End this madness

By Alex Canfor-Dumas / @alexcd88

Writing a blog post calling for the liberalisation of drug laws makes you nervous; it’s the kind of thing you’re not entirely sure that you want your girlfriend’s mother to read. But it’s an increasingly mainstream position – one supported by Financial Times leader writers, former Republican Secretaries of State and UN Secretaries-General, billionaire businessmen, ex-Presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, and even, for those still unimpressed, former speechwriters for David Cameron. The Economist, arguably the in-house journal of the British political establishment, has been arguing for legalisation for over twenty years.

But as sceptics rightly point out, having a long list of important people on your side isn’t enough to win an argument. So what’s the case for the legalisation (or at least decriminalisation) of drugs?

First, there is an argument to be made from basic liberal principle. Yes, drugs are (to varying degrees) harmful – but the harm from the act of taking drugs itself (ignore for now the criminality, the gang warfare and so on) falls mainly on the individual concerned. The idea that people should be allowed to do what they want with or to their own bodies, so long as it doesn’t harm others, is an argument that many people (at least since Mill) have found extremely convincing.

A defender of the status quo would no doubt object here that families and local communities are also damaged by the act of drug-taking. True – but they can be damaged every bit as much by all sorts of legal acts, too. Cigarettes and alcohol are oft-cited examples of legal drugs that are more harmful that many prohibited ones. But what of the misery that gambling, for example, can wreak? Indeed, it’s not difficult to come up with seemingly absurd analogies: should the government intervene, say, to stop an individual making a reckless and foolish investment with his own money, if there is a clear risk of harm to the individual involved or their nearest and dearest?

If not, what makes (a certain sub-set of) drugs so special that they should warrant this treatment?

The spectre of the so-called ‘nanny state’, though, will not be enough to convince everyone – especially on our side of the political aisle – of the merits of a more liberal approach to drugs. (As an aside, it’s interesting to notice how much more exercised about the ‘nanny state’ Tories seem to get when it’s protecting health and safety in the workplace than when it’s regulating freely-made choices about drugs).

So for those not swayed by the argument from principle, consider another fact.

Prohibition doesn’t work.

As Johann Hari and others have argued, the example of the prohibition of alcohol in the US in the 1920s shows one thing: that “when you ban a popular drug that millions of people want, it doesn’t disappear. Instead, it is transferred from the legal economy into the hands of armed criminal gangs.”

Gangsters in the US loved prohibition. A hugely lucrative market had been delivered straight into their hands, and some went so far as to financially support pro-prohibition politicians in a bid to keep business going.

And of course, with the market driven underground there was no recourse to the law; any act of injustice by a rival was met by violence, not through the courts. Thousands were killed in bloody gang wars.

As it was with alcohol, so it is with drugs.

Nowhere in the western world today do marginalised young people form alcohol-dealing gangs. They do not engage in turf warfare in order to secure particular parts of major cities for their own exclusive alcohol selling. Very few people mug or rob or burgle in order to fund their drinking habits. People do not drink low-quality alcohol containing impurities like veterinary drugs and anti-depressants.

Perversely, success in the War on Drugs breeds failure: every time a dealer is taken out, rival gangs move in to fight over the newly vacant patch. The results are horrific; well over 30,000 Mexicans have been killed since President Calderon launched a crackdown against traffickers in 2006. It is not uncommon for police officers to be beheaded if they try to get in the way.

In Britain, the government’s own Strategy Unit reported in 2003 that over half of all property crimes are drug motivated. 16% of our huge prison population of over 80,000 is incarcerated for drug offences – with many more locked up for related crimes. At around £40,000 per prisoner per year, that’s a huge drain on the public purse – even before you factor in the cost of policing and wider social costs. And it’s even crazier when you consider that a move to legalisation – where drugs could be taxed, just like fags and booze – could yield billions to the exchequer. Indeed, the prospect of huge tax revenues was a major factor behind the decision to end the US experiment with prohibition in 1933.

The current system is mad – and, by all accounts, most politicians know it.

But we must be realistic: legalising drugs might be good policy, but it’s not good politics. For someone who’s keen to show he’s in touch with mainstream opinion in the country – and not just with middle-class progressive liberals – it would be a disaster. Ed Miliband will not want to be painted as ‘soft on drugs’, and nor should we want him to be.

This doesn’t mean, however, that we should do nothing. Public opinion can change, and we should be in the business of changing it; for while politics may be the art of the possible, what constitutes the possible is not fixed for all time. One day – in the not too distant future, one hopes – it may be possible to have a more enlightened policy on drugs.