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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: The real snag in legalising drugs
Simon Heffer The Sunday Telegraph
Sunday 05 May 2002 THOSE who would legalise drugs had two boosts to their morale last week. First, Mo Mowlam, the former cabinet minister, advocated legalisation in her memoirs. Second, the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) said that those using drugs should receive treatment rather than punishment. Although Acpo does not want legalisation, it is a deceptively short step from this greater tolerance to being able to buy your dope openly and, yes, legally. The usual argument for legalisation is that the present laws infringe the liberty of the subject. Individuals have a right to harm themselves, they say - as the state acknowledges in allowing the sale to adults of cigarettes and alcohol. A secondary argument is that, once drugs were legalised, there would de facto be less drug-related crime. This is nonsense because those who wanted drugs but could not afford them would still raise the funds in the same way - bopping old ladies over the head, burgling or stealing mobile telephones. However, there is a more subtle reason than that why crime would not fall. If legalised, drugs would have to be treated in the same way as all other mind-altering substances. The Government would need to tax them. It would be unthinkable for the man who smokes a cigarette to have to pay a penal rate of excise duty (and VAT) on his tobacco while someone smoking cannabis did not. Nor can one imagine the Scotch whisky industry, which has been on hard times for years, tolerating the zero-rating of cocaine while a dram is taxed heavily. One presumes that, as with cigarettes, the tax would be designed to deter people from using drugs, because of the health risk. Since the risks to health of currently illegal substances, and the inherent dangers of addiction to harder and harder substances, would be even worse than with tobacco, the tax would have to be appropriately swingeing. Anything less would be a great betrayal of the interests of the British public. This inevitable taxation regime would have predictable consequences. Just as 30 per cent of cigarettes smoked in this country are not duty paid, because the high rates of tax makes smuggling so lucrative, so too would there be a huge illegal trade in drugs to evade their taxes. Indeed, since all drug users are conditioned to obtaining their substances from black market suppliers, there would be very little incentive for them to switch to legal ones, especially if they have to the pay handsomely to do so. Therefore, there would still be an enormous illegal drugs racket in Britain to meet this demand. Also, it is hard to believe that all the minors who take drugs would, after legalisation, wait until they were 18 to start using them: so the police would still have to deal with their innumerable acts of illegality. These, and their consequences, would be far more damaging than the fag behind the bike sheds at school, or the odd under-age Bacardi and Coke in the Rat and Parrot. Once this economic reality is accepted, and it becomes clear that legalisation would be as much of a headache as the present dispensation, only the libertarian argument is left. Since the claims about reducing crime and work for the police do not hold water, we can instead have hours of fun arguing about the need to defend the freedom of teenage crackheads to beat up old ladies who are on their way back from collecting their pensions.
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