What made this journey a little more notable was the accompaniment of a man acting, well, seriously strangely. As I sat under the aluminium canopy on Platform 2 (why oh why did they build the ‘waiting room’ on the platform to Sutton?!) idling away the minutes, a gentlemen with a weird walk and a bag of some sort of vegetable came and sat unnervingly close to me. There was no one else under the canopy at this time, so I was naturally repulsed at having such close human company without prior consultation.
He looked at me quite intensely while I pretended, badly, that I didn’t even realise he was there. He then started to find me extremely amusing, in a horror story sort of way. I really don’t look that funny, I promise. He reached into his bag, picked out a stringy green vegetable thing and started chewing on it. He looked at me again, laughed again, and repeated until the train finally turned up. It truly seemed to take an eternity.
I naturally boarded a different carriage and looked forward to a journey of solitude. At Tulse Hill the, our first stop, we were treated to a five minute wait. The train had performed too well and we all needed to be punished for it. After a couple of minutes I noticed my new friend writhing around on a bench in a fit of uncontrollable giggles. He had a stringy vegetable in his hand, half chewed. I know how to get into that state. I’ve done it. And it required drugs.
Although I never trained as a detective, I knew enough to know that he had been chewing khat, a vegetable that is chewed and a drug used commonly in the Somalian community (my new friend was of north African origin). I thought nothing of it, except that it looked like rather good fun.
By a somewhat remarkable coincidence, later that day I saw a tweet from my local MP, Chuka Umunna:
“Do you think the substance khat (which some people smoke) should be banned?”
Turns out Chuka had brought the subject up in parliament. I don’t know much about khat, but I do know about the harms of banning substances.
It is astonishing, that in 2010, we are still banning substances. Is government really so stupid as to think that banning substances does anything at all to address the social harm they bring? Is there any evidence what so ever that suggests that the prohibition of drugs in this country (not to mention America…) has dealt with the associated problems. Quite the opposite. The drugs trade in this country is riddled with gangs, and kids are killing kids on our streets as a result. And, god forbid, the middle classes are having their houses burgled by drug addicts trapped in an underworld. It really does make me quite angry.
Its not like there isn’t a precedent for thinking differently about drugs. Holland has been doing it for years (although worryingly the swing to the right in Dutch politics is looking as regressive as a ConDem budget). Less publicised are the decisions by both the Swiss and the Portugese governments to decriminalise drugs, soft and hard, in their respective countries. They are thinking differently. My controlling the distribution of drugs you stand a far better chance of dealing with the issues. It’s a free market in the drug trade. The government should be the Tesco of this market and kill off the shady late night convenience stores. I’m serious. Banning drugs doesn’t work. Period. If you are in any doubt have a walk round Brixton.
Lets not go down the road of banning Khat. Instead the government should try and understand its users, and the harms that the drug brings. But don’t for a second think that making a substance illegal deals with the issue. It simply criminalises a whole section of society who are already on the periphery in so many respects. They will carry on chewing khat. Like so many carry on with cannabis, cocaine, ecstacy, crack etc. Its time to think differently.
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