Western governments need to end the war on drugs

Today's Hot Topic, 26th January 2012. Western governments need to end the war on drugs

Death, disease, crime and corruption...believe those who would stop the war on drugs, and you’ll think that we’re missing the simple trick of legalisation to make really serious inroads into all of these modern plagues. One kilogram of heroin costs $500 in the Burmese jungle and $300,000 on the street of any Western capital. That is an opportunity for profit so large that any hope of stopping the flow should be cast away. Listen to the warriors, though, and they’ll point out that when you legalise, you normalise, and that the damage of that will be terrible: on any given day, 80% of the UK adult population has consumed the most popular legal drug there is, alcohol. But less than 1% will have used heroin. The difference? One is acceptable and legal; the other is not.

So should we pass around the peace-pipe and end the war on drugs?

You criminalise drugs and therefore create a massive opportunity for organised crime. Street prices are high – forcing drug addicts to commit petty crime – and this encourages the big-time crooks to develop sophisticated methods and networks to subvert civilised society. And of course, the problem gets exported – you create narco-states in places with weak governance that are desperately trying to get onto the liberal democracy bandwagon and you put criminality and violence into the DNA of these fledgling states. In other words, this well-meaning paternalism just creates a petty crime and insecurity problem in our cities; costs a massive amount in the prison system; creates opportunities for organised crime; and undermines struggling, poor nation states. The war is criminal, not the drug user.

Laws always create an incentive for someone to go around them – that’s never been an argument for not having the law. Theft is a problem in all societies – who argues, apart maybe from mad Syndicalists like Proudhon – that the solution is to abolish private property? The point is that laws need to be judged on their merits and then we need to enforce them – that is what a law-based society does, and that is the only society in which human flourishing is possible. The first shot of heroin may not always be a slippery slope – but the first shot of legal laxism certainly is. It bears all the hallmarks of the soft-willed thinking that the anti-warriors’ pet objects of pity, the drug users, are such living examples of.

Well, even if we were to consider the law only on its merits, you’d see that criminalisation is absurd. We have freedom of speech, freedom of conscience – why not have freedom of chemical experience? A well-established principle of liberal society is that whatever is done amongst consenting adults that does not affect others outside that group should be their business and only theirs. It is even bad jurisprudence to outlaw drugs. Demand chemical freedom!

Well that would all be fine if there weren’t, indeed, effects beyond the group. But who picks up the pieces when someone’s life has been wrecked by addiction? It is families, society at large, communities. There is no such thing as the liberal dream of behaviour that exists only within its own hermetically sealed circle. After all, a permissive attitude to drugs is bound to make more children use them; and there are bound to be some people who become addicts under legalisation who would not otherwise have been so. The business of building society is precisely that of making rules and getting most people to abide by them. For great harms – like violence, or drug addiction – society should impose great sanctions in order to reduce their prevalence and to set a standard of expected behaviour. Your so-called chemical freedom is really a license for society to go off the rails. Homer’s Odyseus had it right with the Lotus eaters:

They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-Eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches. Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to get home, so they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars."

He saw that Lotus-eating was a real danger to the most essential thing about his men: their desire to return home. He is the first leader to understand quite how tough you need to be on drugs if society is to be made up of people who strive towards something valuable.

Absurd! It is not as if drug use is not rife as it is, under criminalisation. The fact that Portugal and Switzerland have both opted for controlled decriminalisation without seeing drug-use balloon suggests that the one thing that the WoD is not doing is deterring consumption. So even if drug use needs to be tightly controlled and often discouraged, the WoD doesn’t seem to be the way of doing it. Much better to follow the lead of the current enlightened states and treat drugs as the public health problem that they are. Note that Odyseus doesn’t criminalise the Lotus eaters or even his men who have become addicts. He treats them for the problem and leaves so that the others will not be tempted – that is hardly mythical justification for the WoD. Indeed, the WoD is so ineffective that you start to wonder about the real reasons for it...

Oh here we go! We’re going to get the conspiracy theories: the world drug trade is orchestrated by the CIA to fund covert operations, and the real interest of the US is to keep it going so that it remains profitable. From the contras in Nicaragua to death squads in Columbia and war lords in Afghanistan, alliances forged by tough men fighting communism turned into a worldwide control scheme to enrich and control. If you believe that, you’ve probably had a few too many puffs on the peace pipe, brother.

Well, the CIA has been involved in drugs running and has supported drugs cartels. And it’s also true that there is nothing that angers US foreign policy so much as drugs being in the hands of the wrong guys – look at the Burmese junta or North Korea, with its huge share of the amphetamine market. But the reason is not conspiracy – it is that this trade really does offer financing opportunities to the bad guys. But much more important, at least for us reformers, is the question of why the domestic Western politics of this is so hard. Almost every ex-politician out there is more liberal on drugs out of power than they ever dared to be in power. Why is that? The answer goes to the heart of our democratic systems: ever since Nixon’s 1972 anti-hippy campaign, politicians have understood that a) it pays to go after a “threat from within” and to appear tough and intransigent, and b) that there is no better or more defenceless scapegoat in modern society than the drug user. But come on – wise up. The war on drugs comes from the weak gullibility of voters, and it’s the duty of anyone clear-headed to counter it.

This still all sounds a bit of a stretch to me. Why not accept the simple fact that politicians might be acting tough on drugs because we know very well what happens if you don’t - there ends up being a lot more drug-taking. Look at the legal drugs - cigarettes and alcohol. All our policy is moving in the direction of greater social control because we understand what damage they do to, especially to the vulnerable and the poor. Drug liberalisation is a favourite policy of the protected, liberal middle classes who see nothing wrong with a line of coke here or there and hate it when their Toyota hybrid is broken into by a desperate junkie. Fine - if that’s the limit of your worries, go ahead and legalise. But if you care about the poor, the vulnerable and the hopeless, those who would become drug addicts under easier supply, then keep your resolve. Just say no - to the the peace pipe as well as the drugs.

Browse previous Hot Topics