Introduction
Most sensible people oppose legalising all drugs tomorrow. The
short-term risks are too great. Addicts and pushers would move to
England and might move on to other areas of crime. The immediate effect on
such crimes as driving cars under the influence of drugs is unpredictable, and
methods to test for drug use are undeveloped. New and inexperienced
consumers would take time to learn to use them safely. Although the
long-term effect on consumption would probably be a fall, the short term effect
is difficult to predict.
However, we know the direction drug policy should take. We
should slowly, cautiously and soberly move to decriminalise and later legalise private use
by adults. It may take
years, it may take generations but the correct direction is clear.
The following article makes the case for full legalisation in a clear and
reasonable way. We print it here to reassure conservatives. Those
who want to take small steps in the right direction have nothing to fear.
1400 Words Against Drug Prohibition, by Sean Gabb
I notice I have not written about drugs for several years. There is nothing
in the news that prompts me to write about them now. I simply feel inclined to
see how well I can express what has become a huge argument in a small number of
words. And so here are my thoughts on why the sale and use of recreational drugs
ought not to be illegal.
Let us begin with the libertarian argument. People should be regarded as having
the right to do with themselves as they please. This necessarily includes the
right to do things that others think stupid or distasteful or immoral. If I want
to, I have the right to join an odd religious group, and give it all my wealth;
to have tattoos put all over my body, and to have parts of my body pierced in
artistic ways; to devote myself to the poor in Africa; to be hung up on hooks
and be flogged within an inch of my life by someone wearing a leather mask; and
of course, to consume whatever mood-altering substances take my fancy.
No one else automatically has the right to interfere with my choices. If you
think I am doing wrong, you can persuade me. You can get down on your knees and
beseech me to better behaviour. You can threaten me with exclusion from your
company and that of your friends. Beyond that, you have no right to go any
further, unless you can prove that what I am
doing involves the use of force or fraud against another person, or that it is
the sort of act - like selling defence plans to an enemy in arms - that
threatens the dissolution of the entire community.
Taking one's own drugs in consenting company is not an act of the first kind
- it causes no one else the sort of harm against which they can legitimately
demand protection. Nor is it an act of the second kind. We are told endlessly
that drugs are a danger to social stability - that they lead to crime and
degradation and so forth. There is no evidence for this claim.
The British past provides a compelling example. Until 1920, drug use was
uncontrolled. Between 1827 and 1859, British opium consumption rose from
17,000lb to 61,000lb. Workmen mixed it in their beer. Gladstone took it in his
coffee before speaking. Scott wrote The Bride of Lammermoor under its influence.
Dickens and Wilkie Collins were both heavy users.
Cannabis and heroin were openly on sale. There was no social collapse. There
were few deaths from taking drugs. Most deaths involving opium were individual
accidents, and even these were negligible - excluding suicides, 104 in 1868 and
thereafter to 1901 an annual average of 95. Hardly anyone even recognised that a
problem might exist.
The claim that drugs are bad for a society is a lie. The truth is the opposite.
It is the criminalisation of drugs that is bad. All the ills that are now blamed
on the availability of drugs are more accurately to be blamed on the illegality
of drugs.
When drugs are illegal, only criminals will supply them. And when criminals are
allowed to dominate an entire market, they will be able - indeed required - to
form extended, permanent structures of criminality that could never otherwise
exist. They will then make drugs both expensive and dirty.
Drugs will be expensive because bribes, transport inefficiencies, rewards of
special risk, and so forth, all raise the costs of bringing drugs to market.
Therefore much of the begging, prostitution and street crime that inconvenience
Western cities. As many as two-thirds of American muggings may be to finance
drug-use.
Drugs will be dirty because illegal markets lack the usual safeguards of
quality. When a can of beer is stamped "8 per cent alcohol by volume",
this does not mean anything between 0.5 and 30 per cent. Nor will caustic soda
be used to make it fizzy. Brewers have too much to lose by poisoning or
defrauding customers. Drug dealers can afford to be less particular.
Therefore frequent overdosing. Therefore poisonous additives. Therefore, the
frequent transmission of aids even today by the sharing of dirty needles.
Moving from the costs of the crime resulting from illegality, we come to the
costs of enforcement. These also are massive.
In the first place, the Police need to become a virtual Gestapo if they are to
try enforcing laws that create no victim willing to complain and help in any
investigation. They need powers to stop and search people and to search private
homes that would never be necessary to stop things like burglary and murder.
They need to get involved in entrapment schemes. They are exposed to offers of
bribes frequently too large to be turned away. In one way or another, the War on
Drugs leads to the corruption of every enforcement agency sent into battle.
And that War cannot be won. The British Customs and Excise have no land border
to worry about. They can track every boat and aeroplane that enters British
territory. They have far wider powers of investigation than the regular Police.
Even so, they themselves estimate that they stop less than three per cent of the
drugs that are smuggled into the United Kingdom every year.
In the second place, we have the war on money laundering. since it is impossible
to stop the import and sale of the drugs, attention has switched in recent years
to stopping the profits of the trade from being enjoyed. The idea now is to
confiscate these profits and use them for further investigations. However,
before the money can be taken, it must
be found. This requires a tight surveillance and control over all financial
transactions. Because any one of us might be a drug dealer trying to launder
dirty money, we must all provide endless documentation when we open bank
accounts. We are not allowed to pay in large amounts of cash - presently more
than œ20,000 - without facing an inquisition from the bank clerks. Our
banking details are open to official inspection virtually on demand.
Just as with drugs, the war on money laundering is also a war on freedom. In
this case, it frees the authorities from the requirements of due process. The
confiscations of alleged drug money are increasingly made without any pretence
of a trial. In America, civil asset forfeiture, has become legalised theft of
the plainest kind. In Britain, we are moving slowly towards a similar breach of
Common Law rights.
Moreover, the fact that our financial transactions can now be monitored gives
the authorities an entirely new power over us. Its means of exercise are not yet
in place. But we are moving fast into a world where all our purchases can be
stored in a database. All of this knowledge is collected for commercial reasons
- loyalty cards, for example, to let a supermarket know whether to offer us a
discount on a certain brand of dog food. It can also be commandeered by the
State and added to our police or medical records. We can try to avoid this
surveillance by using cash. But there are experiments in both Britain and
America to see how anonymous cash can be replaced by cards that leave a record
of every transaction.
Already, known smokers are unable to adopt children in certain areas. They have
also been denied treatment under the National Health Service in a number of
famous cases. Just think of a world where the authorities know exactly how many
cream cakes or condoms we buy, and what magazines we read. And that is the sort
of world to which the war on money
laundering is taking us.
Therefore, on the grounds both of individual freedom and of social utility,
there is no argument whatever for continuing with the present War on Drugs. It
is a War that benefits only criminals and a few drug enforcement agencies, and
that harms every one of the rest of us, whether or not we take drugs.
Of course, the special interests have so far prevailed; and they may within the
next few years get the publication of articles like this made into the criminal
offence of "sending out the wrong sort of message to young people", or
whatever. But even with our controlled media, the lies cannot be kept up very
much longer. This is neither a profound nor an
original article. But I send it out, hoping that it will be another tiny nail in
the coffin of drug prohibition.
by Sean Gabb
Dr Sean Gabb sits on the Executive Committee of the Libertarian Alliance and
edits its journal "Free Life". His latest book, "Dispatches from
a Dying Country: Reflections on Modern England", is available from
Politico's
"Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is
sovereign" (J.S. Mill, On Liberty, 1859)
