLIDARITY
Paper of the Irish anarchist group,
Workers Solidarity Movement
No 43 Autumn 1994 (electronic addition)
Part 3 (Drugs) 16k
In this section
Legalise it
The heroin menace
***************************
LEGALISE IT!
THE LEGALISATION OF CANNABIS is now being
debated openly by sections of the European
ruling class. In localised areas like
Amsterdam they have been conducting a 20
year experiment into the effects of
legalisation. In Switzerland they are
experimenting with the de-criminalisation of
small quantities of heroin. According to
the British Guardian one well-known
brewery, Carlsberg-Tetley, has been
investigating the hash cafes of Amsterdam
with a view to running similar
establishments in Britain. In Italy a
referendum in March of 1993 ended the
obligatory penal sentence for cannabis
possession and in Germany earlier this year
the Supreme Court suggested personal
possession of drugs should not be
prosecuted.
Even senior police are getting
in on the act, Raymond Kendall (head of
Interpol) and Commander John Grieve of
Scotland Yard have both recently suggested
it's time to legalise at least some drugs.
Best of all perhaps was Keith Hellawell's
(Chief Constable of West Yorkshire)
appearance on Panorama when he said "people
are not being honest about the positive side
of drugs, that drugs do give people a good
feeling. A 'buzz' they call it"
By contrast in the US the administration has
created a 'War on Drugs' that echos the
Prohibition (alcohol ban) of the 1920's.
Instead of moonshine and speakeasy's this
time it's cocaine and crack houses. The
jails have been filled with 'drug
offenders' and repressive laws introduced
Some US states give longer mandatory
sentences for the possession of marijuana
than for rape or even murder. Forfeiture
laws allow the confiscation of property
that is in any way related to drugs and last
year more property was seized by this
method than was stolen in burglary in the
whole of the US. Recently a law was being
introduced that would mean possession of
huge quantities of marijuana (60,000 Kg)
would carry the death penalty!
In the US, the War on Drugs (WoD) plays a
considerable number of other functions. It
is used as a pretext for invasions and
interference in other countries, most
notably the invasion of Panama. It is used
to explain away inner city poverty,
unemployment and homelessness as being the
fault of those effected.
It's a mechanism for official racism, such
laws are enforced disproportionately
against Blacks. Drugs with a higher ratio
of Black users receive mandatory sentences
for far smaller amounts. The Crack/Cocaine
ratio, for instance, is 1:100. It has seen
the introduction of some of the most
draconian police powers and many deaths due
to police raids, sometimes of 'innocent'
people in cases of mistaken identity.
FUN & PLAY
Drugs are a leisure activity, nothing more
and nothing less. Some people like
football, some drinking, some smoking hash
and many a combination. If a newspaper ran
an article discussing whether football made
you a worse person we'd all get a good
laugh. But it's not funny, huge numbers of
mostly young, mostly working class people
are criminalised and even jailed every year
for engaging in this leisure time activity.
Many more are harassed by the police on the
same pretext, drugs are on par with
'terrorism' when it comes to giving the
police extra powers to stop, search and
question you.
But drugs are bad for you, don't they kill
people and lead to crime? The accompanying
table shows Marijuana which is very illegal
was not credited with causing one death in
the U.S. in 1990. Of course the fact that
it is illegal makes it more difficult to
measure indirect deaths due to cancers than
for tobacco but most medical research seems
to indicate that the health effects of hash
smoking come well behind alcohol or tobacco.
Hash is the soft end of the argument, other
drugs do kill people.
MDMA (Ecstasy) has recently been the source
of many scare stories. People have died in
Britain and Ireland from heat exhaustion or
hypoallergenic responses to MDMA. But
again let us consider that we are talking
about a leisure activity. Rock climbing
which involves far smaller numbers of
people, thousands rather than millions, has
killed a comparable amount in the same time
period.
Yet as far as I know no-one has called for
the police to arrest rock climbers and raid
sporting shops. Indeed the emphasis is on
making this leisure activity safer, making
sure people are prepared and improving the
equipment. One of the major problems with
MDMA is one of quality control, because
it's illegal you don't know what exactly you
are buying. There is a list of similar
drugs which have led directly or indirectly
to deaths or other serious medical problems
including LSD and speed. Our attitude to
them should be shaped in a similar way.
DR DEATH
Finally there are those drugs that at the
moment are the cause of enormous amounts of
suffering and deaths. In Ireland heroin is
the only significant one of these and it is
dealt with elsewhere in this issue. Heroin
is different not just because of the
suffering junkies inflict on themselves but
also because of the suffering they inflict
on their local community as they rob and
mug to obtain money.
