I’ve just been in New York for the first time in two decades. It’s a young person’s city, it has to be said, but my view was slightly darkened by being far out in Brooklyn and having to spend a lot of time on the subway, perhaps the most depressing public transport network on earth.
Aesthetically horrific, incredibly dirty, full of madmen, unusually uncomfortable and bumpy (the only train service where one can actually experience turbulence). Worst of all, it stinks of weed, almost everywhere. You could pump in the urine smell of the Paris Metro and it would be a vast improvement.
On one particular occasion the subway stunk of weed because some young men were openly smoking it in front of everyone, but more often it was because someone was rolling up a joint, or they just permanently smell of the stuff. On the morning journey to Manhattan there was usually one person smoking a spliff outside the subway station before their daily commute. Nothing like a brain damage-inducing intoxicant to start the day before a shift at the office!
In fact, pretty much everywhere in the city now smells of weed, with the exception of Little Italy, where suddenly one is surrounded by the captivating whiff of cigarette smoke – the odour of civilisation. There are huge billboards in Times Square advertising cannabis, and as The Tablet described it, ‘in tony Park Slope, a marijuana “dispensary” with Apple Store-like aesthetics is mere feet away from the youth soccer fields at the Old Stone House.’ The combination of the weed aesthetic, with the scores of insane, drug-addled or broken people lying on the pavement, is incredibly grim, ‘Back to the Future if Biff became rich’ sort of stuff.
Cannabis legalisation, or at least decriminalisation, once had the force of history on its side. Younger people were in favour of it – I broadly was – the proportion using it was on the rise, and there was a widespread feeling that it was less harmful than alcohol (which, for many people, it surely is). It wasn’t addictive, I was often told, although the people who said that tended to smoke it every day.
When I was younger the US was stricter about marijuana, whereas progressive European countries like the Netherlands were leading the way in harm reduction; while the direction of travel in Europe has also been towards decriminalisation, the US has since gone further, with cannabis now available in 24 US states.
Yet public opinion seems to already be turning against the experiment, at least on the Right, as its effects become clear. In his substack, Alex Berenson wrote that: ‘As more Americans see the problems firsthand, their views of cannabis are slowly turning negative, a recent Gallup poll found. Even in deep-blue New York, almost twice as many residents say cannabis legalization has hurt their quality of life as helped it.’
Much of this is down to recent research, and Berenson noted that ‘In March, scientists in Boston reported cannabis users under 50 had a sixfold higher risk of heart attacks compared to people who didn’t. In February, Canadian researchers found people hospitalized with a diagnosis of cannabis abuse were six times as likely to die as the average person over the next five years. Suicides and trauma-related deaths made up much of the increase.
‘And just weeks ago, physicians in Colorado – the first state to legalize cannabis recreationally – reported that diagnoses of psychosis in young people have soared in the last 15 years, with diagnoses in heavy cannabis users driving the increase. Meanwhile, the promises of cannabis legalization have not come true. Tax revenue from legal cannabis is a rounding error in state budgets, and legalization has not ended the illegal market in cannabis, which remains large and violent. If anything, legal stores are actually losing ground to illegal dealers at this point.’
In Britain, there is also growing unease about the drug, and The Spectator’s leading article this week laments that ‘The drug-ridden, crime-filled streets of downtown Manhattan, San Francisco and Chicago testify to the malign consequences of failing to uphold civic order.’
It pointed out that:
Those who most need help are the ones most harmed by decriminalisation. Last month, a study published in JAMA Psychiatry found that cannabis use by psychotic Americans increased by nearly 10 per cent following relaxation of the law; when Portugal decriminalised cannabis, there was a 30-fold increase in hospitalisations for associated psychotic disorders.
The list of harms associated with cannabis use are legion, as mental health nurse Peter Hurst lists. A few years ago Hurst wrote a first-person account of the extreme damage he has seen with marijuana use, and he has also argued against legalising the drug, pointing out that neither its progressive nor libertarian arguments really ring true.
Of all the negative social effects, the drug’s association with mental illness is the most troubling; Britain has suffered from a number of recent horrific murders linked to psychosis, and cannabis routinely features in the background stories of the killers. American cities are overrun by people who are obviously sick, a large number of whom are on drugs, in particular fentanyl and other opiates. The social costs of drug abuse is clearly higher than anticipated, and after years of fighting the ‘war on drugs’ half-heartedly, decriminalisation doesn’t offer much of a solution either. Legalised cannabis doesn’t even seem to have any effect on alcohol or cigarette sales, one of the supposed benefits.
In reality, middle-class drug users are not the main problem
The progressive argument for decriminalisation, argued by politicians such as London Mayor Sadiq Khan, is that the war on drugs is racist, because arrests and prosecutions are disproportionately used against minorities, especially young black men. That’s actually a pretty weak argument since, as Hurst points out, even after legalisation, disparities in arrests remain the same. Blaming the ‘war on drugs’ for the large number of black men in jail, both in the US and to a lesser extent in Britain, is a comforting explanation but not backed by the data, which shows drug possession accounting for only 3.7 per cent of those sent to state prisons. Most will be in for hard drugs, and will have previous convictions, but arguably they shouldn’t be taking up jail space, especially if you support the libertarian argument over body autonomy – but they don’t make much difference to the disparities in imprisonment rates.
