Referring to heroin, the Report notes that "purity levels are consistently higher across most jurisdictions". It adds that "supply is regular and consistent, although some variations in price and purity do occur".

The Report reaches the reasonable conclusion that:

The proportion who have tried illicit drugs other than cannabis, and their frequency of use of such drugs, has remained stable over the past ten years (albeit with minor fluctuations). These patterns of use are predicted to remain similar in the near future. Continuing availability and growing acceptance of cannabis use by the wider community is anticipated with an expectation that the "decriminalisation debate" associated with its use will become more pronounced ...

Initiatives by both health and education authorities, although individually successful, have not substantially reduced illicit drug demand in Australia, but may have contributed to its stability via a dampening effect. The demand for cannabis, and its widespread use, may increase with the maturation of young adults who are now its heaviest users and with whom it has gained the most acceptance.

This remarkably honest assessment by the ABCI provides little encouragement to those who consider that prohibition has reduced the availability of illicit drugs in Australia. In the United States, the number of people who consume cocaine has decreased but the quantity consumed by those who use cocaine has increased, so that the total quantity consumed is about the same. Is this a victory for prohibition?

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VI. Has Prohibition Reduced Drug-Related Crime?

Former US Surgeon General, Dr Joycelyn Elders, remarked at a press conference that the US should study legalisation. This simple comment provoked considerable controversy across the United States. Some months later, her son was sentenced to ten years in gaol on a charge of selling a small quantity of cocaine. When a journalist asked Dr Elders as she emerged from the courthouse whether she thought her son would commit the same crime again after he was released from prison, Dr Elders replied movingly that she did not think her son had committed a crime in the first place. Many of the people caught up in so-called drug crimes are just ordinary citizens who use drugs from time to time.

The 1994 ABCI Annual Report notes that the recorded drug offence rate in Australia has increased from 150 per 100,000 population in 1980, to 500 in 1992. The rate increased exponentially in the first half of the 1980s, fluctuated over the next five years and then started to increase again in the early 1990s. This cannot be considered a success. Some authorities even suggest that the major effect of law enforcement on drug trafficking is to select survivors who are more ruthless, more violent and more cunning.

Drug offences in Australia increased more than threefold in a little over a decade. During this time, prohibition has been progressively strengthened. Property crime has also increased during this period but this could be due to multiple other factors. Strengthening prohibition by increasing penalties or police resources can actually increase property crime, as the ABCI (1994) noted:

Successful initiatives aimed at reducing the availability of drugs may in fact increase property crimes. In assessing the relationship between heroin and violence, the National Committee on Violence, in 1990, concluded "almost all the violence associated with heroin may be attributed to policies relating to its control, rather than to any inherent pharmacological properties". Some criminologists consider that law enforcement success in limiting drug availability on the streets can have the undesirable effect of actually increasing levels of drug-related crime: "Those who would normally earn sufficient income from trafficking in the drug to support their own drug habit find an alternative source of income, such as breaking and entering or bag snatching, in order to be able to buy drugs from others. Other research has shown that by targeting heroin users, rather than distributors, more beneficial results were obtained from a community point of view, although possibly only on a local level and probably only in the short term." This section of the Report concluded that: ... while there is still some debate over the level of connection between drugs and crime, it is, nevertheless, clear that both Federal and State policies on drugs have the potential to significantly affect the level of drug-related crime.

By 1993, at least 50 of the 680 senior Federal judges in the United States decided to withdraw from drug cases. Judge Whitman Knapp, former head of a famous commission of inquiry into police corruption in New York City (which was the basis of the film Serpico), said "people think they can stop the drug traffic by putting people in gaol and by having terribly long sentences. But, of course, it does not do any good" (The New York Times 26-3-1993). Judge Jack Weinstein, another senior US Federal judge who had taken the same action, added "the penalties have been increased enormously without having any impact. It is just a futile endeavour, a waste of taxpayers' money" (The New York Times 26-3-1993).

Mr Raymond Kendall, Secretary-General of Interpol, was interviewed in early 1994 by the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. He said that "western governments ... would lose the war against dealers unless efforts were switched to prevention and therapy," adding that "all penalties for drug users should be dropped ... Making drug abuse a crime is useless and even dangerous ... Every year we seize more and more drugs and arrest more and more dealers but at the same time the quantity available in our countries still increases." Mr Kendall said "police were losing the drug battle worldwide" (as reported in The Age 1 January 1994).

