Randomly Selected Article or Link

So, Patricia Hewitt says that tax on alcohol should rise to reduce binge drinking among teenagers.

Jeez - my Puilly Fume is already approaching ten quid a bottle. Why should I have to pay for matron Hewitt's inability to enforce the law? Or to educate people properly about drink and drugs?

It is illegal already for the kids she's talking about to buy booze. But at least it is licensed and there are people who care about their livelihood and liberty enough to help enforce that law when Vicky Pollard comes in to the shop wanting to buy some.

It is also illegal for those kids, and the rest of us, to buy heroin, cannabis or ecstasy. But for the price of two coconut and coal-tar flavoured rum slushes one could, if one wanted, buy a wrap of heroin that will leave you blotto for hours, or several days' worth of cannabis, or several weekends worth of ecstasy.

Face it Pat, you're losing this battle, and imposing penalties on everyone else who does indulge sensibly in oder to try to put off the most determined teenagers is just a nasty, mean minded approach that is doomed to failure.

Prohibition doesn't work. Tax was the weapon of prohibition. The reason Al Capone was famously done on tax evasion rather than anything else he could have been done for is that that is the way prohibition was enforced - you didn't actually ban alcohol, you put a tax regime on it that meant nobody could actually pay the taxes and were therefore breaking the law. It's the same with nacrcotics prohibition in the US too. Because so many drugs do have proper uses under medical direction you don't actually want to ban them completely, but make it so that nobody other than the few people the government licenses to produce and sell them can actually trade legally.

It doesn't work. It's illiberal. It's protectionist. It's patronising.

A conversation got me thinking; what is it we seek to control through drugs laws? Is it the substance in question itself, as the system for enforcement would have it - since it prohibits specific substances. Is it the effects of taking certain substances? And if so, is it the health effects, the social effects or the immediate short term effects of taking those substances?

It seems to me that the latter, the short term usually neurological effects that people seek, are mostly benign. People don't do drugs in order to hurt themselves, to bring on short term pain, usually, but in order to give them a particular desirable feeling - often of wellbeing, escape from some painful reality, sometimes of added confidence, at other times of empathy for others, sometimes merely relaxation, or extra energy. All these seem like legitimate feelings and effects for people to want to seek. And sure, they can be gained by all sorts of ways other than by taking drugs - though possibly with more difficulty and less convenience.

But is it actually immoral to take substances to achieve such ends? Clearly not, as many legal substances can do the same things and we don't necessarily proscribe chocolate (the theobromides - poisonous to dogs for example - promote wellbeing), coffee (the caffeine is the most commonly used stimulant on earth) or St John's Wort (an ancient treatment for depression, possibly an "over the counter" SSRI). Heck, humanity might not have survived so long without the supposed aphrodisiac effects of many natural and often exotic foodstuffs and supplements.

Anyway, the point is that we put all sorts of things, natural and synthetic, from oysters to Horlicks, into our bodies in an attempt to achieve certain feelings. And there are "chemists" out there, a whole industry, constantly trying to reproduce some of the effects of illegal substances without actually using any illegal substances. The science will likely always be one step ahead of the legislators, so I have no doubt that these concoctions are achieving more than a placebo effect. You can buy them on the internet for next day delivery from online stores that have forums that people join to say how much they enjoyed them or not. Just like eBay or Tesco online.

But whilst they may be legal, are they safe? They certainly don't have much of a regulatory framework or testing regime to prove themselves. Yet they are legal when many proscribed drugs have had centuries, even millennia of use for us to examine for evidence about their safety.

Why is heroin so intrinsically bad when common lore at least says that our longest reigning monarch to date ran the empire on an opium concoction; even a Roman emperor kept the northern Germanic tribes at bay whilst writing a classic tome about his predecessors while taking opium. Tales tell of how the first president of the United States kept himself in balance with cannabis and that the slavery campaigner William Wilberforce similarly emancipated half the world while toking. Some of our greatest poets seem to have had a penchant for mind-bending substances - would we have denied the world their art worried about what they may have been taking when producing it? And, just as today, throughout history there have been chemists, alchemists, trying to find such things as the elixir of youth.

