Carola Binney
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The Tab, the online student newspaper, recently published an article on ‘how to survive a festival this summer,’ which includes advice on managing an ecstasy comedown alongside telling you to pack some cereal bars and a raincoat. Other articles include advice on the order in which you should take your drugs for the optimal weekend, and tips for smuggling drugs past festival security.
Possession of a Class A drug is punishable by up to seven years in prison; yet there is no other crime which people commit so regularly, and with such little thought. It is unimaginable that a widely-read student paper would publish an article on how to commit theft or run a brothel, yet those offences carry the same maximum sentence. Possession with intent to supply is punishable by up to life imprisonment – I have friends who may well have technically committed an offence with the same maximum sentence as rape and murder.
In no other area is the law so out of sync with what ordinary people consider ordinary conduct – and with what the police and prosecutors are actually willing to enforce. And it’s not just festival-going graduates who are prone to pop a few pills – apparently drug-taking is also rife at London dinner parties. Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan police commissioner, recently slammed the sort of people who ‘happily think about global warming and fair trade…but think there is no harm in taking a bit of cocaine’. These druggy diners are partly responsible for pushing cocaine use to its highest point in a decade.
Cressida Dick has rightly stressed the strong connection between the trade in drugs and violent crime. She would tackle the problem by imploring the drug takers of Islington to add the horrors of the supply chain to their list of worthy concerns. There is a much more effective solution available: we should legalise the lot.
Legalising all drugs would take a huge industry, worth an estimated £5.3 billion in the UK alone, out of the hands of criminals. It would reduce crime rates, boost tax revenues and remove a huge incentive for police corruption. And legalisation would enable regulation, reducing the harm to users by ensuring people know what they are taking.
A very large proportion of drug-related deaths occur because of users’ inability to predict the strength of what they’ve bought, or because of the practice of cutting drugs with other dangerous chemicals. Some suggest that this element of risk is a good thing, because it serves as a useful deterrent; as Hugo Rifkind put it in the Times, this argument is akin to suggesting we fight obesity by randomly poisoning burgers.
The single sensible argument against legalising drugs is that more people might start doing them. This argument ignores the fact that a very large number of people are doing them already – and that the ‘war on drugs’ has only seen availability increase. Regulation would have a good chance of reducing the number of under-18s taking drugs, even if overall usage might go up.
It is also wrong to assume that a few more people trying a few more things would be an unmitigated social disaster. Almost all the risks associated with recreational drug use are the product of a lack of regulation. If taken properly, MDMA (the active ingredient in ecstasy) is arguably less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco. And all these cocaine-snorting dinner party guests are clearly holding down their day jobs.
Some drugs do, of course, cause problems in their own right, but the horrors of heroin addiction ought not loom too large: addicts represent a tiny proportion of all those who have ever used drugs, and particularly harmful substances could be subject to special controls. Addiction is the product of a wide variety of factors, and has very little to do with simple availability. The odd glass of wine doesn’t lead most people to alcoholism, and the odd line doesn’t lead most people to the crack den.
The war on drugs was worth a try, but, like the American alcohol prohibition, it hasn’t worked. Yet politicians seem to think that suggesting otherwise is electoral anathema. David Cameron backed away from his previous support for legalisation as Prime Minister. His successors need to find the confidence to insist that legalising drugs isn’t about good times doing lines – it’s about cutting crime and saving lives.
Because you read about drugs
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