UK - Get tough on drugs, don't legalise them

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edgarshade

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Telegraph

By Simon Heffer 6:27PM GMT 17 Dec 2010

With reader comments

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/simonheffer/8210466/Get-tough-on-drugs-dont-legalise-them.html

The idea of legalising drugs and selling them in a controlled way, advocated on Thursday by Bob Ainsworth, a former Home Office minister, has been roundly condemned. I am minded to condemn it roundly, too – but not in order to belittle or ridicule Mr Ainsworth. His was a thoughtful and important contribution to a necessary debate. But he is wrong.
Drug dealers and, indeed, drug users are criminals. We have criminality in this and other ways not because we have unduly stringent policies against crime, but because they are not stringent enough. This also means that, were we to legalise drugs as Mr Ainsworth suggests, we would still have problems with criminality. These would not just be in continued illegal drug dealing (which Mr Ainsworth accepts will happen) but in other fields of criminality to which former drug dealers would shift their attentions.
In other words, if you seek to undermine what Mr Ainsworth correctly calls the "gangsters" by reducing their ability to make money from drugs, they will simply find another commodity to exploit. Nature abhors a vacuum, and criminals used to idling for a living on a huge income are not suddenly going to get jobs stacking shelves in Tesco.
I am far from sure, however, that there would be much reduction in the scope for illegal drug dealing. Were legalisation ever to happen, drugs would have to be sold on the same basis as alcohol and tobacco. They would need to carry VAT and excise duty. Given the damage done by drugs in terms of health and consequent criminality – such as addicts mugging and burgling to afford their fix, which would not change – there is a strong case for setting excise duty at a higher rate than on booze and fags (and you can bet that the drinks and tobacco industries would make that case powerfully). Therefore, the newly legalised drugs would be expensive, allowing plenty of scope for illegal traffickers and dealers to undercut them – at which point we would be back not quite where we started.
I say "not quite" because the other effects of legalisation would be to encourage people who don't use drugs to have a dabble; and to encourage those who use so-called "soft" drugs (though the psychotic effects of cannabis seem to me to render it anything but "soft") to try something a bit more serious. So as well as having gangsters still operating, we shall have additional burdens on the NHS, more families wrecked by drug abuse, and probably more crime to feed the habit.
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Reader comment by
"TransformDrugPolicy"

1 hour ago
Recommended by
4 people
This point does have some legitimacy: if the most lucrative source of illegal income is denied to organised criminals, what will they all do? The Association of Chief Police Officers, in arguments to the Home Affairs Select Committee suggested it was absurd to think legalisation would cause drug gangs to just ‘fade into the night’. Obviously it is ridiculous to imagine they will all ‘go straight’ and get jobs in McDonalds, or selling flowers, but it is equally absurd to suggest they will all embark on some previously unimagined crime spree. Clearly the impacts will differ at the various levels of the criminal infrastructure and, since reforms will be phased over a number of years and not happen overnight, criminal drug infrastructures will experience a twilight period of diminishing profit opportunities.

Undoubtedly some criminals will seek out new areas of illegal activity and it is realistic to expect that there may be increases in some areas, such as cyber-crime, extortion or other illicit trades (counterfeit goods etc.). However, crime is to a large extent a function of opportunity, and it is impossible to imagine that there is enough criminal opportunity to absorb the manpower currently operating an illicit drugs market with a turnover somewhere in the region of £300 billion pounds a year globally, or over £6 billion a year in the UK alone. Even if there is diversion into other criminal activity, the big picture will undoubtedly show a significant net fall in overall criminal activity. Getting rid of illegal drug markets is about reducing opportunities for crime.

This concern is a curious one because it seems, when considered closely, to be advocating prohibition as a way of maintaining illegal drug empires so that organised criminals don’t have to change jobs. By contrast, from the reform perspective the argument is about removing the largest criminal opportunity on earth, not just from existing criminals but, significantly, from future
generations of criminals. Ending prohibition holds the prospect of diverting millions of potential young drug producers, traffickers, and dealers from a life of crime.

