drugs laws

Libertarian Alliance Conference, 2008 (Part II)

Jock — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 02:01:20 +0000

If there were a few comments after dinner on Saturday night at the NLC with new acquaintances, maybe even friends, about how little of the days' talks actually helped some of them understand Libertarianism as an idea (after all, the links between aging and nano-technology and Libertarianism could have been obscure without a primer in Libertarian philosophy first) Sunday began with something that more people would recognize as a Libertarian issue...

Session 5: Ban the Ban: The Human Cost of Prohibition by Dr John Meadowcroft
Session 6: The Idea of a Private Law Society by Prof Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Session 7: The Modern Panopticon State v Freedom: Why State ID Cards are Bad by Guy Herbert of NO2ID
Session 8: Post-modernity and Liberty by Marc-Henri Glendinning

Session 5: Ban the Ban: The Human Cost of Prohibition by Dr John Meadowcroft

Meadowcroft lectures on Public Policy at King's College London and has recently edited a book called "Prohibitions" for the Institute of Economic Affairs examining the effects of the outlawing in various parts of the world of a variety of what may be regarded as "victimless" or "consensual" goods, services and activities such as recreational drugs, boxing, firearms, pornography, prostitution, alcohol and others.

He showed how in every case the outcome for the users, consumers or participants as well as the wider community is almost always worse than the effects of that which is outlawed. These arguments should be familiar to most of my readers, for I have rehearsed them, at least in respect of recreational drugs, often enough. The handing of lucrative markets to organized crime, the lack of knowledge, information and harm minimization facilities to users, the side effects of this crime on others in the community, the corruption of public officials and so on.

It was interesting in particular to see how murder rates seem, possibly coincidentally of course, to have risen and show consistent continuing rises after the banning of guns in most countries including the UK, since this is an area I know even some Libertarians (including myself until recently) find quite difficult to argue.

Consequently, he argues, prohibition is bad public policy. Rather than assisting in preventing harm it always increases harm from things that are essentially, in the classical Liberal sense, none of the state's business - what you do with your own bodies and lives which by and large do not affect others, except with consent.

I notice that, as they apparently do with all their publications, the IEA has sent a copy of "Prohibitions" to every Member of Parliament. I am sure their mailbags are full of this somewhat higher quality of "junk mail" as no doubt some of them see it and one wonders how many of them have read it, or even passed it onto their staff to read it and brief them on it. I shall be asking Lib Dem MP Tom Brake in particular, currently embroiled in an illiberal attempt to further curtail the availability of cannabis seeds against party policy, what he thought of the book and how it affected his decision to press ahead with his ill-advised private member's bill or whatever device he used.

Over the summer, in the run up to party conference in September, a number of us noted that, for a supposedly liberal party in which one might expect prohibitions to be roundly condemned as a matter of course, that we do not have a party group, association, "ginger group" whatever you want to call it, dedicated to fighting the seeming increasing tendency by our own policy makers to join in with orgies of "bansturbation". One thing I am hoping to do is to start a group "Lib Dems Against Prohibition" and perhaps try and get a motion into Harrogate conference on the issue. Watch this space. Maybe we can get Meadowcroft up to speak at a launch event.

Following Meadoowcroft came an eagerly anticipated session by someone regarded by many, it seemed, as something of a high priest of Libertarianism, and judging by the little informal gatherings in coffee afterwards, he certainly had some new acolytes in the room...

Session 6: The Idea of a Private Law Society by Prof Hans-Hermann Hoppe

I had long understood that there was a school of thought, anarchist to the core, that you don't even need to have "law enforcement" handled by the state - for many, particularly the Classical Liberals, the idea of a "minimal state" includes, more or less, only law and order and perhaps national defence as legitimate functions of that state.

Hoppe disagrees. And disagrees compellingly with answers to what might seem the most convincingly argued objections. I will definitely want to blog further about this, so I'll keep it quite brief here. Basically he argues that this Classical Liberal vision of a minimal state is a logical impossibility. Since by its very definition the state has the "territorial monopoly on arbitration" it has no incentive to minimize itself. Since it is enforcement, judge, jury and executioner all rolled into one, it has every incentive to increase the number of things it criminalizes to justify its own existence.

