Not one week later, and we can breathe easy again: it was all just propaganda. He’s flogging smokeless stoves, shrewdly positioning himself as the George Foreman of a less lung-cancer-inducing inhalation technology. I genuinely thought for a moment there that he was sick of the fog. I’m kind of sick of the fog myself by now. What never ceases to amaze me is how sexy some artists manage to make smoking the herb seem. It’s not.

A friend of mine — a middle-aged mum — once claimed that skunk was worse than heroin. I thought this comment laughable at the time, having been around a lot of heroin abuse. I’ve dabbled myself, but I was always a bit of a tourist, truth be told. Too much time spent watching Countdown for my liking. Too much vomit. Too much possibility of sudden death. What’s a little green by comparison? When someone you love endures a bout of skunk psychosis, you soon find out.

Heroin has a tendency to make the user manically self-involved. Not everyone, might I add, lest I offend anyone. With drugs it’s always different strokes for different folks. Some people, it’s for the best they’re on the smack. They might have been terrible alcoholics otherwise. Or have untethered themselves from reality entirely blazing the chronic. But you can’t get away with smoking brown casually, hence why, even among fairly committed caners, the line is often drawn at heroin. That’s when the phone calls go around to family members. Talk of possible interventions.

Whereas weed is just there. No one bats an eyelid. Intimations of Sixties optimism, of low-grade, no-risk consciousness expansion. That today’s genetically engineered varieties are up to 100 times stronger than those smoked by our Boomer forebears has only recently begun factoring into the equation. This has given the stuff a Trojan Horse-like incisiveness where fucking up young people’s minds is concerned. Never mind that it might leave you three times more prone to have a psychotic episode, or that 25% of Priory cases of paranoid psychosis — a schizophrenia-like illness and depression — were caused by weed or spice use. According to a 2014 Lancet psychiatric report, adolescent weed smokers were at particular risk: 60% less likely to graduate from high school, and seven times more likely to attempt suicide.

Curiously, although cannabis-related hospitalisations have more than doubled since 2013, use of the stuff has been steadily plummeting. Especially among youngsters, who seem to be wising up to the grim realities. In 1995, 30% of 16-24-year-olds were users, today that figure is something closer to 16%. The connotations of pot use are shifting in tandem with the nature of the drug itself then. The Romanticism and consequent naiveté of the previous era are indeed beginning to fade into something darker, sadder, more claustrophobic.

More from this author

Punk's spirit is broken

By Lias Saoudi

Had this vibe shift occurred before I’d arrived in London aged 18 to study art at the prestigious Slade School, I wonder if life might have panned out differently? I might not have squandered the opportunity tooting skunk and masturbating in my halls of residence. All the graft I put in winning my place there as a diligent, pre-skunk teenager back in Cookstown where I grew up went swiftly down the drain. Pornography and pot. Somehow these things became my priority. Life since has basically been a contingency plan rooted in the unforced errors of those wasted years. That the stuff is a gateway drug goes without saying. If you smoke enough skunk, eventually cocaine becomes a bare necessity, a kind of social defibrillator. It might turn you into a prick, but at least you’re out and about again.

Smoking weed is like rolling the dice with the rest of your day psychologically. The stronger the smoke, the higher the stakes. These days, if I’m blazing, I tend to pepper a single skin roll-up with a few crumbs of hashish in the evening. These are odds I can handle. All the same, I often find myself marooned, dumbfounded. My partner can tell almost instantly I’ve had a toke too many. The dry-lipped silence. The absence of common sense. It pluralises perception, as opposed to embellishing it like more intense psycho-actives.

Thoughts cross-pollinate incessantly, pile up and provide you with a new and thrilling vantage point… or… they cascade down into the nether world leaving you speechless with profound doubt, little more than a symptom of your selfhood. There’s no telling which way the wind’s about to blow. This randomising factor can be incredibly useful where creativity is concerned. If you’re working in music — the purest of all art forms — especially. For example: you’ve spent several years making an album. Towards the end of this process, you’re inevitably bored shitless with everything you’re working on. You have to make it new for yourself again in order to summon up the will to push it over the finish line. Simple, just listen to it on drugs.

It isn’t just weed that young people are turning away from, but narcotics across the board. Also: religion, working part-time jobs and having a girlfriend/boyfriend. All things that help you not to feel isolated and lonely. Things might have panned out differently had I not spent the end of my formative years pickled in skunk. But then at least I hadn’t been subjected to social media from day dot in combination with the stuff. That people are watching you and attempting to interfere with you from afar is no longer the stuff of weed-induced paranoia, but hard fact. And if young people have substituted weed for the internet, they might well be replicating the former’s effects.

More from this author

George Michael's longing for oblivion

By Lias Saoudi

Drugs have ravaged my community. Where they haven’t completely alienated people from themselves and the wider world, they have enfeebled without mercy. As we hobble towards and out beyond the 40 mark, we’re all just picking up the tab. We made a few half-decent tunes though. Admittedly, my social group aren’t exactly a great demographic from which to extract generalisations. Over-sensitive song and dance men, entertainers, fools… we only made it through adolescence on account of a handful of records, records disproportionately made by arch-hedonists who frequently dropped dead at 27.

These artefacts were our rallying call, our entry point into something larger than ourselves. They gave our lives something resembling purpose. Generation Z, the world’s first digital natives, don’t seem to be taking the bait where this overweight mythology is concerned. It’s hard to imagine another Winehouse in this day and age. Maybe not. The inevitably meditative kind of boredom we had to play around in growing up is off the menu, probably forever. It’s not been eradicated, but inverted and intensified horribly, a kind of mind-death by convenience, by over stimulation is taking its place.