In 1994 Mr Edward Ellison, former Operational Detective Chief Inspector, London Central Drug Squad, commented on a proposal to increase penalties for possessing marijuana that the Home Secretary should "stop fiddling with the engine, you need a new car," because "the criminal law, as a policy for controlling individual drug misuse, is so palpably failing that protectors of the status quo are thin on the ground". He argued that it is now widely acknowledged by senior officers in both police and customs and by a growing number of the judiciary that the criminal law is incapable of "hitting the individual drug users and it is progressively unable to knock out sufficient of the drug suppliers" (The Guardian Weekly 27-2-1994).

The British newspaper, The Independent, carried an editorial on 3 March 1994 which declared that "if the government wanted to maximise crime levels, encourage burglary, muggings and a proliferation of violent games, it could not have achieved its goal more effectively than with its long-standing policies on drugs." The editorial listed a number of consequences of prohibition: innocent people becoming victims of crimes; the inadvertent fostering of organised crime; already over-crowded gaols now being crammed with illegal drug users and pushers; and entrenched dependence of drug users on drug pushers. The Independent noted that the first step in reform must be to destroy the drug economy which brings misery to users and causes millions of other people to be victimised by drug-related crime.

Supporters (and opponents) of prohibition may hope that attempts to restrict drugs reduce drug-related crime. But if anything, prohibition seems to exacerbate crime. Can this be called success?

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VII. Has Prohibition Reduced Health Problems?

Deaths from opiates in Australia increased 75 per cent between 1986 and 1992 according to Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health figures. These trends should be interpreted cautiously because the numbers of deaths are relatively small. Nevertheless, deaths from illicit drug use have been increasing throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Heroin overdose deaths have doubled in the last decade. Although these deaths represent only three per cent of all drug-related deaths, the average age of people dying from illicit drugs is early twenties.

Drug-related deaths are not only increasing in Australia. They have increased by a factor of six in Germany and Spain, five in Austria and Italy, four in the Russian Federation, three in Belgium, France and Switzerland, and more than one half in the United Kingdom. They are stable in the Netherlands but have also increased in Hong Kong, Japan and Saudi Arabia. Deaths of drug users in the United States are declining on some figures while increasing on others.

There is now little doubt that restricting the supply of sterile needles and syringes, a policy which Australia used to enforce consistent with prohibition, increased the sharing of injection equipment and spread blood-borne viral infections such as HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C. Prohibition made it more difficult to control these infections among injecting drug users. Control was only achieved by ignoring or contradicting prohibition.

Although only a small proportion of the world's HIV/AIDS population are drug injectors, uncontrolled epidemics among drug injectors have had catastrophic consequences for the general population in many countries. The table below shows a selection of rates of HIV among drug injectors worldwide.

Within a few years of the introduction of anti-opium laws in Hong Kong (1945), Thailand (1959) and Laos (1972), elderly men smoking opium became a rarity. Soon many young men were injecting heroin. Opium is bulky and smelly and the large implements required also make it easy to detect. Heroin is concentrated, smells less and the implements are easy to hide. Frequent opium smoking is certainly a health hazard but far less damaging than heroin injecting. Now millions in Asia are at risk of HIV infection because of the recent diffusion of drug injecting which followed the introduction of anti-opium laws.

National and global experience suggests that prohibition does not decrease disease and deaths. On the contrary, the evidence points to prohibition increasing health damage from drugs.

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VIII. Is Prohibition Cost-Effective?

The RAND Drug Policy Research Center in California recently assessed the effectiveness of different ways of controlling cocaine in the United States. For each US dollar spent on cocaine control, source-country activities saved 15 cents, interdiction 32 cents, domestic enforcement (customs and police) 52 cents, while treatment programs for cocaine users generated societal cost savings of $US7.48 for every dollar spent! How does the US allocate funding for cocaine control? In 1992, 73 per cent went to domestic enforcement, 13 per cent to interdiction, with source-country control and treatment each allocated seven per cent.

