Exberliner Issue 138, May 2015

CONTROVERSY
Legalise everything!
A judge, a former police officer and an ex-addict have a crazy new idea: make
all drugs legal. Whatever they’re on, maybe they’ve got a point. After all,
criminalising drug use hasn’t exactly worked, has it? By Ben Knight
Drug policy is probably the most irrelevant
policy there is. Whatever the
government decides we can and can't
put in our bodies, a lot of us will do
it anyway. And even if we don’t, we’ll probably
have to deal with people who do. According to
government stats, a quarter of adult Germans
have taken an illegal substance at least once in
their lives.
Many governments have recently decided that
they can trust their citizens to try a little pot,
and instituted a creeping decriminalisation. But
in Germany, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC,
is, like heroin, amphetamines and cocaine, a
“Category 1” substance – which means you’re
not allowed to grow, manufacture, deal, import,
export, sell, buy or own it. Medical cannabis
has been allowed since 2011, but that isn't really
a world-changer, given that doctors have been
administering much stronger drugs than that for
decades. Also, most German health insurers do
not cover medical marijuana, so your access to it
depends on how rich you are.
The law lags far behind current attitudes
towards the substance – even German police unions
have called for a relaxing of the rules on possession,
if for no other reason than that it would
save them a lot of time. The US organisation
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) is
planning to start a German chapter this summer
(see page 46). In March, the Green Party sparked
up the cannabis debate again with a new draft
law which would allow adults access to cannabis
for “personal recreation”.
But there are others who want to take legalisation
a lot further. Die Linke’s Frank Tempel,
a former policeman, is calling for a “radical
re-thinking of drug policy.” By that he means
the controlled legalisation of, well, pretty much
everything.
End prohibition
Tempel is persuasive enough on the shortfalls
of the current situation: “Prohibition fuels organised
crime, and consumers’ rights and legal protection
of children cannot be implemented on
the black market,” he says. “Instead of reducing
drug-related crimes, prohibition literally causes
the crime, since many normal taxpaying people
are depending on illegal markets.”
That much is backed up by the statistics.
Prohibiting drugs has not prevented people from
using them. According to German police reports,
12 • MAY 2015
the number of first-time ‘hard drug’ offenders
has remained steady at around 20,000 a year
over the past 12 years, and the number of overall
drug offences steady at around 230,000 year.
Meanwhile, there is plenty of evidence that the
criminalisation of drug use damages people and
society. People arrested for possession routinely
find themselves in a spiral of stigmatisation –
arrest, job loss, prison – that can and does turn
them into petty criminals.
Another outspoken liberaliser is Andreas
Müller, a youth court judge whose brother was a
cannabis dealer who became a heroin addict: “He
didn’t become a heroin addict because he took
cannabis. He became a heroin addict because
society broke him,” he says. “Stigmatisation.
Locking away. Young offenders’ home. Prison. Of
course that breaks a human being.”
Müller says there is an increasing consensus
among judges that the current drug laws
are pointless – an endless treadmill that does
nothing but push people into prison while drug
consumption remains exactly the same. “People
who have to deal with the rules say, ‘What are we
doing here? We have to apply laws that belong
in the rubbish bin.’ A heroin addict who buys
heroin shouldn’t be punished. He's already punished
enough by the fact that he’s addicted.”
Stop repression
The government’s drug policy is based on four
planks: repression, prevention, treatment, and
containing the social damage drugs do. The
point that Tempel and Müller are making is that
repression takes up vastly more resources than
the other three, and does the least good. On the
other hand, Germany has made a lot of progress
in the last 20 years when it comes to treatment.
Dirk Schäffer was a heroin addict in the early
1990s, and he says in those days he had two
Current drug laws are
pointless – an endless
treadmill that does
nothing but push people
into prison while drug
consumption remains
exactly the same.
options: “Either you took
drugs or you went to jail.”
He himself spent two
years in custody. “If you
didn't want to steal from
others, you used to deal
small amounts – some you
bought for yourself, and
some you sold on,” he says.
“Then you were picked up
by the police and searched
and in Germany that always
led to some kind of punishment,
especially when it
came to ‘hard drugs’.”
Treat
Schäffer is now a social
worker and drug policy
spokesman for the charity
Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe, and
he says the treatments have
vastly improved, thanks in part to more relaxed
drug laws. Back in 1990, you could be arrested just
for owning “consumption utensils” – now, in many
German cities including Berlin, drug users can go
to exchange points to get clean syringes, which
has vastly reduced cases of HIV and hepatitis
among addicts. In fact, the number of illegaldrug-related
deaths has dropped by half – from
2030 to 1002 between 2000 and 2013. Not only
that, Schäffer says Germany is one of the leaders
when it comes to the number of drugs available
for substitution programmes, such as diamorphine
and methadone. However, doctors face such huge
bureaucratic and legal obstacles from health insurance
companies and authorities that they have
to be extremely dedicated to offer substitution
treatment: “To be honest, if I were a young doctor
I wouldn't put myself through all that.”
Decriminalise
But incremental measures like this towards
decriminalising drug consumption have had a
noticeable effect on improving public health and
reducing the burden on police. There are other
steps that could be taken. In Spain, for instance,
you can start a club where registered members
can grow cannabis for their own use, as long as
they don’t try to sell it. Portugal has some of the
most liberal drug laws in the world, where possession
of what is considered 10 days’ personal
supply is treated as a misdemeanor, like a parking