h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Literally, scrapped all controls over drugs in the UK? (Not asking if it's a good idea - that doesn't matter. What if it HAPPENED?)

For a start, we'd be in a LOT of trouble with the USA, which is probably the main reason it will never happen. I think we're signatories to some kind of treaty that says we'll keep stuff illegal.

But would it matter? Would the USA take sanctions against us?

Would there be a massive influx of dope-head tourists? Probably at first.

Would the strain on the NHS be much greater...? I don't think so, because if you knew for a fact what it was you were buying, and didn't mind asking your pharmacist for help getting the right dose, far fewer people would have serious health problems as a result. I don't think actual usage would go up much after the first couple of years.

I personally would probably give cocaine a try, and perhaps heroin as long as needles weren't involved (I had morphine when I broke my hand and it was GREAT! ). I'd probably end up not actually using them regularly, however, as my only drug of choice right now is alcohol in the form of single malt scotch whisky, and that's more about the subtleties of taste rather than the buzz it gives. But therein lies another question, I guess - can you be a connesieur (sp?) of cocaine? Heroin? Do they "taste" different from one vintage to the next? Does anyone care? And if they were legal, is it possible that some people would?

The biggest difference if drugs were completely legal would be, as far as I can see it, that serious and organised crime would have to find a different outlet, and "petty" crime would plummet. Burglary, car crime and shoplifting would become ridiculously rare as the junkies who are chasing their next fix would simply wait for their giro then nip down the garage for twenty Marlboro, a gramme of coke and half a dozen hits of skag, all for under a tenner thanks to government subsidised supplies, despite the punitive tax rates on them.

Alcohol use might actually go down as people shift over to other, more socially acceptable drugs that don't involve spewing your guts up, crashing your car or getting in a fight.

Any other ideas?

Shame this was canned by the powers when it was posted, it seemed a reasonable question to me.

I think you're a little naive. No question organized crime would go down -- it happened before with Prohibition in the U.S. But that said, to assume that "burglary, car crime and shoplifting would become ridiculously rare" is missing the point that a vast percentage of the perpetrators are not drug addicts looking for a fix. Certainly some of them are and so it's not unreasonable to assume that crime in those areas would go down too, but I think it's a long way from the majority. And even if it's not, they may well carry out the crime for the same reason they do now: To get more money to pay for their drug addiction. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's free.


And what's more socially acceptable than alcohol? It's so accepted that when they did try to ban it in the 1920s/30s (again, in America) it spawned organized crime in the first place. And abuse of any drug, no matter what kind, will impair your driving.

"what's more socially acceptable than alcohol? "

Quite a few people of my acquaintance consider cannabis use considerably more socially acceptable than alcohol, and I can see their point.

Almost every time I've been a witness to or a victim of crime, the perps were attempting to finance the purchase of drugs. Anecdotal only.

And it was legal, it would be cheaper, and if you could demonstrate addiction, it might be offered free on the NHS. I'd sooner pay for that out of tax than the alternative, which is higher home insurance premiums...

What if we combined the two threads on drugs...

I suspect more people would take drugs. This would have detrimental effects on their health in several ways. Most of them would be ok, but some of them wouldn't be.

This would mean that in your average A&E we'd get more.

- Schizophrenia: Cannibis doubles the risk of schizophrenia from 1 in 100 to 2 in 100.

- MIs Cocaine causes heart attacks in young people- which is rather nasty for the s involved, oh and the punter as well.

- Heroin ruins your veins and often causes the need for IV anti-biotics. So I'd get lots more practice putting in central lines, (big tubes into your jugular vein) this would be good because I have been out of practice whilst doing my PhD.

- Meaow Meaow: I saw a bit of that when it first came out, it seemed to cause your heart to go very fast. Usually it settled down if you just slept it off, but we were never very sure what it was likely to do because it was new. We'd just pop them on a heart monitor and let them go to sleep. They'd usually cry and beg us not to call their mum.



Drugs would be more affordable, so less people would need to commit crime to get them.

