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item0063A 930, 931 930 17 February 2003
Stapleford Scandal
The Home Office is an authoritarian monster, running out of control. In drugs policy, one of the few glimmers of sanity has lain in the dispensation to the medical profession to prescribed heroin and the heroin-substitute methadone, as part of medical treatment for drug addiction. Indeed, as a campaigner for drugs legalisation, I have often had this "concession" thrown back at me in debate, and a example of the essential sensitivity of the official UK position, and its essential concern with "harm reduction". That is now shown to be a sham. The out-of-control Home Office has now arraigned seven Doctors at the distinguished addiction clinic, the Stapleford Clinic, before the General Medical Council for professional misconduct. They are all charged with the wrongful prescribing of methadone, outside the confines of Government policy. They are charged with the wrongfulness of prescribing which should never have been designated unlawful in the first place. The courageous journalist Nick Davies has exposed this wicked and destructive move this week in The Guardian. My phone has been ringing, with cries for help. The neglected ones, in this professional inquiry, are the patients. One of those patients, Ian Harris, is under treatment at the Stapleford for a long-term heroin addiction, is seeking some way of bringing their plight before the General Medical Council itself - on the grounds that the GMC decision, if unfavourable, would have direct adverse consequences for the human rights of their 200 patients. I do not know how to help them, faced with the bland insensitivity of an uncaring State, supported by an unthinking majority of its ill-informed citizens. It is difficult to believe that our society can deliberately countenance inhumanity on this scale. This is all the direct consequence of the criminalisation of drugs themselves, the awful long-term arm of American religious fundamentalism, deployed initially in 1920 by Presdient Woodrow Wilson. I find it literally incredible that, of 653 Members of our Parliament, ONLY TEN should have committed themselves publicly to the decriminalisation of drugs - see The Angel Declaration. I hold the remaining 643 guilty of failure of public duty, of culpable cowardice, sheer weak-willed pusillanimity, abject populism and the abandonment of principle. No other verdict will do. The "crime" is perpetrated by the majority upon the minority - by the majority of the population, who explicitly or implicitly uphold drugs prohibition, criminalisation. It is committed principally against the small minority who become addicted to those particular drugs that have been criminalised.
Are you prepared to make a public statement in support of drugs reform? Drop me a line, and I will publish your position
931 16 February 2004 Go Federal Everywhere one turns, the federal challenge is becoming more pointed. Northern Ireland is, at base, a problem of federalism – how to retain a disparate province within a unitary “State” framework. In Wales, the Richards Commission will soon publish its conclusions, addressing similar issues. The elected regional assemblies of England will pose new federal issues, as will the continued success of Ken Livingstone in London.
Federalism is about the integration of competing sovereignties, competing democratic mandates. It is about sharing the cake of political power. Faced with the demands of growing political and commercial integration, the 6,000m inhabitants of this small globe have no option.
Are you comfortable with "federalism"? Drop me a line
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within Russia, will be accommodated only by way of an
imaginative federal solution. In Iraq, the search is for a federal
formula which can accommodate the political aspirations of three deeply
divided “interests”. The South African state is underpinned by a range of
imaginative federal features. Germany, Canada, Australia and the United
States are already practised in the ways of federalism. The European
Union is searching for a new workable federal solution, to accommodate the
ten states due to accede on 1 May.