We are not going to call for the de-
criminalisation of heroin dealing any more
than other anti-social crimes like arson or
rape. But don't think the police are the
answer, their main role is controlling
rather than protecting ordinary people and
in Dublin, at least, they have worked with
big dealers in the past. There was almost
no police response to the heroin epidemic
of the early 1980's until the formation of
Concerned Parents Against Drugs. This
despite the fact that the main dealers, the
Dunnes, were referred to in the evening
papers. When CPAD evicted one of the big
dealers, 'Ma Baker' it was claimed that they
found an address book with home phone
numbers of Drug Squad detectives in it.
On top of this, even when the police are
(selectively) serious it has disastrous
consequences. In the U.S. the attempt by
the state to ban all drugs has pushed
profits up for criminals to the point where
vicious wars are being fought over
controlling the supply. In Washington which
has the highest murder rate it's estimated
that 80% of murders are related to drugs.
Possession of small amounts of all drugs
should be de-criminalised. Anti- social
drugs like heroin should be available on
prescription from doctors at low cost to
prevent junkies turning to crime to finance
their habit. What is needed is a real
debate on the control of the other drugs.
It seems reasonable to say that the maximum
of restrictions should be similar to those
applying in relation to drink or tobacco and
this should be medically based and enforced
rather than state controlled.
We need to wake up to the fact that the
current state ban on certain drugs in
unacceptable. Even in relation to truly
dangerous drugs it is counter- productive.
There is no room for moralism on this as the
drug bans are serious attacks on people and
destroy many lives, either directly through
criminalisation or indirectly through drug
ban related crime. The future society we
are seeking to create will, I hope, have a
bit more to offer than an evangelical
heaven of socialist hymn singing and hard
work.
Joe Black
U.S. SURGEON GENERAL'S ACTUARIAL INFORMATION
This is a list of deaths by substance for
1990
Tobacco................360,000 [legal]
Alcohol................130,000 [legal]
Prescribed drugs......18,675 [legal]
Caffeine.................5,800 [legal]
Cocaine..................2,390 [illegal]
Heroin...................2,147 [illegal]
Aspirin....................986 [legal]
Marijuana..................0 [illegal]
*****************
THE HEROIN MENACE
DUBLIN is currently experiencing a heroin
epidemic similar to the one that hit the
north and south inner-city in the late
1970s. That epidemic left hundreds of
young people hooked on heroin and dozens of
them have since died of AIDS and AIDS
related diseases. Some big criminals made
fortunes out of it.
The Dunnes managed to stay at large long
enough to cause devastation in the tightly
knit working class communities of the north
and south inner city. People in these
areas were already devastated by high rates
of unemployment, bad housing rampant crime
and a decaying environment. = Less than
half a mile from the fancy hotels and shops
of the city centre, people lived and still
live in poverty and often in despair.
The massive working class bias of heroin
worldwide makes it stand apart from all
other drugs whatever about its addictive
quality. The lives of a whole generation
of inner city youth was blighted by the
heroin epidemic of the late 70s and early
1980s. Today young people are dying with
frightening regularity in these communities,
sometimes leaving young kids to be reared
by their grandparents. This is the ultimate
in capitalist logic - young kids turning to
a killer drug in their hundreds to lessen
the despair of their hopeless futures in
this society.
In the early 80s, the official response to
the heroin crisis was muddled and
ineffective. After all it was only the
communities of the inner city that were
effected and we all know that no-one
important lives there. The community
response however was much more decisive.
Concerned Parents Against Drugs (CPAD) was
set up and quickly gained support in both
the north and south inner city and Ballymun
where some of the pushers had moved.
CPAD marched on the houses of known pushers
and sometimes forcibly evicted them.
Pushers were denounced at public meetings
and ordered to leave the community. From
the beginning there was hassle between the
CPAD and the cops. This culminated in the
arrest of John Whacker Humphreys and others
who were tried in the Special Criminal Court
where there is no jury and he was sentenced
to prison and taken to Portlaoise. This
hassle was partly because Sinn Fein was
closely associated with the CPAD in some
areas but also because they were
challenging the authority of the cops and
therefore the state in enforcing the law by
doing what the cops wouldn't or couldn't do.
However, there were problems with CPAD in
some areas. One example was in Crumlin
where they de-generated quickly into
vigilantes who took to hassling anyone in
the community who was different or lived any
kind of an alternative life-style. There
was also the problem that often all they
were doing was moving the pushers from on
area to another.
The biggest problem was that, in the
beginning anyway, they did not
differentiate between pushers and addicts.