Instead, he posits the idea of a "Private Law" society in which individuals insure themselves against the aggression of others (in the widest possible sense - from breaches of contract to physical violence) in a free market of insurance providers (remember that we will have, effectively, abolished the state and certainly its ability to grant monopoly and protection to such providers). In the purest free market they will always have the incentive to pursue violators of the core maxim of non-aggression on behalf of their clients. And when disputes arise between insurers, counter-claims and the like, competing providers of arbitration (appeal) services also have an incentive to produce objectively fair outcomes. Their clients also have the greatest incentives to be themselves non-aggressors - to abuse a familiar phrase you would lose your no claims bonus if you biffed someone!

It probably needs more explanation than can be given here and as I say I want to blog about this more, because he certainly convinced me. I do, of course, have a certain disagreement with him about rights in landed property in particular that I need to think on and try and reconcile, but it a compelling vision of how a truly free society unencumbered by a monopolistic state could be considerably fairer and lead to much less rather than more confrontation and aggression simply because of the financial incentives involved.

I think it probably leaves me with one area of policy to explore further and understand better before I can call myself an individualist-anarchist - welfare, but this one is a significant step towards that! If I remember this conference for just one thing, it will have been Hoppe's contribution, I am sure. And inspired choice of speaker whom we were extremely lucky to get hold of who explained what will for many be one of the far outer reaches of Libertarianism that even many "hard core" Libertarians will have been challenged by I suspect.

And so, from the most theoretical talk of the weekend to what must be one of the most pressing issues for anyone concerned about our liberty in a very practical sense here in the UK...

Session 7: The Modern Panopticon State v Freedom: Why State ID Cards are Bad by Guy Herbert of NO2ID

Again, this session deserves a blog post of its own, and so I will keep this brief. Most of us in the room were I am sure already pretty united in our opposition to the National ID card program being prosecuted by the Labour government. But for me, however strong that opposition, it has largely been from the heart - the "I am a Liberal and I am against this sort of thing" of Clarence Henry Wilcock in 1950 quoted by Nick Clegg in his leadership campaign and since.

Guy Herbert provided the intellectual ammunition for me argue from the head and not just the heart, to understand the sinister machinations in government, and especially the bureaucracy that have attempted to foist this controlling policy on us for most of the last century. Indeed, I came away with the distinct impression that the Leviathan has been trying this for decades and all that is new is that they have finally found a government stupid or naive enough to swallow its arguments and agree to it!

At its heart, the National Identity Register (the database) is the most important issue (this much I knew, but perhaps not why). The state seeks to create the "single source of truth about the citizen", to fundamentally revolutionize the very definition of personhood, from independent individual, who is known through the various connections and activities they do to one in which it is only possible legitimately to exist with the permission of the state and the possession of its membership card.

The superficially beneficial arguments for having ID cards; that they will make your dealings with the state from which you benefit - welfare, health and so on, more efficient; that you will be better able to prove who you are in a whole range of circumstances; and, the worst, that it will help in the "War on Terror" - we've all heard them, and they do give the idea of a policy intended to help us - are not only superficial, but that the real agenda is not actually understood by most of the politicians charged with selling the idea to us.

That real agenda is about control and knowledge, the most intricate web of knowledge about every one of us. It seems likely, for example, that we will need to present our ID to rent hotel rooms, to buy mobile phones, to get bank accounts, insurance, perhaps even to rent your home, and that every time your ID is checked in one of these situations that will be logged against your entry in the National Identity Register. It will so fundamentally alter the balance between the state and the individual that it can be properly termed totalitarian. And even if implemented y people with benign motives is hugely open to abuse, both now in the sense of incompetence as the government has shown in data loss scandals over the past year and in the future in the hands of who knows what flavour of government with more sinister agendas.

