China and drug law executions

On 29th December 2009, Akmal Shaikh, a British citizen, was executed by the Chinese authorities by means of lethal injection. Mr Shaikh had been in custody since 2007, when he was arrested for carrying 4 kilos of heroin into China. Despite last minute appeals for clemency by his family and the British government, and protests from around the world, China has stubbornly defended its actions and its independent right to punish as it sees fit.


There’s a colonial and imperial background to this: in China, the memory of the opium trade from British India, which was carried on against the express wish of the Chinese government, and against Chinese law, is still fresh, along with the “Treaty Ports” system that allowed the writ of European law to run in Chinese centres of maritime trading.

In this context, one might expect that intervention on the part of the United Nations would have been more effective. However, Professor Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on summary and extra-judicial executions, wrote to the Chinese asking them to explain the rationale behind Mr Shaikh’s sentence, pointing out that he suffered from a mental illness. His letter was ignored.

This intervention from the UN is welcome. However, the stream of rhetoric coming from the UN drugs agencies, as well as from British and other politicians around the world, helps to maintain the climate that is used to justify the execution. The Chinese embassy in London stated that, “The amount of heroin he brought into China was 4,030g, enough to cause 26,800 deaths, threatening numerous families.” The question of mental illness aside, China regularly executes people for drugs crimes, and the extreme and exaggerated account of the danger that drugs pose lies at the root of the reasoning involved. The ‘War on Drugs’ may be a rhetorical device, but the bodies are real.

Cannabis, Skunk and Psychosis

Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry in London have published a study looking at the impact of cannabis use on psychosis, which has been a hot political topic in recent years. The research had a specific focus on high-potency, “skunk” varieties of the drug. It compared patients admitted to hospital with first episodes of psychosis with a group of people from the nearby community. There were no differences between the two groups in terms of the proportions of their ever having used cannabis or age at first use. However, amongst the cannabis users, patients with psychosis were nearly seven times as likely to smoke the high potency skunk varieties as the second group. Researchers suggest that the apparent greater risk involved in the use of skunk is linked to its higher THC content and low cannabidiol (CBD) content, two of the main chemicals in the drug. In the traditional resin hash preferred by the control group, levels of THC averaged at 3.4%, with similar levels of cannabidiol. Skunk, by contrast, contains 12-18% THC and 1.5% CBD. It appears that cannabidiol may help to protect against psychosis.

The lead researcher, Dr Di Forti said, “Our study is the first to demonstrate that the risk of psychosis is much greater among people who are frequent cannabis users, especially among those using skunk, rather than among occasional users of traditional hash.” It is unclear whether the researchers are suggesting that heavy skunk use causes psychosis, or whether there is merely a correlation, in which case it may be that those already troubled by symptoms of mental illness are using stronger varieties of cannabis to alleviate symptoms. What is clear is that production of the skunk varieties has been driven by commercial factors in an unregulated market where profit is the sole governing principle.

Cocaine Purity impacts on drug trends

Release is concerned about the impact that low purity cocaine will have on the drug scene in general. The staff on the drugs team, who regularly provide expert testimony at Court, are increasingly seeing cases involving large cocaine seizures where purity can be as low as 3%-4% purity and is on average about 15%. The cost of purchasing on the street is about £40 per gram.

As such many long term recreational stimulant users are not purchasing coke – this is confirmed by calls on the Release National Helpline. Whilst it could be argued that this decrease in purity could be linked to successful law enforcement it is more likely that greed is the real motivator behind this change. Often cocaine powder is being stamped and re-stamped into blocks, being continuously cut, so that the numbing effect traditionally associated with cocaine is now more often the benzocaine or lignocaine used as cutting agents.

Gary Sutton, Head of Drugs at Release states: ‘In my opinion, it is an effect of the recession that we have experienced a lengthening of the supply chain as cocaine passes through more hands from importer to consumer. In a situation not unfamiliar to viewers of ‘The Wire’ we are beginning to see that as benefits become less available to young people and as the availability of work constricts that selling cocaine is seen by as an attractive alternative to unemployment or a MacJob’.

This drop in purity may mean some people are choosing to use other drugs such as Ketamine; mephedrone and other various legal highs. However, it likely that weak cocaine will open the way for methamphetamine – and we will finally witness what has been predicted for years. Not because it is the natural next step in drug use patterns but because when supplies of one drug dry up, people will generally seek out an alternative and, unfortunately, in most cases this will involve a drug that causes much greater harm.

Fear of Music

Release has always had a close relationship with drugs and music. When the organization began, in the heady days of the 1960s (a “more generous decade”, as Leonard Cohen has observed, when it seemed that the world really could be changed by the youth), Release was funded by the counter culture. In practice, that meant largely by rock stars; there were lots of high profile donations, and venues would even put a “tax” on the door so that the bands and audiences who were using the drugs were the ones that paid for Release services: help with bad trips, health and welfare problems and, especially, drug busts. With finances thus secure, Release could even turn down offers of funding by the Home Office, which, to its credit, recognized that the service was worthwhile and deserved government money. My, how the times have changed.

Enough of this wistful sighing. Release aside, the wider point is that there has been a long relationship between drugs and popular music: indeed, it goes far back beyond the 60s. And, of course, it still features big in the media today. As the Mail Online put it yesterday:

“Singer Joss Stone has been condemned for glamorising drugs after an astonishing diatribe in which she claimed cannabis is less harmful than alcohol.”