The old gods are fading, along with their shitty behaviour, replaced by a Warholian micro-portioning out of fame itself. Today, everyone has a public soul. Fame, de-centralised, has lost its transcendent capacity. The druggy role models of yore, deflated. Even if it means there’s no longer any albums worth smoking an ounce to as Snoop Dogg would have it, nobody wants to come off a whopping anachronism. I dare say the future might be a little kinder, a little safer, a lot softer on the liver. But if it’s tuneless, what’s the point?

I was moved. By the end, I teared up, though I couldn’t discern whether my sorrow was solely a tribute to the artistry of the film. My older brother also staggered around with the help of canes and a walker. My brother also suffered from congestive heart failure. In 2009, my brother also died from the medical complications of morbid obesity. To say that I likewise approach this subject matter with intense sympathy is an understatement.

Still, I could have warned Aronofsky that he’d get stick. I channelled the loss of a sibling I loved and admired into my novel Big Brother, which similarly riled the “fat acceptance movement”. (Predictably, none of my aggrieved correspondents read the book.) No amount of sympathy cuts it with these people. I did not have the qualifications to address this topic. I wasn’t fat.

For what it’s worth, my own minor criticism of the film is stylistic. It’s adapted from the eponymous play by Samuel D. Hunter, who also wrote the screenplay. Occasionally, stilted dialogue and stagey acting keep one foot in the theatre. Otherwise, scenes where Charlie jerks off to gay porn while having a heart attack, or joylessly crams his mouth with doubled slices of pizza topped with ranch dressing, do entail an element of spectacle and voyeurism. But all film viewers are voyeurs, and these scenes are supposed to be painful. Charlie is sad, and his confined, shame-drenched life is meant to make us sad, too. That is the naysayers’ real primary objection: Charlie’s weight is tragic. Charlie’s weight is bad.

Stigma has been on the way out for a while. In the early 20th century, divorce was at last a legal option. But as novels such as Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence demonstrate, that didn’t make the dissolution of a marriage acceptable in the drawing room. Divorce was a scandal. Even as breaking one’s solemn vows at the altar grew more common, into the mid-Sixties the iconic female “divorcee” was a wanton loose cannon often preying on the happy marriage. Come to think of it, we seldom use the word “divorcee” anymore, since an identifier is pretty useless when it applies to nearly everyone you know. Nowadays, having been divorced multiple times barely raises an eyebrow.

But this is not the most momentous eradication of stigma during my lifetime. Facilitated by the Pill, that would be the abruptly permissive attitude towards sex outside marriage — although (lucky me) I had morally conservative parents who exposed me to the scathing repudiation and hysterical disgust to which earlier “fallen women” were subject. When I announced that I planned to live with my boyfriend at 18, my mother screeched that I was a “harlot” and a “kept woman” whose “shacking up” would ruin me for the purity of Christian marriage. (Both my parents claimed to be virgins before they wed, and I don’t even think they were lying.)

More from this author

Children can't be experts on themselves

By Lionel Shriver

Spitting parental disavowal didn’t stop me from having a good time in my young adulthood, but it did give me a taste of stigma at its most effective; in my mother, my transgression triggered a visceral revulsion that she couldn’t control. Yet these days the only debate is whether to have sex on a first date, if we bother with dates.

Once unmarried sex became no big deal, the “out-of-wedlock pregnancy” followed suit. Presently, single parenthood can prove an economic challenge, and that’s about it. Yet not that long ago unmarried pregnancy was such a social horror that young women rushed to marry men they didn’t love or sometimes committed suicide. One of my mother’s college classmates starved herself for nine months to conceal her disgrace.

Homosexuality was next, and to be fair the exoneration of same-sex attraction (which, though she later pretended otherwise, my mother also found revolting) was a long slog. But now the stigma attached to same-sex relationships has so evaporated that being gay or lesbian isn’t even interesting anymore. As for cross-dressing, once a deep dark secret hidden literally in the closet, it is now so reputable that drag queens are reading stories to children in public libraries, and the furtive, old-school habit of struggling into your wife’s frock while she was out shopping seems to have been swallowed by the transgender movement. All that time you weren’t excited by dressing as a woman. You were a woman.

The rehabilitation of masturbation may still have a way to go, though, especially for older generations, since post-hoc mortification and an urge to concealment are instilled so early and run so deep. Yet masturbation must be the most ridiculous of no-nos. This free, universally available entertainment has no dire social consequences. The killjoy demonisation of harmless self-stimulation springs from a puritanical discomfort with sexual pleasure.

On balance, all these historically recent permissions probably make life better. Men and women aren’t stuck married to spouses they detest until death, mercifully, parts them. Having been around the sexual block meant that when I hooked up with my husband, I knew we were a good fit. I’m glad homosexuality is boring now, so gay friends and I can talk about something else. If I still feel a residual sheepishness after getting off in private, at least I know, abstractly, that I shouldn’t feel sheepish.

Suggested reading

Britain's food wars

By Aris Roussinos

But even the hunky-dory-ness of divorce and casual sex is a mixed bag. Marriage is not as meaningful; both parties know they can always get out of it. If I’m relieved divorce is possible, I’m also relieved my own parents didn’t get one; the cost of divorce for children is well known. And thanks to what we used to call promiscuity, sex is less meaningful as well. The much-lauded sexual revolution has produced more kids with only one parent to turn to, more children in care, and more venereal disease.

My point being that stigma isn’t always bad. It can attach to particular conduct for good reason. Collective disapproval is a powerful tool for encouraging behaviour that’s in the collective interest. More recent campaigns to remove the stigma clinging to overtly destructive conduct are therefore questionable. That includes the crusade to embrace “fat pride”, which wages a two-pronged war on conventional assumptions about both aesthetics and health.