Ofcourse no one is suggesting that such moves would eliminate the illicit drugs market entirely - but even if it moved to s situation similar to tobacco - where %75 of the market is legally regulated and taxed (and much of the rest at least produced legally) - with a market of the scale of illegal drugs this would still represent a dramatic fall in criminality and related social harms. Moreover, in legal drug markets the Goverment can (and does) intervene on price (with tax or more direct price fixing) to balance the competing needs of dissuading use and dissuading the illicit. No such interventions are possible with an the unregulated crimianl controlled trade.
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Mercc96 said:
ha what a load of tosh in that first article
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It's shocking.

The author bases a lot of his argument that drug users (and dealers) are criminals… but he obviously hasn't realised that if drugs were decriminalised, they wouldn't be!
 
cor how very short sighted and out dated all these drug laws are since the 20th century prohibition has been the main driving force of drug laws but now they have roughly a 100 yrs of experience to draw on and learn from...as such try a change.thomas dequincy bought his opium from a druggist in london he was no criminal a great author,nor was the guy who supplied it he was a legit bizniz man.
 
edgarshade said:
I wonder if he really believes it himself or his boss told him to write it to "send the right message" :\
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exactly why our government moved cannabis from Class C up to B. "to send a message" . Surely passing laws to send a message is wrong? It just shows that the Government cares so little about actual facts, but more about moral standings and personal believes.
 
The amount of criminal activity in transporting and selling drugs is a function of opportunity thereof and people's willingness to engage in it. For one thing, people who choose to engage in the pursuits of drug dealing do so because it's easy money and they don't have a moral issue with it. From a moral standpoint I cannot see how selling drugs is any worse than selling alcohol, notwithstanding the issue of selling to young people which is fucked up in either case. Because the sales of alcohol are tolerated and even encouraged in Western culture, it's not viewed as wrong, and upon realizing the arbitrary distinctions the law draws between alcohol and drugs any moral distinctions between them also disintegrate. In the moral sense, drug crime is very distinct from trafficking child sex slaves, but the argument made implies that 'criminals' don't differentiate between the two and former drug criminals would seamlessly transition into things like child prostitution because that's where the crime dollar is. Really??

If people's willingness to engage in drug crime is a function of their willingness to do so, and if willingness is a function of moral acceptance of the act, and if not all crimes are equally weighted on a moral basis, not everyone who engages in drug crime would engage in other, nastier sorts. But it's very convenient to lump all 'criminals' into one lot and make generalizations like this if you're arguing against legalization.

The bit about taxes on legalized drugs leading them to be more expensive than street drugs is shaky too. The markup on drugs is enormous, even discounting the fact that quality is generally low compared to what would be available if regulated companies could provide them. Drug prices would crash like subprime bonds, and if the penalties and obstacles didn't change for illegally trafficking or selling drugs upon legalization, there's no way it would be worthwhile to engage in illegal trafficking.

Legalization should be debated for it's own sake, not the speculative effects it might have on making criminal activity more concentrated in other areas. Even assuming that argument holds, the net amount of 'crime' remains unchanged in the worse case scenario, so what does it matter? Unfortunately for this writer the argument does not hold, as the Portugese example has clearly demonstarted. This is simply a classic straw-man argument designed to detract attention from the real issues involved with drug legalization.
 
Simon Heffer is truly the worst of the worst; a vile obnoxious hypocrite deluded into thinking there's virtue in fallacious notions like not questioning authority or the status quo, maintaining traditions for tradition's sake and slavish adherence to social convention. I make an active point of reading his weekly column just to remind myself how fucked up some people's values really are.

To be the by far biggest cunt in a newspaper chock full of cunts is quite an achievement actually.
 
Hmm, makes a lot of sense, you know? Let's keep something outlawed so that the people breaking the law don't graduate to higher forms of lawlessness. Maybe in doing so, greater laws won't be broken!

Or, let's plug up the dam to avoid a terrible flood. Here, put your finger in that hole. Too many holes, so let's hire more hole-pluggers.

The flood will come eventually, but it won't last. The people who make money selling drugs can still do so legally if we let them. They have an occupation, why should they have to change jobs once drugs are legalized? Make it easy for them, and while we're at it, we can even have some form of quality control which would be a hell of a lot better than what we have now.

Are the drug sellers losing money with incarceration? Divert those spendings into quality control and taxation. It's not all lost, but as long as we keep overreacting to things which aren't crimes, we will make no progress.
 
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