If in doubt, ban it...or why Tories are not for libertarians

Jock — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 01:48:27 +0100

Having established myself as an anarcho-geo-libertarian-mutualist I can't help wondering why is it that many libertarians seem to gravitate towards the Conservative party. A party with less libertarian instincts I can hardly imagine. Whatever their rhetoric on occasion, when they tactically oppose Labour's assaults on peoples' freedoms for example, when it comes down to it they are the archetypal we know best patristic party that is happiest telling the plebs what they can and cannot do, should and should not expect.

They may point to Thatcher's rolling back of the state in the form of privatisation of government owned business assets, but a true Libertarian cannot be happy with reform merely of the economic sphere. Rolling back the state means ending interference in all areas of our lives. Anything else is authoritarian. And so, it is with little surprise that I find this reported in today's Observer:

Tories highlight cannabis dangers in drug blueprint

Jo Revill and Nick Watt
Sunday July 8, 2007
The Observer

The health risks of cannabis are so great that it should now be reclassified as a class B drug, carrying much greater penalties for possession and trafficking, says David Cameron's new blueprint for dealing with Britain's growing addiction problems.

The Tory leader has been convinced by emerging evidence that a strong form of the drug, skunk, is causing an epidemic of mental health disorders. A report being published this week by a Conservative policy commission will confront the issue, recommending an upgrading of the drug to class B, as well as arguing the case for a complete transformation of addiction treatment in Britain.

What utter bollocks. Look, the rush to create ever stronger strains (and actually the evidence is mixed - while people report finding stronger strains the prevalence of those strains is far from clear) mirrors precisely the ever stronger concoctions of alcohol produced under prohibition. If you want to control such production, the best way is to free it up and regulate it lightly. If the problem is primarily with growing brains (and the science here is also mixed as I've mentioned before) then, as with alcohol and tobacco, make it illegal for licensed vendors to sell it to minors. But while all vendors are unlicensed and unregulated there are no controls and it is pot luck, if you pardon the pun, as to whether the authorities catch someone selling to kids.

It is fact that cannabis can be a sociable drug. It is fact that cannabis can be a soothing drug for all sorts of ills, from stress to MS and arthritic pain. Indeed only on Friday there was a case of a grandmother effectively being allowed by the courts to continue to use cannabis as pain relief. But the silly side of the law means she cannot cultivate it for her own use, so she has to go to a criminal to get hold of it by definition.

The drugs laws in this country are a mess. And no party seems really to want to grasp the nettle and look at how individual freedoms to do what one wants with one's own body and mind, where it does little or no harm to anyone else, can be combined with protecting the truly vulnerable. Yes, addictions kill. But they mainly kill because the market in addictive things is so often criminal and the vulnerable are open to the worst kind of exploitation. Therefore I say that the authoritarian state, with regard to addictive substances at least, is complicit in those deaths. And by extension, the party that imposes more prohibition are murderers.

They can change the language if they like - the Tories say the phrase "war on drugs" is outdated and doesn't convey what they want to achieve - but returning to ever more criminal sanctions will harm more people, and will do the law itself a disservice by continuing a charade that everyone knows is upheld more in the breach than the observance. If you ever want to even imagine you might get the vote of this anarcho-geo-libertarian-mutualist, Cameron, you're going to have to do a lot btter than this knee-jerk classic moral panic nonsense.

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If in doubt, ban it...or why Tories are not for libertarians