Forget the politicians' assurances that safeguards will be implemented. Even since it was announced the functions the database will fulfill have ballooned more than most of us appreciate, can be extended without reference to parliament and are almost entirely in the hands of bureaucrats who do want to know every last thing about you in their area of responsibility. It is truly scary, sinister stuff, and as I say I will return to it again no doubt. And the worst part of it of course is that many, even most people accept the platitudes of politicians that this will be good for us.

I believe it is no longer acceptable for those political parties and individuals who say they oppose ID Cards and the ID Register to have little blog buttons or mere "oppositional" press releases, or "stunts" like saying we will go to jail rather than register for one, we have to up our arguments and explain more precisely the menacing revolution that the whole project threatens. If you only watch one video from the conference, I urge you to watch this one and like me, hopefully learn about the real agenda in more depth, and be appalled!

And so to the final session....

Session 8: Post-modernity and Liberty by Marc-Henri Glendinning

No disrespect to Marc-Henri Glendinning but I confess after all the excitement of Hoppe and the surge of anger generated by Herbert, it seemed a little surreal to end the day with post-modernist philosophy and, whilst I certainly wasn't switched off by this stage I will need to watch this session again to understand it and be able to comment on it more fully!

I did pick up on the general idea that (at least the vanguard and leadership of) the statist left have metamorphosized from what was at least an intellectually honest and fundamentally well-meaning promotion of socialist redistribution with an image of a fairer society, to one which is superficially much more "cuddly", that seems to provide succour and answers to everyone in a supposedly more free mixed economy and society but which masks a more insidious creeping totalitarianism that is anything but benign, putting the state at the centre and subjugate the individual. Beyond that, though, I will need to revisit the session to tell you any more.

And so ended one of the most intellectually stimulating and varied weekends I have ever had I think. I will need, as I said, one of David Friedman's nano-bot enhanced brains I think to be able to really thoroughly cogitate on the many ideas, some new to me, some just newly explained, I got out of the whole event. And I have material enough to keep my blogging controversial enough till next year's conference!

Everyone who helped arrange the weekend and all the speakers are to be commended, and the rest of the audience helped make it a convivial weekend in all sorts of ways in the formal sessions and in the more informal breaks and dinner. The "broad church" of Libertarianism was there for all to see, and I only wish that we could have had more Lib Dems there, perhaps ones skeptical about Libertarianism, for I am sure they would have had many of their misconceptions - in particular that Libertarianism is some selfish right wing "beggar thy neighbour" creed dispelled. read more »

drugs laws, surveillance state

E's linked to schizophrenia risk

Jock — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 23:11:18 +0000

No, not those "E's" that make you a little bit more chirpy and empathic when you're out at a club, but E grades at GCSE level...

BBC NEWS | Health | Low marks linked to schizophrenia

Low marks linked to schizophrenia A lack of diligence and attention at school could be early signs of illness Poor performance at school could indicate an increased risk of later developing schizophrenia, a study says. UK and Swedish researchers followed more than 900,000 children born between 1973 and 1983. The Psychological Medicine paper found getting an E grade in any GCSE-stage exam was linked to a doubling of the small risk of developing schizophrenia.

Interesting that getting a grade E may double the relatively tiny risk, while smoking skunk may increase it by less than half that. I suppose it is distinctly possible that all the Grade E students are perpetually on spliffs.

Personally I think both this research and the cannabis research are more on the "urban myth" front than good science but I'll bet we don't get some lurid headlines in the Express or Mail these next few weeks about all those just about to receive their GCSE grades and how half of them are doubling their risk of evil psychosis. I note also the last paragraph of the BBC article:

[Hilary Caprani of mental health charity Rethink] added: "The good news is that many people who have psychosis recover and go on to have challenging careers."

We don't hear that much in the scaremongering about dope, do we? read more »

Quelle Surprise: if you're a rich influential crackhead...

