Sandro Botticelli Primavera (1477-1490), Firenze - Uffizi
The newly elected leader of the Liberal Democrats has stirred up a storm by suggesting the legalisation of soft drugs should be reviewed by a Royal Commission.
There is a strong argument for legalisation. It is demonstrable that outlawing these drugs has failed to stem, still less eliminate, their sale. All the indications are that the consumption of illicit drugs is now common-place – especially among the young. So, if we can’t beat it, perhaps we should try regulating it. This, after all was surely the lesson to be learned from the American experiment with Prohibition. Outlawing commodities that people want to buy simply encourages criminals to supply them, leading to gangsterism. It also leads otherwise law-abiding people into the clutches of those with a vested interest in ensuring that they become addicted to harder drugs.
Regulation not only eliminates criminal involvement, it can ensure product standards. When people buy illicit drugs they have no idea how strong the dose
will turn out to be, with the obvious risk of overdosing. And let me remind those who say ‘serves them right’, that the victim might easily be a member of their family. Distribution through legitimate retail outlets means the consumption of these drugs would also be controlled through the informal rules that surround any social activity. Pubs dispense a potentially lethal drug in ways that encourage moderate usage. It is hugely watered down, mixed with non-alcoholic beverages, and regarded as an accompaniment to sociability, rather than an end in itself. These are all more effective controls than the threat of police action. As advocates for the legalisation of cannabis are fond of telling us, the harm that cannabis does is far less than that done by alcohol. They are absolutely correct: the drug problem on university campuses nationwide is that of alcohol – not cannabis or amphetamines. However, this is precisely where I find the argument for legalisation unconvincing. The regulation of alcohol is held up as a model to emulate and Prohibition as a failure to be avoided. It seems strange to claim that a policy has been a ‘success’ when it evidently produces such mayhem. The country that has pursued policies of decriminalising soft drug consumption most avidly is, of course, the Netherlands. It has the highest crime rate in the western world in the recently published International Crime Survey. When my wife and I visited Amsterdam, we took the opportunity of revisiting the youth we never had and threw ourselves on the mercy of the proprietor who sold us a couple of cannabis chocolates. Apart from sending us both soundly and gigglingly to sleep, my experience was that taking dope was very different to consuming alcohol. It was an act of deliberately consuming a drug in order to experience the effect. This is not how I experience the consumption of alcohol, where the effect is almost an incidental by-product of the taste of the wine or beer and conviviality of the circumstances.
The suggestion that the adverse consequences of soft-drug use owes most to the fact that it is outlawed, also seems contrary to experience. In the 1970s and 1980s Scotland suffered particularly from heroin addiction. The path that addicts seem to have taken was via solvent abuse. Now, at that time the supply of solvents was both legal and abundant, and their abuse was not outlawed. Yet solvent abuse seemed to be the slippery slope down which many young people tragically slid into heroin addiction. The ‘slippery slope’ argument is revealing in another sense: advocates of legalisation insist that without the involvement of criminal suppliers cannabis use need not lead to addiction to harder drugs. Implicit in this argument (which some advocates are willing to make quite explicit) is the acceptance that hard drugs should remain illegal. Of course, this raises the whole thorny issue of where the line between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ should be drawn. It is predictable that having legalised cannabis, another campaign would commence to legalise cocaine and heroin.
I don’t know where this leaves us, but mine’s a pint.
