Issue 194 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published February 1996 Copyright © Socialist Review
I remember being told at school that if you smoked marijuana there was a danger that you would start hallucinating, believe you could fly and very easily kill yourself. So some time later when I actually puffed the dreaded stuff I did so with a terrible knot in my stomach, and with a mixture of disappointment and relief when it seemed to do little more than make me feel drowsy, and a bit giggly.
The teacher in question was an alcoholic, and I have often suspected since that what he was describing much more accurately was a bout of delirium tremens.
It was, however, a salutary lesson in the way in which any form of illegal drug is described in the most sensational and inaccurate form. Indeed the press is about as reliable in its coverage of drugs as it is in its coverage of Northern Ireland and the IRA.
For years it painted the IRA as trigger happy psychopaths. This was always a highly inaccurate and shallow explanation, which allowed the convenient omission of any explanation as to why the Troubles existed and why people had been forced to take to an armed struggle.
Funny then that the Provisional IRA should decide to go along with the most hysterical sections of the press, and the most hypocritical sections of the establishment, in deciding that the greatest evil of our times is drugs, and the greatest enemy is the drug dealer.
Far from funny, though, is the way it has decided to deal with these dealers. Through the front organisation (for that's clearly what it is) Direct Action Against Drugs it has embarked on a course of punishment beatings, and, even worse, killings of people they describe as 'drug barons'.
In fact their victims are far from being barons. Many live in the poorer areas of West Belfast, the most glamorous owning a fish and chip shop. In reality therefore their victims are at best local small time dealers, many of them probably users themselves selling on to finance (in the case of harder drugs) their own habits.
The 'barons' will not be living in working class areas, nor will they mix in the sort of circles that the average Provo is to be found in. Although Gerry Adams may unknowingly bump into one or two as he mixes with the great and good, rich and famous.
Shooting the local dealer is rather like shooting the local newsagent because you don't like The Sun. Of course Rupert Murdoch or the paper's editor is to blame but they're too out of reach, too well protected, so shoot the newsagent--but The Sun will still be printed tomorrow and millions will still buy it.
Still, they may argue, we are saving 'our own people' from the people who are leading them astray and into danger.
They are wrong on both counts. People take drugs not because some evil character persuades them to, but because their lives feel boring and humdrum. They want to escape the bad housing in which they live, the fact they have no job or the job they do have is boring, unrewarding, and doesn't pay enough.
In fact such is the degree of alienation in capitalist society that even sections of the better off look for escape through drugs. People take drugs for much the same reasons as others drink alcohol.
Over the last year there have been huge panics on the three occasions that someone has died as a result of taking ecstasy. In the same period how many have died as a result of drink, how many lives has drink wrecked, and how many have become drink addicts?
Just to ask the question shows the absurdity of this campaign, but let us suppose that the IRA in a fit of amnesia has decided that the key question is legality. Drink and fags are legal, therefore they must be OK--cannabis (which is what one of their victims was accused of smuggling) and ecstasy are illegal, so they're not. What then of poteen, Ireland's very own moonshine?
Poteen is illegally stilled spirit, which ranges in quality from a nice strong drink to life threatening firewater. Will the IRA be taking to the hills of rural Ireland and rooting out the poteen makers?
I think not. On one of his albums Christy Moore sings a song called 'McIlhatton', a song about a legendary poteen maker from the North of Ireland. 'Ah will we ever see his likes again?' asks the song wistfully. The song was written by... the late Bobby Sands!
Worst of all about all this is that, while the British government and the Unionists are doing their best to block the peace process and lay the blame at the door of Sinn Fein/IRA, the IRA seems hell bent on playing into the hands of those who've always argued that they were trigger happy psychopaths who terrorised their own communities.
It was never true, and they do themselves and the community they come from no favours if they go round behaving as if it is. The tactics may have been wrong, but there were good reasons why they waged war on the security services. The war they are waging now is not only a war of bad tactics, and bad targets, but a war without an iota of justification.
Pat Stack