Johann Hari

In Kabul hospital, half the patients who need opiate-based painkillers are writhing in agony because they have none-while in the fields outside and across Afghanistan, farmers trying to grow opiates are having their fields trashed and livelihoods destroyed by western troops. This is just the most ironic intersection between the west's "war on drugs" and what the World Health Organisation calls "an unprecedented global pain crisis."

The world is suffering from an opium drought. The International Narcotics Control Board calculates that the US, Britain, France, Canada, Spain, Australia and Japan consume 80 per cent of the world's medical opiates, leaving the remaining 80 per cent of humanity with the dregs. Even in developed countries, in cancer care alone there is a need for 550 metric tons more opium every year, and overall-according to a University of Toronto study-only about 24 per cent of the demand for medical opiates is now being met.

At the same time, a violent and utopian attempt to physically stop Afghans from growing the opiates we need is causing us to lose a battle there that Tony Blair has called "essential for the safety of civilisation." Human Rights Watch warns that the Taliban now effectively control southern Afghanistan, and many observers warn they could be in a position to march on Kabul and topple Hamid Karzai's elected government within a couple of years.

The war on the Taliban is being lost because the soldiers sent to fight it are also being forced to wage a "war on drugs" that requires the destruction of a major part of the Afghan economy. This summer, Emmanuel Reinert, executive director of the Senlis Council, a development think tank, commissioned around 30 researchers to find out why so many southern Afghans were turning to the Taliban when they cheered their defeat five years ago. He found that, "The Taliban revival is directly, intimately related to the crop eradication programme. It could not have happened if the US was not aggressively destroying crops. And it is the single biggest reason Afghans turned against the foreigners."

Reinert adds, "If you look at where the Americans have carried out the forced eradication programmes, it's where people cannot feed their families because their crops have been destroyed. That's where the Taliban is opportunistically gaining support." The Christian Science Monitor, in a long investigation, found that international drugs prohibition has also caused the fledgling Afghan police force to be crippled by corruption at the moment of its birth. By demanding that more than one third of the country's total economy be criminalised-and therefore placed in the hands of armed gangs and warlords, rather than taxed by the legitimate government-prohibition ensured non-state actors will always have bigger guns and more cash than the state.

The only solution the US seems to have is to speed up eradication. The state department has commissioned studies into the viability of a clone of "Plan Colombia," in which vast amounts of chemicals were sprayed on the Colombian countryside, creating ecological wastelands and cancer epidemics. Hamid Karzai is known to be a strong opponent of this suggestion, but he may yet be overruled.

In the long term, there is only one solution to narco-states: bring the global drugs trade-some 5 per cent of global GDP-into the legal economy, so countries like Afghanistan and Colombia can reclaim their territory from armed gangs. But that is a goal that requires vast political change within the country driving global prohibition, the US. It will come-if at all-too late for Afghanistan.

So the Senlis Council has come up with a sensible short-term solution. It is simple: in an Afghan equivalent to the EU's common agricultural policy, instead of destroying Afghanistan's opium crop, our governments should simply buy it, and sell it on to produce legal opiate-based painkillers. Instead of approaching Afghan farmers with weapons, our representatives would be approaching them with cash.

This can be done easily, even within the current structure of global prohibition. In the early 1970s, the Nixon administration began to demand that the opium farmers of southern Turkey destroy their crops. Every programme of destruction-carried out by reluctant Turkish prime ministers coerced with threats of cuts in US military aid-failed. Eventually, Turkey was considered to be such a crucial cold-war ally that the US agreed that it could be an exception. Turkey joined India as a legal supplier of opiates for pain-control purposes, and remains so today. The US department of agriculture operates according to the "80-20 rule"-80 per cent of US opium is purchased from two supplier countries, while the remaining 20 per cent come from the rest of the world.

Isn't Afghanistan even more important today than Turkey was in the 1970s? If Tony Blair wants at least one of his liberations to work, he should ask a final favour of George W Bush- a former recreational drug user himself-to extend the list of countries licensed to grow opiates to the high hills of Tora Bora, and plead for a global Afghan brand of opiates for every hospital. It is a strange truth that if Blair really wants to live up to his commitment to save Afghanistan, he should bow out by orchestrating the biggest heroin deal in history.

Long after the names of Bush and Blair and Brown are forgotten and the ephemera of our little lives have crumbled into old newsprint, this decade – the Noughties – will mark one of the greatest shifts in human history. As Professor Mike Davis puts it, “Sometime in the next year, a woman will give birth in the Lagos slum of Ajegunle, a young man will flee his village in west Java for the bright lights of Jakarta, or a farmer will move his impoverished family into one of Lima’s innumerable pueblos jovenes. The exact event is unimportant and it will pass entirely unnoticed. Nonetheless it will constitute a watershed in human history, comparable to the Neolithic or Insutrial Revolutions. For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural.”

