The "War on Drugs" is killing our citizens

During prohibition in the USA in the 1920s many people were poisoned and died due to alcohol that had been produced in sub-optimal conditions and in some cases had been adulterated with various chemicals. It was an obvious consequence of the fact that the trade in a substance that millions of people wanted had been driven underground.

People like to describe this sort of thing as an "unintended consequence". Their argument is that they are trying to stop the trade in substances they have decided to outlaw and that they do not intend people to die as a result.

In recent weeks six people in the west of Scotland have died as a result of taking what they thought were ecstasy tablets but in fact contained a dangerous toxic stimulant.

Since the "War on Drugs" started in the early 1970s there have been countless thousands of people who have died due to taking what they thought was one substance but was in fact another. Or they thought it was of a particular concentration but it turned out to be much stronger than they had realised and by the time they did it was too late.

Imagine if you went down to a shop to buy a bottle of alcoholic beverage and instead of it being labelled "Wine" or "Whisky" or "Vodka" along with a clear ABV percentage (e.g. 13.5% or 40%) instead there was no label and you had no idea what was in the bottle. It might be something that is around 10%. It might be 40%. It might be 80%. There is no way to tell. Also, you think it contains an alcoholic drink but it might instead contain something that if ingested even in small amounts would kill you.

That's analogous to the sort of situation that people who take drugs in this country regularly face. Most of them get lucky. But some of them do not.

The simple fact is that exactly like they found in the USA, prohibiting a substance drives trade underground and quality control goes out of the window. By 1933 the US had learned the horrible lessons that prohibiting alcohol had caused far more problems than it solved and reversed the law in short order. But we are still to learn the lessons regarding drugs more than 40 years on from their prohibition.

There have been so many deaths like those in Scotland recently that I am no longer willing to accept the term "unintended consequences" to describe them. I would not go so far as to say our politicians want these people to die but it is clear that they see them as some sort of collateral damage in the "War on Drugs". They are not collateral damage. They were human beings with thoughts, feelings, friends and family exactly like you and I.

It is nonsensical to declare war on a substance. The "War" if it exists at all is on our own citizens, particularly our young and often very vulnerable citizens. They bear the brunt of the poison they put in their bodies due to lack of any sort of quality control. They serve the time in prison if they are caught with "controlled substances" and have their future prospects utterly ruined.

It is time to recognise that criminalising substances that people want to put into their systems simply makes the problem worse. Much worse.

It only took 13 years for the Americans to realise this in relation to alcohol. I really do wonder why it  has taken more than three times as long (and counting) when it comes to other substances. Because the problem is exactly the same.

The phrase "those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it" has never been more apt.

It's time for Nick Clegg to make the liberal case on drugs policy

The Mail on Sunday yesterday reported that the Home Affairs Select Committee report into drugs policy, reporting this morning is going to recommend that the option of legalisation should be seriously considered and a Royal Commission should be set up to report on the issue prior to the 2015 general election.

As readers of this blog will know I am a long standing supporter of liberalisation of our drug laws. So this report is a breath of fresh air as far as I am concerned. A sensible pragmatic look at the problems with current policy and an attempt to suggest steps that could help.

Right on cue, the government has already given its initial response and completely unsurprisingly they are making it clear they do not intend to do what the report suggests, before it has even been published. A government spokesperson said:

"Drugs are illegal because they are harmful - they destroy lives and blight communities. Our current laws draw on the best available evidence and as such we have no intention of downgrading or declassifying cannabis. A Royal Commission on drugs is simply not necessary. Our cross-government approach is working."

This is the same line that is trotted out by current ministers every time anybody: former ministers, senior business leaders, scientific advisers etc. try to advance this debate beyond the heavily constricted terms imposed by the government of the day. No matter what evidence is put in front of them they respond instantly to shut down further discussion.

However, this time we know that there is someone very senior in government who does not agree with this knee-jerk dismissal response. It is the second most senior minister of them all, the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. We know this because back in September I interviewed him and one of the questions I asked him was on drugs policy. You can read the full interview here but the salient part of it is below:

"...there are an increasing number of bodies who are revisiting this debate in the round. So for instance the Home Affairs Select Committee has been looking at this now for a long time and I think is due to report in December. I will be reading that very, very closely indeed. If a cross-party select committee revisits some of these issues and urges us to open them up as a government, I think the onus is on us, not them to explain why we shouldn’t. Because every time people look at this issue on a cross-party basis in a considered fashion, it seems to me over several years now including in the committee that David Cameron once sat, actually the advice is for radical action towards a more evidence based approach. I will look out for what the HASC has with quite an open mind."

The onus is now on Nick Clegg to make the case for a liberal approach to drugs policy. It was clear from the interview that he is very open to discussion about alternative approaches. This report now gives him the political space to do this. It's not a loony fringe view from some political outsiders but a clear call for a sensible approach from a committee consisting of MPs from all parties who have taken the time to look at the evidence and speak to a broad cross-section of witnesses on this subject.

Mr Clegg also told me that he hadn't discussed this particular issue with the Prime Minister. I very much hope that will change today and he will make clear that the HASC report has the full backing of him and his party.


This piece has been cross-posted today on Liberal Democrat Voice.

In which I disagree with Ewan Hoyle on alcohol pricing

My friend Ewan Hoyle has posted a piece on Lib Dem Voice arguing that Cameron's minimum alcohol pricing idea could be the government's first evidence based drugs policy.

