My drugs rant

It's well past time I wrote about this, given the title of my blog and the fact that support for the legalisation of drugs is probably the earliest political stance I adopted - I've held this view since I was a very young child, though it has evolved a lot since then and there have been times I doubted it. In part this is the reason I haven't written about it thus far, I've gotten bored by the arguments and having failed to find any significant flaw in the argument in many years of presenting it to people who disagree (and in some cases changing their minds) I am sceptical about what I will learn by doing this. But regardless here it is..


There is a short "cliffs notes" version of this here.

First this is not an argument to legalise all chemical substances and have no regulatory framework for anything. By "drugs" I only refer t0 well known substances which are used recreationally and by legalise I mean bring into a carefully regulated framework. Also really we should assess each drug individually but that would take too long. So be aware it is possible there are exceptions for each argument and while I'm not aware of a popular recreational drug for which the balance isn't tilted in terms of legalisation this doesn't preclude that possibility nor that such drugs couldn't in principle appear.

OK a libertarian principle which I ~ subscribe to is that you shouldn't make laws restricting consenting decisions between adults. I don't think that many people believe in this principle in it's entirety, at least not when they've thought through all of the consequences, but I suspect most think that it is a reasonable default and if you are breaking that principle then you should have some pretty powerful reasoning or evidence.

So why might people do this? One possibility is absolute moral values. If you fundamentally believe drug use is immoral (without reference to social or personal harm we can study) and think they deserve to suffer then I doubt I will persuade you otherwise. Based on those values the drug laws makes sense, though I do think your values are rather disgusting. However presumably everyone else is interested in the pragmatic results of this legislation and on that we can have a discussion. If drug prohibition leads to more deaths than under a regulated framework would you still support it? For this we will need to look at the evidence. Here I will outline the argument about how to use the the evidence and will at points give you my impression of what the evidence states. However I deliberately avoid quoting statistics and making many references to science papers because I am not an expert with the fairest overview and I want YOU to investigate yourself.

So some people are simply concerned with protecting vulnerable people from their own bad choices. Most recreational drugs have some health risks/dangers, as do many other activities people choose to do for pleasure (e.g. football, boxing, drinking, mountaineering, sex). If this the case we need to establish the extent of those risks and consider what is an acceptable reasonable choice. I am not a medical expert and will not get into details, especially since this is a general discussion but in general the health risks are far lower than is suggested by the tabloid press. It is my understand that the health risks of drugs like ecstasy, cannabis*, speed and even non infrequent use of powdered cocaine** are not usually considered to be significantly worse than those of alcohol and tobacco. Other drugs have more severe health implications associated with use, heroin users suffer high rates of overdoses and HIV infection for example. Remember each drug has different qualitative risks though (how do you compare the long term risk of cancer, with that of an allergic reaction leading to instant death or a risk of liver failure or infertility? and so on) so they cannot be compared directly, you need to examine each risk (by consulting experts or reading public communications by them) and consider how you personally weigh each of them.

Now it's possible that for you even with a realistic estimate of the health risks you still believe some or many drugs are too dangerous for their use to be a legitimate recreational activity and anyone who disagrees and wants to use them must be protected from themselves. But there are other considerations. You must also consider how much more dangerous the drugs are when sold in an illegal market under drug prohibition. Dangers associated with adulteration/contamination of the drugs, unsafe practices due to secretive use (e.g. needle sharing, makeshift pipes), increased risk of overdose due to unstable supply and unreliable purity levels are all a direct result of the drug laws. To be quantitative you need again to look at each drug and each risk individually, but I suggest that this increased risk is a very substantial, often overpowering the moderate risk of the drug itself. On top of this there is now the risk of arrest and incarceration created by the laws, which we need to also consider. Ruining someones life by throwing them in jail for several years to "protect them" from their decision to take a mild risk of getting tuberculosis does not seem very caring. Punitive responses to drug use can only be justified if the deterrent effect really works, i.e. substantially less people submit themselves to these risks you deem too great to tolerate. If we could reduce drug use to zero it wouldn't matter that they are much more dangerous when purchased in an illegal market. However that is spectacularly unrealistic.

So now we need to consider what impact if any drug laws have on usage. Let me delay that for a bit though because it will also be important in the other concern which may lead people to support drug laws.

Namely the wider social harm. So while the transaction for drugs and the use of them appears to only involve the user and his supplier, there may be others who are affected. Syringes lying in the street, "dangerous drug mad" people wandering the streets, theft to support their habit.