A study commissioned by the Commonwealth Department of Health estimated that in 1988, Australia spent at least $258 million on illicit drugs law enforcement. Less conservative estimates are about two or three times that figure. For a country struggling with massive foreign debt, high unemployment and low exports, a policy burden which costs a quarter of a billion dollars a year to achieve next to nothing is a sacred cow we can ill-afford. In the United States, Federal spending alone on illicit drug law enforcement is now up to $US13 billion a year. When State and local illicit drug law enforcement spending is included, the bill probably rises to over $US60 billion. Curiously, politicians and communities are willing to approve vast sums for illicit drug law enforcemerit without the evidence of benefit they would demand in any other area of government expenditure.

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IX. Why Geo-Political Changes Make It Impossible
for Prohibition to Work

Since the collapse of communism in 1989, global instability has markedly increased. The post-cold war era has been remarkable for widening gaps between the underdeveloped and developing world. Free markets have spread. International economic systems have opened in new areas. Ethnic, religious and nationalist conflicts in the developing world and former communist countries have flared up. Social controls in the emerging private sector have been reduced, accompanied by widespread graft and corruption in the public sector of former communist countries. Incentives for global drug production are growing with diminishing economic prospects for most developing countries. Opportunities for global drug trafficking are expanding with the development of more open and less regulated economies.

Another fundamental factor fuelling the spread of illicit drug production and trafficking is the growing importance of terrorist organisations. These days, most major terrorist organisations generate a substantial part of their income from the illicit drugs trade and most major illicit drug traffickers are linked to terrorist organisations. The terrorist organisations have the technology and skills needed by drug producers. Drug producers control a trade which provides the lucrative profits so needed by terrorists.

The CSIS Report noted that "all the coca plants under cultivation throughout the world would fill a space not much larger than the eastern shores of Maryland", concluding that "the global capacity for the cultivation of coca, opium and cannabis is virtually untapped and unlimited". Geography is clearly not a meaningful constraint on the cultivation of illicit drugs.

Illicit drug production is now concentrated in those parts of the world where there are few alternative ways of improving living standards. Peasants who can earn from growing coca, poppies or cannabis up to ten times what they would receive growing traditional agricultural products are hardly likely to be concerned about the condition of teenagers in Cabramatta or St Kilda. Drug cultivation now occurs in some of the most remote and impoverished places in the world. For some peasants, growing illicit drug crops means the difference between providing for the most basic needs of a family or life-threatening poverty.

Illicit drug cultivation usually occurs in remote border areas controlled by guerilla forces and populated by impoverished ethnic minorities beyond the control of central governments. The world's two largest producers of opium poppies are Burma and Afghanistan, the main coca producers are Peru and Bolivia, and the world's leading producer of hashish is Lebanon. If prohibition is to be effective, we will need to find ways of controlling drug production in nations which are racked by civil war and barely members of the international family of nations.

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X. Why Technological Changes Make It Even Harder
for Prohibition to Work

During the last decade, communications technology has improved dramatically. Although this helps law abiding citizens running legal businesses, technological improvement is just as much assistance to those who run different kinds of enterprises. Facsimile machines, cellular telephones, paging systems, and computerised banking have all made the work of illicit drug traffickers easier. In 1991, the Clearing House Interbank Payment System (CHIPS) handled 37 billion transactions valued at $US222 trillion. Any thought that this might be effectively monitored to detect improper transfers of funds is laughable.

International trade is rapidly expanding. In 1991, 374 million people, 4.5 million containers and 122 million cars and trucks crossed US land borders. Over 1.8 million containers arrived in the port of Newark in 1991 where customs are only able to inspect up to 18 containers per day.

To improve legal trade, vast super-national organisations have emerged. Other organisations are planned. The North American Free Trade Agreement now links the 340 million people living in Mexico, the United States and Canada. Soon goods landed in Accupulco will not be inspected again before being transported to Northern Canada. The 360 million people living in the European Union must now seem an attractive market for drug traffickers. Illicit drugs landed in Piraeus (Greece) on the way to Gothenburg (Sweden) will not be inspected again over a dozen or so border crossings of the European superstate. In our own region, the APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) forum will in time also reduce obstacles for drug traffickers anxious to move their goods between Asia and Australia.

