Thorny issues

The saying goes that madness consists of doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.

There are a good number of areas in life where this adage applies very strongly, such as co-dependence behaviours.  I think one could include public policy choices, such as compulsive freeway-building, obsessive pursuit of private-public-partnerships (and my ordering of the first two Ps is deliberate), and general ignoring of the major environmental problems created by our collective lifestyle.  The recent federal election campaign was a study in different types of madness emanating from the choice of echo-chamber policy development.

Kenneth Davidson has written a piece which follows on from last week's 4 Corners, which was titled Crime Incorporated.  The 4 Corners piece was a fascinating exercise, and showed how multifarious the influences of organized crime can be.  The rather dour conclusion -- that one can shut down one band of drug lords only to have another bunch of barons set up the following day -- highlights how murky the whole issue of total prohibition of recreational drugs can be.

I think Davidson's conclusion is a good one: that treating drug addiction as a matter of public health rather than the basis for criminal proceedings would achieve more than the present situation.  He points out that Australia only prohibited opium and cocaine in 1906 and 1913 respectively; the net result of that choice was the loss of tax revenue by driving the market underground, and lack of regulation to monitor the purity of the product.

We know that these two issues remain potent even in the legal and regulated industries of alcohol and tobacco -- it is difficult for the average person to guess what the incidental effects of various preservatives in either of these might be on the level of dependence developed through regular use.  But regulation exists to cover what the basic expectations are, and the government derives taxes from the sales of tobacco and alcohol which help to offset the public health costs of these substances.

Legalization along with the attendant development of public health-based regulation for the sale and use of various illegal substances would do much more to curb organized crime than the present approach.  I think of the perennial argument against safe-injecting rooms: that the very establishment of such facilities is to propagate and encourage a social evil.  Well, we reap the whirlwind without them -- perhaps doing something different would serve to ameliorate the evil.

What Davidson proposes is radical in its simplicity.  Stop doing the same thing over and over again, and instead change the conditions in which the drug trade presently thrives.  Trying to deal with it as a law and order challenge hasn't really worked when high-ranking officers freely admit that cutting one player down leads a further thousand flowers to bloom.  Trying to interrupt the supply chain clearly means that market principles win out.  If the drug syndicates had any of the influence of the mining industry, they would be mounting an advertising offensive.  As things stand, down the present road lies continued madness.