ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Available for over a year

Good morning. A government report says there’s no obvious link between tough laws and how much drug-taking is going on. At least in Portugal. And some other countries. And so the two sides resume the great drugs debate. One corner says, drugs are a multi-million pound system of exploitation, and the only answers are strict laws and rigorous enforcement. The language is all about war and conquest. The other corner says, making drugs illegal simply criminalises the trade. It turns prisons into training centres for drug-lords, it contradicts the approach taken towards alcohol, and it forgoes the tax revenue from licensed commercial activity. Here the language is all about pragmatic calculation and dispassionate policy. Beneath these two loud positions are corresponding quieter convictions. Behind the language of war and combat lies a belief that if something’s wrong or bad there should be a law against it – even if the law doesn’t work very well and even if that law is sometimes counterproductive. By this estimation drugs are bad news and legalising them sends a message of anarchy. Behind the language of calculation and policy-outcomes lies a view that the state can’t be telling or ordering the individual what to do. When it tries it often does as much harm as good. So if people make choices that harm themselves but not others, the state shouldn’t assume it must stop them. 1700 years ago two theologians set out profoundly different notions of what constitutes the human predicament. Those notions aren’t about policy solutions. They’re about our souls. In the fourth century Augustine of Hippo made the case that our human problem is perversity. We pride ourselves on our ability to choose but what we don’t realise is, we’ve lost the ability to make good choices. We can’t help ourselves. A couple of centuries earlier Irenaeus of Lyons argued that the human predicament was ignorance. With the right moral formation and inspiring teachers we can choose well and learn to do good. So today’s controversy about drugs and regulation is rooted in a centuries-old quandary concerning whether the law should be used as a moral instrument and a millennia-old debate about whether our human problem is fundamentally perversity or ignorance. It’s not a question we’re going to resolve quickly or easily. But one thing Augustine and Irenaeus both assumed is that you can’t make a better world without us needing to become better people. Today we’re talking about drugs. But every day we’re facing up to the real issue, which is about human weakness, false consolation, and the tendency to take advantage of one another. The heart of the problem is the problem of the human heart.