People did not know as much about heroin
addiction then and certainly not as much
about AIDS, and there were practically no
treatment programmes in existence for
addicts. CPAD sometimes did not distinguish
between hard and soft drugs either. People
were harassed for smoking dope in some
areas. However, despite its very real
faults, CPAD was a progressive response to
the heroin epidemic at that time.
The present situation is very different.
AIDS and H.I.V. are the main reasons that
it is so different. So many families in the
inner city have had someone either die of
AIDS or become H.I.V. positive that it is
now part of the community. In this
situation people are reluctant to go for
the tactics of the CPAD again because it is
their own brothers and sisters and sons and
daughters that would be targeted.
A revival of CPAD-type organisation seems to
be happening in the south inner city at the
moment where there was a recent march to
"keep our communities free from drugs".
People do need to organise to defend their
communities from heroin, AIDS and drugs
wars. However this time around there needs
to a clear distinction made between pushers
and addicts.
The recent survey of H.I.V. positive people
in Dublin [Building Positively published by
the Round Tower Housing Association,
February 1994] shows that a very high
proportion of them are either homeless or
in very bad privately rented flats, and that
the biggest single reason why they are in
that state was that they had been harassed
out of their homes by vigilantes because of
their drug use and because they were H.I.V
positive.
The Corporation now will not house people
defined as anti-social and a lot of drug
users get defined in this way. People who
are often very sick and dying in some cases
are being harassed out of their homes
because they are addicted to heroin. There
is no easy solution because addicts
sometimes push drugs and sometimes are into
theft to pay for their addiction and they
can make terrible neighbours. But simply
throwing them out of their homes and
communities and not calling for treatment
programmes, and that means needle exchanges
and methadone maintenance centres in the
area where they live, is not acceptable to
anarchists.
Heroin addicts are victims of capitalism
and should not be made scapegoats. People
need to focus on the lousy conditions that
create heroin addiction and to fight and
organise around them. Anarchists believe
that heroin should be decriminalised and
available to addicts on prescription.
Heroin is different to most other drugs
because it is used intravenously and has
led, though sharing needles, to users
becoming HIV+.
The distinction between "hard" and "soft"
drugs changes all the time with the arrival
of new kinds of drugs. As anarchists the
distinction we make is between drugs that
have a bad effect on users and the wider
community, and those that don't. Heroin
addiction leads to crime and violence, and
it is working class communities who have to
bear the brunt of it. It also leads to HIV
infection and AIDS. It kills people. This
makes it an anti-social drug.
We are not in favour of more punitive
legislation as a response. That has
changed nothing. One only has to look at
the number of junkies who go into Mountjoy
jail and come out still addicted. Indeed
many young prisoners have gone in never
having used heroin but come out addicted.
The state has been more concerned with
appearing to do something rather than
actually doing it. It has been a case of
scapegoats rather than solutions.
Anarchists are fighting for the sort of
world where nobody will 'need' to escape
from reality through self-destructive
addiction. Until this is achieved we will
support communities who want to defend
themselves from heroin pushers and anti-
social behaviour.
Patricia McCarthy
************************
Part 1 (Intro & Shorts)
Socialism & freedom
10 years of the WSM
Thats Capitalism
World Unemployment
Revolutionaries
letter from Serbia
Part 2 (Ireland & Imperialism)
It was always time to go..Troops out now!
When British army chiefs refused to obey orders
Nationalism...No Thanks
When the Falls & the Shankill fought together
Part 4 (Campaigns & Struggle in Ireland)
TEAM workers told not to expect a decent job
Lets get together
Anti-Water charges campaign gets off ground
Reasons to bin the bill
Part 5 (A rotten world)
Interview with Italian anarchist
Ireland..The land of a 1000 welcomes?
Hicksons chemical spill
37% illegally underpaid
***********************
Workers Solidarity currently comes out four
times a year. For subscription details write
to WSM, PO Box 1528, Dublin 8, Ireland.
Also appearing in the near future will be a
theoretical magazine called Red and Black
Revolution.
*****************
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Workers Solidarity Movement can be contacted at
PO Box 1528, Dublin 8, Ireland
or by anonymous e-mail to an64739@anon.penet.fi
Some of our material is available via the Spunk press electronic archive
by FTP to etext.archive.umich.edu or 141.211.164.18
or by gopher ("gopher etext.archive.umich.edu")
or WWW at http://www.cwi.nl/cwi/people/Jack.Jansen/spunk/Spunk_Home.html
in the directory /pub/Politics/Spunk/texts/groups/WSM