The CSIS report (1993) concluded that:

The ability of a state to prevent drug trafficking either across or within its borders is becoming prohibitively costly or hopelessly impractical. The volume and diversity of international trade make it extremely difficult to distinguish between licit and illicit goods. The explosive rise in international travel precludes the ability to thoroughly inspect all individuals who cross national borders ...

To even try to inspect more than the smallest percentage of air passengers at places like Heathrow in London or Kennedy International in New York would create travel gridlock ...

National efforts to improve interdiction and to contain money laundering generally run head-on into domestic economic deregulation designed to improve efficiency and international competitiveness. Finally, the accelerating revolution in transportation and communications technologies is simply out-stripping the ability of governments to independently develop regulatory regimes and enforcement mechanisms to monitor and control their use. Drug traffickers, therefore, have a rising level of drug supplies and also a historic opportunity both to service existing markets and to develop new ones. The question that remains is to what extent there is an untapped market for widespread drug consumption.

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XI. Why Economic Forces Make It Impossible for Prohibition to Work

The senior US Federal judge, Whitman Knapp, once had to listen to lengthy surveillance tapes of a major New York drug trafficker as part of his judicial duties. One of the conversations took place in the late afternoon as an associate of the trafficker entered the room and began to exchange pleasantries about how the day had been. The drug trafficker responded that it had been a great day. "Prices are up! The cops just made another bust". (Speech to Merchants' Club, New York 26.3.1993.)

Conservative estimates of the annual turnover of the global illicit drug industry range from $US400 to $US500 billion. This is equivalent to approximately ten per cent of total international trade. The global illicit drug industry is larger than all international trade in each of the following sectors: oil and gas; food, beverages and alcohol; chemicals and pharmaceuticals; and the textiles and clothing industry. The turnover of the world's illicit drug industry is about twice that of the global pharmaceutical industry, and several times bigger than either the global motor vehicle or iron and steel industries. Turnover in illicit drugs is seven to eight times worldwide foreign aid. Over 90 per cent of the profits made from cocaine and heroin are generated during the distribution of these drugs, with only ten per cent during cultivation and production. A gram of cocaine from Colombia sells in the United States for between $US60 and $US300, of which 95 per cent represents profit. Heroin costing about $US3000 a kilogram in Pakistan sells for $US90,000 on the streets of Europe, with 95 per cent of the retail price being profit. As nearly half of the final price of drugs is added in the national distribution networks of developed countries, however successful efforts are to restrict cultivation, production and transport to consumer nations, prohibition cannot win.

Almost 108 tonnes of cocaine were seized in the United States in 1993. This represented a street value of between $US10 and $US20 billion, larger than the individual Gross National Product (GNP) of more than half the countries in the world. The largest single national consumer of illicit drugs in the world, the United States, has more than 11.4 million consumers.

In Australia, annual turnover of the illicit drug industry was estimated by a parliamentary committee in 1989 to be $2.6 billion. Cannabis is the second biggest agricultural crop in Queensland, after sugar and ahead of wheat. The illicit drug industry in 1989 represented 15 per cent of Bolivia's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and up to 11 per cent of Peru's GDP (the world's largest coca cultivator), and up to 13 per cent of Colombia's GDP in 1991. The illicit opioid industry added four per cent to the GDP of Pakistan. This may not be as beneficial for these countries as may seem at first. The contribution of the illicit drug industry to the economy of these countries increases their exchance rate, discouraging diversification of the economy and endangering export-oriented and import- substituting industries. Employment generated by opium production represented one per cent of the labour force in Pakistan, while the coca industry involved up to 4.5 per cent of the economically active popolation in Peru and up to 17 per cent of the economically active population in Bolivia. The value of coca and cocaine exports to Bolivia in 1990 is equivalent to about half the total legal exports. Illicit drug exports from Pakistan are estimated at $US1.5 billion in 1992 compared with legal exports of $US7.3 billion.

The costs of illicit drugs have been estimated conservatively to be equivalent to 0.5 per cent of GDP in both Australia and the United Kingdom and $US76 billion or 1.3 per cent of GDP in the United States in 1991. Almost half of the costs of drug use are due to an inability of most drug users to earn a decent income, while drucg users' health costs are almost 80 per cent higher than those of other citizens of similar age.