Hmmm, sounds familiar. Doesn’t this put Joss Stone into the honoured company of Professor David Nutt, with whom we launched ourselves into the Blogosphere last week? Or perhaps the other way around? Either way, the Mail is filled once more with a righteous wrath, commenting that the 22 year-old singer has “enraged anti-drug campaigners” and added that her remarks may be seen in the context of her desire to stump up publicity for her new album. She went on, we are told, to dismiss the dangers of cannabis, in spite of the fact that ministers upgraded the drug’s legal classification from C to B last year. Whatever her motivation, she too seems to have been sending out the wrong message. In another echo of the Nutt affair, David Raynes of the National Drugs Prevention Alliance remarked, “People like Joss Stone should keep their mouths shut about things like this.” Right then.

Since jazz music first appeared in the dance clubs of Soho in the early twentieth century, provoking fears of sexual primitivism and the madness of dancing women, racial interbreeding and the swamping of national identity (yes, all the old favourites), drugs and music have been entwined in the passion of the cultural imagination. Jazz and blues singers smoked marijuana and took cocaine; as the century progressed they became associated with heroin use—and it’s true, a lot of the bebop jazzers believed the drug helped them play. Maybe it did. In the 1950s, the large scale immigration of West Indians into the UK led to new fears, especially when white girls appeared to be drawn to their shadowy all-night clubs, their rhythms and their reefers, their reportedly outsized anatomical adaptations. Cannabis was the symbol of all this. For the authorities it was a fearful thing, to be repressed. For the youth, a marker of new experiences and a promise of exciting social freedoms.

Drugs, it would seem, are made of symbolism as much as they are made of chemicals. It is this symbolic struggle which is still being played out in contemporary culture. And while drugs are associated with music, itself an element of a libertarian popular culture that celebrates drug experience, no amount of “education” is going to stop people using them.

Release blog will return to the relationship of drugs and music in the near future.

Been through the desert on a horse with no brain?

The affair of David Nutt’s sacking has prompted widespread debate. The injustice of the dismissal is, therefore, balanced by the opportunities it has provided to push the boundaries of the conversation that UK society is having with itself about the direction of drug policy and the factors driving it. The new Release blog launches itself onto an unsuspecting world in a week in which discussions about drugs are going on beyond the usual circle of policy nerds, journalists and evasive politicians. One topic of interest lies in an area that is customarily held to be somewhat arcane: the relation between drug policy and evidence.

A couple of times now I’ve had the pleasure of watching Professor David Nutt, erstwhile Chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, deliver his famous or infamous lecture on Equasy—“Equine Addiction Syndrome” to give it its full title. As widely reported, the presentation takes for its theme the relative hazards of Ecstasy and horse-riding, with that time-honoured and quintessentially English pursuit of the nobility—and lest there be any confusion, I am referring here to equestrianism—standing condemned as the more dangerous of the two. This scholarly but provocative conclusion caused considerable unease amongst the ranks of our elected representatives.

To its credit, the BBC News magazine has just attempted to look further into the facts of the horse-riding plague that is spreading amongst pockets of our youth, even though they remain the better-lined ones. Lucy Higginson, editor of a publication entitled “Horse and Hound” and evidently an apologist for equestrianism, commented: “There have been quite a few fatalities in Britain over the years. Most people accept riding is a risk sport. The reward and the thrills more than make up for it.” Interestingly, the risks are acknowledged but the pleasures afforded are judged to make them worthwhile. Every weekend millions of UK citizens perform the same kind of cost-benefit calculation in relation to their drug use. “Doing an E tonight? Yes, there are risks, but the reward and the thrills more than make up for it.” But because the drugs are illegal, and those who stand guard over the moral well-being of our society are anxious about the “messages” sent to the young and the vulnerable, such considerations are frowned upon when made in the context of drugs. Professor Nutt has begun to make them, and therein lies his sin.

Approached by the BBC, Dr John Silver, a prominent consultant on spinal injuries, observed that the accidents associated with horse-riding generally result from a “mismatch between the skills of the participant and the task attempted”. Again, this is a point that is highly relevant, yet is, explicitly at least, denied entry to the policy considerations of government, and for the same sort of reasons. But the fact stubbornly remains: many, perhaps most, of those who come to grief with illegal drugs, who overdose and who unwisely mix substances—lack the skills and knowledge necessary to make their drug use relatively safe. Drugs and horses have this in common. So do cars and mountain-climbing.

This introduces another set of considerations into the equation, which do not invalidate Professor Nutt’s position, but they do problematize it. How do you make a “scientific” scale of drug harms when the harmfulness of drugs, like horses, is in part a function of the skills sets of those in the saddle? The harmfulness of a drug, like its effects, does not just reside in the molecular structure of its chemical constituents or their impact on the body’s neurological and physiological systems. Things are more complex than that: the emotional and psychological frame of reference of the consumer plays an important part, as does the social setting and its associated expectations, myths and fantasies.

The truth is that, despite its claims to be “evidence-based”, the classification system for illegal drugs functions mainly as a vehicle for the government’s beloved “messages” about the dangerousness of drugs. Professor Nutt is surely right to stand up and say so. But the notion of a purely scientific system of drug classification is itself something of an illusion, built on the reductive model of drug-effects as matters of chemistry and biology. Of course, they are matters of chemistry and biology, but they are also much, much more.