On the aesthetic front, alas, what qualifies as attractive cannot be imposed by cultural fiat. No number of Dove models spilling from their underwear in Tube adverts can make riders on the Circle Line yearn to take them to bed. Standards of beauty are stubborn; we don’t find certain bodies beautiful because we ought to. On the health front, advocates for “people living with obesity” — an expression that suggests they’re not overweight but have simply taken in a flat mate — like to claim that one can be “healthy at any size”. Yet the NHS estimates that obesity costs the service £6bn every year, a figure projected to rise to over £9.7bn by 2050. Matthew Crawford, who at 55 stone once earned the title of “the UK’s fattest man”, requiring four adjacent hospital beds to lie down, died last year from sepsis and organ failure. Purportedly quite nice fellow, he was only 37.

Far too many people make themselves miserable over their weight, sometimes anguishing disproportionately over a few extra pounds. Nevertheless, is it in our communal interest for obesity to become broadly condoned? Already, especially in the US, television presenters and commentators are growing ever portlier. What qualifies as a standard build has risen several sizes. That’s good news for bigger people, who may feel more socially at ease, but bad news for any nation’s medical bills.

The drive for alleviation of stigma doesn’t stop at fat. We are henceforth to spurn the word “prostitute” and substitute the less loaded “sex worker”. This linguistic tweak is intended to convey that selling sexual services is no more degrading than attorneys selling legal services. “Sex work” is merely a career path, as deserving of respect as accounting or interior design. If specialists in desire wish to perform certain physical acts for a price, that is literally their business.

The world’s oldest profession is never going away. Personally, I support decriminalisation of prostitution. Yet most of the prosperous progressives who advocate this new open-mindedness would never themselves trade intimate access to their bodies for money in a million years. These are the same people who, if their daughter announced that instead of studying Economics at UCL she aspired to become a “sex worker”, would be horrified and would probably send the kid to a therapist. These are the same people who, should their daughter indeed end up walking the streets at 2am in fishnets, would regard her as in some ways lost and themselves as having failed as parents.

Suggested reading

Being fat isn't feminist

By Sarah Ditum

Expunging stigma is not so simple a matter as wiping down a sticky marble counter with Cillit Bang, job done. Stigma is more like the black mould on the wall of the loo, which has an exasperating tendency to grow right back. Moreover, any society that pushed its young to pursue “careers” in prostitution would either be very desperate or deeply disturbed. I know of nowhere in the world where selling one’s body for sex is a neutral option. It’s reliably a last resort, and no new terminology can make the experience of turning tricks any more agreeable or raise the status of the sex trade a jot.

Drug addiction and alcoholism are now subject to the same brisk Left-wing housecleaning. Enlightened social services have rechristened an addict or drunk, “person struggling with substance use” — we no longer say “abuse” — or “person with substance use disorder”. The most extreme manifestations of this new moral detachment are in San Francisco and LA, whose downtowns are now covered with tented encampments of homeless people — whom we’re now meant to call “the unhoused”, the grammatical inference being that their circumstances are wholly the responsibility of some delinquent outside party. These denizens of faeces-strewn pavements are almost all drug addicts or alcoholics who may also be mentally ill. The city provides food, pocket money, drug paraphernalia, and safe, sanitary venues for getting high, because consuming meth, fentanyl, or a bottle of vodka every day is merely a defensible life choice. Behold, no stigma. What’s an addict not to like? Big surprise, the population of substance users in these cities continues to soar.

California has also effectively destigmatised theft, by demoting shoplifting of goods worth less than $950 to a misdemeanour, which police ignore as inconsequential. Ravaged by losses, businesses are closing retail outlets. If everybody does it — if stealing is normal and never punished — California’s shoplifters have no reason to feel contrite. Likewise, in the riots following the death of George Floyd, the wholesale ransacking of shops was justified as a “mass protest against our dominant conceptions of property”, as the sociologist Russell Dynes put it. Vicky Osterweil, author of In Defense of Looting, commended widespread commercial theft because it “gets people what they need for free immediately”. Looting also, she says, “attacks the history of whiteness and white supremacy”.

Yet this takes the biscuit: the serious campaign to make paedophilia respectable. Apparently, the stigmatisation of “Minor Attracted Persons” is unfair, because Minor Attracted Persons (MAPs) are just doing what anyone sexually drawn to children would naturally do. This MAPs business so crosses a line that it makes the prospective rehabilitation of a range of other once-villainous behaviours short of fanciful. Rapists could soon become “people with a coercion disorder”.  Burglars might be reclassified as “people living with other people’s things”. Perhaps we’ll simply see “Murder Attracted Persons” as “being themselves” — and who are we to interfere with their sanguinary self-expression?

For the consistent pattern here is an accelerating, positively demented refusal to make judgments. The stigma that once attached to socially unacceptable conduct has shifted from the transgressor to the adjudicator. If you use the word “addict” and ever suggest that maybe getting clean would make this person happier and more productive, you’re the problem.

More from this author

Why wait to die?

By Lionel Shriver

Furthermore, the language of mindless moral neutrality — “people living with obesity”, “people with substance use disorder” — distances people from their own decisions and deprives them of agency. The plight of alcoholics, drug addicts, and the life-threateningly overweight is medicalised, ascribed to having innocently contracted a disease. For erstwhile outcasts, the price of acceptance is helplessness, if not hopelessness. If your behaviour played no role in determining your current circumstances, then presumably behaving otherwise won’t improve those circumstances, either. You’re stuck.

Stigma has its place. We’re not obliged to celebrate everything our neighbours get up to. For the sake of a liveable country, we should fiercely discourage addiction to substances that turn people into stupefied dependents on the rest of us. Stealing, looting, prostitution, medically burdensome obesity, and sexual predation on children don’t make the world a better place. We should want thugs who break into our homes to feel shunned. For shame, guilt, and remorse also have their place. AA’s classic “hitting bottom” often involves self-disgust, which can finally motivate folks to pick themselves up.