Sales of cocaine, heroin and cannabis amounted to an estimated $US122 billion per year in the United States and Europe during the 1980s, leaving 70 per cent ($US85 billion) available for laundering and investment. Others estimated that up to $US300 billion per year might have been available for laundering in the late 1980s. The current figure is believed to be about $US350 billion per year in the 1990s but some estimates go as high as $US500 billion. Even the lowest estimate of $US85 billion would make the drug money available for laundering larger than the individual GNPs of 34 of the 207 economies of the world, white the hichest estimate of $US500 billion would be equivalent to about a tenth of the GNP of the United States.

There is a growing sense that prohibition can never succeed. Former US Secretary of State, Mr George Schultz, said that the war against drugs is doomed to fail because "the conceptual base of the current program is flawed ... we need at least, to consider and examine forms of controlled legalisation of drugs." (The Wall Street Journal 27.10.1990). Is it any wonder that he supports a new approach to drugs policy "cutting out the middle man" and "supplying the drugs in some other way"?

A Report to the President of the United States by the US Attorneys and The Attomey- General in 1989 concluded that "peasants have turned to cultivating the coca plant because it is the most lucrative cash crop, offering in one season an income equivalent to many a year's effort growing traditional crops". The same report noted that "the Colombian Government was able to avoid rescheduling its foreign debt payments due to the positive economic effects of the drug boom". Even Princess Anne has suggested that "asking South American peasants to stop growing coca was like asking the Scots to stop growing barley because people on the other side of the world could not hold their drink" (The Independent 11.4.1990).

The flaw referred to by George Schultz is the steep economic gradient down which illicit drugs slide from supplier to consumer. The more successfully law enforcement maintains higher prices, the more it creates extraordinary profits. These profits attract the very entrepreneurs the authorities seeks to discourage by enforcing the laws which created the profitable markets and attracted the entrepreneurs in the first place. No wonder an editorial in The Times of London (10.4.1990) concluded that "only when supply is taxed and regulated can criminals be removed from the supplier chain, and demand tackled through education and taxation. An unwelcome industry which cannot be contained, let alone banned, must be regulated some other way".

Mark Kleiman, former Director of the Office of Policy and Management Analysis of the Criminal Division, US Department of Justice, estimated in his book Marijuana: Cost of Abuse, Cost of Control, that halving the 1986 US Federal marijuana enforcement budget would save $320 million in expenditure, free prison cells for other offenders, reduce the earnings of marijuana dealers and the drug budgets of marijuana users by two per cent, but would increase marijuana consumption by only 1.5 per cent.

Forty per cent - $US423 million - of the US Federal Government drug enforcement budget of $US1.1 billion in 1982 was spent on marijuana-related investigations, prosecutions and incarcerations. Between 1982 and 1986, the US Federal Government increased the marijuana enforcement budget by $US636 million. Estimated total marijuana consumption fell per cent (by volume) between 1982 and 1985 but because of per cent increase in average potency, consumption of the main ingredient (THC) actually increased 22 per cent. In constant dollars, law enforcement costs had risen by one-third since 1982, imposing an additional 20 per cent cost on the marijuana market. However, the imported and domestic marijuana market grew 50 per cent, from $US9.4 billion to $US 14 billion. Kleiman estimated that if the enforcement budget was halved, prices would decrease 3.5 per cent and consumption increase 1.5 per cent. As Kleiman points out, there is a limit to how much damage the state might want to inflict on consumers of illicit substances to prevent them from damaging themselves. Kleiman noted that druc, policy reform risks additional consumption in order to reduce harm to consumers, while prohibition increases potential damage in order to reduce consumption.

In June 1995, Henry Loa'za Ceballos, also known as "The Scorpion", gave himself up in Colombia after a $US500,000 ransom had been placed on his head. He was wanted for a number of atrocities related to drug trafficking, including the massacre in 1991 of 107 peasants who were dismembered with chainsaws. President Ernesto Samper of Colombia still carries four bullets in his body from a shooting incident at Bogota airport in 1989, which resulted in the death of the politician he was conversing with. Yet Samper has also been accused of receiving funds for his political campaigns from the Cali cartel. In July 1995, the Treasurer for Samper's re-election campaian was arrested because Cali drug funds were traced directly to the re-election account.

