Читать книгу What Works: Success in Stressful Times - Hamish McRae - Страница 24

One difficulty will be obvious from the above: Switzerland has a serious cannabis problem. While the treatment of heroin addiction has been very effective, there has been less success in the treatment of softer drugs. But the bigger question mark over the Swiss experiment is the extent to which its success was down to the special circumstances of the Swiss drug problem at the beginning of the 1990s and therefore how much of this model can be replicated elsewhere.

Those circumstances included a sense of desperation and public shame. The Zurich authorities were forced to confront their failure but were also given the legal tools, backed by a national referendum, to take the tough steps as well as the soft ones. Now other places can do bits of the policies it pioneered. The treatment centres are relatively simple to transplant and prescription and administration of heroin, rather than substitutes, is easy in the sense that it merely requires legal consent.

But if the soft side is relatively easy to scale, the tough side is much harder. There is a political problem in that the places where there is a willingness to regard drug taking as a medical condition rather than a criminal one are not those where there is support for, say, holding foreigners without trial for a year. Conversely, perhaps an even bigger problem is that the places where there is support for the tough measures are unlikely to have the funds, facilities or political impetus for the medical approach. The USA, where 55 per cent of the people in federal prisons are serving time for drugs, is the obvious example of the latter.¹¹

There are also a number of ‘third rail’ issues-the ones that people are afraid to touch in case they are electrocuted. Switzerland does not have historic connections with areas with a long history of the production and transfer of hard drugs. It has a huge immigrant population, more than 20 per cent of the total, but relatively few are from Latin America, West Africa or the Caribbean.¹² So Switzerland does not feel the same need as other Western democracies to tiptoe round the racial associations of the drug trade, or indeed crime generally. Some 70 per cent of the inmates of Swiss jails are foreign-born.¹³

It is hard, then, to transplant the Swiss experience wholesale. Harder still is the chase for the greatest prize of all: having a real impact on drug demand. But that goes beyond the realms of both medical intervention and law enforcement and into marketing, psychology, brand advertising and so on. No one has yet succeeded there. Advertising can project the notion that drug taking is harmful but it has yet to succeed in convincing young people that it really is an illness. There are some elements, though, in what Zurich has achieved that point in this direction. It is not glamorous to have to make a daily appointment at a drug clinic to get one’s fix.

All our experience of drug taking through the ages is that it does not head forever in one direction. It goes in cycles. One form of drug abuse, or more broadly one set of social problems, recedes while others take its place. But well-designed policies can have an impact. We know what does not work; we know that the hands-off approach of Zurich in the 1980s did not work; it is pretty obvious that the turning of drug taking into a criminal offence, as in the USA, does not work either. The way forward must be some balance between the two extremes, and this experiment is as good an example of that as any in the world.