"Should illicit drugs be legalised in Australia?"

YourView—a forum where we can vote, comment, and respond to each other—asked, "Should illicit drugs be legalised in Australia?"

To stimulate the debate, Alex Wodak of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation and Jo Baxter from Drug Free Australia shared very different views about how we should control access to drugs.
http://yourview.org.au/issues/10-Should-illicit-drugs-be-legalised-in-Australia

Ignoring the good advice of Families and Friends for Drug Law Reform:
http://www.ffdlr.org.au/resources/docs/ActivistGuide.htm

... I wrote way too much, way too complex :)

I encourage you all to have a go at articulating what you believe and why. I think it's time to speak up and make a difference.

I can't link directly to my comment at YourView, but here's what I wrote.

Regulate like alcohol (or better)

Drugs are dangerous, so we should regulate them. Paradoxically, prohibition is no regulation at all. We can only regulate what is legal. Criminal suppliers do not ask for age identification and are not forced to guarantee the quality, purity, or even identity of the products they sell. In contrast, the government regulates the production, packaging, marketing and availability of alcohol and tobacco, just as it regulates cars and all aspects of road transport. Clearly, it is possible to regulate behaviours that some consider dangerous, so that mature, responsible individuals can undertake them safely and with benefit.


Drugs were not "an enormous social and health problem" in 1961 when the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs created the International Narcotics Control Board, banned Cannabis, and enabled enormous criminal profits. Prohibition was ideological from the start, and based on flawed research that was tainted by racist and ethnocentric prejudices.
50 years later, by all measures, drugs now cause great harm in every country. But by far the most harm associated with drugs is created or exacerbated by prohibition and the police, prison and treatment industries and criminal cartels that feed off the system. Prohibition has done nothing to reduce the risk of actual harms that drugs pose, like addiction. And the harms that prohibition has created - incarceration, massive corruption, violent criminal gangs, and drugs that are not what the dealer claims they are - are much greater than any harm the drugs themselves might cause.

"The vast majority of drug users world wide are casual users who cause no harm to themselves or others." 
http://www.undrugcontrol.info/en/issues/ending-the-war-on-drugs/item/3051-drug-policy-in-the-andes

Despite the real harms that prohibition creates, most white educated drug users are getting away with it. The heaviest burden falls on people who are already disadvantaged - black communities in the US and impoverished communities in supplier nations.

One more argument: a moral one. We can't grow up under prohibition, which seeks to ban choices we may regret: choices that challenge us to grow. Obedience is an immature virtue at best, and often very much worse.

I value my drug experiences because they have challenged me to grow and connect. I would prefer to buy these tools from a regulated supplier, so I can be confident of what I am buying and what sort of inebriation I can expect. And so that my purchase doesn't profit violent criminal gangs or corrupt government officials. Like I can buy alcohol. Legally and regulated.

τί τό σοφόν; ή τι κάλλιον -- What good is cleverness?

This year I spoke about drug policy at #EGA2011, exploring the tensions around our right to inebriate our selves, and proposing how regulation might create a better space for us to exercise that right as adults.

*sigh*

Two years ago I spoke about poetry and "culture under the influence".

Prohibition causes real harm! I look forward to a better future when I can stop fretting about drug policy and can let my mind and heart dance again, and even stumble, deliciously.

Here are my speaking notes from EGA2009. In dry summary, I argued that:

• Despite its claims to being a universal method for gaining knowledge, science only gives us fragments of knowledge out of context that can inform, but not calculate, political and other important decisions.
• Poets—“the true legislators of the world”—are another source of knowledge.
• Some poets tell us to drink wine as a consolation; others warn against wallowing in our comfort zones. Some poets drink in order to write poetry; poetry can itself be a sort of inebriation—a cultural tavern.
• Another way of drinking focuses on the palate: we can drink to delight our senses and to enhance our sensitivity: to grow “new organs of perception”.
• Science promises a knowledge for controlling; Goethe’s way of science offers a knowledge that empowers.
• Paying attention to and even enjoying sensual experiences is not the same as succumbing to our appetites. Indeed, cultivating our sensitivity is a way of creating freedom within the tragic constraints of our appetites.

http://tinyurl.com/vanKeulen2009b-DrinkingPoetry

I also wrote a short article for that year's conference journal, which includes links to a bunch of inspiring stuff I read while preparing my talk.

http://tinyurl.com/vanKeulen2009-DrinkingPoetry

Becoming more sensitive is not just a commitment to one’s self, and a personal pleasure: it is also a political gesture.

Regulating the irregular -- my talk at EGA2011

What a big weekend! So many presentors, including Fire and Earth Erowid, Keeper Trout, 6 other international speakers, and dozens more from across Australia. And as always, an amazing audience of hundreds of lively curious people from around the world, gathered to discuss entheogenic* practices and cultures.
* We call a psychedelic drug an entheogen when we use it as a tool to facilitate direct spiritual experiences. Some of us revere some plants and chemicals as spiritual guides or teachers.

At EGA2011, I facilitated a discussion panel called "Beyond evidence-based policy" in which we explored whether+how we might talk about values in the drug policy debate, rather than just about evidence.
http://www.entheo.net/panel/beyond_evidence_based_drug_policy

I also talked about our right to inebriate ourselves. I argued that:

• we have many reasons to try to end prohibition
• ending prohibition requires more regulation, not less
• specifically, a new schedule for inebriants might be useful
• asserting our right to inebriate ourselves exposes tensions around the status of adults and what makes a good life, and
• expert knowledge can inform but not calculate political decisions.

Here are my speaking notes. I was the last speaker in the Main Dome, on Monday at noon. After me, the banquet!

http://tinyurl.com/vanKeulen2011-On-Inebriation

Anthropocentric?

I often say I'm misanthropic, but really I think I'm just trying to strike a different balance. This quote by Graeme Gibson in an otherwise often hilarious interview with Ramona Koval on Radio National's Bookshow shows how heavily our priorities are currently skewed to just humans. 

"… of all charitable giving, in North America at least and our European friends say it's similar over there, 97 per cent of it goes to human causes—hospitals, education, this disease, that disease. And of the 3 per cent that's left, 1.5 per cent (that is, half of the 3 per cent) goes to our pets, so that in all charitable giving in North America, 1.5 per cent goes to non-human nature. It's not enough. It's not that one shouldn't be giving money to the other things but that balance is so preposterous and it's a very clear indication of why we're doing what we're doing. We're so self-centred as a species."
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2007/2115781.htm