Starkey's Last Word on drugs
23.11.06
at 00:34
at 00:34
tagged with:
Not surprisingly there's a reasonably well informed debate going on on Starkey's Last Word with Howard Marks on the show, Fraser Nelson from the Spectator - "I'm normally of a libertarian leaning but..." (you either are or you aren't IMHO) - has brought up some hackneyed cliches -
The illicit drugs market is not like the smuggling of tobacco:
He was worried that if you made drugs legal and controlled you would still have a huge amount of black market product like the fact that one in four packets of cigarettes are smuggled. The point is is that for the main part the smuggled tobacco products are legally produced and controlled, they're just avoiding the tax on them. If you could buy quality controlled Heroin from Beyer (who hold the trademark on the name incidentally) in small measured doses quality controlled and as "safe" as can be made, why would you ever go back to buying the Vim (sorry, Cif) cut crap sold out of the back of white BMWs? Even if you did have smuggled stuff to get round any tax measures imposed by government, it would be of the same quality as the legally sold and taxed stuff or they would not be able to sell it.
They've tried legalization in Alaska/Netherlands/Switzerland/wherever and it didn't work:
Erm, no, they didn't. They made possession and use a lesser or no offense, but acting alone in the world they could not get into the supply side and start controlling the quality and availability of supply. They practiced "tolerance" rather than full blown legalization with all the structures of the market opened up. It still did not make it socially acceptable to be a drug user and seek help for it when you needed it.
We're an island, it ought to be easy to cut off the supply:
Wrong. Especially with "harder" drugs. Such is the technology available to concentrate and then dilute drugs, especially heroin, that you can fit enough to supply an addict for a whole month under a postage stamp. How on earth are we supposed to police that? You don't have to ship it around in multi-billion dollar bundles on board someone's Falmouth registered yacht. The more we clamp down the more people work on the concentration technologies and the only thing that is likely to result is that people who don't know how to dilute properly will die.
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Jock, you've made this mistake a couple of times.
Marijuana was banned through the Marijuana Tax Act in the 1920s, but alcohol prohibition was achieved through a constitutional amendment, and revoked the same way.
Oh - I thought that was whyit was the IRS police that managed to get Capone!
Isn't the difference something quite logical - like if there is any potential medically beneficial use they do it by tax, so that they don't need to unban" it to exploit the medical advantages, rather they can just tax exempt licenced companies.
Anyway - whatever, the argument is still the same - if you increase the tax on something you encourage people to try to smuggle it in under the wire to avoid it. Which seems to me to be the problem with cigarettes in this country now coming not from Spain or Germany but from south east Asia or Africa."
What you say about illegal imports is not quite correct. One of the main concerns about illegally imported cigarettes is about quality standards.
A lot of illegal imports don't originate from Europe but are manufactured in the Third World. Many Third World countries have different standards regarding tar and nicotine levels and the presence of other chemicals.
In addition, many are counterfeit (like much of the perfume and all the DVDs) and are much worse for the smoker than the UK-regulated ones.
That being said, heroin users would at least have the choice of buying from a safe and predictable supplier from whom they could seek redress if the product was faulty.
And of course, if we had free trade in such products consumers could make informed choices and the counterfeiters could be squeezed out of the market.
Sadly, this debate falls foul of the usual illiberal belief that people cannot be trusted to make their own minds up.
Prescribe heroin to addicts
On 18.02.07 at 14:57 Anonymous (not verified) said:
If the drug clinics would only prescribe pharmaceutical heroin to all long term injecting addicts who cannot cope with methadone, there would be no need for dealers, illegal dangerous street gear, crime, etc
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In the back of my mind when I wrote it I did actually think about more distant counterfeit cigarettes. I'd be interested to know the relative quantities involved. For a long time it was mostly stuff avoiding UK Duty on cross border European stuff, but I realize there is now a lot more overseas counterfeit.
I suspect that tax harmonization and increasing EU-wide taxes on tobacco products have led to the more distant and less well regulated counterfeits coming in.
But the principle remains - the good will drive out the bad. High tax is of course the mechanism of prohibition. Alcohol was not so far as I am aware ever anned" as such in the US (because that would have been a state power) but federal taxes on it were made so high, and being able to pay them made so difficult, that all alcohol was effectively illicit - and why the IRS were the primary vehicle for enforcement."