Surprise surprise. Today, the headline above this story, on the front page of the Guardian caused me to actually buy the thing. But I learned little I did not already know.
The profit margins for major traffickers of heroin into Britain are so high they outstrip luxury goods companies such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci, according to a study that Downing Street is refusing to publish under freedom of information legislation.
Only the first half of the strategy unit study led by the former director general of the BBC, Lord Birt, was released last Friday. The other half was withheld but has been leaked to the Guardian.
It says that the traffickers enjoy such high profits that seizure rates of 60-80% are needed to have any serious impact on the flow of drugs into Britain but nothing greater than 20% has been achieved.
The study concludes that the estimated UK annual supply of heroin and cocaine could be transported into the country in five standard-sized shipping containers but has a value which at a conservative estimate tops £4bn.
Or, as I remember a visiting American policeman saying, in some argument about drugs that I took part in about a quarter of a century ago: These guys don’t count their money, they weigh it.
The trouble is that our political class has persuaded itself that it simply cannot legalise this trade. People might kill themselves by taking too many drugs. (The perfect punishment, I would say.) The politicians already ban lots of other things because they are unsafe. (Stop. Let people take their own risks and their own chances.) “Middle England” would not stand for it. (Middle England stands for lots of other things it dislikes.) But, but, but, we just can’t. (Why not?)
Well, why not indeed? What is going on here? Maybe the root cause, if there is such a thing, of the utter refusal of the present generation of politicians to legalise drugs is that they have got it into their heads, as have an appalling proportion of their voters, that it is the job of politicians to look after the voters, in the manner of parents looking after their children. To legalise drugs would be to send out a message that the politicians simply cannot bear to send out, namely: We don’t care about you! Look after yourselves! If all you can think of to do with your lives is take drugs, you will get no money from us to pay for them. And if you wreck your lives with them, and find yourselves ill and starving, tough. The only way you will get our attention is if you commit crimes under the influence of drugs, or because you can think of no other way to make a living, in which case we catch you and punish you some more.
Meanwhile, the rest of us can help by discriminating against people who damage themselves with drugs, by denying them employment, friendship, romantic attachments, respectability. That way drug abusers, if abusers they be, will have the necessary incentive to pull themselves together.
Drugs are dangerous, although it is clear that lots of people manage to use drugs regularly while nevertheless keeping these dangers at arm’s length. As this report makes clear, the stuff is pouring in, yet our civilisation trundles on, and when it comes to civilisational collapse, alcohol surely now does far more damage than (the other) drugs. Nevertheless, there are dangers attached to these drugs, and I for one have never doubted it, which is why I have refrained from ever using them, timid soul that I am. Even cannabis – much talked up as harmless by some of the people I went to university with – actually seems to have quite severe mental health risks if you use it too much. To put it bluntly, it is now quite widely believed by scientists and doctors that it can drive you mad – which is just what my recollections of the characters of some of the people recommending cannabis to me all those years ago have long caused me to suspect.
But, however harmful – or harmless – all these drugs may be, there is no sensible future in the government treating their sale and use on a par with the kind of genuine crime where someone else is immediately hurt or attacked or has their property harmed or stolen, and is accordingly immediately ready to help the authorities with any inquiries they might be inclined to make. How is the government supposed to learn about the drug trade? Who is going to tell them about it? (Even when compiling reports about the drug trade, with no thought of arresting anyone, all they can do is “estimate” what is really going on.)
But alas, such commonsensical questions are mere pinpricks when they come up against the entrenched mental positions of virtually all our current rulers. What is needed is more than a policy upheaval. A mental upheaval is required, and those are an order of magnitude harder to contrive. Meanwhile, it does not matter to our rulers – not enough to make any difference in how they behave – how much absurdity and expense they inflict on us in order to sustain their paternal illusions, and to sustain the corresponding illusions of all those of their voters who share them.
The modern doctrine is that something is either compulsory or forbidden.
Even when politicians reject this they tend to go for “forbidden or approved”.
The idea that one might accept that something does vast harm and yet be against banning it, is something that modern voters (let alone politicians) have a problem understanding.
So if a person says “the laws against drugs should be repealed” he must be pro drugs (or at least think they do not do much harm).
That is the condition of mind we are up against.
Oddly enough in the supposedly ultra Puritan Victorian period far more people (inculding politicians) understood the libertarian position on things like drugs than do now.
I should, if I were you, be more careful about making comments such as “Alcohol surely now does far more damage the (the other) drugs”. Consider the likely consequences of this government believing this to be the case.
(Other) Brian
What, prohibition you mean? No chance. They drink too much themselves. If they all become non-drinking puritans, then we can all worry.
Paul
I think we are pretty much in agreement. Allowing harmful things and not caring are very closely related mindsets, I would say.
‘Drugs’ – a term which happens to include perfectly natural plants – are illegal because people can grow them in a cupboard or make them with simple chemistry kits if the preference happens to be for the synthetic over the natural.