Jock — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:40:42 +0000

I don't suppose they were referred to the local DAAT (Drug and Alcohol Action Team), or SMART (Substance Misuse Arrest Referral Team), nor will the "formal warning" likely include a Drugs Testing and Treatment Order (DTTO). They're unlikely to have a probation officer who needs to send their details to the Employment Service to get their benefits stopped, but what the hell - they've got off basically...

Drugs charges against Tetra Pak heir and wife are dropped

Drugs charges against Tetra Pak heir and wife are dropped Elizabeth
Stewart and agencies guardian.co.uk, Tuesday July 29 2008 Article
history Drugs charges against the heir to the multi-billion dollar
Tetra Pak fortune and his wife have been dropped, it was announced
today. Prosecutor Martha Godwin told a hearing at City of Westminster
magistrates court that the charges would be dropped as part of an
arrangement that will see the couple given a formal police warning

...one rule for the few, and one for the many. Britain's drugs laws...useless, counterproductive and deadly...but usually only if you are poor. read more »

Are you a "death enabler"?

Jock — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:48:30 +0000

See, some people think I am over the top saying that supporters of drugs prohibition are complicit in the murder of the victims of the illegal drugs trade, but I'm not the only one...

Are you a death enabler?

"If you support drug prohibition policies that make black market drug sales profitable, then you are encouraging violent behavior by criminals and supporting the funding of terrorists. This directly results in the deaths of thousands.

You are a death enabler.

If you support drug war enforcement..."[continues]
read more »

drugs laws

Jock's response: The positive case for negative campaigning

Jock — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:23:14 +0000

Dan Paskins takes me to task for moaning about Labour's tactics against me when they put out that "scurrilous" leaflet while others, including he says the Lib Dems, are doing just as negative things in their leaflets. I should treat it, he says, as an opportunity to debate those issues if I feel so strongly about them and accept that, in such a debate, I might win over some people, or at least their respect for making the case rather than whining.

He provides an example that, in our East Oxford wide tabloid, we ran an article asking whether Andrew Smith, Oxford East's constituency's New Labour MP, was the biggest hypocrite in town for his duplicitous stance on post office closures. He says that as an issue, that too was beyond the remit of the City Council and therefore, by one of my "rules" of discourse not something that should be mentioned in the context of those elections.

Set aside for the moment a leaflet I saw for Hinksey Park ward with a priceless (literally!) picture of Andrew, the Labour council candidate and A N Other hugging a pillar box pledging to keep Grandpont Post Office open. Even if they hadn't made it a campaign issue of their own, economic well-being is, according to their own government, part of the remit of any local authority. The other four districts in Oxfordshire have pledged to fight the closures and to support communities that are affected if they fail in that fight. Already considerable time and effort had gone in, not, it has to be said, much on the part of the city council, as much as by the various bodies that help social enterprises in the county, to keeping Iffley Village Shop and Post Office going after previous owners decided to stop running it. But clearly the campaign issue for Grandpont and Mr Smith's own actions in supporting the closures in parliament are at odds. They made it a campaign issue even if it wasn't. The person in the photos objecting to the closures voted in favour of them when he had the chance. That seems materially different from my case.

Then there's the question as to whether one should simply debate what is thrown at you to debate, or object to it. Well, I don't for one minute believe that putting out a leaflet on the last weekend of the campaign, distorting my views by selective quoting, is an invitation to a debate. After all, I know some Labour lackey had collected the quotes some weeks previously - I saw them trawling through my drug posts in the week commencing 7th April - if they wanted a debate, there would have been time. It was also notable that they did not put out the said leaflet in the part of the ward that might have been expected to be most interested in such a debate, in the halls of residence (though they didn't put anything round the halls of residence to be fair, in their apparent attempt to disenfranchise a quarter of their electorate by not engaging with them). Yes, let's have such a debate. It is all too rare in this country to be able to have a reasoned debate about drugs policy. And stunts like this leaflet prove why.