His basic thesis is summed up in the final part:

Once we demonstrate that the harms caused by legal drugs can be effectively diminished through evidence-based policy, we can then take the fight to the criminals and terrorists of Big Illegal Drugs. It is a fact the government urgently needs to confront that we can only ever win the “War on Drugs” if they are legal. Only then can the policies of government have a significant moderating impact upon the market.

Ewan has done fantastic work within and without the party pushing the case for liberalisation of our drugs laws in his role as head of LDDPR but in this case I am afraid I disagree with him.

I should first point out that his argument is the best stab I have seen at defending Cameron's idea and a good attempt to look at the potential positive side. Unfortunately from my point of view it overlooks too many of the negatives and there are too many hopeful assumptions about what may need to happen to underpin the policy.

Numerous commenters below his piece have taken issue with his approach, although to be fair there are some supporters too. The objections range from it being an "illiberal" policy (Mill is even rolled out to back this up at one point of course!) through to it not being likely to work and that the evidence is not there.

Whether something is "illiberal" or not is always the source of much contention in any debate like this and there often seem to be nuanced arguments on both sides so I will leave that to one side for now. However I want to briefly tackle whether the policy is likely to increase or decrease harm. In order to do that I am going to reference what us drug policy reform campaigners love to do, the period of prohibition in the USA during the 1920s.

One of the strongest arguments in my view for legalising drugs is that when alcohol was banned we saw a massive increase in crime and harms associated with alcohol consumption. The inherent harms that alcohol consumption can lead to were hugely exacerbated by its very illegality. It encouraged people to distill their own spirits or buy them on the black market or at "speakeasys". The illegal liquor was often of variable and unpredictable strength and sometimes mixed with all sorts of other substances to increase the effect more cheaply. Many people died or suffered horrendous effects such as blindness during this period as a direct result of the legal change. Indeed within a few short years the Americans reversed the policy, so disastrous had it been.

Now I understand that Ewan is not advocating banning alcohol but instead imposing a minimum price. But given that as he rightly points out alcohol can be available for as cheaply as 12p per unit, moving to a situation where the cheapest alcohol is instead quadruple that price or higher is very likely (I would argue inevitably) going to lead to a large increase in the amount of home-made and illegally manufactured spirits. And I would be very surprised if in turn this did not lead to wider harm with the sort of effects that were seen during prohibition in the USA.

Whenever I have been arguing about drug legalisation with someone and they try to argue that there would still be an illegal market in drugs even if they were legalised (look at cigarettes and booze they say) I always respond that the illegal tobacco and alcohol markets are very small in comparison to the legal variants. And I am right about that, the evidence backs me to the hilt. I then counter by suggesting that were drugs legalised we would need to make sure that the scope for a remaining illegal market was vastly reduced by ensuring we made the illegal variants highly unattractive through  ensuring taxation was set at the right level.

So if we erode that argument by increasing the size of the illegal alcohol market then we could end up doing the exact opposite of what Ewan intends by giving succour to those who argue substantial illegal markets would remain so "what's the point".

In my view alcohol pricing should remain roughly where it is now. I do not see the case for a big increase being made convincingly enough without account being taken of the potentially major downsides.

However where I do very strongly agree with Ewan is where he calls for "effective investment in outreach and treatment services" in order that for vulnerable people such as impoverished alcoholics "life doesn’t suddenly become an intolerable struggle.". There is no reason why we can't have a big push for investment in that area.

We don't need a minimum price for alcohol in order for that to happen though. It should be happening anyway.

Drug prohibition and alcohol prohibition - parallels

Johann Hari had a brilliant in-depth article in The Independent last Friday where he drew parallels between the current prohibition of drugs and the US experiences of prohibition in the 1920s and early 1930s until it was abolished in 1933.

Here's are a couple of snippets:

When you ban a popular drug that millions of people want, it doesn't disappear. Instead, it is transferred from the legal economy into the hand of armed criminal gangs. Across America, gangsters rejoiced that they had just been handed one of the biggest markets in the country, and unleashed an Armada of freighters, steamers, and even submarines to bring booze back. Nobody who wanted a drink went without. As the journalist Malcolm Bingay wrote: "It was absolutely impossible to get a drink, unless you walked at least ten feet and told the busy bartender in a voice loud enough for him to hear you above the uproar."

and:

Once a product is controlled only by criminals, all safety controls vanish - and the drug becomes far more deadly. After 1921, it became common to dilute and relabel poisonous industrial alcohol, which could still legally be bought, and sell it by the pint-glass. This "rotgut" caused epidemics of paralysis and poisoning. For example, one single batch of bad booze permenantly crippled 500 people in Wichita in early 1927 - a usual event. That year, 760 people were poisoned to death by bad booze in New York City alone. So many people became partially paralysed by an industrial alcohol known as 'Jake' that a shuffling, stumbling inability to walk was known 'Jake leg.' Wayne Wheeler persuaded the government not to remove fatal toxins from industrial alcohol, saying it was good to keep this 'disincentive' in place.

Prohibition's flaws were so obvious that the politicians in charge privately admitted the law was self-defeating. Warren Harding brought $1800 of booze with him to the White House, while Andrew Mellon - in charge of enforcing the law - called it "unworkable." Similarly, the last three Presidents of the US have been recreational drug users in their youth. If the law was enforced in full, they would all have been ineligible to vote, never mind enter the Oval Office. Once he ceased to be President, Bill Clinton called for the decriminalisation of cannabis, and Obama probably will too. Yet in office, they continue to mouth prohibitionist platitudes about "eradicating drugs", and insist the rest of the world's leaders resist the calls for greater liberalisation from their populations and instead "crack down" on the drug gangs - no matter how much violence it unleashes

It's well worth reading the full article here.