If not all stigma is bad, some stigma is still both poisonous and unjustified, and it remains the case that pariah status can be whipped up with a vengeance almost overnight. Not long ago, one group was singled out as homicidal, delusional, and stupid. Pundits and politicians alike urged us to spurn their company; complex bureaucracies sprang up to keep the scum from restaurants, cinemas, and planes. Social media’s pitchfork brigade demanded this subhuman dross be denied access to healthcare or brazenly hoped they’d all die. That’s right, the unvaccinated. Stigma at its most ferocious. (For the record: I am triple jabbed.)

Clearly, stigma is a powerful force — for ill or good — which, having been firmly planted in a collective psyche, is not necessarily subject to top-down control. Stigma is sticky. Once a population is stigmatised, it’s hard to take the stigma back. When most of us watch Charlie showering his infeasible naked bulk in The Whale, no number of lectures from fat activists or censorious comment pieces in the New York Times can mitigate an unsettling sense of revulsion — which, even if tinged with a vertiginous sympathy and sorrow, still rivals my mother’s disgust at her daughter’s “shacking up”.

These deaths are the predictable result of political failure. For decades, politicians have been hooked on prohibition. They have pushed the idea that use of illicit drugs should be punished and persisted with suggestions they can stifle flows of heroin, cocaine and cannabis, rather than accepting there is strong demand and focusing on harm reduction. The absurdity of their stance is exposed by the failure to keep even top-security prisons free of drugs, while on the streets prices fall, purity rises and new synthetic drugs arrive. This is, after all, a country with 11,000 miles of coast that sees 500m tonnes of goods a year move through its ports — yet total annual consumption of cocaine could fit in a solitary shipping container.

The legacy of such political irresponsibility is seen in these grim fatality figures. Our leaders outsourced the drug markets to criminal gangs, which rely on violence and grooming of young recruits to dominate their lucrative trade. There is, of course, no quality control on the content or strength of their wares. So forget all that Tory talk of levelling up, given the devastating impact of these policies on poorer parts of society. In England, the highest rate of fatalities is found in the north east, three times higher than further down the coast before the pandemic. In Scotland, epicentre for this whirlwind of misery, hospitalisation rates for drug-related incidents are reportedly 16 times higher in low-income areas than more prosperous parts.

The data is even more dispiriting when you probe prohibitionist policies. It is 50 years since signing of the Misuse of Drugs Act, which banned possession, supply, manufacture, import and export of controlled drugs — arguably the most damaging piece of legislation passed by parliament in recent decades. Since then, the number of heroin users in England and Wales has risen 25-fold, according to analysis by Transform Drug Policy Foundation, while drug-related deaths have soared more than 30-fold. The fatality rate in Scotland is ten times the average across Europe — and it has more than doubled over the past five years. Half of our homicides are also linked to drugs (along with half the acquisitive crimes and rough sleepers).

Could there be a more damning indictment of failure than all these corpses? Yet politicians cut support for treatment centres, pushed abstinence and kept pandering to fear with disastrous consequences. In Scotland, much of the rise in fatalities is down to use of benzodiazepines. Media hysteria led to tightening of the rules on legal prescriptions, which choked the supply routes for people abusing these drugs and thus incentivised criminals to develop the market for ultra-cheap, high-potency street benzos − the “blues” behind much of the horrifying carnage north of the border.

Or take events in parts of northern England after police targeted the cutting agents used by cocaine dealers to pad out their products and hike profits. Yes, this led to successful prosecutions of people found in illicit possession of large quantities of benzocaine, a mild anaesthetic used by dentists. But the result was simply a sharp rise in the purity of cocaine sold on the streets of places such as Manchester. Prices also plunged at the same time from about £45,000 a kilo to £30,000 a kilo, according to the charity Release, due to increased production in Latin America. This is close to half the £55,000 cost of a wholesale kilo 12 years ago on official figures, indicating significant rise in supplies.

“The drugs market is resilient and increased money for policing, increased busts and increased prosecutions do little to disrupt the trade,” said Niamh Eastwood, executive director of Release. “Even when borders have shut across the world in the pandemic it had little effect on the supply chains. This is a business that adapts fast, so as the government lauds the success of law enforcement closing down so-called county lines, new supply models are developed. We need new thinking, we need to start exploring decriminalisation and we need regulation of these substances.”

Suggested reading

Why I regret my war on drugs

By Charles Falconer

She is right. The war on drugs has been a dismal failure — as shown by the government’s own reports. These admit Britain has the highest number of cocaine and high-risk opioid users in Europe, disclosing that there has been rising cocaine use over the past decade with recent hikes “clear in most age groups” and purity at highest levels on record due to “increased availability’. A 2017 review of strategy revealed central government spent £1.6bn on enforcement, yet “drug seizures… had little impact on availability” although there were “potential unintended consequences…such as violence related to drug markets”.  Even the biggest of drug busts barely dent supplies or costs on the streets, as many cops will admit.

It is estimated the “harms” cost England an astonishing £19.3bn a year, mainly due to crime and health. Yet Boris Johnson, unveiling a package of rehashed crime policies last week to look strong for his red wall voters, misleads the public with continuing pretence that we can beat the “scourge” of drugs. His ministers talk of “tough law enforcement” and win headlines for “cracking down” on recreational use with more testing after arrests. They claim this will “challenge drug misuse, reduce demand and change the perceived acceptability of using illicit drugs”, while a cross-government summit will “drive down demand for illegal drugs”.

