It's just not fair

Andrew Varley reviews The Pursuit of Oblivion by Richard Davenport-Hines, Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Mr Davenport-Hines has little doubt that the argument about illicit drugs is between cavaliers and puritans and in his concluding paragraphs quotes Philip Jenkins's remark: "None of the regulating agencies accepts that a drug should have as its primary goal the elevation of mood, the giving of pleasure, the enhancement of sexual feeling or the refining of consciousness, at least for normally functioning people (as opposed to the clinically depressed). If none of these features is accepted as desirable or even tolerable, then the slightest evidence of harm automatically outweighs the (supposedly nonexistent) benefits of a given chemical."

Well, there you have the assumptions which lie behind The Pursuit of Oblivion and the argument that the harms which flow from the use of illicit drugs are, to an overwhelming extent, the result of their criminalisation and clandestine, unregulated production. It is absolutely true, of course, and Mr Davenport-Hines emphasis the fact at every opportunity, that heroin produced in laboratory conditions is going to do you a lot less harm that the stuff you might buy from a seedy dealer and shoot up in a fetid garret, just as you would undoubtedly be wiser to drink a fine old malt than bathtub gin. That whisky, however, is as addictive and the dangers of its misuse as real as those of the liquid which drips from your still.

The parallel with alcohol is not neglected in the book. The standard argument is trotted out: "Adults outside the Muslim world are entitled to buy, possess and use alcoholic drinks. They have, by custom, a right to be intoxicated in private. Someone who dislikes drunkenness in others is not entitled to interfere in another citizen's drinking as that person drinks in the privacy of their home, or somewhere appropriate such as a club. It seems irrational not to apply similar principles to Ecstasy." The line is old and fatuous. Privacy is not inviolable because man is a social animal and what he does in private can have serious repercussions for others. A great deal of excessive drinking may be done in private and if the damage were confined to the drinker's liver then that would be fine. But the damage does not stop there and if Mr Davenport-Hines thinks that private drunkenness does not lead to domestic violence, financial disaster, disturbed children, and a host of other harms then he is deceiving himself.

What about the irrationality of applying different standards to alcohol and illicit drugs? If we were in the sixth form debating society, this might be a devastating argument. But we are in a real world where matters of public policy have to be considered in the light of their history and not in some Platonic vacuum. In Mr Davenport-Hines' world of moral absolutes, Chateau Leoville-Barton and skunk deserve identical treatment because of the similarities in their nature and effect, as though they were both new products which have appeared before us from some benevolent research and development department. Were this the case, society might agree that both should be equally available. On the other hand, it might feel that both were dangerous substances that at least required severe restriction.

We have, of course, to deal with illicit drugs in the context of their history and the cultural baggage they have acquired across the centuries. They have a much more confused past than alcohol and the value of Mr Davenport-Hines' book lies in his exposition of this history. Drugs, despite the qualities which Philip Jenkins implies, have always been associated with the darker side of human nature. Access to other worlds, occult knowledge, unnameable sexual experience have been among the dangerous benefits ascribed to their use and, whilst it is true that higher spiritual goals have also been an aim of some users, any contemplative will tell you that there is no short cut to enlightenment.

In the west, drugs have always been inextricably linked to criminality. Obviously, we choose what to make a crime and in doing so drive a particular activity underground or endow it with the thrill of the forbidden. It may be unfair that alcohol is treated differently from illicit drugs, but that is not an argument for removing restraint. Quite rightly, however, the author puts forward a case for the health benefits of liberalisation and few would disagree with him that the war against drugs has been a disaster.

There is no doubt that a debate is needed: a way out of our current mess has to be found. The greatest danger of the libertarian view, which, it seems, is the one implicit in The Pursuit of Oblivion, is that we shall find just that.