We might be able to tax them which would mean more money to pay for the above problems. But it might be that if you are addicted to heroin you can't really work so you can't raise enough cash to buy it legally or illegally.



If you take a lot of some drugs it is difficult to hold down a full time job. Alcohol being a prime example.. if more people take drugs then less people could hold down a job. If someone can't hold down a job to pay for a legal drug habit then you



I think the evidence needed to make a decision would be:

1. Would more people take drugs if it was legal?

2. Would there be less crime?

We would need to look at other countries that had done it and see what happened there.

"it might be that if you are addicted to heroin you can't really work "

Is that really true? I don't know... but there are plenty of people where I work who apparently have to have smoking breaks, and I've worked with people in the past (although not currently) who've been pretty well into the alcohol and have held down jobs. Not been brilliant at them, mind, but kept them going. Is heroin really that different? (This may sound naive, but I can't help thinking that the people who are so into their drugs that they can't hold down a job aren't the sort of people who could hold down a job even if drugs didn't exist...)

Apart from anything else, here's a question I've always meant to ask a real doctor:

If heroin, cocaine etc. were legal, would more convenient/safer delivery methods be feasible?

You mention dangers to your veins from heroin, we all know what happens to that soap star's nose who did too much coke, and smoking weed gives you cancer if you mix it with tobacco...

Is it beyond the bounds of possibility that one could simply purchase heroin, cocaine or cannabis in a handy inhaler, or tablet form that would immediately remove *some* of the current risks? Isn't a lot of what's hazardous about heroin and cocaine the very fact that you have to inject/snort it? (Anecdote: a nurse friend of mine described him and a few of his mates snorting Baileys. This led to lung infections, quelle surprise. Apparently snorting it, while more hazardous, gives you a more instant buzz. Yet, given the choice, every single other person I've ever met simply drinks the stuff, which gives quite a nice enough buzz soon enough, thanks...).

Obviously cannabis is always going to cause schizophrenia. Is cocaine inevitably going to lead to a rise in MIs, or is that partly to do with how it's consumed? If there were a safer method to administer it, would that help?



One question you don't need to think very long to answer is the one about "would there be less crime?". By definition, if owning, using and selling this stuff stopped being an offence, there'd be less crime *instantly*. You could release from prison the thousands of people whose only offence was possession, or possession with intent to supply, substances which you've legalised.

It's very, very hard to imagine how making it legal to own, use and deal in drugs would lead to any *more* crime.

There would, I would submit, DEFINITELY be less. The crimes that would still take place would be of a different character. Tobacco is legal, but people still smuggle it to avoid tax, for instance. So there'd still be drug related crime... just far, far less, and far, far less damaging.

Ooh this is interesting:

- Jobs. There are people who got addicted to morphine as a pain killer during WWI who carried on taking it and managed to hold down jobs.

But I have met lots of alcoholics who have lost their jobs due to alcohol. Ok, these have been people dying of alcoholic liver disease. If you turn up at work high, drunk or stoned you are going to loose your job if you are a van driver / doctor / receptionist.

- Safe delivery. Yes it would be safer in some ways if legal, but not totally safe.

Heroin:

You need to inject heroin to get the high, and any one who has repeated injections *will* get through all their veins. I don't mind drug addicts with no veins, they're usually really nice about it, and often have lots of helpful tips on where their last veins are. If you injected actually heroin and not brick dust mixed with heroin you'd be less likely to get infective endocarditis.

You'd still be at risk of overdose. Heroin has a narrow therapeutic window, so what would stop a heroin naive person breathing is just about right to a long term user. Easy to get it wrong and end up dead. Easy to treat - there's an anecdote and it reverses it. Apparently then the user will get angry with you for 'wasting their fix'. They're probably have to be auto injectors of the anecdote in all places that sold heroin and the staff would need to be trained to use them.

Cocaine: I don't think that you could make it safer, it's the actual drug that causes the MIs, not how you take it. It causes the blood vessels to contract.

Crime: when talking about a reduction in crime you'd have to exclude all the convictions for the offense of possession or dealing from the statistics.

It might be worth seeing if it led to a rise in violent crime or theft to fund a habit.