I doubt cartel bosses and drug barons are quaking with fear over Johnson’s drug bash. In truth, it is bordering on criminal to see politicians stick to their bungling stance as the death toll mounts. Yet there are signs that behind the tough talk, the state’s backfiring drug war stance is starting to crumble. Both Scottish and English governments are putting a bit more cash into treatment while two key parliamentary committees have called for drug decriminalisation. “We recommend a radical change in UK drugs policy from a criminal justice to a health approach,” said the health and social care committee. “A harm reduction approach would not only benefit those who are using drugs but reduce the costs for their wider communities.”

Many frustrated police forces, fed up with wasting resources, are simply pressing ahead with “diversion schemes”. Avon and Somerset, North Wales, Thames Valley and West Midlands were among the first to follow the successful lead of Durham in seeking to slash reoffending rates and save costs by offering drug education or treatment as an alternative to arrest, cautioning or prosecution for people caught in possession. At least eight more have followed suit, with Scotland among others developing schemes. “You could call this de facto decriminalisation,” said Steve Rolles, senior policy analyst for Transform. “But that word seems problematic for this government because of worries it is seen as being soft on drugs.”

Rolles pointed out, however, that these strategies are winning ministerial plaudits and were backed by this month’s Black review into drug strategies. But surely it is unacceptable to have a postcode lottery that sees one person caught with a small stash of drugs end up in prison with a criminal record, while another sits through talks learning about harm reduction? Not to mention the inflammatory racial bias seen in police stop and search efforts focused on drugs. “We need to stop people going to prison for drugs since it is the wrong place for those people with problems,” said Professor David Nutt, the former government drugs adviser.

Suggested reading

The truth about 'Woke Coke'

By Max Daly

Nutt was sacked in 2009 by the New Labour government for daring to tell the truth about cannabis, ecstasy and LSD being less harmful to public health than alcohol and tobacco. Since then, cheap potent, synthetic drugs such as fentanyl and mephedrone have arrived on our shores. But both big parties remain terrified of talking honestly to voters about drugs, although the few MPs breaking ranks have found the public in a more progressive place than they anticipated. Meanwhile there is increasing interest in Portugal, which 20 years ago this month showed a way out of the drug morass under the leadership of António Guterres, now United Nations secretary general.

Portugal acted out of desperation at a rising death toll. It had high levels of heroin use at the turn of the century, hundreds of deaths, highest rates of HIV infection in the European Union and prison cells filled with people sentenced for drug offences.

“It was almost impossible to find a family in Portugal that did not have drug-related problems,” said João Goulão, architect of their reforms. So they decriminalised drug possession, focused on health rather than punishment, shifted from abstinence-based campaigns and flipped funds into treatment. The result is shown in the latest annual data for drug-related deaths: 62 fatalities in a population twice the size of Scotland.

This is a spectacular turnaround. Now Portugal has among the lowest drug-related death rates in Europe, along with some of the lowest levels of use among younger generations. There is still a bedrock of high-risk opioid users, although numbers have fallen significantly and habits tend to be less problematic. It remains illegal to deal drugs. But those found with small quantities for personal use are sent before a local commission — typically a doctor, lawyer and social worker — to be told about support services. “We do not focus on drug problems but any issues people might have in their lives that lead to drug use,” said Goulão. “This is the key to our success. No one ends up in prison with a criminal record and stigma.”

Other countries have also seen the light, such as the Czech Republic and Spain. If Britain had followed similar policies, thousands of lives might have been saved. And these deaths should not be dismissed: they are a symbol of collective societal failures as well as a sign of lethal political stupidity. It has been shown time and again how the hallucination of prohibition can have perverse consequences by fuelling death, innovation and sales rather than depressing demand. So let us stop pretending another bust, another crackdown and another poor sod with mental health struggles being sent to prison is going to stop the use of drugs. Portugal shows there is a path forward that is cheaper, kinder and safer for everyone — as well as more honest about human nature. So why not level up with the electorate?

This wave of assaults last week marked the end of phase one of  ‘Project Python’, a previously-secret mission to confront one of Mexico’s most terrifying drug cartels. It led to the capture of more than 600 people linked to the gang. “They promise hope and they deliver despair,” one Drug Enforcement Administration official told a receptive journalist. Agents boasted they’d seized 20,000 kilograms of drugs along with $22m in cash and other assets.

Their target had been the Jalisco New Generation (JNG) cartel, a gang that stands out for its hideous savagery even by the debased standards of the Mexican drug war. It is led by Nemesio ‘El Mencho’ Cervantes, a former police officer with a $10m bounty on his head, whose bodyguards once shot down a military helicopter to prevent his arrest. His moustachioed face stares down from billboards across California, as the authorities appeal for help in re-capturing a shadowy figure once jailed for three years in San Francisco on drug charges.

This highly-disciplined character leads a group that has used appalling violence to become probably the world’s key trafficker of heroin, fentanyl, cocaine and crystal meth; it controls at least one-third of the lucrative United States market. Using extortion, kidnapping, torture and murder it has muscled in on several other key sectors of the Mexican economy, from farming to mining — as I saw for myself last month, while visiting the state of Michoacán.

Cervantes was born here 54 years ago, one of six boys in a poor family of avocado farmers. I was there to report on how the drug cartels have muscled on production of the fruit as a new source of cash. Initially, they used avocado farming as a way to launder their mountains of money, but soon found it had become as lucrative as heroin, thanks to growing demand from Western consumers. Mexico grows almost half the avocados sold globally — and most of its ‘green gold’ comes from Michoacán.

Suggested reading

2017: when the US woke up to its drugs shame

By Ian Birrell

This fertile state was already at the core of cartel operations. I was staying in Uruapan, home to a club where five decapitated heads were rolled across the dance floor in 2006, in a move which kick-started Mexico’s war on drugs. The day I arrived, 11 bodies were found in a shallow grave. The following day, as I walked to my hotel, I stumbled across the scene of a mass shooting that had left nine teenagers dead. Soon after my departure, another farmer was kidnapped from his avocado orchard and killed, then 24 more corpses were discovered nearby with several of them showing signs of torture.

