Heightened sense A critical perspective on drug prohibition

The substance tautology

Enjoying a drink and supporting the prohibition of other drugs is hypocritical. Picture credit: Stefan Gustafsson http://stefangustafsson.com/

The artificial difference in legal status between alcohol and other drugs is unjust and counterproductive

One evening towards the last throes of a pitiful summer, and you're approaching the run-down concrete expanse that you call... not ‘home’, exactly, but at least the place where you sleep and where most of your possessions are to be found. Before you get there you're accosted once again by the same man that has stopped you several times previously, seeking spare change but given short shrift. Perhaps in his 40s and perpetually dishevelled, he can occasionally be seen swilling cheap lager before 9am in the morning, or being forcibly ejected from the nearby off licence at night. Which is cause and which is effect here is, as so often, not easily determined, and drinking is just as likely to be a crutch to a combination of problems as it is to be the trigger of any of them.

Turning off the main road, you stop by the grocer's. Its owner, a friendly Turkish gentleman, is berating his friend for spending money on alcohol rather than on his children. The rather unfortunately named "Wine House" that apparently sees too much of his custom is three doors further up the string of shops that sit beneath current and former local authority housing. The tall man with the dreadlocks is absent from his usual position outside, missing from the spot where he spends night after night and most days too. This evening, for a change, there is no fog of weed-smoke in the shop doorway. As it turns out, he's in the next street making a phonecall and looking decidedly shifty – but harming nobody.

As brazen as they are, the crowd that hang around there are seldom – if ever – troubled by the law. The police station is only a few hundred yards away, but its inhabitants only come around here when they're called. This is not to say that the occurrence is infrequent, and the short stretch of pavement between the vendors of food and of booze is where, just a few days earlier, you overheard a different group of young men openly debating whether to forcibly relieve you of your phone.

In a rare piece of sensible prioritisation, the police have bigger problems to worry about here. There are real crimes to detect and enforce. Sometimes a van will show up to drag a local wrong 'un off to the station; more often still you hear the sirens' wails obeying Doppler and plummeting in pitch as police cars and ambulances race past the maw of the estate towards the town centre, sometimes to mop up after knife crimes, commonly pub brawls.

Of two drugs being used in close proximity, it seems, at least superficially, that it is the legal one that does the most damage. And, given the respective probabilities of harm, Dreadlocks is more likely to get lung cancer from the tobacco in his joint than develop schizophrenia due to the cannabis in them.

It sets you thinking.

You cast your mind back, first recalling that time early in the initial years of this millennium, in a nightclub in Wales, when you were pegged against the sides of a dancefloor as two barechested men settled their differences in the neanderthal way that alcohol encourages, before being unceremoniously removed by security staff.

And then further into the past, to the time when, in your early teens back in the north of England, you heard what turned out to be the local drunk beating seven shades out of his father, when you dutifully phoned the police and struggled for far too long to convince them that it wasn't a hoax call.

Or to all the occasions that you too have behaved badly, in youthful exuberance and under the disinhibiting influence of alcopops and cheap lager. And those times are many.

You’re savvy enough to know that booze-related harms tend to peak around this time of year, with a greater number of festive-season revellers not accustomed to drinking, so you sit on these reminiscences for a few months.

Central London meets at least some of its grim expectations, with an apparent outbreak of creativity in the form of that peculiarly British style of abstract pavement art that uses vomit as its medium. You have a stomach that is weak to the point of absurdity and the mere sight makes you gag, but you manage to fight your own reflexes.

Two days later, returning to the north east, you work on the write up of these ponderings while on a train that has been made a ‘dry’ service at the request of the British Transport Police because it was thought likely to be full of football fans (it isn’t), and, according to the train company’s email, banning the consumption of alcohol “is effective in reducing anti-social behaviour onboard”.

These are simply a smattering of instances that you can remember having noticed in which alcohol, and policy on the subject, happen to have intersected with your own life. Meanwhile, the accounts of the capital’s ‘booze bus’ from Drinkaware and from the BBC speak for themselves – as do the statistics.

In Scotland, 73% of murder suspects had been drinking. The homicide rate drops during recessions because people drink less. Alcohol is thought to be a factor in 10% of all ill health and premature death in Europe. Et cetera ad nauseam.

Regulate.
It’s becoming increasingly accepted that alcohol is under-regulated. One could readily make a case for minimum pricing or greater taxation, restrictions on promotions and advertising, and so on. But that’s as far as it would ever go.

Most of us can use alcohol responsibly, and it is so ingrained in our culture that we tolerate those who cannot, or will not. We are unlikely to accept being forbidden to share a bottle of wine with a meal, or a few beers after work on a Friday, simply because a minority of over-testosteroned young men like to get tanked up and hit each other, nor because some keeping pouring until their livers are blackened messes. And for those of us who do like an occasional drink, it would be rank hypocrisy to argue that others should be denied their own particular choice of substance.

But with illegal drugs, there is no official toleration even of the 90% who do use responsibly.  The point is that it is unjust for the criminal law to deal with two people differently, ignoring the one and punishing the other, if the only discernible difference between their actions is the specific chemical with which they choose to intoxicate themselves.

The difference in legal status is plainly nothing to do with an inherent difference in the harms that the two drugs cause, but on the socio-cultural view of them. Alcohol has been an essential part of life on these islands for centuries. Cannabis, to take one example, is a minority pursuit. The fundamental nature of policy is essentially based on a tautology: we accept alcohol because we accept alcohol; we don’t accept other drugs because we don’t accept other drugs. Therefore the freedom to drink is accepted despite its occasional downsides, whereas although cannabis is not especially dangerous its mere use is potentially punishable with imprisonment in an ineffective attempt at deterrence.

But there's more. Overall, the good must outweigh the bad. We must, as Churchill had it, have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of us.

The value of alcohol's benefit to society, as explained by economics blogger Tim Worstall, is equal to the amount we’re willing to spend on it:

“What is the benefit of booze? The pleasure that people get from boozing of course. How can we measure the value, in cold hard cash, of that benefit, that pleasure?

“The amount that people spend on booze of course. No one who thinks that 50p in their pocket is more valuable than a pint of cheap cider will exchange the 50p for the pint of cheap cider. Thus the pint of cheap cider which people do exchange 50p for must be worth more to that person than 50p.

“The value to, the pleasure gained from, the boozer of booze must be greater than the amount spent by the boozer on booze.”

According to the Institute of Alcohol Studies [pdf], the cost that drinkers imposed on the UK economy in 2004 was £15.4bn, while the total spent on booze was more than £40bn. So we’re quids in.

However those costs don’t fall equally, and we must render unto George Osborne that which is George Osborne’s. The share of the cost borne by the public sector was perhaps £9–12bn compared to exchequer revenue of just under £8bn – so there’s possibly a case for increased taxation.

Similar calculations can be applied to tobacco, against which the tide of public opinion has begun to turn, resulting in concurrent but not necessarily consequential increased restrictions and reduced levels of smoking. But for other drugs, because of the absence of regulation, the tax side of the equation is missing.

The Independent Drug Monitoring Unit has estimated that tax revenue from regulated sales of cannabis would amount to £0.3–1.5bn, excluding VAT and before taking into account the criminal-justice savings. With the introduction of appropriate restrictions on advertising and suchlike that are conspicuous by their absence with alcohol, any increase in actual use would likely be marginal, so the benefit of regulation in purely financial terms is clear.

But instead of this pragmatic approach, we are faced instead with prohibitionist moralising and policies based on culture rather than evidence. Not only is it unjust, it’s needlessly costing us money.