Heroin - you can get the high from smoking it, but I'm reliable informed that injecting is better.

(You have to talk about something whilst finding a vein).

Well, that was the point of the Bailey's anecdote. Apparently that's better if you snort it, but the process itself is unpleasant and gives you a lung infection. I've had intravenous morphine and it was GREAT, but it would have to be a lot better before I'd be prepared to stick a needle in myself. More the point, it would have to be a lot, LOT better before I'd be prepared to stick a needle into myself if there was a safe, non-needle alternative that gave me a hit anywhere near as good.

Would you snort vodka? It's a better hit than drinking it... no? Me neither. Give most people the choice, and I think they'd take the safe, pleasant, "good enough" hit rather than the better one that could give you AIDS, septicaemia, etc. etc. and requires you to stick a needle in yourself.

"there's an anecdote and it reverses it... the staff would need to be trained to use them"

I'm trained to use an anecdote. See, I was in this strip club in Edinburgh once on a stag night, and... oh. Not that kind of anecdote. Righto.

If you HAD to inject heroin, isn't there some way you could develop a delivery system like they've got for insulin for diabetics? They don't seem to run out of veins? What's the difference?

Re: narrow dose windows, I've a few responses to that. First of all, being absolutely cold and pragmatic, there's an acceptable number of deaths due to that which we could tolerate as the price of legality. I'm betting that number would be less than the number of deaths we tolerate from car crashes, less than deaths from smoking related diseases, and possibly less than deaths indirectly caused by alcohol (drink drivers, falls etc.).

Second, if legal, couldn't you just dose low and work up? (Engineer, here, not a doctor, so shoot me down).

Ultimately re: cocaine and MIs, same deal with idea of an acceptable level of death. Put a warning on the packet and only sell it to adults. I paraglide. Nobody pretends it's 100% safe. Guess what? There's a little warning notice in the manual, and another on a label by the leading edge of the glider, warning you that flying is dangerous. Like you didn't know.

The thing is, you WOULDN'T exclude convictions for possession from the stats - there are a LOT of people banged up just for that, or dealing. Free them all, and our prison population crisis goes away. Which means we could start *properly* banging up people who do crimes that have *victims*, like burglary or assault, instead of giving them a slap on the wrist and a community sentence. If you put away 1% of criminals permanently, you'd prevent something like 30% of all crime. There really is a very, very small number of gits ruining life for the rest of us, and one of the reasons we don't simply lock them up and throw the key away on their third offence is that we can't afford to because we spend all our time and money chasing, catching, imprisoning and feeding and clothing drug users and dealers.

Violent crime or theft to fund a habit would, I suggest, reduce. Usage would go up, but by definition the new people doing the using are the law-abiding - the people who didn't use when it was illegal. These are not the type of people who would turn to crime to feed their new habit. Conversely, if you no longer have to deal with dodgy geezers to get your fix, and instead can simply get it from Tesco, there's less reason to hang around with crims, which means you're less likely to be a crim yourself.

Of course there will be people who persist in low level crime, but those people are already robbing to support their DVD and video game habits, too. They are the ones we should be locking up instead of the users. Life would be better for everyone, except of course the aforementioned scrotes.

Veins v. smoking heroin:

At the moment if you want to take heroin illegally you have the choice between smoking it or injecting it, and a good enough proportion of people choose to inject. So it must be sufficiently good for enough people to want to choose that method of delivery.

Heroin needs to go into a vein and insulin can just go under the skin, which is why diabetics don't run out of veins.

Narrow therapeutic window: Most people do start low and work up, but you loose your toleration fairly rapidly.

So if I start low and work up and get to a stage when I'm safely taking 1g a day, enough to kill the average person, then I stop for a few weeks, and then take 1g a day again it could kill me. Again education could reduce this risk.

I don't have any strong feelings about legality or otherwise. I can see that if people want to risk their own lives by taking them, then in a way it's their problem, as their health would be damaged not mine.

I think if drugs were legal and there were be more people taking them, there would be on average more illness and human misery in the country. And that would be sad.

