Another Tony Wood

Unlike my relative of the same name, this Tony Wood is standing in Local Body elections in Sydney on a No Drugs ticket, and he's another case that illustrates my earlier point about people being persuaded by their personal experiences rather than something more objective. The poor mans daughter died after taking ecstasy over 12 years ago and now he feels hes cooled down enough to think clearly about the issue and take action. He's proposing a Zero Tolerance to Drugs policy and making the police enforce it. Or in other words Prohibition.

The trouble with Prohibition is that its already been tried and it doesnt work. All that happened when alcohol was outlawed in the US between 1920 and 1933 was that the perfect conditions were created for an underworld of crime to flourish, giving rise to such evil gangsters as Al Capone, Bugs Moran and the Mafia. They made most of their money from smuggling, producing, and distributing alcohol, but also from prostitution and gambling, and they used it to corrupt the police, the legal profession and politicians, thus eroding the most fundamental pillars of society. Furthermore the Government spent millions trying to enforce these laws which were finaly repealed in 1933. Prohibition however has remained the Policy in respect of every other recreational drug except for cannabis in a few enlightened places. The reality though is that the world wide war on Drugs is a massively expensive failure and a new appproach needs to be developed if any sort of progress is ever to be made. Cranking up enforcement like Tony Wood wants is not going to help. It will just make drugs more expensive and therefore more attractive to criminals and smugglers, and make it harder for users to seek help.

Instead try to imagine what would happen if all recreational drugs were legal, say like alcohol and tobacco are. Firstly the whole underworld of crime that the drug trade has created would no longer exist as there would be no market for the drug lords products; Drug users would no longer be forced into prostitution and petty crime such as robbery and burglary to suppport habits which can cost thousands per day;addicts could freely seek help rather than hide themselves and their illegal activities and contacts from authorities fearing punishment; governments all round the world would save millions if not billions of dollars by not having to spy on people and train sniffer dogs and customs officers and helicopter pilots to look for drugs, and instead spend more money on education about the dangers of drug use, of alcohol and tobacco use and on encouraging people to behave responsibly. Police and the Courts and Prisons could get on with dealing with real crime. Its the Drug Trade that keeps the Taliban in business in Afghanistan, it was the drug trade at the heart of the Crime War in Victoria Australia recently portrayed on the TV drama "Underbelly", its the drug trade that still fuels the Mafia and much of the violent crime on US Streets , its the drug trade that funds the civil war in Colombia - imagine how the world might change if all this drug money just disappeared!

There would of course be problems, and deaths, just as there are with tobacco and alcohol. And just as there are with playing many sports, with fishing and swimming, mountaineering, sailing, driving cars, and even hamburgers, peanuts and chewing gum have choked and killed people.

Instead of banning all these things we simply educate and inform and encourage, and hope that people will behave responsibly. Prohibition was a huge mistake in the 1920's and it created an evil underworld - we need to grow up and move on.