Humanity just stopped being a country-dwelling species. The incredible experiment that began in 4000 BC in Ur, Iraq – when tens of thousands of people began to huddle together, for safety and business and company – just hit its logical end-game. We all live in Ur now. But this development hasn’t happened gradually; it happened in a sudden spurt in the last 300 years. Between the fall of Ancient Rome and the Industrial Revolution, nobody – not a single person – lived in a city of more than half a million people. As recently as 1800, only three percent of human beings managed it. In my lifetime, according to the UN, it will hit 70 percent.

And most people, when they hear this, feel a low sense of sadness. They imagine a peaceful Pochahontas past of people living in tune with nature, ruptured by the roaring concrete confusion of the city. Perhaps I am an evolutionary freak, a person born without a biophillia gene, but I don’t feel this way. Before I register all the complex practical problems this new reality tosses out – and there are many – I have an underlying gut reaction I can’t shake. I have never found a city I didn’t fall in love with, and I’ve been to some of the worst: Baghdad, Kinshasa, Gaza City, Hull. Every city every day is a swirling, whirling mix of people forced to find a way to live together or die trying, an on-going experiment using the most interesting raw material of all – humanity. If I’m not part of it, if I have not been shoe-horned into a tiny space with at least seven million other people, I feel lost and alone.

Every day in Zone One life in London I spot at least one amazing human cocktail, a surreal, infinitely fascinating mix: I was just driven by a super-smart Somalian taxi driver whose family back home lives under shariah law, but who works in Soho and spends most of his time transporting transsexuals, transvestites and girls in tiny belt-skirts. “Life,” he sighed. “It is interesting, no?” And you tell me I should be in Keswick looking at a Lake that seems to me like just an immense puddle?

And, in parallel, I have never been to a patch of countryside I didn’t detest. I have never found a Lake District that didn’t bore me into a semi-coma, a Swiss alp that didn’t make me pine for some polluted air, an Arizonan desert that didn’t make me want to hail a taxi to the nearest town. Go back two generations, and all my family were subsistence farmers living “in tune with nature”. It was a life of back-breaking tedium that left them all dead by forty. I want to keep the green belt buckled far from me.

Every political value I like – cosmopolitanism, the mixing of peoples, intellectualism – was cradled and nurtured in the city. Every political value I hate – inwardness, prudishness, a longing for stability and stasis, a dislike of ‘book-learners’ or Jews or gays – is nurtured in the wide open plains of the countryside. The French Revolution or the Nazis, Stonewall or the Taliban, Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, Coronation Street or Emmerdale: who could choose the intellectual children of the countryside over the fruits of the city? Who would not strangle Wordsworth with one of his accursed daffodils in order to get to W.H. Auden, sitting in one of the dives on 52nd Street, uncertain and afraid?

At first glance, there is one glaring exception to these urban panegyrics. Isn’t environmentalism – a political philosophy that has never been more necessary as runaway global warming trashes our human habitat – the product of the countryside? But the hard figures reveal something fascinating. Which part of Britain do you suppose has the lowest carbon emissions per head of population? Dorset? The Welsh Valleys? The Highlands? No. The Department for the Environment has discovered it is London. The average Londoner makes half the contribution to global warming of the average inhabitant of Cornwall. She also uses half the electricity, and a third of the petrol. They are, in short, far greener.

This is true of city-dwellers all over the world. It’s a startling fact that if every American brought their carbon emissions down to the level of the average New Yorker, the US would soar past the Kyoto targets and become the greenest country in the developed world. The environmentalist writer David Owen explains why: “Spreading people out increases the damage they do to the environment. Nearly everything we do from our new home [in the countryside] requires a car trip. Renting a movie and returning it later consumes almost two tonnes of gasoline, since the nearest Blockbuster is ten miles away. When we lived in New York, we walked or used the subway. Heat escaping from our apartment helped heat the apartment above ours. Nowadays it leaks into the dazzling star-filled winter sky above.”

Of course, setting up a rural-urban battle, while fun, is also foolish: we need to co-operate, since we depend on each other. But it’s worth bearing in mind that a significant shift of humanity from the country to the cities may actually be an environmental victory rather than an environmental disaster. We should feel no green guilt about being urbanites; quite the opposite.

