WHEN ARGUMENTS FAIL, BANS APPEAR

We are confronting a malicious policy disguised
behind a façade of benign intentions. Public
health and safety are invoked as arguments to
maintain policies that result in the increase of
harm in these same areas. Real harm reduction is
incompatible with prohibition.

Dutch Public Health Minister Ab Klink realises
this. His proposal to ban 168 species of
psychoactive mushrooms in the Netherlands was
again postponed on May 29th, after several Dutch
Parliament Members, encouraged by activists
(http://www.encod.org/info/NL-BAN-ON-PADDO-S-IS-INSANE.html),
posed critical questions to the minister that he
will need to reply to in the coming weeks. All
expert boards (including the International
Narcotics Control Board, interestingly enough)
have advised the minister not to impose a ban, as
this will very likely lead to increased public
health risks (http://www.encod.org/info/LETTER-TO-THE-MEMBERS-OF-THE-DUTCH.html)
and an increase in the number of incidents.

Growing your own cannabis as a way to reduce harm
to health and safety was accepted three years ago
by the Belgian parliament. A piece of legislation
was then introduced that would allow each adult
citizen to cultivate one cannabis plant for
personal use without aggravating circumstances.
However, Belgian authorities do not respect this
legislation. When the board members of Trekt Uw
Plant, a legal association of cannabis producers
and consumers, planted the seed of their personal
plant in public on Worldwide Marijuana March Day
on May 3d in Antwerp, they were arrested and
accused of "growing cannabis in the possible
presence of minors"
(http://www.encod.org/info/IS-IT-ALLOWED-OR-IS-IT-NOT.html).
Two days later, when they repeated the action in
a public field without any minors present, the
police intervened against what was called the
"privatisation of the public space". In the
press, the spokesman of the Antwerp police
stated: "it is not because cannabis cultivation
is being tolerated that we are going to allow
people to do it."

Even UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa
has now embraced harm reduction as showed up at
the annual International Harm Reduction
Conference that was held from May 10 to 14 in
Barcelona. Harm Reduction is a concept that
everyone can agree with as long as certain
logical implications of this policy are ignored.
In a manifesto for real policy of harm reduction
(http://www.encod.org/info/MANIFESTO-FOR-A-REAL-POLICY-OF.html)
some Spanish associations of drug consumers as
well as ENCOD tried to raise this issue at the
Barcelona Conference.

As soon as it becomes clear that harm is produced
not only by the drugs themselves, but by the fact
that they are illegal, it becomes more difficult
to find any universal agreement. And when
proposals to reduce drug-policy-related harm are
made outside the scope of the public and private
health industry, nervousness and embarrassment
enter the room. Suddenly people realise that in
the current system, harm reduction is an act of
resistance that may endanger their careers.

The only way forward is to bring this reality
into the drug debate. In fact the experience of
ENCOD at the second session of the Civil Society
Forum on EU Drug Policy
(http://www.encod.org/info/REPORT-ON-SECOND-SESSION-CIVIL.html)
on May 20 and 21 showed that sometimes a real
discussion can take place with authorities, even
with people representing prohibitionist
organisations. In this forum we may have started
to be accepted as a necessary nuisance, people
whose most radical proposals can not be used for
anything without breaking the general framework,
but people who do, in fact, contribute with
serious issues.

At the UN level, ENCOD representative Fredrick
Polak is playing a similar role, repeating his
question to UNODCs Director Costa
(http://www.drogriporter.hu/en/node/987) for the
third time in Barcelona at the IHRC: how can one
explain the relatively low consumption of
cannabis in the Netherlands where this substance
is legally available for adults. Actually, as we
wrote before, Costa has now visited the
Netherlands to find an answer to this question.
In the days after the Barcelona Conference, he
published a paper on his website
(http://www.encod.org/info/COSTA-S-SELECTIVE-EVIDENCE-SEEKING.html)
which entitled: Amsterdam, city of tolerance
tightening the rules". After a few days, it
disappeared from the site, apparently after the
Dutch government had refused to accept it.
Costa's paper is merely one of the
endlessly-repeated mantras of prohibitionists,
completely unsupported by any scientific evidence.

The ENCOD General Assembly in Vitoria
(http://www.encod.org/info/20-22-JUNE-ENCOD-GENERAL-ASSEMBLY.html),
organised in cooperation with the regional
government of the Basque Country, comes at the
right moment to take the next step in the
development of ENCOD as an action network to
spread the seed of doubt among the general
population to suggest that maybe prohibition is
not the best answer after all.

It is possible to challenge drug prohibition with
few resources but with a determined attitude and
with growing expertise on how to formulate a
message and spread it. The use of mind-altering
plants and substances has always been an
essential part of human societies everywhere,
something that cannot be banned by people in
black or monopolised by people in white uniforms.
By maintaining the idea of a world in which
people can deal with the production, distribution
and consumption of substances in a responsible
way, a collective train of thoughts is set in
motion towards the improvement of the present
situation.

In Morocco a citizens platform calling for the
legalisation of cannabis
(http://www.encod.org/info/FOR-THE-LEGALISATION-OF-CANNABIS.html)
was formed, consisting of university professors
and human rights activists. They have gathered
enough evidence to maintain that growing hemp for
industrial and cannabis for medicinal purposes is
a sustainable option to develop the poor areas in
the Rif mountains. Current programmes aimed at
the eradication of hemp, carried out under
pressure of the European Union, only contribute
to increased poverty and higher revenues for the
criminal organisations.

In Peru, Member of Parliament and former coca
leader Elsa Malpartida has gathered evidence of a
large number of human rights violations committed
during erradication operations of coca leaves for
the past 8 years, and denounced the Peruvian
government before the Interamerican Human Rights
Commission. For the first time in 30 years, this
Commission has accepted the claims and will
investigate them.

Likewise we in Europe should continue to
challenge prohibition as a policy of "criminal
negligence" which is causing two main harms to
society:

The control of the drugs market by criminal
syndicates with all that follows, including
violence between rivalling gangs, corruption of
officials, significant waste of policing and
customs efforts and budgets, banking and currency
problems related to money laundering, and so
forth.

The impossibility of quality control, leading to
the prevalence of bad quality products, often
laced with substances far more dangerous, leading
to many serious health problems.

By Joep Oomen (with the help of Peter Webster)