AUTHOR’S NOTE

There’s no doubt about it that unless the Americans become less hysterical about perception-changing substances, the War against Drugs will never be permitted to come to an end. They started it in the first place and without their enthusiastic cooperation it can’t be stopped. If anybody wants the law brought into line with reality, that has to be the first step: getting the hearts and minds of the American people.

It’s my belief this can be done and I hope this short book will make a useful start. Many of my American friends have read it and, although the story is so unflattering to America, they all say, ‘Get it published. It needs to be said.’ Actually, it needs Mark Twain to tell this story, and as an American talking to Americans he wouldn’t pull his punches. But although I feel inhibited by my great fondness for America, the facts are the facts, and since a debate has unexpectedly started in Europe, this short sad story is necessary information for that debate.

I was called to the bar in London in the early Sixties, and like many other young barristers I cut my teeth on drugs cases. I carried on doing them as part of my workload until I went to live in America almost twenty years later. I qualified at the California Bar and for nearly ten years I taught or practised as a trial lawyer based first in California then in New Mexico. One of my children was born in San Diego and is therefore a US Citizen. By the last chapters of this book I felt positively identified with the Americans and found myself writing of ‘We’ and ‘our country’ as if I were a citizen myself and not just a Green Card holder.

And it was in America I stumbled upon the appalling story behind the War against Drugs. The whole of this book was researched and most of it was written in California, and when I wrote it, the reader I was talking to was the American reader.

The historical truth is that the War against Drugs was started in the first place because the American voting public wanted it, and they have been supporting it for the last 125 years. This book explains how and to some extent why this all happened. And although the book is addressed to the thoughtful American, the story is as urgently relevant to Europeans as it is to Americans, and I hope my European reader will not find the transatlantic focus uncomfortable.

And I think I must declare my own position. Apart from cannabis, I am not an abolitionist – not yet anyway. I feel sure a sensible solution will emerge if the real facts are known, which is why I took the trouble to write out the story. What I was hoping to do was to get a debate started, which seemed almost an impossibility because politicians are so afraid of being thought ‘soft on drugs’. Then suddenly, miraculously, the flow of events pushed the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition [the Conservative Party] in England into declaring that he wanted such a debate, and within days the leader of Britain’s third biggest political party was reported as going further than that, already calling for the decriminalisation of cannabis. Public Opinion polls within the week were already reporting huge support for the same thing, and a British Chief Constable is reported on the BBC as saying that the decriminalisation of cannabis is bound to come.

Part of the story is that patch of history called ‘Prohibition’. A lot of lessons were not learned from that episode, but once you know the story you realise we are in another kind of prohibition era ourselves, and unless we can agree on a fair and sensible solution, our children will be left with a nasty mess to clear up.

Certainly, now that a debate has had to be called for, it is as if a log-jam has been broken, and I hope this book will give you at least some of the background information you need to decide what you personally feel we ought to be doing at this point in the history of civilisation. I hope too that you’ll find the story as entertaining as it is sometimes breathtaking.

KEITH EVANS