But only a Panglossian fool could unequivocally celebrate the way urbanisation is happening today. The most poignant symbol of this unplanned exodus to the towns is in Cairo’s City of the Dead, where one million bitterly poor people have taken over the vast Marmaluke tombs and live among the graves in a walled island next to clotted motorways. They sleep in the Pharonic vaults and hang their washing between the gravestones. But they are actually fairly lucky, since their housing is structurally safe. Compare that to the tin slums that have built up on the hills surrounding Caracas in Venezuela, where – as I saw when I was there recently – a heavy rain can simply wash away homes and children to a muddy grave. In 1999, over 10,000 people died in a single flash-flood.

These disasters aren’t the result of urbanisation itself, but of urbanisation uncoordinated and unaided by government. If a government stands limp and passive in the face of drastic and chaotic change, if it refuses to regulate and develop the new slum-cities, then a mudslide into one disaster or another is guaranteed. One of the tragedies of the past decade is that this global rush to the cities has coincided with a period when the World Bank and International Monetary Fund were demanding poor world governments scrap public services and effectively dismantle themselves. The one billion people who are now living unhelped in new slum-cities are monuments to this market fundamentalism, a sign of what you get if you create economic conditions where people will head to the cities but prevent governments from offering them any kind of social help, or even planning the new areas they create. The new populist movements rising in Latin America – from Hugo Chavez to Evo Morales – are largely a backlash of the slums screaming for help.

But still millions flock to the cities, and not just for economic reasons. When you hear of shift in the history of our species, don’t think of some Arcadian rural past, but of the intellectual and social and sexual freedom these people will find now they able to choose from a pool of millions to interact with, rather than being trapped with the stale hundreds chance happens to have dropped into their claustrophobic village. And think of the carbon they won’t belch into the atmosphere.

Like Burt Lancaster at the end of ‘The Sweet Smell of Success’, I can only smell these new statistics and mutter, “I love this dirty town.”

POSTSCRIPT: POSTSCRIPT: You can send comments on this article for publication in the Independent to letters@independent.co.uk or comments just for me to johann *at* johannhari.com

Ho ho. For Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and their army of Top Gear speedophiles, driving cars so fast they can smash a skull or kill a child has been a subject for uproarious laughter and acidic hate for years now. Clarkson has declared “speeding is no big deal” and shouldn’t be punished with points on your license. He has in the past supported the gangs of thugs going around smashing the British speed cameras that have – according to independent studies – saved over 1000 innocent lives. And he has derided anybody who disagrees as a “health and safety Nazi.” His acolyte ‘Hamster’ Hammond said that because of these views, Clarkson should be made Mayor of London so he can “roar around London in a Lamborghini with a mayoral flagpole, shooting cyclists.”

Now Hammond is lying in a hospital bed, his life very nearly ended by this adolescent need for speed. I wonder if Clarkson, as he stared tearfully at the wounds of one of his best mates and comforted Hammond’s wife and kids, thought back to all the times they have used Britain’s massive death-toll from speeding as a glib punchline. Did he remember the column he wrote recently, in which he declared, “Of course, in France speeding is endemic and this means they have a far, far higher death rate than we do. But let’s be frank here. You can’t really judge a country by the number of people who don’t die in car accidents”? Did he remember the snarling contempt with which he responded to pleas from the AA and some of Britain’s most senior traffic cops to stop encouraging people to break the law? Does he see now why we “Nazis” try to slow cars down?

I have never engaged with Jeremy Clarkson’s arguments in my columns, because he doesn’t have any. I may as well engage with one of the Tweenies. He is merely the court jester for the Petrolhead death-cult, a far-right jokesmith whose erotic obsession with inanimate metal objects may well stem from the fact that – as Piers Morgan alleges in his diaries – he once confessed to being “not physically capable” of sexual intercourse. (Clarkson of course denies this, but with trousers that tight, who would be surprised?). A man whose response to global warming is to deny its existence and brag that he leaves his patio-heater on 24 hours a day “just to wind up Greenpeace” is not a person to argue with; he’s a person to ignore. But as he has learned in the past week, Clarkson’s unserious statements can have very serious consequences.

The chief speedophile’s campaign against speed cameras has vastly increased the number of people like his mate Hammond lying brain-damaged or broken in a hospital bed. It’s hard to find a logical thread in Clarkson’s opposition to the “Gatso” cameras. At times he claims he is angry because they don’t actually save lives, but every single international study shows this is nonsense. Speeding has fallen by 40 percent in areas with speed cameras – and that has huge consequences. If you smack into a child at 30mph, the odds he or she will die are 50 percent. If you hit them at 20mph, their chances of dying fall to just 10 percent.