It is like the Wild West. Farmers speak of being extorted, indigenous people are armed with semi-automatic weapons to protect forests, trucks are hijacked daily and even taco sellers pay protection money. One journalist described fleeing the country after being summoned by a cartel chief who said he would pay $50,000 a month to have his public image improved. Vigilantes ran one town, boasting of having 2,000 weapons to protect 15,000 people. Police are distrusted since many are in the pay of cartels. Yet corruption is complex: as one source explained to me, often officers don’t have any choice, since if they refuse to help the gangs they — or their children — are killed.

The beautiful but brutalised state depicts with stark clarity the impact of the global war on drugs. Uruapan is in the midst of a vicious struggle for supremacy between JNG and a local cartel called Los Viagras (so called after the spikily-erect hair of one of its founders). Last year, the Jalisco mob strung up nine bodies from a bridge alongside a banner threatening Los Viagras, with 10 more corpses — many dismembered — left on the road below in a macabre show of force. To fight them is to attempt to cut heads off a hydra, as local leaders shift loyalties and new groups spring up. One source sent me a list of 20 different gangs contesting the terrain while the state’s security director told me the cartels have 200,000 members in Michoacán alone.

This huge figure puts the US arrest of 750 JNG goons in grim perspective. Now consider the cause of this spiralling violence in Mexico, which last year left 35,000 people dead in its worst year for murder since records began. For the emergence of this cartel highlights how criminal gangs descend into increasing barbarity as they battle to control illicit markets. JNG has filled a void left by the capture of Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, which weakened his powerful Sinaloa cartel. Typical of their depraved tactics was an incident five years ago in which dynamite was taped to a man and his son, then detonated — with the execution filmed on the sicario’s phone.

Suggested reading

When will politicians quit the war on drugs?

By Ian Birrell

The unintended consequence of taking out Guzman, who was jailed in the US last year, was the ending of a period of comparative peace that one analyst called ‘Pax Sinaloa’. His removal unleashed a fight for supremacy in which someone even more sinister seems to have triumphed —namely El Mencho, who oversees smuggling operations today on every continent.

The escalation of violence is a familiar story. We have seen the same thing here in Britain. Neil Woods, a former undercover cop, detailed in two superb books how risking his life for public safety made minimal impact on stopping the flow of drugs. He witnessed over his career a spiral of savagery as crooks fought to control the trade, the spoils of victory going to the most violent among them.

This partly explains the disturbing rise in knife crime in Britain, which in turn is associated with county line supply models that exploit vulnerable children to sell drugs. Politicians, though, continue to push the same old failed drug polices, which only inflame the violence — from Manchester to Mexico.

Meanwhile, we are seeing a surge in stronger synthetic drugs which are harder to detect and can be more dangerous. History has shown how prohibition fosters potency, from the days of moonshine replacing beer a century ago in the US through to skunk replacing milder cannabis more recently on our streets. Stronger products mean smaller quantities for smuggling and bigger margins. It is noticeable that JNG first emerged from Jalisco, Mexico’s centre for such products. Now, this gang is trafficking vast quantities of methamphetamine and fentanyl across the US, where the drugs are fuelling homelessness and addiction.

Suggested reading

Why the drugs don't work

By Tom Chivers

Ironically, one reason these cartels moved into avocados is the recent fall in the price of heroin due to the emergence of new rivals, especially in Asia. Another reason has been the legalisation of cannabis in Canada, parts of the US and, effectively, in Mexico, which has cut off another supply of illegal cash. But this shift has happened too late to stop the cartels from becoming so strong they have corroded their country. And in any case the rise in the synthetic drug demand is filling that gap. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a veteran socialist and close friend of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, won power two years ago by promising to end violence with focus on the economy and a policy of “abrazos, no balazos“ (hugs not bullets). But the economy has stagnated, despite the avocado boom, and violence worsened.

Uttam Dhillon, acting head of the DEA, boasted after the raids last week that his team had carried out “one of the largest, concentrated actions against a single criminal organisation in many years”. He argued that the arrests would have “significant impact” since they were inhibiting the cartel’s ability “to regenerate and to continue to threaten our communities with their deadly drugs”. It’s nonsense. He should listen to his own agents who say that El Mencho is a far more deadly foe than his predecessors with his extreme use of terror and violence — and he should question why the murder and mayhem grows worse for all the DEA’s noble efforts.

However, as is often the case, he succumbed to the curious allure of the substance he was peddling: heroin.

“Are you not aware of the damage the drug causes?” I ask, perhaps glibly, keen to hear how he now justifies selling the drug to vulnerable people, like young mothers and the homeless. He pauses briefly, locating what, to him at least, feels like an appropriate, face-saving response: “I never took heroin until I was 27. I went through a heavy withdrawal.”

The withdrawal associated with heroin and, indeed, all opiates, is brutal and unforgiving. Indeed, the phrase “kicking-the-habit” refers to the physical agony of going cold-turkey, where addicts become emotionally and physically excruciated as the substance makes its long, painful retreat from their tortured minds and bodies, forcing them to kick-out involuntarily, as if convulsing.

Serious heroin addicts with a high tolerance for the drug become trapped in the hellish cycle of scoring drugs to escape withdrawal symptoms, which isn’t cheap. This is why criminality becomes a necessity for many.

This bone-chilling fear of withdrawal trumps the shame of social exclusion, the indignity of prison and the permanence of death. The need to pursue the next fix, at the cost of all else, leaves many drug-abusers physically and morally disfigured.

Suggested reading

My social mobility shame

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

Only when contending with that reality, does my 50-year-old drug-dealing friend’s rationalisation for peddling smack sound a little more believable. Having gone through a ‘rattle’ — slang for withdrawal — he, in his own words, “knew how much these people needed it”.

