Decriminalisation would allow the state to set manufacturing standards and collect taxes, writes Allan Massie
Every week, people appear in sheriff courts all over Scotland charged with drug offences. Sometimes they are in possession of drugs for their own use. Sometimes they are charged with supplying them to others, often acquaintances, friends or members of their own family. They are, I suppose, dealers, if only in a small way, though they may also have closer connections to organised drug crime, which is, after all, a big and profitable business.
Occasionally a big shot is arrested. Assets are seized and charities, sports clubs etc may benefit from the distribution by the state of the profits of crime. Most of those who come up before the courts seem, however, to be small fry, often the smallest of small fry. They acquire a criminal record because possession of certain named drugs is illegal.
Vast numbers of people – hundreds of thousands, millions probably – habitually or occasionally use these same drugs, but are fortunate enough not to be arrested and charged with possession. Everybody knows that drug use is common, that, for instance, City traders snort cocaine and drugs are passed round the table at dinner parties. Newspaper columnists write of their own drug use, and do so with impunity. The vast majority of drug users , at all levels of society, shrug their shoulders at the law, which they probably regard as ridiculous, if also potentially oppressive.