Whatever the progressive argument, the real reason that the war on drugs has been fought half-heartedly is that large numbers of middle-class people are not prepared to encompass jail sentences for people like them who simply want to use recreational drugs in their spare time, and who are otherwise law-abiding and useful members of society. This is a much better argument, but people prefer not to openly make it. In fact, Tory politicians occasionally promise to crack down on ‘middle-class drug users’, which always feels like an attempt to shift the debate by using the left’s framing that certain groups have more moral weight than others.
In reality, middle-class drug users are not the main problem – it’s the huge destruction that drugs have done to the underclass, and the effect on unemployment, petty crime and mental illness. Yes, drugs wreck the minds and lives of well-brought-up, privileged youngsters, but in relatively small numbers, and less than alcohol; their effect on poor communities is far more devastating.
You don’t have to be a full-blown libertarian to think that arresting a banker for taking cocaine on a Friday night is not the best use of the state’s resources; he’s not doing his body any favours, and he may become more obnoxious and boring, but the harm is mostly privatised.
The problem is with the very-much-not middle-class crack addict who repeatedly steals from your local supermarket – that’s the reason why you have to ask a shop assistant to unlock the meat counter. It’s the weed-riddled unemployed twenty-something who fails to get a job and lives on benefits. It’s the young man from a broken home with a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia who develops psychosis after smoking the stuff. It’s the countless people you now see passed out on streets. In those cases, the harm is both more extreme to the individual, and externalised.
These social costs are now enormous and catastrophic, and far worse than in the 1980s when drug abuse first became a media concern, but they are not largely due to ‘middle-class drug abusers’. It’s the poor, the marginalised, society’s downtrodden – that’s who we want to prevent from taking drugs, which should be a luxury for the Sherlock Holmes of this world.
The new social order is largely a meritocracy of impulse control: our brains are now bombarded with temptation, not just with drugs, alcohol, gambling or junk food, but by entertainment and the slop pumped out of our phones. Impulse control tends to correlate with social class, due to both genes and environment, but it’s a rigged game made harder by circumstances: the more you struggle, the harder it is to resist instant gratification, as George Orwell noted almost a century ago when writing about the diets of the poor.
The new social order is largely a meritocracy of impulse control
Society’s winners tend to favour rules that maximise their freedom, both out of principle and because they have the greatest impulse control. The problem is that the social costs are paid by society more generally; drugs totally transform the urban environment of American cities like New York and San Francisco, and I wonder if and when we’ll face the same (I saw someone on a zombie drug in my area for the first time this year). Dealing with a large proportion of non-functioning or psychotic people is incredibly expensive, and the proposed savings of legalisation don’t seem to cover this immense human wreckage.
Yet the reality is that we aren’t prepared to send that banker to jail in order to make it that much easier for those at the bottom to resist temptation. So, as a thought experiment, I wish to suggest a compromise – narcotics licences. If you want to take marijuana, or cocaine, ecstasy, amphetamines or even heroin for that matter, you apply for a licence in the way you might for a gun: you answer a series of questions about income, employment, past criminal record and mental illness, and once you acquire the licence, you can legally buy narcotics from certain pharmacies. Drug companies are free to produce these products, which are tested to maximise their safety, but their prices are regulated and advertising is treated the same way as nicotine.
As well as passing certain criteria about criminal history and income, licence holders may have to pay for medical insurance, and if you end up hospitalised as a result of narcotics, you lose your licence. But the licence should be secret, and employers will be banned from asking staff whether they hold one, and will not be allowed to test them for drugs – except with certain professions like pilots and surgeons. Foreign visitors could also be allowed to apply for a licence, in theory.
All of this you can do completely legally, but individual supply will be limited to prevent abuse or resale, and if you provide narcotics to anyone else, you go straight to jail; if you are found with any restricted narcotics without a licence, you go straight to jail. If you’re caught dealing them, you go to jail for decades. This sort of personal freedom would only work if the authorities were prepared to stomach the necessary punishments for those who break the rules (as I said, it’s a thought experiment, and perhaps not relevant to UK 2025).
The argument when I was growing up was that ‘prohibition doesn’t work’, but alcohol prohibition in the US did work in certain ways: alcohol use declined, with subsequent reductions in the associated health problems, and perhaps more importantly, domestic violence massively fell – that, after all, was the aim of the women who got the stuff banned. Likewise, drug prohibition does work in that it reduces their consumption, and therefore the extreme social problems associated with misuse.
But alcohol prohibition failed in the sense that most people enjoy drinking, can do so safely, and didn’t feel that criminalisation of its sale was a proportionate restriction on their lifestyles just to minimise the downsides for a small number; many were therefore prepared to still pay for it, even if by doing so they were funding organised crime and its subsequent violence, as with the prohibition of drugs.
This widespread flouting undermined the law, just as the laws against drugs misuse have been completely undermined by a popular feeling that imprisonment for possession is disproportionate. In many cases it is, so let them smoke weed, so long as they take responsibility and privatise the costs.
This article originally appeared on Ed West’s Wrong Side of History.
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