It’s broad-daylight in the heart of this bustling post-industrial community. Another two men loiter behind a pair of battered phone-boxes which partly shield them from the glare of a busy high street. They’re here to score. It’s not even tea-time and nobody anywhere is battling an eye-lid. The police-station round the corner will close shortly, not that it will make a difference. Here, even the cops have all but accepted that drugs and their attendant miseries are inevitable.

Scotland has a proud pioneering history. We brought the world antibiotics, telecommunications and a paradigm-shifting enlightenment. But we also lead the way in delusional hubris, and finger-pointing. In Scotland our successes are our own, but our failures — and they are many — are usually someone else’s fault. And by far the greatest blemish on our storied history in recent times is the collective abandonment of the most vulnerable, persecuted and excluded group in our society: drug-addicts.

Data recently published has revealed that in Scotland, drug-related deaths rose by a shameful 27% last year to 1,187. That means the death-toll in Scotland was equivalent to five Lockerbie bombings or fifty 7/7s. It is nearly three times that of the UK as a whole, and, per capita, the drug death rate in Scotland is higher than that of the U.S. Yet no national emergency has been declared.

Suggested reading

The even more deadly hurricane surging across America

By Ian Birrell

In 1996, an e-coli outbreak, which affected 200 people and caused 21 deaths, led to a public inquiry which produced a damning report placing blame on a Wishaw butcher and council health officials. But in 2019, with tens-of-thousands hooked on drugs and 1,187 dead last year, there is quite simply no accountability. The buck stops nowhere.

In Scotland, the drug-problem is now out of control. Much like a fire that leaps from one structure to another, it has taken on a life of its own. It is now self-sustaining, independent of the conditions that caused it.

And the cause has baffled many. Myself included. It may be attributable to a number of factors, including the sharp managed-decline of the industries around which many working-class communities formerly cohered. The mechanisms by which they once lifted themselves out of poverty were sacrificed on the altar of the free-market and replaced with Frankie and Benny’s, American-style shopping malls, casinos and, in Dundee (the drug-death capital) a world-leading design museum — partly funded by the billionaires implicated in the U.S. opioid crisis.

Drug-related deaths, like untreated disease and violence, beget drug-related deaths. Much like flowers that drop seeds before wilting, those who perish in such sordid, undignified and often terrifying ways, don’t serve as warnings to others; instead, they become martyrs of sorts. They are mourned, not just by their families, but by those they with whom they sought and used the drugs that killed them.

Opiates such as heroin, diazepam, methadone and morphine are implicated, but by far the most consequential development in recent years has been the rise of counterfeit versions of prescription benzodiazepines, such as etizolam (street Valium) as well as cheap, deadly imitations of the popular American anti-anxiety drug, Xanax.

Suggested reading

Why I regret my war on drugs

By Charles Falconer

My theory is that the drug problem is worse in Scotland for the same reason the drink, cigarette and life-expectancy problems are worse: the severity of deindustrialisation was that much more acute north of the border because we lacked the political autonomy to mitigate its impact in context-specific ways. Then again, I’m not an academic. Maybe it’s just the weather that’s killing everyone.

A compounding factor is the panic that grips those communities of drug-users who can’t go a day-or-two without hearing another story about someone who’s died. Thanks to a largely useless mainstream media (with a few notable exceptions), drug-abusers are invariably portrayed as vulgar, selfish and feckless individuals, whose problems are entirely self-generated. The notion that they may actually care about each other and, indeed, take care of one another, has thus far, eluded the public conscience. But drug-takers survive by moving in tight-knit communities, bonded by the acute and constant social-exclusion they endure.

Every time one addict is found dead, the others grieve. They sense too that they might be next. They feel that society has all but abandoned them. Socially excluded, bastardised by the public and misunderstood by many who wish to help them, what is there to live for? And so they do what we all do when terrible things happen: they reach for whatever numbs the pain. And so the fire spreads, tearing through entire families and communities, leaving death and despair in its wake.

Back on the street corner, as the men candidly regale me with their tales of drug addiction, the self-abuser in me begins to feel nostalgic about my past drug-use — a sign of the insanity that defines the condition of addiction. I drift into a day-dream about that half Temazepam from years ago, that I should have just swallowed before the police got their hands on me. “What a waste”, I think to myself, able to recall its sweet taste and chalky texture in my mouth.

Also known as benzos, eggs, norries, rugby balls, vallies, moggies, mazzies, roofies or downers, tranquilisers came in different forms. One was a small egg-shaped pill, soft to touch, not dissimilar to the texture of a Kiwi fruit. The other, a thick, white, chalky tablet.

Suggested reading

The absurdity of legalising drugs

By Peter Franklin

They start to take effect between about 20 and 40 minutes after swallowing, at which point a euphoric lethargy washes through mind and body. You are not tired, but should you close your eyes, you would appear to be asleep. Falling asleep after the drug has taken hold, though, would be a terrible waste of its pleasant effects.

Staying awake is also important because it can be terribly hard to wake up out of a tranquilised sleep. And physically getting up is quite the chore. Limbs are heavy against whichever surface you are rested upon. A hard floor becomes a soft bed.

The constant physical tensions you often mistake as natural mannerisms (a furrowing brow, a tapping toe, or an incessant nail-picking finger) begin to leave the body, joining an exodus of unintentional scowls, facial twitches and stomach butterflies. You feel heavy, but the extra weight is offset by your lack of desire to move.

Should you wish to speak, you may notice your voice is noticeably quieter — not because it is being suppressed, but because it returns to its natural level; it is no longer inhibited by the physical stress placed on the voice-box, which so often modulates the tone and volume of your speech. Words come a little easier, especially for those who struggle to make conversation because they second guess themselves.

