             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

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             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]

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          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

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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
    

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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.

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The Workers Solidarity Movement can be contacted at 
     PO Box 1528, Dublin 8, Ireland

or by anonymous e-mail to an64739@anon.penet.fi

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