Even if all drugs were legal, the government would still be entirely unable to control and tax the supply as they do with far more harmful legal drugs like alchohol and tobacco. There-in lies the only reason for their continued prohibition.
This way, if they want to arrest an evil dealer to make it look like they’re saving the very same poor kids they feed a school dinner of 37 pence worth of junk food every day, they can.
Fairly simple. Money. At the root of an evil. Again.
For the edification and enlightenment of all:
[ Cannabis, Mushrooms, Psychoactives & Evolution
[The Cannabis Psychosis Myth Exploded
[ Cannabis Psychosis Myth Explosion #2
I think the state’s obsession with banning drugs is even simpler than you suggest, Brian. I think it just gives them something to do. Think of all the things they couldn’t do if they didn’t ban drugs. Here’s a selection:
1. They couldn’t insist you prove where you got more than £10,000 in cash from, so that your earnings would become far less visible to their taxmen.
2. They couldn’t rip apart your possessions, at a port of entry, because they didn’t like your face.
3. They couldn’t insist on the right to insert a rubber-gloved finger into the orifice of their choosing, at the same port of entry. Pun unintended! 🙂
4. They wouldn’t be able to smash down people’s front doors and rip apart their furniture, and occasionally shoot them dead in their beds, in dawn raids that go horribly wrong involving mistakenly-identified next-door neighbours, in which the police marksmen are always let off, scot free, despite being property-invading butchering murderers.
5. They wouldn’t have the excuse to raise the taxes needed to pay for all those drugs czars and customs and excise staff needed to ‘fight the war on drugs’.
6. Politicians wouldn’t be able to grandstand on TV about how they are ‘fighting the war on drugs’.
7. They wouldn’t be able to morally pontificate about how they need to ban drugs because if they didn’t, the cost would be borne by the NHS, that fair sacred beast.
8. The police would have far less to harrass people about.
9. There would be far fewer property crimes (to help pay for illegal drugs), thereby decreasing even more the need for politicians, public police, taxes, and draconian statist measures.
10. With a free market in drugs there would (probably) be far less addicts, following the principle that if you ban something, you make it ten times more popular. With less addicts, and with those fewer addicts using purer drugs supplied by reputable swiss pharmaceutical firms, there would be far less need for all of those rafts of non-job Guardian Readers in the public social services, making a show of cleaning up this gigantic drugs-related mess of the state’s own making.
And that’s just a few reasons, jossed off, as it were.
Obviously, to really make people behave sensibly with drugs you have to remove the entire welfare state. Because if the welfare state is there to pick up the pieces, the temptation is often to let yourself go, and to hell with the consequences (because Jack and Brian will be forced to pay for them).
And if people managed to survive without a welfare state, just where would we be then? It would simply be horrible! 🙂
Drugs bans are simply excuses for states to stick their big fat noses into everybodys’ lives. It works on so many levels they’d be absolutely crazy to remove the bans. We might just realise that we don’t need all these busybodies after all, and worse than that, that all these busybodies have been the ones causing the drugs problem in the first place. Sacre bleu.
Imagine, for a moment, that they did remove all the bans and everything righted itself, to return to an age in which just a few dilletantes quietly got on with the job of playing violins, holding down respectable law-abiding jobs, and chewing the odd coca leaf? You never know; Britain could become a place worth living in again, rather than being its current blood-soaked swamp of welfare-dependent hoodies. I won’t, as they say, be holding my breath.
BTW, a belated happy fourth of July to anyone reading this of an American persuasion. Some of you may have spotted me in Los Angeles yesterday, resplendent in my Union Jack polo shirt. I didn’t wear a red coat, as it was a little warm (though today is a little fresher), and I also love the fact that so many of you celebrate the removal of the British state’s yoke. I hope one day we English, Scots, Welsh, and Ulster residents, can do the same thing back in the British Isles! 🙂
Oh, and thanks for all the drinks. Pip pip!!
I agree wholly with Jack on this. The only problem the state has is showing that all their actions are worthwhile to justify further taxes to pay for further programmes. Drugs must continue to be a problem for society so the state can be seen to be doing something about it. It is a balance between those two things and nothing else whatsoever.
We often fall into the trap of looking at the supposed problem and figuring out sane solutions to it. Sane solutions to such problems will never be put into effect by the state. Other examples abound everywhere. If you believe the crime problem is “how do we reduce it?” then the right to bear arms would be a sane solution. But what would the police have to justify their existence and expense?
Do we need racial and religious hatred? No but the state does so they can gives us racial and religious hate crimes and they can have race and religious relations commissions.
The state’s whole philosophy is that we should be dependent on it.
Two thoughts,
1) Drugs are illegal mostly because it is feared that without such control a sizeable portion of the masses would necessarily engage in other antisocial behavior when altered.
2) The inconsistent treatment of alcohol versus other drugs is simply the proportion of people who engage in the former over the latter. The State only makes something illegal if it can triangulate a minority that cannot defend itself.