So on the one hand we have all these relatively natural substances - opium, cannabis, coca, certain fungi and so on - used for millennia and with relatively well researched evidence about their effectiveness, the dosages at which they are safe (from experience if nothing else) and the circumstances in which they may not be, and they are illegal. Even the main active ingredients in some synthesized drugs like ecstasy have a hundred year history since it was patented my Merck and has been tested off and on for different uses - a drug waiting for something to cure! On the other we have perfectly legal concoctions, though nobody but the creator and I suppose a DEA investigator if they wanted to check, knows what's in them, they have little research history and for all we know they might be toilet cleaner and arsenic.

The devil you know, versus the devil you don't? I know which I would consider safer. Drugs laws are pointless. They criminalize the wrong people. And in the process drive the whole thing underground into a system controlled by organized crime - killing far more people in that process, from failed narco-states to street gangs in Manchester or London. And that criminalization makes it all the harder for people to seek help or even to be open about their use, often until it's too late. We know it would be possible to maintain a fairly humdrum ordinary existence even addicted to opium if it were available, regulated and quality controlled, for before the Harrison narcotics acts in the US that started the "war on drugs" we know that the preponderance of addicts were white upper and upper middle class women, like Queen Victoria mentioned above. We don't know that about the toilet cleaner and arsenic concoction deemed legal - albeit by default probably - and I think I know what I would rather my friends and family were taking if they were that way inclined.

When reputable science puts ecstasy nearly twenty places below alcohol and tobacco in the list of the most harmful substances and yet its supply can get you a life sentence who do we think these laws are serving?

Today's Observer highlights a story about the Conservative's upcoming report on "Quality of Life" which includes measures to be outlined to "burnish their green credentials". Amongst the measures highlighted is that a future Tory government will ban the provision of "standby buttons" on things such as TVs:

Ban the standby button, say Tories

Conservatives target plasma TVs in radical report on how to tackle global warming

Nicholas Watt, political editor
Sunday September 9, 2007
The Observer

Television sets and other domestic appliances will be fitted with special devices to switch off standby power as part of a radical plan to cut wasteful use of electricity, a special Conservative report will recommend this week.

Now, I know these policy review groups have been going on since sometime shortly after BC ("Beginning of Cameron") but I thought I had heard something like this previously. So taking a quick look around I found this...

July 12, 2006
TV standby buttons will be outlawed

By Lewis Smith and Mark Henderson

THE Government is to outlaw standby switches on televisions and video and DVD players to cut the amount of electricity wasted in the home. etc, etc...

It's not by any means a record time-lapse between original announcement by someone else and the Tories deciding to brand the policy as their own, but thirteen months is really quite impressive. I know it's difficult keeping an eye on what's going on in the big bad world out there, but if you hope to run the country one day, it's quite an important skill I'd have thought.

I've been out of the loop for a couple of weeks buried in work so haven't paid much attention to blogging and so on. recently a senior police officer in Oxfordshire told local media he would like to see an informed and open debate on drugs policy and specifically a look at whether legalisation would be better. Slightly surprisingly it hasn't generated a huge hoo-ha in the letters pages, but one yesterday I thought worth replying to...

Dear Sir,

I disagree with my good friend Alan Lester (8th March) and congratulate David McWhirter for wanting to raise the debate on drugs policy.

For while politicians run scared of proposing radical ideas because of the tyranny of focus groups the police, as agents who implement current policy, can provide the evidence that what they have to enforce, and how, contribute to the deaths of those who have fallen into the oftentimes inescapable grasp of insidious addictions. As such, it is bad law.

Further, the law is discriminatory. If you have money to book yourself into the Priory or similar you get a telling off and perhaps even kudos for doing something about your problem. If you are poorer, you are at the mercy of public treatment and rehabilitation regimes and ultimately more likely to end up in jail.

We should start with some very fundamental questions. Like why are certain things banned, and not others? Many would be shocked at the racism and prejudice that accompanied prohibition. Alcohol and tobacco are bigger killers than all illegal substances put together. Sugar, as I should know, is coming up fast on the rails. Millions are addicts to caffeine and thousands to prescription drugs.

Once monarchs, emperors and ministers used opium. Popular pick-me-ups contained cocaine. And whatever effect they had on the individual was as nothing compared with the effects of prohibition on society, locally and globally, today.

Sincerely,

Jock Coats,