When confronted with these basic facts, Clarkson switches his jabberings into a different lane. He begins to argue he opposes speed cameras because politicians have installed them simply to “pay for their junkets”. But as Clarkson himself admitted last year, “Recent figures show that Britain’s 6000 Gatso cameras earned £110m last year but made a profit of just £12m.” In governmental terms, that is a pittance. So… they aren’t “raking in money”, then, are they Jeremy? That’s because the government has installed the cameras for the reason they say they have: to save lives.

Then Clarkson is left to fall back on the case that he is a brave defender of the rights of ordinary people from a “1984-style” government. But the right of an individual to drive at 50mph doesn’t weigh much against the right of a pedestrian not to be killed, and Clarkson knows it. That’s why – when his mercifully unbroken back is against the wall – he confesses, “I don’t curse speed cameras because of civil liberty issues. I curse them because they slow me down.”

He describes speeding with as a glorious aesthetic experience he is prepared to take massive risks to indulge in. This pure distilled glee is at the core of his hatred of speed cameras; the rest is just a rationalist sheen that is easily scraped away. But this makes it clear how purely selfish his defence of speeding is. So Clarkson and his groupies can feel an adrenaline rush, there has to be a blood-sacrifice on our roads that tops even the hellish death-toll jihadists have so far inflicted on us. (If this sounds like hyperbole, remember: the death toll from 7/7 is racked up every 10 days on our tarmac by Mullah Clarkson’s soul mates).

Of course, if these sad boy-men want to pay to go on private land and take risks with their own safety – as Hammond did in this instance – they should be allowed to, just as you are allowed to go mountaineering or chain-smoke or (in my case) eat too much lard. If Jeremy Clarkson wants to commit suicide, who are we to stop him? But these Top Gear toffs posing as Ordinary Blokes know the vast majority of their viewers will speed on ordinary roads, where they will smack into ordinary people. (Hammond thankfully seems to be recovering. Every year, 1000 of his fellow Brits never do.) Indeed, Clarkson brags about his ability to speed on real roads, saying he can find sustained “high octance red-line thrills” on Britain’s standard-issue tarmac any day.

The rhetoric of this tiresome eunuch doesn’t only blatantly encourage his viewers to speed; it has bullied and intimidated the government too. Richard Brunstrom, the Chief Constable of North Wales, explains, “Police resources have slowly drifted away from road policing [over the past few years] because that is the government’s intention.” The government is allowing this vocal, vacuous campaign to skew their priorities – and as a result, kids die.

And the BBC is giving it a swollen platform. Would they broadcast a show dedicated to the joys of money-laundering? Of course not; but money-laundering, for all its evils, is a far less serious crime. Speeding is one of the biggest killers in Britain, and the BBC is giving it a prime-time advert. Jeremy Clarkson seems not to have learned from his friend’s near-death, still raving this weekend against “the environmentalists and… muddle-headed road safety campaigners” in the very articles where he described his mate’s injuries. But his blindness is no excuse for the BBC’s.

It’s time for the corportation to send the rusty, dangerous old piece of scrap called Top Gear to the wrecker’s yard – before it can maim and kill anyone else.

POSTSCRIPT: You can send comments on this article for publication in the Independent to letters@independent.co.uk or comments just for me to johann *at* johannhari.com

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Over at Harry's Place, Brownie responds to critics of this article by making my point much more eloquently (and calmly) than I did. He writes:

The problem is that speeding is socially acceptable in a way that drunk driving used to be. One of the reasons such an insidious activity enjoys social acceptance is that otherwise intelligent people regard the perpetrators as "normal people driving from A to B who don't know about the risks they are imposing on others" rather than the selfish tossers they are. It's a pernicious view programs like Top Gear and 'celebrities' like Clarkson are given to encourage, with the result that speeding is thought of in much the same as littering, even though no-one ever died from a carelessly discarded crisp packet.

Incidences of drunk driving started to decline when friends and colleagues began telling those engaged in this practice that they were behaving like wankers. A more than apt description for any “normal person” gambling with the safety of other road users and pedestrians alike...

They are ordinary people who are playing fast and loose with the safety of other road users and pedestrians. We need to shatter the perception of ordinary people doing ordinary things and ram home the message that speeding is what selfish pricks do because they can and because their peers won't think any less of them in the event they are caught.

The profusion of speed cameras across the country at the very least ensures drivers now think about speeding in a way they never did previously if for no other reason than the camera forces them to. A corollary is that the number of people who can genuinely claim to be ignorant of the potential risks their driving habits pose is small and getting smaller.

