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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: No place for business in Whitehall's drugs mind games
Graham Searjeant, Financial Editor The Times
Friday 30 Jan 2004 LITTLE exercises the liberal mind more creatively than reconciling impossible contradictions. To the rest of us, it often seems like the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. But that can underestimate the subtlety of those who devise policies. For them, it seems perfectly reasonable to lecture us on the need to save for much bigger pension pots, and at the same time to reduce those pots by 5 billion pounds a year, plus compound interest for up to 40 years. There is renewed talk of forcing people to save, a measure that would undoubtedly be followed by further tax raids. Regulators are firmly instructed to cut the prices of gas, electricity and water to the lowest level at which supplies will be sustained. Other policies demand that prices be put up again to cut consumption and protect nature. In these cases, there is at least one common thread. Savers, investors and companies should not make any more money out of these activities than is absolutely necessary. If possible, these economic activities should be conducted without anyone making any profit. That is also about the only thing all parties concerned with currently illegal recreational drugs agree on. A liberal society cannot effectively deter users by law. If the authorities want to crack down, they can only target those who supply what, in spite of the evidence, so many people still seem to insist on demanding. At the opposite end of the spectrum, those who want prohibition laws to be abolished on libertarian grounds, also want regulation to prevent commercial production and sale. Green Party members, for instance, envisage social smoking of cannabis at Amsterdam-style drug cafes, with the proceeds used to finance local community projects. From yesterday, cannabis (other than cannabis resin) has been downgraded under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Instead of being Class B, where it ranked alongside amphetamines but below cocaine,heroin, and Ecstasy, to Class C, where police do not normally arrest people for possession in private. The perception that cannabis was no longer very illegal persuaded ministers to place advertisements to say the contrary. At the same time, substances tagged 'date rape' drugs were made illegal, as were several more varieties of steroids recently put on the International Olympic Committee banned list. Any confusion is intentional. The Office for National Statistics most recently estimated that one third of men below 25 have used cannabis within the previous 12 months, along with one in five young women. However, cannabis was not redesignated on social grounds, or to win votes. The change was made to improve relations between police and groups of young men and to free police time for more serious crime (as well as to fill in more forms monitoring and comparing the effectiveness of different speed cameras). The change is not expected to have much impact on the cannabis trade, which remains wholly illegal. People trying to open a new bank, savings or investment account may have mixed feelings about this. Under bureaucratic new money-laundering regulations, they are liable to have to produce multiple official evidence of who they are. This is not merely inconvenient for consumers. Taken with other controls, it raises costs and deters innovation in financial services. Another layer of procedures, monitoring and dedicated managers is being grafted on to the compliance system, data recording and marketing supervision. As long as we have a large, profitable but illegal trade in all manner of prohibited drugs, however, regulations against money-laundering are likely to fail. They will be just costly gestures that make the economy work less efficiently. No one knows how big the UK drugs trade is. It is illegal so it is not publicly recorded. Estimates tend to reflect the attitudes of whoever is making them. A Home Office study a couple of years ago suggested that annual sales of cannabis alone were about 1.5 billion pounds. A consultancy called the Independent Drug Monitoring Unit (IDMU), which advises courts, puts cannabis at 5 billion pounds. Others, not inclined to underplay the issue, suggest 8 billion pounds, with a further 6 billion pounds for cocaine and heroin. Taking the IDMU figure, it seems likely that the trade in all the main illegal drugs is about 1 per cent of gross domestic product. That is comfortably more, for instance, than pre-duty sales of beer. The cost of keeping this trade illegal, without taking effective measures to eliminate it, is heavy. The profitability of the trade is based on the product being addictive and the trade illegal. This combination keeps prices of some drugs so high that most addicts cannot afford to buy them regularly. A vast load of petty, fear-inducing and unsolved crime is committed by consumers. Producers are probably responsible for an equally high proportion of serious gun crime, which is expensive and extremely hard to prosecute successfully. The entire industry pays no tax. If it did, income tax might be cut by up to two pence in the pound and still raise as much revenue. Potentially, all the money raised in this trade might need to be laundered. The supply chains are so long that it is hard to say how much money sticks where. Doubtless, however, many cash businesses exist that would not be worth running if they were not used to launder drug money. Regulations on banks are unlikely to make much difference at this level. The illegal drugs trade is also ideal for transferring funds across the world for nefarious purposes, including providing the funds for many terrorism groups. As cannabis slides down the legal scale, prices have been falling. That reduces crime, especially among soft drug users. As with electricity (or Ecstasy), however, you would expect a fall in price to increase sales, which is the main drawback of making the drug fully legal and commercial. These compromises may satisfy refined Whitehall intellects. They still make no sense.
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