The case against Drug Prohibition

This post originally appeared as a guest blog I wrote for The Freedom Association.
http://www.tfa.net/the_freedom_association/2010/10/the-case-against-drug-prohibition.html

David Grundy reviews this month's Free Spirits event, 'The case against Drug Prohibition'.

On Wednesday 13th October, around 60 of us gathered in the St Stephens Tavern to hear Dr John Meadowcroft make the case against drug prohibition. This was the October edition of The Freedom Association's Free Spirits discussion series, which take place on the second Wednesday of every month. It was a well attended event with some people having to stand, which goes to show the interest that this subject generates.

Dr Meadowcroft, from Kings College London, outlined two different types of argument against drug prohibition. First is the absolute moral case, which most advocates of freedom will be familiar with. The argument is that fundamental to the concept of individual rights and freedom is the right to your own life; all other rights are built upon and depend upon this. As rational beings, we should be free to act on our own judgement free from force and coercion, pursue our own goals, and reap the rewards accordingly. Readers of philosophers such as Aristotle, Locke and Ayn Rand will know that the moral argument is the only solid foundation for liberty. Individuals have the power to take self-correcting action and recover from their mistakes. Ingesting substances in our own body is a private matter and we must use our own judgement in deciding how to treat our bodies.

This is something that Government force and intrusion simply don’t cater for. Collectivized rights are an arbitrary use of force directed by the flavour of the month and whichever policy a politician thinks will win them enough votes to win a new term. Aside from restricting people’s personal freedoms, the decision making process is divorced from reality and this is only too clear from the reactionary drugs policy decisions that Governments make. Awash with unintended consequences, these populist measures fail to create the intended rational utopia of eternal health.

This leads us to the 2^nd type of argument: the practical. Regardless of your philosophical persuasions, all you have to do is stand outside Brixton Tube Station or the queue of a night club for long enough to see that the war on drugs is a complete and utter failure. Produced in the fields of Afghanistan, heroin and opiates first line the pockets of our enemies then make their way to the UK drug dealers. They’re then diluted with talcum powder, or worse. Inconsistent potencies are sold on street corners and via text message deals and people then begin to smoke and inject who knows what. Even something as simple as growing an illicit cannabis crop in a cellar is not without unintended consequences. The dingy artificial lighting in secret cellars and lofts actually results in the chemical composition of cannabis changing and losing some of its proven medicinal properties.

Further evidence of the practical failure is the sheer quantity of drug addicts in the country. Despite drugs being illegal, the Government spends more than £800m annually on drug rehabilitation treatments. This doesn’t even take in to account the cost of incapacity and unemployment benefit that the people receive during their prolonged course of treatment. The cost of crimes committed by addicts to fund their habit is estimated at £13.9bn annually and this financial burden says nothing of the terror and havoc wreaked on the lives of the victims of these crimes. Although young people are luckily averse to trying the more harmful drugs, the Government is currently in the unenviable position of playing cat and mouse as legal highs are banned, only to be immediately replaced with drugs containing new legal chemical compositions – ones which are so new that there is no scientific evidence of their effects whatsoever and young people are literally acting as guinea pigs.

So what can and should be done? In the spirited Q&A some audience members did see the pitfalls of full legalisation. To put it quite simply: not all drugs are the same.
Not only would advocating a full blown legalisation package deal almost certainly fail, but it equates getting stoned and eating carbs for one evening with the disastrously life changing effects of heroin and crack where addicts literally struggle to come up with new injection sites because their body is already bruised, if not infected. In the process they often share needles and spread blood bourne viruses such as HIV and hepatitis which have clear financial costs to the other members of society.

Despite drugs prohibition, the UK Government is actually very welcoming to individuals who seek support in getting clean. Starting with Thatcher and enhanced under Labour, an addict can come to a treatment centre and matter of factly report the substances they are using. A careplan is then created, the data is collected and interventions are made to wean people off their problematic substances. The data shows that there are currently an estimated 330,000 people in England who are addicted to heroin and crack. Of those, a whopping 60% are involved in the drug treatment system, most of whom came voluntarily because they realised their problem was getting out of hand. By the time they realize their problem they may well have lost their job and descended in to a cycle of deprivation. Having expended all of their resources on their habit, these people do in fact infringe the rights of others by the vast healthcare and intervention costs as well as the crimes they may have previously committed.

The Conservative government will soon be forming a Public Health Department which will govern drug policy. The current policy mood is to seek quasi-religious abstinence to purify the souls of people so they can enter the gates of heaven, but this could end up making things worse and simply mask over the problem. There is a strong case for legalization of many drugs, but in advocating it we must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater and risk smearing relatively harmless substances with the obvious disastrous effects of the few substances which do have provably negative consequences on the other individuals in society.

Many would argue that drugs should be legalised because then they can be regulated, taxed and made to consistent quality. Whilst taxing products isn’t often endorsed by advocates of liberty, it would serve to recuperate the costs involved with healthcare and rehab treatment whilst allowing greater personal freedoms than what we have now. One thing is for sure, private charity tends to have little sympathy for these people.

After the Q&A we quickly went downstairs to indulge in legal pleasures: cigarettes and alcohol. How long they will be legal for, we were not certain.

DISCLAIMER: I work in the drug treatment sector. Any views expressed are purely my own.