You listen more actively and are usually more considered and sensitive in your response. It’s hard to know if it improves how you communicate, or whether you are just less concerned about communicating badly. You may also suddenly feel capable of articulating precisely that which you so often struggle to express. Words that have failed, eluded and embarrassed you, become your keen and humble affiliates – or perhaps this is a lack of concern for how much nonsense you are really talking.

These are called tranquilisers for a good reason. They induce a peace, serenity and sense of well-being that is difficult for even the most prolific and articulate drug-abusers to describe.

To the uninitiated, such a drug may hold an alluring curiosity. “How do the dealers come up with this stuff?” you may ask. But this drug is not the vulgar concoction of illicit dealers, it is a pharmaceutical-grade, state-approved chemical-compound. And one which was so widely prescribed by GPs in the Nineties, that addicts have been chasing its effects ever since.

Suggested reading

Sadiq Khan, the knife-crime fall guy

By James Bloodworth

That’s why, even though drug-abuse is so often framed as an issue for the feckless individual, we must also consider why and how these substances are created — and how thoughtlessly (and sometimes malignantly) they are introduced into society.

What risk-assessments were undertaken before drugs such as methadone, diazepam and tranquillisers were introduced through the NHS? Beyond the risk-benefit analysis on the individuals being legally prescribed them, what other factors were taken into consideration? When drugs are road-tested for approval, their broader social-implications are rarely contemplated.

There is a long-established pattern of drugs being developed and introduced into society through pharmacies and healthcare-systems before later being withdrawn because of their negative social impact. An impact which cannot be predicted when the chemicals are tested on rabbits and rats.

In 1895, for example, the German drug manufacturer Bayer marketed diacetylmorphine (an opiate) as an over-the-counter cough-suppressant under the brand-name Heroin. Yes, you read that correctly. Heroin was developed as a morphine substitute but despite being marketed as “non-addictive” it wasn’t long before it scored some the highest rates of addiction among those who used it.

Fast-forward to the opioid crisis in the United States where over-prescription more than 30 years ago claimed the lives of over 200,000 Americans between 1999 and 2016. The United States is home to 5% of the world’s population but currently accounts for 80% of all opioid use. Again, those communities devastated by 21^st-century deindustrialisation are the ones more adversely affected – with the opioid-crisis rising sharply in the period of economic-decline between 2001 and 2009.

Where the U.S. led, Scotland followed. Research published by Scottish Universities in 2018 found that 18% of the Scottish population was prescribed at least one opioid painkiller in 2012 and that “there were four times more prescriptions for strong opioids dispensed to people in the most deprived areas, than to those in the most affluent areas”. Every bit of data available points to a large increase in the prescription of addictive painkillers like co-codamol and tramadol over the last 10-years in the very communities where people are dying.

Suggested reading

Why I like my politicians to be hypocrites

By Giles Fraser

The drug-crisis may be framed as an issue about dangerous cocktails of counterfeit drugs, but many of the illegal substances on the market today, the ones linked most often to the drug-deaths, are simply amateur attempts to mimic the effects of state-approved substances which were either withdrawn or restricted — once the damage was done. Also, people who become dependent on pain pills may switch to heroin because it is less expensive. In 2016, the National Institute on Drug Abuse in America estimated that nearly half of young people who inject heroin turned to the street drug after abusing prescription painkillers.

The fake drugs are dangerous because nobody can ever be sure what’s in them. State-approved drugs are dangerous because when over-prescribed, they increase the likelihood of addiction and tolerance and therefore the demand for drugs rises — including the fake ones. While America is now doing something about the scourge, what are we doing in Scotland? The Scottish government has cut funding for Alcohol and Drug Partnerships by 6.3% since 2014/15.

Which brings me to my final point. The risk of addiction rises in areas of deprivation for a multitude of reasons. There is interplay between the prescription of drugs for health problems and the subsequent uptake of addictions. This is as true of treatment for physical pain as it is for anxiety and depression. It is also commonplace for people to take drugs that were not actually for them.

Analysis by the BBC suggests around 2.3 million people in England took a prescription painkiller that was not prescribed to them in 2016-17 alone, which means we can be sure it’s going on in Scotland. My drug problems actually started when my gran gave me a painkiller to help me sleep when I was a teenager. Within a week, I was dipping into the medicine cabinet.

Suggested reading

America's other drug epidemic

By Peter Franklin

In poorer communities, ill-health is more commonplace, increasing both the likelihood of treatment and the risk that a patient (or someone in the household taking the drugs) may become dependent. Society is awash with psychoactive substances in an age of chronic emotional and psychological stress. Increasing numbers are turning to drugs designed to treat chronic physical pain and mental health problems to self-medicate the emotional pain, stress and anxiety of poverty and social alienation.

Put simply, without serious action on social-inequality, drug-related death and despair are inevitable. If we want to make a serious impact on this matter, we must be prepared to analyse the environments in which addictive behaviours are likelier to emerge.

For some, the social conditions are so miserable, the addiction so severe, and the range of options available so few, that injecting a dirty needle into the groin, despite already having had a leg amputated, seems like a reasonable solution. When that’s your threshold for pain, popping a few tablets is merely a formality.

Back on the street corner, one man is bloated and jaundiced, his black, sunken eyes disappearing into a weathered yet expressionless face. “You have a choice before you take it”, he says, “but after you’ve tried it the choice is gone.” The others nod knowingly as do I, before they break into a discussion about addiction, each recounting their experiences of drug misuse in a manner suggesting they are all, in their own way, resigned to its permanence.

I tell them I have never tried heroin, and they all warn me to keep it that way. Even though they have only just met me, because I have showed them a modicum of respect, they have a genuine concern for my well-being. For in their world of addiction, crime and social-exclusion, telling someone never to try heroin is an act of purest love.