Dan thinks my position is significantly different from that of my party. It is not. The party concluded that the current system of criminal enforcement was often if not always ineffectual and counter productive, failing to minimize harm and continuing to put users and others into the realms of the brutal organized crime networks supplying these substances. The main difference really between my position and the party position is the action I would take to remedy that - legalize, regulate and tax - whereas the party still feels that legalizing would not be an option even if it wanted to promote that as policy because of international obligations. As their leaflet nearly managed to get right, whilst not strictly legalizing, policy is that people whose only crime is possession of small amounts of any drugs for personal use will not be impriisoned, usually leading them to further addiction and contact with drugs. Honest reporting of my opinion would of course also have said that I believe legalize, regulate and tax is the way to stop drugs getting into the hands of children, for example, which was obviously not even explained to former councillor Standingford when asking for her opinion who went off on one about protecting and educating children about drugs.

No, let's face it, I have a moral right in law to object to my work (this blog) being chopped up into sentences and rearranged out of context to create a derivative work whose sole intention, the evidence suggests, was to bring into question my character or reputation. I will argue that doing so (creating a derivative work against copyright rules) amounts to making a false statement of fact about an opponent (the same cannot be said of claiming, correctly, that Andrew Smith is "supporting post offices" in Labour leaflets, but voting for their closures in Hansard, or indeed in Dan's case that a vote for the Labour Party is support for the party that has recently taken us into several illegal wars). I say again, it is this sort of stunt that puts people off indulging in meaningful progressive debate about what is a significant issue in our world, even if not one that I have any power to do anything about whether elected to the city council or not.

I say supporters of prohibition are accessories to the gangland and drug related deaths that happen at home and abroad as a result of the criminal underworld in which the drugs trade operates with justification. Such moral turpitude on the part of those that would shirk that debate or use the difference of opinion for a little electoral gain is shameful, frankly. It's uncomfortable I'm sure, but call a spade a spade - Labour traded those deaths, past and future, for a few extra votes. read more »

Why you should vote Jock Coats, Liberal Democrat, on May 1st

Jock — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 16:44:28 +0000

First, let me welcome all the many new visitors who have been reading my blog, thanks to the free publicity of my Labour opponent's latest leaflet!

In contrast, I and the Lib Dem campaign across the city are focussing on the issues on which the city council can make a difference in local services and stressing our positive record:

Keeping the council tax down.
Improving council services.
Reviewing, and hopefully abolishing, residents' parking charges.
Improving the quality of private rented housing.
What we have already been doing locally

Let me look at these in more detail:

Keeping the council tax down. Labour and the Greens in Oxford have voted for above inflation increases in the council tax set by the city yet again. We need to maintain pressure on council budgets to force managers to deliver more efficient services without asking more of the hard pressed tax payer. Council Tax is the most unpopular and unfair tax. The Lib Dems would abolish it nationally. Labour have fudged the issue after spending millions (of your money) on a report telling them what we all know.

Improving council services. The independent council watchdog, the Audit Commission, has reviewed the last two years of Lib Dem administered Oxford and given us high praise for improving the state of Oxford City Council and the services it delivers. We have more than doubled recycling and are about to take that to a new level with the pilot introduction in parts of the city of weekly food waste collections which will go to be composted and remove the need to have anything in your ordinary rubbish collection that can go off. We have cut the time council houses are out of action between tenants to just one fifth of what it was under Labour in Oxford.

Reviewing, and hopefully abolishing, residents' parking charges. The Conservative run county council ignored the wishes of residents in Headington Hill and Northway and many of you have told me on the doorstep how unfair you find it that you have to pay to park in your own street. Even those of you without cars and others with driveways to put theirs on understand that this is an extra tax on their neighbours. My Labour opponent opposed my campaign to have the major employers developing in the area pay for implementing a scheme if it proved necessary. Those same PFI developers she was so keen to support have made millions out of the contracts, and millions more through sophisticated financial wizardry while we are paying for what they have imposed on our neighbourhoods. Our streets belong to us - why should we pay twice for using them?

