I know people who drink fair-trade tea and coffee, shop locally and take cocaine at parties. They are revolting hypocrites.
Every year cocaine causes some 20,000 deaths in Colombia and displaces several hundred thousand people from their homes. Children are blown up by landmines; indigenous people are enslaved; villagers are tortured and killed; rainforests are razed. You'd cause less human suffering if instead of discreetly retiring to the toilet at a media drinks party, you went into the street and mugged someone. But the counter-cultural association appears to insulate people from ethical questions. If commissioning murder, torture, slavery, civil war, corruption and deforestation is not a crime, what is?
All faciliated by tax havens George, never forget that. The professional classes have to get their rake off. Add that to the list of hypocrisy.
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What’s wrong with legalising it?
Nothing else seems to work. You legalise it and regulate it. It’s not complex.
But as long as the demand exists, the punishment for the user is no deterrent, and the margins are huge, you won’t stop the supply.
Legalise it and tax it. Put the criminals out of business.
“What’s wrong with legalising it?”
Absolutely. What is wrong for legalising a drug which causes severe health damage, creates accute dependency, leads to crime and prostitution to feed the cost of addiction, puts a severe burden on the NHS and leads to the liquefaction of the family nucleus?
You forgot to add: what is wrong with child prostitution? Let’s just tax it and it will put criminals out of business. It’s not complex.
Demand will always exist, for sure, but you can influence demand. It’s time for a consumer campaign to do just that. Call it the Blood Cocaine campaign. You can already imagine the advertising . . . .
I am not wholly convinced about legalisation. The assumption is that there will be no problems if it is regulated and taxed, but look at alcohol. Legal, regulated and taxed and look at the battlefields that our cities and towns are on a saturday night.
But even if you beleive that legalisation is the best way forward that does not excuse anyone from addressing the consequences now of buying illegal drugs. Buying drugs now is pumping money into a whole network of corruption, extortion, prostitution etc.
@Paul
Sure, the demand exists, but demand also exists for child slavery, weapons of mass destruction, and the pelts of all sorts of endangered species. Where do we begin to the lines here?
Markets can be created for all sorts of harmful products and services, and the demand will be stimulated by supply (this is how the British introduced opium to China) but few would regard this as a triumph of the market. As James (above) points out, even where a regulated and taxed market is created the human consequences are appalling.
John,
The difference with the examples you cite is that they are all wrong in themselves. Weapons of mass destruction inherently risk killing large numbers. Child slavery by definition involves exploiting children. Using the pelts of endangered species risks the rich heritage that we should be looking after for the next generation.
The trade in cocaine (arguably marijuana and opium as well), on the other hand, involves processing and transporting plants that grow fairly freely in many parts of the world. It does not need to involve any exploitation or harm. There is, I suspect, little reason why coca, poppies and hashish could not be grown in the same way as wheat or corn or grapes. In other words, by farmers. The only difference is that instead of selling their product for pennies to drug ganglords, they would sell it for a “fairtrade” price to co-operatives and thence to the global market. After all, wine is now produced in every continent of the world.
I spent a lot of my childhood watching cricket, and one of the main lessons in my life was Geoffrey Boycott’s view of captaincy. He always said you should do what the other side most feared. In the case of drugs, the “other side” are the criminals, the gangs, those that exploit. We have had decades of trying to stifle demand and criminalise users and small-scale traffickers but it doesn’t work. I went to school in Jersey and of the 80 kids in my year at school at least 3 have died a drug related death and another 3 have been mentally scarred by prolonger drug use. Now I have children of my own, I would prefer if they never took drugs: but realistically, there is nothing you can do to stop whether teenagers take drugs or not. All you can do is let them know that you love them and hope they are sensible and don’t get in trouble with the police or addicted.
I agree with James that it doesn’t solve every problem, but if legalised and taxed the farmers could make a decent living, we could afford proper drug rehab programmes for those who want to give up, and the gangs would be squeezed, hopefully out of business.
Hum, the same arguments apply to your view. Drugs aren’t wrong in themselves: very few serious commentators would say that occasional use of any drug causes long term problems. The problem is with addiction, and you solve that by funding schemes to get addicts clean. But giving people criminal records, imprisoning mules and allowing druglords to build multi-billion pound empires and to exploit and murder? Well, not in my name.
Paul
Your argument is the same that the NRA uses for guns: guns do not kill anyone, it is people who do.
If this is your position, then self-abuse is ok? Regardless of the type of drug? What about heroin? Crack cocain? Legalised also?
Hum
Paul doesn’t need to demonstrate that ‘self-abuse is OK?’. The question is how do we minimise the total social harm. We clearly are failing at that today.
The range of substances that are, or have been, proscribed and subject to criminal prosecution is very wide. Some are pose a health risk to a small minority of users (alcohol, cannabis and – yes – ecstasy), some are strongly addictive which increases the health risk (tobacco, cocaine).
Nevertheless the evidence is over-whelming that prohibition increases the damage to society through
– criminalisation of people (users) who otherwise would have no run in with the law, resulting in many cases in a downward life spiral.
– vastly increasing profits available to be made
– pushing those profits to the nastiest people in our society who are prepared maim and kill
– robbing mainstream society of the opportunity to tax these products. Such a tax would raise far more then the costs of treatment for the minority of addicts who exist in any case. The case of tobacco demonstrates this.
Forty years of the ‘war on drugs’ has been a monumental failure.
None of the this is intended to contradict Monbiot. Given the nature of today’s cocaine industry casual users of cocaine do bear responsibility for supporting murderers.
This is less true for users of ecstasy which is mostly manufactured in Europe and is completely untrue for those who grow their own weed.
This last category are causing less social harm then tobacco companies. Prohibition of marijuana makes no sense at all.
Hum, heroin is a relatively safe drug. In the first half of the 1900s many respectable people became addicted to heroin following surgery but lived long and useful lives when provided with good quality supplies by the medical profession. When I was young I never heard of any crime associated with drugs (although I knew many users – 60s) but that was before doctors were prohibited from prescribing for addicts.
And it is debatable whether heroin or nicotine is the most addictive. I don’t know about cocaine, but coca leaves (which provide the active ingredient) have been enjoyed/chewed for centuries where they are native. Prohibition has never worked. Imagine the crimewave which would be unleashed if tobacco were outlawed.
It’s about time drug use was removed from the morality debate.
Just to add to Colman and Carol’s posts, which I agree with…
While I wouldn’t say crack cocaine or crystal meth are safe drugs, I think if the whole drug supply chain had not been placed in the hands of criminals it is doubtful that such potent substances would have been developed. The same probably applies to skunk. These substances are much more harmful than their parents.