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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,

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?

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.

There's been lots off discussion about poverty this week with the little tiff between the Cameroonies and the rest of the conservatives about embracing and addressing relative poverty and so on and so forth...

Anyway, I want to proffer a different definition of poverty. One which leads to different solutions. A liberal definition as I see it.

If the end of liberalism is personal freedom, then in the economic sphere perhaps the definition of poverty ought to be someone who has not yet attained "financial freedom". Financial freedom is usually thought of as the point at which you can meet your basic needs without being compelled to sell your labour. How does one achieve financial freedom? By having sufficient capital assets to provide an income that covers one's basic expenses, or allows you to liquidate enough to live on long term.

Now, I'm not poor in the conventional sense - I have enough to eat (far too much!) and although I don't have a home that I own, which is a significant step in achieving financial freedom, I do have enough income to want to give much of it away in good causes every month. But if I were to lose my job I would be flung on the good auspices of the state pretty quickly.

The point about financial freedom is that you can then pick and choose what you want to do - do you want to go improve yourself through education in order to accumulate lots more wealth? Do you just want to make a bit more pin money to buy a nice Christmas present?

Despite the attempts of the Tories in the eighties to create a nation of shareholders, financial wealth in this country is even less well distributed than incomes.

We are entering the post-industrial age. A few weeks ago it was noted that there were fewer people engaged in manufacturing than at any time since the mid-nineteenth century. Some of the prophesies of the C H Douglases of the early-mid twentieth century have indeed come about - that we would have most menial, manual tasks done for us in the future, through the benefits of automation. But that has meant that all the benefits of that have accumulated to the owners of the capital, rather than the providers of the labour that made that capital productive.

How do we change this? There have been lots of theories - Louis Kelso suggested creating more widespread Employee Share Ownership Schemes, that there was spare capacity in all that capital going to waste, that if employees were to be allowed to make use of they should accumulate a share in that capital. Douglas suggested social credit.

But to my mind the real solution is to recognize that we have a cornucopia of natural wealth that belongs to all of us by birthright as human beings. We only have one planet, we cannot choose where we are born. That planet is for all of us. Yet the best bits of it are owned and traded for the profit of the few. If we recoup the value of those natural resources, land, and so on, that are used by people and production processes, the "community collection of rent" suggested as long ago as by John Locke, we would have a source of income producing assets that would keep all of us in the basics and free us up to pursue our talents and interests, rather than our mere survival.

Land Value Tax funding a Citizens' Income. No income taxes, no national insurances; firms would be able to pay employees that big chunk more that could go into capital assets instead of tax. There'd be no marginal tax problem with taking employment and losing benefits. It seems a no brainer to me.

I noticed Antonia Bance the other day getting exercised about why planning decisions are an area committee function in Being a councillor - the joy of planning.

I wonder if Antonia knows the full history of what has been the longest running disagreement between the political groups since planning for local government "modernisation" started in 2000 or so. And the reasons for the disagreement, I think, are quite profound; an apt allegory of our ideological differences. Of course all this must be set against a background in which, for a variety of reasons (and I personally don't hold planning officers primarily responsible in this), perverseness, lateness and downright badness of planning decisions are key performance indicators in which Oxford City Council seems to be perpetually well placed to top the league tables!

It is a pretty fundamental and often quoted attribute of liberalism that decisions should be taken as close as possible to the people affected by them. Development control is, to some of us, an important illustration of that principle. Development control is one area of a council's functions that can involve local people quite intensely even when the matter they are concerned about is extremely local. I would go further if I could and devolve most development control decisions to Danish style local planning councils that cover only a few streets, a neighbourhood, but in the UK context the closest possible level is for the representatives directly of the area in which the application occurs to decide the issue in an open forum where local people have the opportunity to have their say.

Antonia writes that "one of the few votes lost by the minority Labour administration who ran the council 2004-6 was about the removal of planning from area committees, as it puts councillors in the invidious position of not being able to represent the views of their constituents, but instead having to be neutral in order to make Òquasi-judicialÓ decisions."

This is not a reason I've seen put quite like that before. But more importantly it is not a justification for centralised development control, but against the ridiculous government regime of so-called standards in public life that, in particular when it comes to councillors, presumes that people are complete idiots who cannot tell the difference between helping out your constituents and doing things that "fetter discretion". When the decision was originally taken to devolve development control to area committees it was not an argument that was made publicly that I remember, not least because the patronising standards regime was not in place. And further, a similar situation pertained anyway in the old system, as a planning decision is a decision of the authority, and any one of them, especially contentious ones, could be called into Full Council at which point the same prejudicial activity would have to be declared.

The proper response to this objection is to get the standards regime that circumscribes far too tightly what councillors can and cannot do and what their personal interests are in any discussion and decision (not merely development control) changed the better to respect peoples' basic honesty and ability to distinguish for themselves when someone has a personal and/or prejudicial interest if and when it comes into question.

Anyway, she goes on: "I can see it must be infuriating to have to stop being a representative of an area, and make decisions for that area taking only planning considerations into account, rather than the wider needs and opinions of residents."

However, even if you are taking a position that would be "prejudicial" by openly campaigning for or against a particular application, you would still be wise to base all your arguments on sound planning grounds in any case. The "wider needs and opinions" cannot shout louder or be more persuasive than purely "planning considerations".

And then, "in particular, making these decisions in local community centres in front of oneÕs electorate means there may be a powerful incentive to make politically-wise decisions. In these days of targets for planning decisions upheld at appeal and financial penalties for poor performance, it seems a silly system to me."

