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UK: The case for legalisation. Time for a puff of sanity
The Economist Thursday 26 Jul 2001 IT IS every parent's nightmare. A youngster slithers inexorably from a few puffs on a joint, to a snort of cocaine, to the needle and addiction. It was the flesh-creeping heart of 'Traffic', a film about the descent into heroin hell of a pretty young middle-class girl, and it is the terror that keeps drug laws in place. It explains why even those politicians who puffed at a joint or two in their youth hesitate to put the case for legalising drugs. The terror is not irrational. For the first thing that must be said about legalising drugs, a cause The Economist has long advocated and returns to this week (see survey ), is that it would lead to a rise in their use, and therefore to a rise in the number of people dependent on them. Some argue that drug laws have no impact, because drugs are widely available. Untrue: drugs are expensive - a kilo of heroin sells in America for as much as a new Rolls-Royce - partly because their price reflects the dangers involved in distributing and buying them. It is much harder and riskier to pick up a dose of cocaine than it is to buy a bottle of whisky. Remove such constraints, make drugs accessible and very much cheaper, and more people will experiment with them. A rise in drug-taking will inevitably mean that more people will become dependent - inevitably, because drugs offer a pleasurable experience that people seek to repeat. In the case of most drugs, that dependency may be no more than a psychological craving and affect fewer than one in five users; in the case of heroin, it is physical and affects maybe one in three. Even a psychological craving can be debilitating. Addicted gamblers and drinkers bring misery to themselves and their families. In addition, drugs have lasting physical effects and some, taken incompetently, can kill. This is true both for some 'hard' drugs and for some that people think of as 'soft': too much heroin can trigger a strong adverse reaction, but so can ecstasy. The same goes for gin or aspirin, of course: but many voters reasonably wonder whether it would be right to add to the list of harmful substances that are legally available. Of Mill and morality The case for doing so rests on two arguments: one of principle, one practical. The principles were set out, a century and a half ago, by John Stuart Mill, a British liberal philosopher, who urged that the state had no right to intervene to prevent individuals from doing something that harmed them, if no harm was thereby done to the rest of society. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign, Mill famously proclaimed. This is a view that The Economist has always espoused, and one to which most democratic governments adhere, up to a point. They allow the individual to undertake all manner of dangerous activities unchallenged, from mountaineering to smoking to riding bicycles through city streets. Such pursuits alarm insurance companies and mothers, but are rightly tolerated by the state. True, Mill argued that some social groups, especially children, required extra protection. And some argue that drug-takers are also a special class: once addicted, they can no longer make rational choices about whether to continue to harm themselves. Yet not only are dependent users a minority of all users; in addition, society has rejected this argument in the case of alcohol, and of nicotine (whose addictive power is greater than that of heroin). The important thing here is for governments to spend adequately on health education. The practical case for a liberal approach rests on the harms that spring from drug bans, and the benefits that would accompany legalisation. At present, the harms fall disproportionately on poor countries and on poor people in rich countries. In producer and entrepot countries, the drugs trade finances powerful gangs who threaten the state and corrupt political institutions. Colombia is the most egregious example, but Mexico too wrestles with the threat to the police and political honesty. The attempt to kill illicit crops poisons land and people. Drug money helps to prop up vile regimes in Myanmar and Afghanistan. And drug production encourages local drug-taking, which (in the case of heroin) gives a helping hand to the spread of HIV/AIDS. In the rich world, it is the poor who are most likely to become involved in the drugs trade (the risks may be high, but drug-dealers tend to be equal-opportunity employers), and therefore end up in jail. Nowhere is this more shamefully true than in the United States, where roughly one in four prisoners is locked up for a (mainly non-violent) drugs offence. America's imprisonment rate for drugs offences now exceeds that for all crimes in most West European countries. Moreover, although whites take drugs almost as freely as blacks and Hispanics, a vastly disproportionate number of those arrested, sentenced and imprisoned are non-white. Drugs policy in the United States is thus breeding a generation of men and women from disadvantaged backgrounds whose main training for life has been in the violence of prison. Legalise to regulate Removing these harms would bring with it another benefit. Precisely because the drugs market is illegal, it cannot be regulated. Laws cannot discriminate between availability to children and adults. Governments cannot insist on minimum quality standards for cocaine; or warn asthma sufferers to avoid ecstasy; or demand that distributors take responsibility for the way their products are sold. With alcohol and tobacco, such restrictions are possible; with drugs, not. This increases the dangers to users, and especially to young or incompetent users. Illegality also puts a premium on selling strength: if each purchase is risky, then it makes sense to buy drugs in concentrated form. In the same way, Prohibition in the United States in the 1920s led to a fall in beer consumption but a rise in the drinking of hard liquor. How, if governments accepted the case for legalisation, to get from here to there? When, in the 18th century, a powerful new intoxicant became available, the impact was disastrous: it took years of education for gin to cease to be a social threat. That is a strong reason to proceed gradually: it will take time for conventions governing sensible drug-taking to develop. Meanwhile, a century of illegality has deprived governments of much information that good policy requires. Impartial academic research is difficult. As a result, nobody knows how demand may respond to lower prices, and understanding of the physical effects of most drugs is hazy. And how, if drugs were legal, might they be distributed? The thought of heroin on supermarket shelves understandably adds to the terror of the prospect. Just as legal drugs are available through different channels - caffeine from any cafe, alcohol only with proof of age, Prozac only on prescription - so the drugs that are now illegal might one day be distributed in different ways, based on knowledge about their potential for harm. Moreover, different countries should experiment with different solutions: at present, many are bound by a United Nations convention that hampers even the most modest moves towards liberalisation, and that clearly needs amendment. To legalise will not be easy. Drug-taking entails risks, and societies are increasingly risk-averse. But the role of government should be to prevent the most chaotic drug-users from harming others - by robbing or by driving while drugged, for instance - and to regulate drug markets to ensure minimum quality and safe distribution. The first task is hard if law enforcers are preoccupied with stopping all drug use; the second, impossible as long as drugs are illegal. A legal market is the best guarantee that drug-taking will be no more dangerous than drinking alcohol or smoking tobacco. And, just as countries rightly tolerate those two vices, so they should tolerate those who sell and take drugs.
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