opinion

Stripped of our rights

I later learnt that this is actually quite common in drug-related crimes. All that is required is to get someone to sign a statement, while in police custody, and the job is done. In doing so you would have effectively incriminated yourself outside a Court of Law with the ensuing criminal proceedings little more than mere formalities.

Now of course, there must be some zealots out there who are all for these highly "efficient" methods in dealing with anything that has to do with drugs. After all, the young man did say that he had smoked pot, didn’t he? And that is also the reason that dealing with the drug problem has been dubbed "the war on drugs". It conjures up romantic militaristic images of an all-out battle in the name of a cause while, at the same time, it hides a cruder agenda: that in this "war", as in all wars, dispensations of some rights, even fundamental ones, is legitimate.

Because here is a right that is at stake, what most Bills of Rights would refer to as the right to be protected from self-incrimination. The intention behind it is to avoid, at all costs, ugly scenes like the ones from Soviet Russia where dissidents "confessed" whatever crime had been put into their heads and into their mouths after physical or psychologically pressure.

Then again, most people would not be bothered by all this. Summary incrimination for smoking pot is far from their daily life experience. And this is not Britain where William Hague’s suggestion to amend the centuries-old rule of double jeopardy caused a storm. So whoever is responsible for this state of affairs must be pretty smug knowing that an adverse public reaction is not to be expected.

But then the people who are shrugging their shoulders might not be doing so for long. The circle, it seems, is tightening. It started off with the realisation that we have a Security Service (our euphemism for "Secret Service") and that there is little public institutional check on its activities. The only reassurance we received from high above was that this service "had been instrumental in rounding up drug barons", a claim which, unfortunately, due to the secrecy of the service, cannot be verified. Critics were treated worse than that with criticism being brushed off simply by implying and wildly speculating that it was driven by certain interests in the drug trade.

That’s equivalent to bringing in a bogeyman to demonise critics and to make the public suspicious, if not paranoid, of anyone who does not nod in assent. The bogeyman recently made another appearance, after The Times carried stories of the way party-goers were made to strip by the police. While partygoers complained about the humiliating way they were treated, the same paper quoted police sources as saying that "it is only those who have something to hide who object to searches".

Oh yeah, "Moonshine if you’re drug-free". Those of us who do not do drugs should enthusiastically strip naked to show our firm belief in a drug-free lifestyle because as the corny anti-drugs poster reminds us, life is beautiful. Those who feel queasy taking off all their clothes in front of perfect strangers who are only too well-known for their manners, those are suspect. How could it be otherwise?

But then should this be surprising? The whole drug enforcement scene is run as if it revolves around police activities. I remember I was surprised the first time I discovered that in other countries the effectiveness of drug enforcement is measured in health terms. That is things like: what is the number of addicts per capita, what is their average age, what is the success rates of rehabilitation programmes?

I should not have been surprised for it should have been obvious. But that was new to me because if those figures for the local scene do exist they must be a closely guarded secret. Here the progress in drug enforcement is measured by the amounts of drugs police seize, in the number of arrests police make, in the number of successful convictions police bring about (even if that happens with the "summary" method mentioned earlier). All these are certainly indicative but policing for drugs is the means not the end. The end, if I remember correctly, was to protect people from the harmful effects of drugs.

With policing having become the be-all-end-all of the whole issue there should be little surprise that dubious ways of law-enforcement start to be taken for granted. Attention has become primarily focussed on increasing police succeses, not the successes of our education or heath systems. That’s when the more efficient "shortcuts" start to be taken.
But then, sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes? Who will guard our guardians? the Roman satirist Juvenal famously lamented long ago. In our case we are only given the assurances that they know what is good for us. Personal security is best safeguarded by having it violated.