Which I just find perverse, though sadly from observation, very true. The idea behind getting decisions and their discussions made in public in front of one's electorate was so that said electorate could better understand the reasons why sometimes objections could not be taken into account (and couldn't whether they were in the Town Hall or the community centre). However one thing that Oxford City Council has resolutely refused to look into, despite several promptings from myself at least and others in the past, is to put an end to this ridiculous charade that people get five minutes to object in total and the applicant gets five minutes likewise to respond.

The justification given by the council's lawyers for this stifling of public debate has always been that under the Human Rights Act (there it goes, getting its bad rap again) a "fair hearing" in what is a quasi judicial process must mean that both sides get the same mount of arguing time. The technical term for this advice is "bollocks" in my opinion. Other authorities, most notably the one we went to visit when looking at area committees, Eastleigh, do not have this rule at all. Open discussion is encouraged, questionning of both objectors and applicant is encouraged by all in the room. When the public discussion is over and people have had reasons why their objections are not material in planning law and so on there is little left for councillors even to discuss. They frequently are able to move straight to a vote or provide to the applicant's satisfaction likewise why they won't support something. Sometimes they even have time to get agreement from the applicants to change things they hadn't realised would be contentious and so come to better decisions based on communities and applicants owning a responsibility to each other.

Contrast this with Oxford where the artificial time limit then prompts councillors often into a long speculative discussion of what the public might have said as well if they had more time, and fleshing out their objections to form tenuous but technically justifiable reasons for refusal rather than a basis on which to move forward.

Lastly, this shows a common misconception about planning and planning applicants in my opinion. There are costs, often big costs, of late decisions. Peoples' businesses, livelihoods, and homes depend on planning decisions being made reasonably and promptly. The cost of financing a site lying idle to the developer alone (let alone wider costs of dilapidation or lack of delivery of affordable housing) for a year until an appeal rules that the councillors were being perverse and small 'p' political all along are costs that can never be recovered. The result of pitting applicant and objector in a prolonged battle rather than a constructive dialogue about a way to achieve some of what both want out of a site is further antagonism towards any development and a feeling of loss of control over what's happening around your neighbourhood.
Antonia goes on: "Planning - Òcan this building have an illuminated fascia?Ó Òcan this house have a porch?Ó - also takes up vast amounts of time."

If either of these applications come to committee it would be because someone had made enough of a fuss to get them there through a call-in. They would both normally I am sure be delegated to officers. If you find these ones boring, control your fellow councillors!

"The system works quite well for major applications, which are still decided centrally by a committee of councillors called the strategic development control committee - councillors from the south-east area get to comment on those in our areas, but donÕt make the decision. But where it comes to the more minor decisions, it just doesnÕt seem like the best use of eight councillorsÕ time."

If you are prepared to delegate such decisions, even to other councillors, then why not to officers? One aspect of the development control system that did change under Labour's previous administration in Oxford was to reduce the number of applications dealt with by officers. It should have been the other way round. Open discussion leading to better understanding by both public and applicants of their rights and their responsibilities to each other followed by a realisation that officers did in fact usually get it right and could therefore be trusted with more delegation. And as I have already noted, you are still bound by the same regime of unfettered discretion since at any time you could find yourself making the actual decision as a result of a call-in to full council.

"IÕd rather have a real chance to hold local services to account on behalf of residents of Rose Hill and Iffley, and give local people the opportunity to stand up and have their say. IÕd happily attend a city-wide planning meeting at another time, either as an advocate for local residents if thereÕs something controversial, or to be part of a panel deciding on applications for other areas."

I don't see the dichotomy here. You could have as many meetings as you want each month - if there was the business to fill them. Centralised planning committee was very onerous. Imagine all those undelegated decisions that come to each area committee bundled up, add another bunch where councillors call in ones from other areas that they couldn't do under the original area committee structure but would be necessary in a centralised structure for consistency, and we used to have two scheduled half days per month and often overspilling to the Friday's adjournment day as well. All you succeed in doing is abrogating responsibility to someone else on matters that are usually really local and properly dealt with locally, and shutting the public out of even more discussion and "planning education" by holding them centrally and almost certainly during the working day.

"Members of the licensing committee (like me) arenÕt allowed to decide on licence applications for pubs in the ward we represent; why is planning different?"

The real question is why you are barred from taking part is a discussion of something as important as a license to your local area. Two wrongs do not make a right. Yet another example of Labour's utter mistrust of local councillors deep down.

"By all means letÕs devolve decisionmaking as much as we can, but itÕs not meaningful devolution when you end up with four-hour long meetings discussing alterations to buildings, by the end of which there are just the councillors and clerks in the room, even the Oxford Mail journo having given up."

Then look at ways of improving that rate of throughput. Whenever I've been along to an area committee (and okay, it's the one with twelve members) it always seems to me that every one of the councillors has to have a five minute opinion of the scheme under discussion, often including spending at least another five minutes discussing and explaining to objectors not why their points can't be accommodated but why they can't ask a question after their five minutes set-piece is finished!

The arguments for centralising development control all seem to focus on how much easier it would be for councillors to meet targets somehow and ignore the basic tenet that decisions be taken as closely to the people they affect and by people who are accountable to them as possible. There is no "out of the box" thinking going on about how to make better decisions, better owned by both applicants and objectors, and a better understanding of development control issues and why sometimes people can't have everything just how they want them.