Colombian authorities recently arrested Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, known as "The Chess Player", but better known as the head of the Cali cartel which is believed to control 80 per cent of the world's cocaine supply. This cartel is believed to generate $US44 million per day and to have smuggled more than 210,000 tons of cocaine out of Colombia since 1983. Orejuela had been protected by his own security forces headed by senior ex- policemen. Following his arrest, 29 people in the centre of Medellin were killed when a statue of a dove of peace was blown up, apparently the work of a drug cartel intending to send a warning to the government against any attempt to dismantle the narco-trafficking industry. Three days later, the national head of counter-inteltigence was assassinated.

"The Chess Player"disdained the violent ways of Pablo Escobar. "We don"t kill judges or ministers. We buy them" (The Guardian Weekly 18.6.1995). Yet authorities took no chances. Orejuela was interrogated by four judges hidden behind one way mirrors with voices altered to protect their anonymity. By the end of the first day's interrogation, the cartel had already worked out the identity of at least one of the judges. In August 1995, police captured Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, the sixth of the seven known cartel leaders to be arrested so far. A month earlier, Miguel Rodriguez had left evidence of far-reaching corruption for police to find. This led to the resignation of the Defence Minister, Fernando Botero, as well as calls for the impeachment of the President and the subsequent declaration of a state of emergency. It is abundantly clear that one of the poorest countries in South America is being destabilised politically and economically by an illicit trade - feeding a demand in other countries - which it is powerless to control.

A decade ago in Colombia, 1500 people were arrested and 12 tons of cocaine destroyed in one operation. But it made no difference to the cartels. When Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, then Minister of Justice, was accused of taking drug money, he responded by intensifying the search for drug traffickers and seizing many of their planes. Within a year, he had been shot dead on the streets of Bogota. In the first five years of the 1990s in Colombia - a country with a population of 36 million - more than 1500 politicians and union leaders, more than 1000 police officers, 70 journalists, four of six presidential candidates in 1990, an attorney-general and a governor have been killed.

Former Colombian Prosecutor-General, Gustavo de Greiff, argued that "a kilo of cocaine costs $US50 in the trafficking countries and is sold in the consuming, countries for $US5000 to $10,000, and so there will always be someone ready to run the risk of the illegitimate business". De Greiff, who was responsible for the apprehension of cocaine cartel boss Pablo Escobar, pointed out that Escobar had already been replaced by the time of his arrest and argued that:

Traffickers do not deserve the profits we are helping them to gain. Our efforts to curtail production and impede the sale of drugs keep in place a complex set of institutions ... that consume billions of dollars and imperil the lives of thousands in both the United States and Colombia and whose chief effect, judging from the results we have, is to reward the traffickers and their associates by keeping the price of their deadly merchandise artificially high. (The Washington Post 11.3.1994.)

"Nothing will really change" said Maria Jimna Duzan, whose own sister was killed making a documentary about drug trafficking in Colombia, "until the world understands that the problem involves not just drug-trafficking but drug consumption and that it reaches to the heart of the industrial world, not just the relatively poor producer Nations" (The Guardian Weekly 18.6.1995). The celebrated Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez has forecast that a failure by the world to realise this will mean that Colombia "will rot alive in a war that cannot be won - and the rest of the world will rot with us" (The New York Times 20.2.1994). As long as there are consumers willing to pay for their pleasures and peasants in producer countries earn ten to 20 times more cultivating drugs than they would from traditional crops, the drug trade will continue. It may be forced to shift from one neighbourhood to another, from one province to another, from one country to another, or even one continent to another, but the drug trade can only grow while such vast profits are there to be made.

A more fundamental question is the extent to which economic forces influence the dynamics of the drug market. Prohibition assumes that raising the health, social, financial and legal costs of drugs deters potential consumers and perhaps accelerates the early retirement of current users from drug use. Defenders of prohibition maintain that any relaxation of enforcement efforts would only lower prices with an inevitable increase in recruitment of new users. Drug reformers argue that it is the lucrative profits which maintain the growth of the illicit drugs industry and lead to recruitment of new consumers. While conceding some logic in the notion that lower prices may recruit new consumers, reformers argue that this trend is likely to be more than offset by "taking the oxygen out of the drug trafficking trade". If drug trafficking becomes less lucrative, fewer individuals will be attracted to the trade and there will be less pressure to recruit new consumers.