Improving the quality of private rented housing. All too often in Oxford people having to rent their home, and there are lots of us because of Labour's mismanagement nationally of house price speculation, have been used for far too long to accepting substandard accommodation run by landlords who, at times, let homes in a dangerous, unhygienic properties to the most vulnerable people. The Lib Dems in Oxford have started to introduce stronger checks on rented properties going way beyond the Labour government's minimum standards and the small number of only the largest properties they legislated for.

In Northway:

We have recently agreed a near £60,000 package of investment in the childrens' play area in Foxwell Drive - an important facility that allows younger children in particular to get out and enjoy fresh air and physical activity in a safe, contained environment.

My colleague Altaf Khan, city and county councillor for the area, has successfully campaigned against Tory cuts that closed the Northway IT hub. Instead the equipment is now in the Northway Community Centre and Altaf is now working towards getting funding to create a pleasant and appropriate space to host the IT hub and get more people learning about and using these fast becoming essential tools of modern communication.

In Headington Hill:

I have been campaigning against flier and flyposting litter and many, though not all yet, of the venues and promoters are now being more responsible about how they distribute their adverts.

And I successfully managed to get the city council to take some responsibility for the parking chaos on Pullens Lane caused by the new residents' parking arrangements in other parts of the local area.

I will be campaigning for better, safer, parking arrangements, especially near council built apartment blocks where space at the moment is woefully inadequate, and for new investment in the Northway Community Centre to restore it to a vibrant and well used community facility and hopefully to encourage many more residents to join the community spirit and participate in the sports and leisure facilities in the area. And I would like to help create a "Friends" group for Headington Hill Park and Dunstan Park to get regular users and neighbours involved in managing and developing these wonderful urban green spaces.

But yes, I admit, and am proud to do so, that I am passionate about reducing the dead weight the heavy hand of government at all levels imposes on our lives and communities. I am passionate about those communities instead being enabled to take ownership of local public assets and to meet their own local needs through their own initiatives. And I am passionate about individuals taking responsibility for their own behaviour so enabling us to reduce our addiction to government interference in our lives. And if you stick around a bit and read some more, you'll see I would bring to the City Council innovative ideas about how that could be achieved and financed without adding to the burden of the public purse and the taxpayers' pockets.

Do you have Facebook? Sign up to the elections event to tell me you are supporting me! read more »

Jock on drugs...

Jock — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:32:07 +0000

...but if some of you arrived here because of a scurrilous Labour leaflet trying to discredit me because of my opinion on drugs issues, I wanted to settle your minds, I hope, with a synopsis of my position...

I am indeed in principle in favour of legalizing the vast majority of recreational drugs - for adults. Once legalized, their supply should be regulated, controlled through a licensing system, and taxed - which can help fund more treatment instead of prison cells. It is not the state's job to prevent adults in particular choosing to put something into their own body, or indeed, like dangerous sports and so on, what they do with their own body, if others are not harmed by that. Such laws actually remove the ability of the individual to be morally responsible for what they themselves do.

That is not to say that I want to see an increase in drugs use. Just that I believe that it is the current approach, the "war on drugs", that creates and sustains an illegal underground market that encourages people into multiple addictions and puts people into the hands of criminal suppliers who could not care less about the health of their customers so long as the money rolls in. It was recently suggested that the international trade in illicit narcotics is now the world's third largest trading sector, after I think it was financial services and energy. When heroin was legal in this country we had 18 registered addicts in the country - despite it being used in common, over the counter, drugs such as cough syrups. Make it illegal and we have seen the level of addition soar exponentially.

This is a long considered and pragmatic position, that agrees with many professionals in the fields both of law enforcement and drug treatment. Basically, that the current system, based on criminal enforcement, puts far more people in danger from drugs - it makes it easier to peddle to children, because the peddlars are unseen and uncontrolled (and sometimes children in the schoolyard themselves). It creates the core of gang and gun culture. It makes it harder to seek help when, in doing so, you have to out yourself as a criminal.

