THE forbidden fruit is always more tempting because it is not allowed - hence puffing behind the bicycle shed or swigging cider after school, all the more pleasurable because of what the grown ups would say if they found out. Presumably this argument also applies, to some extent, to the first drag of a joint or hit of heroin too. Would it all still seem so wrong if we could just go into a shop and say, "I'll have one of those joints please," and the shop assistant gave us our purchase in a paper bag?
Tim Murphy, a lecturer in Constitutional Law at UCC, believes the fact that certain psychoactive drugs are illegal is, counter productive if we want to reduce the current alarmingly high level of drug abuse. He explains why in a pamphlet, Rethinking the War on Drugs in Ireland to be published soon by Cork University Press.
Murphy believes legalising drugs would make it much easier to regulate their use, and that more dangerous, impure substances such as crack would be less likely to flourish under such regulations.
He also believes the prohibition of drugs draws many drug users into the criminal world by creating a black market. This leads to artificially inflated drug prices, which place "heavy financial burdens on regular drug users". Many turn to petty crime to fund their habit.
The illegality of drugs also results in the involvement of crime gangs in drug trafficking; Murphy points out that when alcohol was illegal in the US, murder and assault by firearm rates rose steadily. As soon as Prohibition was abolished, the rates fell for ten years.
Murphy notes that we are spending huge amounts on campaigns to prevent young people taking drugs. Yet in May 1995 it was estimated that about 50,000 Ecstasy tablets were being sold every week in Ireland. Huge amounts are also being spent on keeping those convicted of drug associated crime in prison - in 1991 it was estimated that it cost £36,000 to incarcerate a prisoner for one year.
Making a relatively innocuous drug, such as cannabis, illegal is particularly counter productive. Murphy says, in that it only succeeds in alienating the young. He quotes Janet Paraskeya, director of the British National Youth Agency, who says the prohibition on cannabis "criminalises large numbers of young people for whom drug use is problematic neither to themselves nor to society. Worse, it suggests to young people that society neither understands nor cares about their culture, thus making it difficult for youth workers to get down to the real business of drug education."
The 1991 Government Strategy here found that over 70 per cent of persons charged with drug offences in 1990 were charged with cannabis related offences.
Murphy believes drugs in themselves are not the problem. "A drug isn't going to jump up and bite you. Drug problems are people problems," he says. In 1994, the most probable profile of the problem drug user who came to a treatment centre in the greater Dublin area was that of "a young, poorly educated, unemployed male, living in a deprived area and misusing heroin." He encourages an approach that would look into the reasons behind why people take drugs - often a history of sexual abuse, or unemployment, or unmet emotional needs - in short, a desire to escape. This approach, he feels, might be a more effective remedy than the stock message that "drugs are bad" and that drug use must be prevented at all cost: "Emphasis should be shifted away from the prevention of all use to the prevention of dysfunctional use.
As for the automatic assumption that all drug use damages your health, British researchers have found a general agreement throughout the medical and psychiatric literature that the overall effects of opium, morphine, and heroin on the addict's mind and body under conditions of low price and ready availability are on the whole amazingly bland. "The physical complications frequently found in addicts are the result of unsterile injection practices, the sharing of syringes, the injection of drugs such as barbituates which were are not designed to be injected, and infection caused by contaminants found in illicitly manufactured heroin."
He notes that while Irish people are ambivalent about alcohol, often turning a blind eye to under age drinking, our fear of the unknown leads us to be far more suspicious of drugs. Yet legalisation would not necessarily mean blanket availability; there would be "restrictions and conditions on the distribution and sale of drugs". These conditions would apply differently to different drugs.
Drugs policy in the Netherlands is far more progressive than our own, he says, and more effective. Although the Dutch have not pursued a policy of legalisation, they make a distinction between soft and hard drugs: "Although the law is strictly observed as far as the manufacture of or traffic in, illicit drugs is concerned (notably hard drugs), relatively little action is taken against possession of small quantities of any drugs for personal consumption and the sale of cannabis in coffee shops is openly tolerated.
"The Dutch spend far less than the UK on law enforcement and more on services to drug users. Because possession is not a crime, the courts in the Netherlands are not clogged with offenders. Drug related crime is minimal."
Murphy is aware of the fact that taking drugs can be dangerous, especially for young people. But, in answer to the question of how young people would respond to the legalisation of drugs, he replies: "Young people are already taking drugs now, under dangerous circumstances, and getting into crime, that whole spiral." He believes that legalisation, regulation, a more open approach to education and an increase of resources for treatment - particularly at community level - are the ways forward. While he realises that the prospect of legalisation is still a remote one, he hopes the report of the Ministerial Committee on Measures to Reduce Demand for Drugs, headed by Pat Rabbitte, TD, which is due for completion today, will remain open to some of his other recommendations.