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XII. How Prohibition Damages the Environment

Severe environmental damage is reported from the cultivation and refining operations of the illicit drug industry in the Andes. Coca farmers cut down forests on steep hillsides leading to erosion. An estimated 700,000 hectares in the Amazon region of Peru was deforested as a result of coca cultivation. Two to six hectares of forest are cleared by farmers in Bolivia for each hectare of coca production, suggesting, that between 260,000 and 780,000 hectares have been cleared each year for coca production compared to 250,000 hectares lost annually from timber extraction and cattle ranching. In South East Asia, hill tribes use traditional slash and burn agriculture to clear enormous areas of rainforest for poppy cultivation, damaging the environment through denudation, topsoil loss and river silting. In Bolivia, 30,000 tonnes of toxic chemicals including lime, sulphuric acid, kerosene, acetone and hydrochloric acid used to process illicit drugs are flushed down the river systems each year without any proper waste-water treatment, and around 200,000 tonnes of discarded, contaminated coca leaf are left to rot into the soil each year. In Peru, chemicals used to process drugs have killed off whole species of fish and aquatic plants in the river systems. Cocaine processes in the Andes have dumped ten million litres of sulphuric acid, eight million litres of acetone and between 40 and 770 litres of kerosene into the rivers.

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XIII. Has Prohibition Ever Worked?

The Report of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the National Crime Authority Drugs, Ciime And Society (1989), which was an all party committee of the Federal Parliament, concluded that:

Over the past two decades in Australia we have devoted increased resources to drug law enforcement, we have increased the penalties for drug trafficking and we have accepted increasing inroads on our civil liberties as part of the battle to curb the drug trade. All the evidence shows, however, not only that our law enforcement agencies have not succeeded in preventing the supply of illicit drugs to Australian markets but that it is unrealistic to expect them to do so. If the present policy of prohibition is not working then it is time to give serious consideration to the alternatives, however radical they may seem.

Opponents of prohibition sometimes say that it never works, but this is not entirely true. Prohibition does work for certain drugs in certain countries at certain times in history. First, the prohibited drug must be desired by few people. Second, the drug has to be difficult to manufacture or smuggle. Third, substitute drugs must not be even more dangerous than the banned drug. Fourth, it helps if the country is isolated and its government authoritarian.

In the 1960s, Australia had the highest incidence in the world of a particular kind of kidney disease due to compound analgesics (made up of aspirin, phenacetin and caffeine). Compound analgesics were readily available from dispensaries in many offices and factories where staff took a few pills whenever they experienced a minor discomfort. After Australia banned compound analgesics, this kind of kidney disease disappeared. No negative consequences of this policy were detected. Prohibition worked because demand was weak.

Prohibition may also have been a successful policy for the first five or six decades of the century. After all, drug consumption globally was very low and drug problems were rare (apart from in the United States). Again, prohibition worked because demand was weak. It has only really been in the last quarter century, as demand and supply increased, that concern has grown about the effectiveness of prohibition.

Nevertheless, prohibition may still work for certain countries. Prohibition seemed to work for China from the 1949 revolution until the 1980s. Drug consumption was apparently low and drug-related problems rare. However, China paid a high price for this apparent success - few countries today would wish to consider paying this price even if it were possible - China was isolated from the rest of the world and experienced poor economic growth despite grinding poverty. The opening up of China's borders and liberalisation of economic policies has improved living conditions. But this too has come at a hich price. As a Chinese leader once said, "when you open the windows, the gnats and mosquitoes fly in". Liberalisation has brought prostitution, venereal disease, HIV infection, opium cultivation, heroin injection and HIV infection among drug injectors along the heroin trade routes from the south west to the east of the country.

There may also be other "special case" countries such as Singapore. It is difficult, however, to generalise from this island police state to other countries. Authorities in Singapore are able to implement measures unthinkable in most other countries. Norway might be another country where prohibition has helped to keep drug problems at low levels. Norway is geographically somewhat isolated and civil liberties in Scandinavia has a very different meaning than in most other liberal western democracies.