We actually have a case for comparison here. Before WWI, at least in the US, your 9-year-old daughter could have walked into any pharmacy and purchased heroin over the counter, no questions asked.
And yet…the streets weren’t littered with 9-year-old heroin addicts, and in fact the drug problem seems to be less then than now (here I’ll admit I’m guessing, I haven’t been able to find statistics, but I’d say the modern drug laws have destroyed more lives than the drugs would have).
We must have a “drug problem” so we can have a war on drugs. I’m not being funny I’m just sure that is the right way round as far as the state sees it.
Brian,
I cannot agree with your suggestion that we should deny employment to drug users. Random drug testing of employees is a clear and substantial imposition on their privacy. Employers have a clear right to require that their employees are capable of performing whilst on the job and an obligation (to their shareholders) to act if they find that an employee is incapable of performing their job. You do not need to demean your staff by having them urinate in a bottle under the supervision of a nurse; if they are not up to the job it should be obvious in terms of their actual performance. They should be judged on that alone.
We would also do well to remember that cocaine and opiates clear out of the body within 48 hours whilst cannabis can still be detected up to three months later. As a result many people eschew the odd spliff instead prefering to take cocaine which, arguably, is more dangerous. This is a very clear example of the law of unintended consequences.
If they really think the case for banning drugs is so strong, then they had better have appropriately harsh punishment for it.
Still, the prevailing social attitude regards drugs as dangerous items that may inflict costs far beyond other considerations. It’s in that grey line for the issue: Are some things so costly that people have to be protected from them in order to promote a greater good?
I don’t know about you guys, but I pretty much like my own country’s stance on drugs, as well as the extent of drug proliferation. A death sentence is really very useful. And most productive members of society here have nothing but disdain for the drug liberal dutch: they think the dutch are fools, and the social fabric is breaking down due to drug liberalization.
Not my views completely, mind you, but just an idea of where people are coming from.
Robert,
That drug testing issue also became a serious issue with prisons. When random drug testing was introduced, prisoners switched from the odd spliff to heroin as it cleared the system much quicker.
The problem can be seen in the government’s attitude – they think that legalising it would be to condone it. As if people gave a fig about anything the government endorses.
Jack Maturin,
You provide a long and daunting list of things that the state will be unable to do once drugs are legalised.
I think you may be being naive……
Toodle pip
PG
The various bans on drugs largely date back to the 1920’s, and I feel relate to the huge expansion of the role of the state caused by the Great War. It’s 2005, and we are still living with the effects of 1914-18.
Since we have a government that has just outlawed the ancient sport of fox hunting on the grounds that it doesn’t like it very much, I can’t see them legalizing skag any time soon, can you? What would the public sector outreach workers do? Oh the humanity!
Problem is, there’s no political benefit to legalising drugs. Until a politician can see a clear plus in votes or contributions from repealing this fascist scheme, they won’t do it.
Let me suggest one additional reason why the legalization of drugs is indeed unthinkable for policy makers. If anybody were to seriously start talking about legalization the drug cartels would kill them, their children, parents, neighbors, cats and dogs and mistresses. Legalization would destroy what amounts to a legal monopoly that the cartels currently enjoy, sending profits down the crapper. Not only would they face major competition from the tobacco and pharmaceutical companies, they’d no longer be able to eliminate low level retail competitors by simply making a phone call to the police.
What a bunch of cynics. I’d say you have it about right.
Don’t forget the bias against any sort of euphoria. Even anti-depressant medications are disparaged in some quarters as a type of cheating. You can’t just take a pill to feel better, you know. You have to work through your troubles.
As to street drugs, it is of course unlikely that a junkie ever experiences much in the way of euphoria. Still, it’ll be interesting to see what happens when “safe” euphorics become widely available.
I don’t believe for a second they have any paternal illusion. Most politicians and related vested interests certainly want to maintain the illusion of the necessity of criminal treatment in order to protect the variety of powers that come with it.
And the ability to justify new ones and maintain others, of course.
As long as the public sees this issue not as just a mere brick in the regulatory wall but one of those big huge blocks at the bottom, politicians with a sense of self-preservation and a flair for grandstanding will stick to the status quo and make it known that they do so, for the better good etc etc
I am actually more conservative than I am libertarian, and do sincerely believe that drug abuse is inherently quite dangerous.
But, so is driving. And I just cannot imagine that anything is worse than the current situation! So I would simply legalise the lot, except those that are purely toxic like crystal meth, and to hell with it. If someone insists on selling them finland-style under government monopoly, well, I could take that too.
But even though I am anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-environmentalism, anti-UN, anti -almost every idea I hear, and indeed anti-drug, the current situation re drugs is just untenable. At least with freely sold drugs, only the guilty get hurt.
Wobbly Guy: the Dutch social fabric has been breaking down due to un-assimilated immigrants, not Dutch chemical and sexual freedom. Check your Dutch crime, welfare and employment stats before you try to tell me I’m wrong, ok? Thanks for playing! 🙂