What not to do about drugs

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33869, 14 June 1975, Page 10

What not to do about drugs

The Forbidden Game A Social History of Drugs. By Brian Inglis. Hodder and Stoughton. 256 pp. Index, bilbiography N.Z. price $11.70. "Tobacco,” said James 1, is like hell in the very substance of it, for it is a stinking loathsome thing: and so is hell." James was a freak; and a pedant at the best, of times. But he was no i.iol and smart enough to realise that while drugs might be hellish tn nature they could, with a little mutual connivance among interested parties, re made a source of heavenly income B\ 1620. .lames was collecting 1'16,000 a year in duty from tobacci imports in the first attempt of us kind iO get rid of a drug by indirect prohibition. As far as stemming the .'low of drugs it was to prove as worthless as every subsequent attempt at prohibition but it did line his and many other people's pockets. A survey of the social history of drugs tells us. Mr Inglis says, not so much what to do about drugs, but what not to do. Through tobacco, alcohol, opium, and LSD. the lesson of history is that prohibition does not work; it has always failed in free enterprise society. Worse than this, it has not only failed but encouraged consumption, corruption and manufacture. Mr Inglis has selected carefully from a mass of available material to draw a coherent thread through the book from ancient rite to contemporary cult, and the variety of illustrations serve his conclusion that if consumers choose drugs, no law can stop them The question, he writes, is not so much “Shall we legalise' 1 ” but. ' How shall we legalise?” In a detailed account of the opium wars of the nineteenth century when the English in India were plying a very lucrative trade to China. Mi Inglis points out the limitations of honesty, integrity and assiduity shown by officials who were supposed to be carrying out a campaign to suppress the traffic in a drug. Whenever a drug has been regarded as an anathema this has. led to duplicity on the part of the

government and the aw entorcers The reason the opium !aw< weir • protracted wa- that the Britts! government were somewhat e-s t-,-wholeheartedly tn favour of stoppin: the traffic. Governments in continually denouncing men wh manufacture and sell heroin, -ays M Inglis, but it was a government whi. ‘ ’aught them how What is mme. the '■eheniecontrol that were attempted with v the variety of drugs were attempts with little or no sound knowledge the "iniquitous” substance 'hat th. uithorities vvert s< half-heartodl' tying to get rid of. For every nsane account of the effects of .< dr .. there have been a hundred accountfrom confessions • theses with or no factual truth. S ■ we get 't>ba< c< sixteen! century being regarded as the area' cure-all. herbs panacea At the othei end of the scale we get the argument that when St Bernard dogs went '< rescue people in ihe snow they should not have carried brandy in their barrels because it is a nu'd depressant So prohibition has nevei (vorked On the other hand history. is no help in telling us how to legalise. What we need to do. savs Mr Inglis, is t. change our attitude to drugs completely 'Drugs will not be brought under control until society itself changes, enabling men (,■ u-e them as primitive man did; welcoming the visions they provided not as fantasies but as intimations of a different. an<: important level of reality.” But while historical survey may show that the primitives were the only ones who knew how io handle drugs Mr Inglis’s argument that we should ail become primitives again in this sense, is quite useless; it is the sort of nineteenth century utopian answet which sounds eloquent but gets us nowhere. It is as old and as foolish as Gauguin dashing off to the South Pacific, and with al! the. talk of history, misses the point that we never have been able to rescue what we wanted of the past.