It causes me pause to know that a man of your experience considers the likely consequence of legalisation to be more illness and misery.

I've always been of the (perhaps ill informed) opinion that with legalisation would come more and clearer information, better control, cleaner safer product and delivery methods, and a consequent reduction in illness and misery. I think - but have no data to back it up - that that would more than outweigh any increase caused by more people actually taking it, even assuming that did in fact happen. The fact of the matter is that, among people of my acquaintance, the law is absolutely no deterrent whatsoever to drug use. Specifically - of all the people I know, everyone who would wish to take drugs is taking them already. Anecdotal evidence only, obviously. But I can't think of anyone who's sitting at home wanting a doobie and not having one in case they get caught, or someone who'd try injecting heroin if it became legal.

Entering the debate as an American only a couple hundred miles from our southern border.

If drugs were legalized in the US, would Mexico cease to self-destruct? The crime, the murder rate just the other side of the border makes the Prohibition wars between Chicago gangs and the G-men look like a teddy bears' picnic.

If drugs were legalized in the US, would the privatized prison business suffer a serious setback in its profits? Would there be a drop in the percentage of incarcerated black males in their 20's?

Would there be a reduction in hepatitis C, sexually transmitted diseases, HIV? Would there be fewer crack babies? Mind you, the questions in this paragraph also speak to a big difference in the availability of health care in the US compared to the UK, but ceterus paribus, ceterus paribus.

If drugs were legalized and taxed as heavily as cigarettes and alcohol the government would benefit tremendously, not just in increased revenues but in ceasing to lay out funds for the so-called War on Drugs; those funds could be diverted from the arrest and incarceration business (and I use the word advisedly) to the border search-and-seize business.

I think both sides have good points. Z is absolutely right about the deleterious effects of drugs and alcohol upon the human body and psyche. Hoovooloo is absolutely right about the fact that the illegality of drugs has not stopped their abuse by that portion of the population most likely to abuse whatever they can get their hands on.

As for the collateral damage to society caused by theft and muggings as a means of getting money for drugs, right now I think societies face a graver threat to the protection of property from the jobless thrown off the welfare rolls who have no means of getting money legally. In any case, police forces will be better equipped and manned to deal with property protection if they are not spending time and money on chasing down cannabis smokers.

No doubt, any kind of drug, including the legal ones, impair driving ability. But we have the means to test for drugs in the human system and can impose the appropriate sanctions just as we do for alcohol. Have those sanctions stopped alcoholics from driving while drunk?

While acknowledging the risks, I argue that those risks are outweighed by the benefits, albeit some of my points may only be applicable to the US.

I don't deny that the legality, or lack thereof, hasn't prevented people from using or abusing drugs. That said, I'm opposed to arguments like this:


~*~One question you don't need to think very long to answer is the one about "would there be less crime?". By definition, if owning, using and selling this stuff stopped being an offence, there'd be less crime *instantly*. You could release from prison the thousands of people whose only offence was possession, or possession with intent to supply, substances which you've legalised.~*~


on the grounds that sure, we COULD say that since eveybody's doing it anyway we might as well make it legal and reduce the prison population. But by that logic criminals obviously aren't being deterred from things like fraud or money-laundering so we oughta just legalize those too. And grand theft auto's still going on, so why don't we make that legal too. And hell, rapists and murderers are still around even in spite of death sentences, so let's just make that legal too!

So you can see a line has to be drawn somewhere, right? And it's a very slippery slope that it's best not to start on in the first place. If it makes you feel better, I wouldn't argue that the sentences should be reduced. Years or decades in prison for one moment of bad judgement or losing your temper is too harsh.

There's a blindingly obvious difference though, isn't there?

For clarity, let's list all the crimes you've mentioned together:
- fraud
- money laundering
- grand theft auto
- rape
- murder

There's a common thread running through all those things, which makes them qualitatively different than using or selling drugs. Namely, there's a victim.

Now, admittedly, in the case of money laundering, the "victim" is pretty indirect. But the principle stands: the point of laundering money is to prevent law enforcement from tracing its origin, its origin being illegal activity, perhaps fraud, or pimping, or extortion. And THOSE activities have victims, so they're the indirect victims of money laundering.

