Drug War

Drugs. Just reading the word is enough to elicit a jerk of even the most resilient of knees. Talking sense about drugs is rare. It shouldn’t be this way. It is actually very easy to talk sense about drugs. The problem isn’t the logic. The arguments are so simple and straightforward that it’s hard not to feel patronising putting them forward. The arguments are well-rehearsed. It’s very difficult to come up with new ones. I think that most people already know them, but don’t face up to the logical consequences. The problem is historical. We happen to live in a society in which some drugs have become socially sanctioned whilst others are socially vilified. The result of this is a set of drug laws that make no sense in the slightest no matter what twisted logic is applied to them.

In the current context, drugs are substances that are absorbed into the body for the purpose of the effect that they have on the central nervous system. In most cases, this effect will be an alteration of some aspect(s) of experience. Alcohol gets you drunk, LSD produces hallucinations and a shift of normal conscious experience. Both are drugs, and this isn’t debated. All the available evidence suggests that humans have always been keen to alter their consciousness in some way or other. Most primitive cultures still existing do this with a combination of techniques, with the ingestion of mind-altering substances having been long ago integrated into various other cultural traditions (or, perhaps just as likely, vice versa).

In most developed countries, we have the situation in which governments have attempted to control the use of drugs. Some drugs are sanctioned by the state, who tax them and make money from them, whilst others are outlawed, criminalising those who use them. What is the basis for this distinction, and what is the most sensible, logical and socially responsible course of action to take with respect to drugs?

As far as I can see, there are three options: 1. Ban all drugs. We decide that changing our natural conscious experience is a bad thing and people shouldn't be allowed to do it, so we make it a criminal offence to take any substance that alters your experience. That would include alcohol and caffeine. Anyone who is caught using any mind-altering substance is deemed a law-breaker….Obviously, this doesn’t appear to be a realistic option. If this was ever to happen, it should have happened before some drugs became widespread in society. Even if they had been banned from an early stage, a black market is inevitable.....as the American prohibition experiment demonstrated so clearly, and the illegal global drug trade continues to. Given the natural urge to alter our consciousness, it follows that banning all substances that did that would be ignoring what it is to be human.

2. Ban some drugs, but allow others. This is the situation we've got at the moment. However, if you go back to first principles, then you have to have sensible criteria for how to draw the line between legal and illegal. How do you decide that X is legal and Y is illegal? It would seem to me that the most sensible way to do this is to base the decision on the evidence concerning the harmfulness of drugs. The drugs that cause the most harm should be banned, the ones that are fairly harmless should be legal. There are still problems with this, as there has to be a line drawn (which will necessarily be arbitrary) between the "harmful" and the "less harmful”. Although this is problematic, it could be done by scientists specialising in toxicology and pharmacology. In 2007, a paper was published in the Lancet that aimed to provide an informed means by which drugs could be classified in terms of the harm that they do, based on the available evidence at the time. The authors of the paper, all distinguished experts, advise that the process by which drugs are classified is “ill-defined, opaque and seemingly arbitrary” (Nutt et al, 2007, p. 1047). Based on a variety of factors (including their physical effects, social effects and addictive properties), they offer a revised list that classifies drugs in terms of the harm that they do. They examined 20 drugs, some of which are legal, some of which are illegal. Here is their list, starting with the most dangerous and going down to the least dangerous:

1. Heroin

2. Cocaine

3. Barbituates

4. Street methadone

5. Alcohol

6. Ketamine

7. Benzodiazepines

8. Amphetamine

9. Tobacco

10. Buphrenophine

11. Cannabis

12. Solvents

13. 4-MTA (aka Flatliners)

14. LSD

15. Methylphenidate (e.g. Ritalin)

16. Anabolic steroids

17. GHB

18. Ecstasy

19. Amyl Nitrates

20. Khat

So, take your pick at where the line should be drawn. Even if you arbitrarily opt for a 50-50 split, you’ve still got to ban alcohol and tobacco whilst making LSD and ecstasy legal. Nobody is saying that this list is definitive. It may turn out that long term ecstasy use has serious neurological effects that we don’t currently know about. What we can be certain of, however, is that alcohol and tobacco aren’t going to get any safer. One person a day dies of acute alcohol poisoning. That’s not long-term use, that’s just someone dying from drinking too much in one session. When you look at the effects of chronic alcohol use, the effects are beyond comprehension, not just in terms of deaths, but in terms of the other burdens that alcohol use places on society. 10 people a year die from using ecstasy. Even when considered proportionately, this isn’t something we should be getting to worked up about (notwithstanding any unknown long-term effects).

The reason why alcohol is legal is a historical accident. When religious puritanity lost its grip on society, certain things became tolerable. The Dry Law was repealed, and the population rejoiced. However, the population at the turn of the last century only really knew about alcohol, and so that's what they demanded. As a result of the demand for alcohol, it was legalised and made widely available. As the population didn't have any knowledge of any other drugs, everything else remained illegal. If this situation had been just slightly different, we might now be in a position when buying a spliff in Tesco’s was no big deal. That's how the decision was made in the first place. It wasn't based on what was most dangerous, but on what there was most demand for at the time. It's not a good way to make a decision like this, so if we really want to be sensible, we need new criteria for what is legal and illegal.

I don't think there's anything really controversial about the logic used here. I’d love to hear of any flaws in the logic (think with your head, not with your knee). But there would certainly be controversy were this to be implemented. It seems obvious that the reason people use alcohol and condemn other drugs is based solely on the fact that alcohol is legal and other things aren't. But that is a historical accident and is not based on any sensible, evidence-based criteria. As such, there is no logical reason for thinking that alcohol is "OK" whilst LSD is not, because, by all sensible criteria, alcohol is by far the most damaging of the two.

3. The third option is to legalise all drugs. Although the most sensible approach is to have evidence based criteria about what is legal or illegal, this is never going to happen. Given that this is the case, the only remaining sensible position is to legalise all drugs. People are rightly scared about this prospect. However, if we can control the sale of and access to alcohol and tobacco (both strong psychoactive substances) then there's nothing stopping us controlling and limiting access to other drugs. Legalising them would wipe out the illegal trade, thus dealing a hammer blow to organised crime. They would be heavily taxed (and highly priced), of course, which would pay for education and healthcare (which are both currently massively underfunded, especially in relation to drugs and alcohol).

Legalisation would also save billions of pounds that are currently being spent in the so-called "drug war" - a war that is being lost on every front by the prohibitionists. These billions of pounds could be better spent.

Most people recoil at the suggestion of legalising all drugs. It's a hard thing to get your head around. However, if you think it's a bad idea, then tell me why......many people use the argument that soft drugs lead to hard drugs. All evidence says this is not the case. There will be some instances of this, but the evidence suggests that there is no direct and inevitable trajectory from soft drugs to hard drugs. Anyway, even if this was the case, the link is probably only due to the “illegal” status of some drugs. Nobody ever suggests that alcohol and tobacco lead to “harder” drugs, even though this logic says that this would be the case.

I didn’t think I’d end up with this conclusion when I started to think about these things. I thought that the most sensible thing would be re-classification, with certain things remaining illegal. But when you look at the effects of the “legal” drugs, then any sensible re-classification becomes impossible. Legalisation is the only thing that makes sense.

Now, if your knee has stopped jerking, have a lovely glass of wine. Just stay off that evil LSD.