From Colombia to Croxteth, Afghanistan to the Aylesbury Estate, more people die because of the criminal networks engaged in the drugs trade than from the drugs themselves. Our politicians know this and continue to pursue the obviously failed "war on drugs" strategy because it is a populist one that's sure to get some people huffing and puffing and voting for them - don't fall for it - they are nothing short of accessories to murder! We need a mature debate about these immoral laws (any law that actually colludes in and creates the environment that breeds killings in our communities is an immoral law).

Nonetheless, as the desperate Labour party scaremongers know, my theoretical position on drugs is not one that has much relevance in the role of a city councillor, which is why we Lib Dems have decided not to rise to this astonishing personal attack, marring as it does what has been a reasonably well conducted campaign so far, and concentrate on the positive things we wish to do within the remit of the city council. I do not want any more people, and predominantly younger people as many of the victims of the current drugs system are, dying because of a populist and immoral set of laws that create more problems than they fix.

Now, perhaps you will stick around a bit and read up on my positive ideas for the pressing problems on which Oxford City Council could have an influence, such as affordable housing, and partnership working to bring a bit of business sense and community ownership into the management and development of community owned assets - in the process, I hope, giving more opportunities to people to do something fruitful with their lives and leisure time and not get onto drugs in the first place! read more »

Getting around the drugs laws?

Jock — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:00:46 +0000

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? read more »

Jacqui Smith: how many have you condemned to death today?

Jock — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:00:49 +0000

Yeah, okay, it's a bit of hyperbole, perhaps, but I simply cannot fathom why someone who is presumably deemed bright enough by her colleagues to manage law and order in this country cannot understand how drugs prohibition worsens the problem and leads to deaths, from violent street crime in the gangs that fight over patches where they sell drugs, via the dangers of adulterated or unknown strength products, to ignorance of what to do in reaction to symptoms of drugs and the inability to admit you have a problem because it marks you out as a criminal.

And our lawmakers are directly responsible for all these deaths. They could begin to take the supply chain out of the hands of the real criminals, disarming the streets. They could regulate and control the quality of substances so that people know what it is they are getting and taking. They could make it so much easier for people to access treatment where they develop a problem, and remember not all drugs users do develop a problem, simply by removing the stigma of criminalization, freeing up people to admit to friends and family, to stop hiding until it's too late.

Channel Four News has just run a package talking to teenagers who started various drugs in their early to mid teens. This is a problem, but it is far more difficult a problem to tackle while the whole supply chain is criminal, hiding from the law not operating within it and subject to proper scrutiny like alcohol and tobacco sales. And I'll bet you that in any community in the country there are more drugs dealers hiding, especially if you include 'social suppliers' who just sell to a close circle of friends, than there are outlets for the legal drugs of alcohol, tobacco and caffeine. How are you supposed to police that. How are you supposed to police the international trade in heroin when you realize that a month's supply for an individual addict can be concentrated enough to fit under the postage stamp on a letter?

And now, in addition to all the deaths and misery that prohibition causes, the government wants to overturn a central tenet of nearly all legal systems - that one is innocent until proven guilty - by seizing assets when someone is arrested on suspicion of supplying drugs rather than on conviction. We have truly entered a police state.

Jacqui Smith...I hope you are prepared, just as the Defense Secretary should do to returning coffins of our service personnel from theatres of operations, to attend every funeral of a drug related death of someone's son, someone's daughter, someone's husband or wife, look their relatives in the eye and tell them you're doing everything possible. Because you're not. You're exacerbating the problem and making rich some very nasty people. Prohibition kills, just as surely as if you strapped them to a chair and plugged them into the national grid, and you are perpetuating those deaths. read more »

Government drug sham due tomorrow

Jock — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:46:43 +0000

For those who have been watching for this, the government's response to the sham consultaiton it carried out late last year on drugs policy, in the form of its new Drugs Strategy, is out tomorrow.

I can't do any better than to point you to Transform's pre-publication press release which just about covers all the things I am angry about this process, only in more measured language than I could muster! No doubt there will be more tomorrow. read more »