Car theft, rape, murder - their victims are pretty direct and immediate.

But use, possession, even with intent to supply, of a drug? Where is the victim here? Assuming of course that when your dealer sells you that stuff, it is indeed what he tells you it is - but then if it isn't you're a victim of fraud, right? And assuming he's not charging you a ridiculous amount of money and threatening you with violence if you buy from someone else, or threatening them if they sell... but that's extortion, or assault, or whatever.

So - assuming a clean product and a fair price, where is the "victim" in a drug deal? Not the buyer - they know what they're buying and what it will do. Not the seller - they're making a fair profit on a product, right? Not the grower - they're turning their labour into cash, and if they're in Afghanistan it might be the best profit they can make from their labour. Who is suffering here?

You might, if you're trying to be pedantic, attempt to make a case that the user's family suffer if they're addicted, and that "society" suffers if productivity goes down because of drug use, or whatever. But that's an argument for banning alcohol and tobacco *today*, because we KNOW how harmful they are, and they're each a far, far bigger problem than any illegal drug. Ask the family of any alcoholic. It's conceivable (I don't know...) that if an alcoholic could transfer their addiction to a different substance it might actually cause them less problems. Just a thought.

It's the absolute epitome of a victimless "crime".

You have to question what the point of the criminal justice system is. Is it intended to protect the population from harm? If so, the drug policy is an abject failure. The drug policy indeed seems to INCREASE the amount of crime, and more to the point the amount of VICTIMED crime, rather than reduce it. It wastes masses of money pursuing, prosecuting and incarcerating people who have done no harm to another, and as a result FAILS to efficiently pursue those who steal or hurt others directly. The police, courts and prisons are a finite resource - using them to prevent people buying and using drugs does NOTHING to protect me and mine from harm.

Filter through your own personal politics what you think the point of this waste of time and money really is...

I have. My objection has never been over the legality of the drugs themselves, only the nature of your argument, as you can see by my phrasing.

But the nature of my argument is clear: this isn't a "slippery slope". You *always* have to draw a line and say "This side of the line is illegal. The other side is legal."

"Slippery slope" arguments are almost invariably bogus. You can use that argument to justify banning abortion entirely, or conversely allowing it without any time restrictions at all. A line must be drawn.

And in this case, my feeling is that the first principle of the law should be to minimise harm to victims. And in the case of someone selling clean drugs to someone else at a fair price - I can't see a victim. I can't, in fact, see any need for the law to be involved at all, except insofar as they'd be concerned with accuracy of labelling, purity of product, payment of taxes on the transaction, etc. - in short, the places where the law is involved in any other transaction, on an administrative level.

I also didn't say that the nature of your argument was unclear. But nevermind, I don't care enough.

The Guardian (left leaning UK broadsheet newspaper) gave a bunch of contributors just one question each to ask the Prime Minister, David Cameron.

Jonathan Ross, broadcaster:

Will you or your cabinet be the first to see sense and do something about the expensive, time-consuming and ultimately pointless "war" on drugs. Time to legalise some and legislate others, surely?

Cameron's response:

"I don't believe in legalisation. If you legalise, you make more available; and if you make more available, you build up a larger problem."

I thought I'd post my response separately.

There's a lot of interest in that short statement.

"I don't believe in legalisation."

Not "agree with", "support" or "endorse". "Believe in". That, to me, sounds a worryingly but predictably religious attitude. A dogmatic attitude, which brooks no argument.

"If you legalise, you make more available"

Questionable whether it could be any more available than it is now...

"and if you make more available, you build up a larger problem."

Presupposes that legal drugs would be a problem. Most of the problem with illegal drugs is not the drugs, but the illegality and what flows from it. But I wouldn't expect a politician - even a politician like Cameron, who was grounded at Eton for using cannabis - to admit that.

He was grounded at Eton? Hypocritical of him. And I take it he took no logic courses while he was there.

It's deeply saddening to see ideology supersede reasoning in all walks of politics. Or am I romanticising the past?