Perhaps prohibition works under certain circumstances but not under others. Prohibition does not appear to work well when potential source and potential demand countries are well connected by obstacle-free extensive legal trading and while highly mobile populations are cheaply and easily transported. It does not help when there is a proliferation of terrorist groups desiring large incomes and possessing the necessary skills and technology to conduct business with drug traffickers. Nor does it seem to work well in an era when crushing poverty, increasing inequality and rampant social injustice coexist side by side with privilege and affluence.

Like everything else, prohibition can be made to work if communities are willing to pay a sufficiently high price. That price may include suspension of most civil liberties, isolation and restricted contact (including international trade) with other countries. In supplier countries, there have been major sacrifices in the name of prohibition, including the overthrow of a government and major violence involving the assassination of ministers, judges, presidential candidates and the downing of an airliner with all 200 people on board killed. Corruption seems to be an almost inevitable companion to prohibition. In Australia, there have been a dozen Royal Commissions and other official enquiries into drug trafficking and police corruption.

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XIV. Conclusion

The 1993 World Bank Report, Investing in Health, noted that "the success achieved in controlling the use of alcohol and tobacco through restrictions on promotion and access, high taxation, rehabilitation of addicts, and public education - may also be relevant for efforts with other drugs". Although officially, Governments and authorities still deny that prohibition has failed, many official reports and enquiries have reached this conclusion. The US President's 1986 Commission on Organised Crime, America's Habit: Drug Abuse, Drug Trafficking And Organised Crime, concluded that "despite continuing expressions of determination, America's war on drugs seems nowhere close to success". The 1990 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report concluded that "although precise information is difficult to obtain, it also seems that worldwide abuse of drugs is increasing. A number of countries reported or were estimated to have, more intense drug abuse problems than in previous years".

The CSIS report (1993) concluded as follows:

The participants reached a sobering consensus around the following issues: (1) the production of heroin, cocaine, cannabis, and synthetic drugs is at a record high and will continue to rise in the foreseeable future; (2) drug trafficking organisations are taking advantage of the tumultuous changes throughout the international system to develop aggressively new markets for their products; (3) the seeds for widespread drug consumption exists practically everywhere as do the worrisome signs that the drug epidemic is spreading swiftly to the Third World and many of the former Communist states; (4) the current US National Drug Control Strategy is simply no match for the challenge.

We have seen that under prohibition more opium and coca are cultivated almost every year. Refining these plants into drugs presents no problem to the drug traffickers. Only a small proportion of illicit drugs are detected during transport. Sales occur with minimal impediment. Prohibition has been successful in raising the health, social and economic costs of drug use. But it has not succeeded in reducing drug use. Prohibition has been an expensive, ineffective and counterproductive failure. Not only has prohibition failed, it has no chance of succeeding. Each year, technolocical change, geopolitical developments and the new trade environment make the job of prohibition even harder.

Prohibition is like trying to empty Sydney Harbour with a bucket. Law enforcement officials can point to the amount of water scooped up and show that more water was scooped up this year. Politicians can make larger and more expensive buckets available. But the net result is unchanged.

Global political trends, technological change and the economic fundamentals underpinning the illicit drug market suggest that prohibition will never be successful. Not surprisingly, many now consider that prohibition of illicit drugs during the last quarter century has been as much a resounding failure as alcohol prohibition in the United States was a half century earlier.

On 17 December 1992, Mr Jim Snow MP, Federal Member for Eden-Monaro, moved in the House of Representatives:

That This House -

1. declares that urgent action is needed to deal with organised crime, death and health and social problems associated with illegal drug use; and
2. calls on the Executive to initiate action with the States to:
   (a) oversee the sale of drugs of addiction such as heroin and other opiates, cocaine and amphetamines by prescription; and
   (b) ensure that prescribers are approved physicians and that dispensers are approved pharmacists, all having completed appropriate additional training.

As mentioned at the beginning of chapter 2, Mr Snow had been a pharmacist in Queanbeyan, where he had dispensed heroin linctus to his patients - legally prescribed such medication by their doctors - before heroin was banned. His memory of how well his patients managed before prohibition prompted him almost 40 years later to introduce this motion to the National Parliament. Mr Snow knew that prohibition has failed and that alternatives exist.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez said in a recent essay that consuming and producing countries should "grab the bull by the horns and concentrate on the various possible ways of administering legalisation" (The New York Times 20.2.1994).

In the next chapter we examine those alternatives.

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