Is this reasonable? Well first certainly not all drugs have much wider effects. There is no wider social impact from a drug like ecstasy. It is not addictive, and therefore does not induce theft to pay for it, people who use it do not get typically get violent, it is swallowed in pill form, not injected so no needles lying around.

As for violence it may seem reasonable to believe that some drugs, e.g. cocaine can stimulate aggression and violent acts in the right circumstance due to their elevated mood, with the opposite effect from e.g. cannabis. However to make a case justifying drug prohibition we need evidence first that significant numbers of violent acts can be causally attributed to cocaine and an explanation of why deal with this and not alcohol which is associated with far more violence . While the first two points appear not to be satisfied, and thus sufficient to dismiss this argument for now, the latter is devastating. Alcohol leads to an enormous volume of violent incidents and health problems. Scientific drug experts have weighed up the overall harm (using subjective weightings for individual risk) of these drugs and classified them, finding alcohol to be the worst by far and this has been widely reported.

Although it is good that this has been reported in the media I find it disappointing that they have ignored the fact that there have been subjective choices made in combining qualitatively different social harms (e.g. injuries from drunken assault against used needles in parks or deaths from drunk drivers) . It should also be stated more strongly that this is the net harm from current use levels, not harm per user nor harm per single dose. Alcohol does so badly because it is used so widely, if we considered harm per user heroin, crack and crystal meth would dominate. Nonetheless the findings are still useful to consider, but it is really more important to look at the individual risk factors for yourself and in particular which might be solved by a reduction in users and which are a product of the drug laws themselves


As with health risks the wider social damage caused by the drug laws themselves is enormous. With violent gangs in charge of trafficking and supplying drugs to addicts and drug addicts committing crimes to support their habit, the relatively small number of drug addicts and criminals involved in supply have a disproportionately large impact on the rest of society. You can check the figures for yourself , the numbers are very very large and shocking.

It is indisputable that the effect per user must be greater under prohibition than under a regulated legal framework, and I am suggesting (but check for yourself) that in fact the harm per user which comes from the drug laws themselves is many times higher than any the harm from the drugs alone. So to support the illegality of drug use as a protection one must assume that the number of actual drug users is dramatically cut by the laws. I am aware of no evidence to support this.


One can use Portugal, Switzerland and Netherlands as well as the past history of the UK and US to get a feel for what happens when we change laws on certain drugs in liberal democracies. There is little there to give one the impression that things get worse when you liberalise. 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.

Of course these are real world cases and have all the problems in identifying actual factors behind any change, but given the huge and undisputed problems with contamination, criminal gangs and crime to pay the inflated prices created with drug prohibition, one has to maintain a rather strong prior belief that the number of addicts will massively shoot up to maintain a belief that harm is worse without prohibition.

I find it 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 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.

I really think you have to be either uniformed or hold a fairly extreme moral view to not come to the conclusion that we should legalise and regulate addictive drugs. People are dying while many voters remain ignorant of the issue, please help change this by informing yourself and possibly others.


*People may worry about cannabis because the media has put out a number of scare stories that it causes mental health issues. I am not a medical expert and therefore one should not rely on anything I say in this regard, but it is my understanding of the situation is that there is a link, known about for quite some time, between the cannabis and psychotic symptoms severe enough to lead to a schizophrenia diagnosis, and some evidence suggesting cannabis use predates onset of these symptoms (this ruled out the self medication hypothesis). This does not demonstrate a causal link as there may be a common cause, it is difficult to be sure that the people diagnosed with schizophrenia were not instead suffering from temporary drug induced psychosis and finally even if these studies are correct the incidence level is still very small and most people suffering from schizophrenia do not pose a serious risk to others. Note: I AM NOT AN EXPERT. PLEASE DO NOT RELY ON ME FOR INFORMATION ON HEALTH RISKS.



**Cocaine is addictive in the sense that users exhibit signs of dependency and distress when they try to break habitual usage though they does not appear to be the same physical withdrawal issues associated with opiates. Patters of of addiction may be different and less severe for powdered cocaine than crack, however addiction is a risk which should be considered seriously. And again: I AM NOT AN EXPERT. PLEASE DO NOT RELY ON ME FOR INFORMATION ON HEALTH RISKS.

EDIT: Just to add although I didn't discuss the nature of the regulated framework for the legalised use of drugs, I personally favour providing registered addicts with maintenance doses of their drug through national health services from a non-commercial provider, to remove any incentive to encourage addiction. For further discussion on what a regulated post drug prohibition framework could look like please see this article by Steve Rolles in the British Medical Journal.