Pretty soon, speeding drivers will be out of excuses; that includes those offered on their behalf, as well as those they are prepared to deploy in their own defence."

My grandmother was nearly killed by a idiot speeding driver, so I have an intense loathing of these people; but Brownie puts it better.

A reader I have sparred with via e-mail on several issues wrote to the letters page this very kind e-mail, which I wanted to reprint here:

Dear Sir,

I find myself in the somewhat unusual position of writing to defend Johann Hari, and on two fronts to boot.

Barbra Pearman (September 22nd) says, “There is nowhere in the Bible where Jesus supports slavery, genocide or stoning prostitutes and he certainly didn't recommend feeding small children to bears.” This is a rather clever evasion. The article she is criticising by Hari was not talking about Jesus, but about the God of the Old Testament, and He certainly does do all these things. Those eager to see the deity feed small children to bears should turn to 2 Kings 2:24.

Then Nick Cohen today claims it was “hurtful” for Johann Hari to call him “startlingly dishonest” after Cohen claimed Hillary Benn was with-holding £50m from the World Bank because its new head, Paul Wolfowitz, is “too tough on corruption.” Yet Hari was absolutely right. Benn is withholding the money because of the privatisation conditionalities, not corruption. Cohen conspicuously failed to tell his readers about this, and clearly implied that Benn was motivated by anxieties about Wolfowitz’s corruption charges. For Cohen to shed crocodile tears now he has been called on this is a bit much.

Yours sincerely,

James Levin,
Finchley, North London"

One of London’s most embarrassing roles over the centuries has been as the stage-setting for Britain’s royal family to parade their births, deaths and psychoses before alternately adoring and spitting crowds. From the scaffold on Whitehall where King Charles I was beheaded to the long concrete steps to Westminster Abbey where Diana Spencer was ceremonially deflowered and sacrificed before an adoring nation, London’s icons are ineradicably tainted by monarchy. The golden gates at the end of the Mall always seem to me like the least and lowest of our tourist attractions, a reminder that underneath all the teeming glory around you there is an unmeltable core of hereditary privilege you can never enter.

Strangely, some people have seen the biting, brilliant film ‘The Queen’ – currently topping the West End box office charts – as a movie that will bolster monarchism. It is the story of the bleak tango between Elizabeth Windsor and Tony Blair in the week following Diana’s final curtain in the concrete of Paris. With a perfectly repressed and bitter performance from Helen Mirren, the film explores what happens when a democratic media-driven culture crashes into a feudal family pickled in protocol and emotional repression. It uses real footage of Diana week, that beautifully surreal time to be in London, when the Mall was covered with a crunchy carpet of flowers and cards cursing the Windsors, and strangers stood weeping at a bare flagpole. Julie Burchill called it “a floral revolution”. I remember walking up Oxford Street on the Saturday morning of the funeral, every shop closed, central London totally quiet, and wondering if any other event in my lifetime would bring London to this static silence.

But the film – which makes any viewer feel a tender pity for Elizabeth Windsor – is only an advert for monarchy if you buy the tired old line that we republicans hate the Windsors while monarchists slather them with sympathy. In fact, the opposite is the case. The film shows how monarchists have tortured poor Elizabeth Windsor and warped her into a woman incapable of expressing the most basic human feelings. To find a childhood as profoundly weird the one monarchists have forced on Elizabeth, you have to look to Michael Jackson. She made her debut on the cover of Time Magazine at the age of three, and her mother taught her to chant as a toddler, “We are not supposed to be normal. We are not supposed to be normal.”

The child was taught she was an emissary of God, enacting His will by becoming monarch. As the film shows, she was deeply disturbed by watching her father reduced to a stammering, shaking wreck when he was forced to assume the throne after his brother did the one sane thing and abdicated. A life of such deep weirdness, doomed to the deafness that comes from only ever hearing sycophants, made Elizabeth Windsor into a woman who abused her own children by abandoning them as toddlers and forced to put up with a marriage widely alleged to be hellish. As Tony Blair says in the film, “She’s had fifty years doing a job she never wanted, fifty years doing a job that nearly killed her father.” This is an advert for monarchy? This is something the royalists are proud to have done to an innocent person?

All we democrats want to do is release Elizabeth and her tormented offspring to live very happy private lives in the Republic of Britain. It is the monarchists who want to continue torturing her, and creating generation after generation of gnarled freaks to fill her place on the sprawling, stained London stage. Yes, go and see ‘The Queen’ – and then join the fight to set the Windsors free form the sadistic institution of monarchy, and to set Londoners free from the sterile snobbery that surrounds it.