Pokey for Cokies?

George Monbiot has an article in today's Guardian rather provocatively titled "Yes, addicts need help. But all you casual cocaine users want locking up". The thing, according to Monbiot, is that those people who casually and only occasionally use cocaine (i.e. that aren't addicts) are helping to promote the violence and criminality that surrounds cocaine production and sale in the third world, where the stuff grows. In fact, so heinous is the act of casual consumption of cocaine (a subject previously discussed on this blog) that all users should be criminalised, regardless of their behaviour, motivations and intentions.

This, it falls to me to say, is utter nonsense. No one disputes the horrors that seem to accompany the production, manufacture and sale of cocaine. Especially not in Colombia (which I courageously flew right over during my travels in Latin America a few years ago). What is ridiculous, though, is to blame the consumer for this mayhem, when there are such worthier targets for our righteous, Guardian reading-anger. It seems obvious to me that the only reason coke is such a bad business all round is because of its continued prohibition, both in the consuming first world and the producing third. There's no comparative trouble in the tobacco, or alcohol, producing industries, because it's done by grey men in suits with an interest in making money, rather than Colombian neckties.

At this point, were he to debate the issue with individual bloggers with approximately a fifth of his brain matter, Monbiot would no doubt point out that, whatever our personal political inclinations, prohibition is the status quo across the world and that we'd better get used to it. He's right, of course, in that cocaine isn't going to be legalised any time soon, here, in the US, or in Colombia. Especially not in Colombia, in fact, as the US has a death-grip on its drug policy, dangling as it does the possibility of the withdrawal of aid were Colombia to come to its senses and legalise the trade that's currently killing its country and therefore necessatating reliance on aid handouts .

He's quite wrong, in this imagined debate, however, in saying that we should accept that the system is as it is and that we should therefore modify our behaviour accordingly. Let me ask you/him this: during the prohibition of alcohol in the US early in the 20th Century, were people wrong to go to speakeasys? To want a drink at a funeral, at a wedding, or just after a hard day's work panning for gold in them thar hills? Or was the policy that prevented them from doing so wrong? Were these people responsible for the havoc wreaked by Al Capone and the other liquor traffickers of the time? If not, why the hell is that any different from the consumers of cocaine?

It's the policy that should be locked up, with the key thrown somewhere deep into the Colombian jungle.