My Drugs rant: cliffs notes

This is the short version of my drug rant, without details or caveats. The full version can be found here.

Generally people tend to accept that adults can choose to make whatever lifestyle choices they wish so long as they do no non-consensual harm to anyone else.

With drugs however you may worry that health effects are so severe people must be protected from themselves. First educate yourself about the severity of these risks, they are rarely as large as the tabloid press claims, secondly be aware of how much more severe they are under drug Prohibition, with contaminants, unsafe practices and unpredictable strength.

You might also worry about the wider social harm. But be aware that much of this, such as criminal gangs distributing, addicts stealing or committing other forms of crime to pay inflated prices for the drugs is a direct result of the drug laws themselves, and would not exist if the drugs were legalised and regulated. In my opinion these wider harms substantially outweigh other social problems associated with drug use.

While how you weigh these factors may vary, it is clear that the damage caused per user both to themselves and to society is far greater under prohibition than a regulated system with legal purchase and use. So to support the illegality of drug use as a protection from harm one must assume that the number of actual drug users is dramatically cut by the laws. There is absolutely no evidence to support this.

In fact to the contrary looking at countries where addictive drug use has been decriminalised (Portugal) or medical subscriptions provided for addicts (Switzerland) the uptake of these drugs has fallen. This result is anticipated by an understanding that since addicts cannot break their addiction when it is clearly in their own interest making it illegal will not stop them either. Instead their demand fuels an illegal market with high reward for the creation of new addicts as well as the supply of existing ones. The situation is not much better for soft drugs with evidence of only a small increase in uptake if any.

It is almost impossible to take seriously any politician claiming to advocate continued prohibition to save lives. This is simply not supported by the evidence, which suggests the reverse that the drug laws cost many lives and ruin far more. In my opinion there is no credible case for drug laws.

If you are a voter I suggest you it is your duty to consider this issue. Consider these arguments and investigate the evidence. I am not not a medical expert and may be wrong or misinformed, but I recommend you find out what experts say on each empirical point raised here, and judge for yourself.

People are dying while many voters remain entirely uniformed on the issue, please help change this.