The prohibition paradox
This newsletter is a five minute read
Dear reader,
Today were are asking whether the failures of Germany’s drug suppression policies can teach us anything about lockdowns.
Regards,
Jörg & Axel
Five Things
As we “go to print” (23.30) the heads of the German states are being given a right good Merkeling. The lockdown summit started in the mid-afternoon and broke off in the early evening, at which point the Chancellor broke things down into small working groups. Just ask former Greek PM Alexis Tsipras, the woman will grind you down even if it takes all night. The north German leaders want people to be able to go on holiday over Easter in their own state, but the Chancellor is reportedly having none of it. She has been pushing for night-time curfews in regions with 7-day incidences above 100. We’ll let you know what the result was in the Friday newsletter (for those of you on Discord, we’ll drop you a line tomorrow).
At a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Monday, the bloc agreed on sanctions against China for the first time in 30 years over its persecution of its minority Muslim population. China immediately reciprocated with sanctions against European politicians including Reinhard Bütikofer of the Greens. Strangely, the German Foreign Ministry's brief on the meeting doesn’t mention China at all, only detailing sanctions against Myanmar and tensions with Turkey. Could Berlin’s strenuous attempts not to upset Beijing be behind this omission?
The smell drifting from the Health Ministry is becoming more acrid by the day. But is it the whiff of incompetence, corruption - or both? In the last newsletter we reported that taxpayers will foot a €2 billion bill after Jens Spahn’s ministry paid way over the odds to pharmacies which provided free medical masks to the elderly. Now, Der Spiegel has revealed that the health ministry bought half a million FFP2 masks off the company Mr Spahn’s husband works for - without making a public call for offers. Quite how Hubert Burda Media - a publisher of doctor’s waiting room literature - is so well placed in the medical supply chain is beyond us. But both sides insist they settled on a good price, and that husband Daniel Funke had nothing to do with the deal. Ministers have been granted special exceptions to sign deals without tendering for bids during the pandemic, something opposition politicians says opens the doors to nepotism. Given that Mr Spahn handed out €4.6 billion worth of such contracts last year, we might not have heard the end of this story…
Prosecutors have opened up investigation after a CDU politician died on a flight back from Cuba on Sunday evening. Karin Strenz collapsed mid-flight, and doctors could only pronounce her dead after the plane made an emergency landing in Dublin. Prosecutors in Schwerin now want to know the results of the Irish post mortem, while stressing that this is standard procedure. There are some curious details to the story, though. Ms Strenz was neither in Cuba for the Bundestag, nor for her party - and private travel to the country is currently forbidden on public health grounds. The 53 year old, who entered the Bundestag in 2009, was best known for having her parliamentary immunity removed as part of an investigation into alleged bribes from the Azerbaijani government.
In February, we reported on news that the commanding general of Germany’s elite army unit, the Kommando Spezialkräfte (KSK), had offered his soldiers a secret amnesty to return munitions they had been stowing away at home. The KSK had been under intense pressure to reform after allegations that it tolerated a culture of far-right extremism in its ranks. Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer even threatened to dissolve the unit entirely if commander, Markus Kreitmayr, couldn’t get his house in order. The Defence Minister announced on Sunday that she had opened an internal investigation into Mr Kreitmayr, but would allow him to stay in position until it was concluded.
The prohibition paradox
I recently stumbled across an old article published by the New York Times called “the Paradox of Prohibition” which seemed somehow fitting to the times we are currently living through.
“The most ambitious, most widely supported, and most uncompromising attempt to modify the behaviour of Americans was, of course, Prohibition,” wrote author Daniel Okrent.
“Not at all incidentally, it was also a colossal failure.”
The reason for this failure, he argues, was that one can’t legislate human desire. “If people really want to do something, and there is no immediate and universally acknowledged victim, they will find their way to do it, irrespective of laws and regulations.”
Laws merely prompt people to become more imaginative. In the case of Prohibition that meant distilling moonshine. The paradox was that, when prohibition was repealed, alcohol was harder to come by. Opening times, taxes and age regulations served to control use.
The same case has been made for Germany’s current drug policies, by Dr. Lorenz Böllinger, a law professor at Bremen University. Pushing drug consumption into the dark corners of U-Bahn stations hands over quality control to mafias only interested in profits, criminalizes users, and is largely ineffective in cutting access to supply, he argues.
I’m no epidemiologist, but I see a few parallels here.
I write this text on the morning after my neighbours denied me a good night’s sleep by partying into the early hours. I could list the “music rehearsals” or “small gatherings” I’ve been invited to in recent weeks as proof that people are becoming increasingly inventive in finding ways around he rules.
And so I wonder, as the government blames those dastardly coronavirus variants for the third wave, whether there is not another factor at play.
Prohibiting behaviour makes measuring its influence hard. But one proxy the Robert Koch Institute publishes is weekly mobility, and their latest graph shows that by the end of February mobility had crept back up to just 5 percent under the equivalent week in 2019. In late December it had dropped off by 40 percent.
So perhaps it's time for the German government to get off its moral high horse and think about solutions that actually work for a population so fed up with Verbote.
If restaurants and theatres were open, meetings between friends could take place under oversight. A functioning smartphone app called Luca has been developed that allows people to check in and out of stores and cafes, meaning movement could be tracked more efficiently.
The enticement of entertainment would lead young people to get tested at the door, meaning asymptomatic cases would be picked up.
Indeed, there is a brave city that has embarked on this route. Rostock started using the Luca app in early March. The coastal city of 200,000 inhabitants has opened its high street back up - and even had a few hundred fans in its football stadium last weekend. The prerequisite is that everyone logs in with Luca.
While a third wave of the virus is sweeping the nation, Rostock currently has a 7-day incidence of around 20, the second lowest in the country.
Perhaps, though, I’m falling into the old trap of cherry-picking my data.
Anyway, I asked Dr. Böllinger what he thought.
“The basic idea is compelling: the constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom and life would be better guaranteed in both cases [drug prohibition and lockdowns] by regulation and control,” he replied in an email.
But he adds that, contrary to drug consumption, the state has limited ability to control the human behaviours that make the virus so dangerous.
“The state can try to influence compliance - both secret and illegal - with it rules, but it can’t really control it. To a qualitatively and quantitatively much greater extent than with drugs, the danger is caused by the virus itself and not by damaging state action.”
J.L.
Who we are:
Jörg Luyken: Journalist based in Berlin since 2014. His work has been published by German and English outlets including der Spiegel, die Welt, the Daily Telegraph. Formerly in the Middle East. Classicist; Masters in International Politics & Arabic from St Andrews.
Axel Bard Bringéus: Started his career as a journalist for the leading Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet and has spent the last decade in senior roles at Spotify and as a venture capital investor. In Berlin since 2011.