Why Ban Drugs? An Introduction
In the world today, there is no state that has not made drugs illegal. In 1961, the United States used its clout as the preeminent superpower to consolidate laws against the manufacture, distribution and possession of narcotic substances in all the territories where it held influence, and the Soviet Union shared their opinions, an unusually bipartisan endeavour. For almost a whole decade, every country in the Western world took concrete and often blunt steps toward suppressing the consumption of these dangerous substances.
Of course, very few nations have the capacity to enforce these laws. Nobody expects the Central African Republic to run sophisticated wiretap and sting operations any time soon, nor even to manage basic police patrols. But out of those nations who are wealthy and efficient enough, there seems to be a departure of attitude - many are now looking at legalising several substances. I had, for most of my adult life, been staunchly convinced of the necessity, even the moral right to decriminalize, for reasons attached both to personal autonomy and to the wellbeing of those jailed for petty offenses. But I have since changed my mind quite considerably.
Quite aside from the political dimensions, I have since learned that it is in fact medical consensus that cannabis contributes extraordinarily to mental illness, and can be quite unpredictable in its expression. Beyond that, it is in fact a "gateway drug” (Fergussen et al, 2006; Secades-Villa et al, 2015; Hall & Lynskey, 2005). It is also a teratogen, meaning it causes deformities in unborn children (Volkow et al, 2017; Kozer & Koren, 2001; El Marroun et al, 2009; Reece, 2009). Most saliently, it risks causing permanent psychosis at such a high rate that 1 in 30 people who ever even try the drug once undergo some kind of psychotic break (Semple et al, 2005; Moore et al, 2007; Smith et al, 2009; Large et al, 2011; Marconi et al, 2016). These facts have sobered my outlook somewhat - I had been thoroughly convinced that psychedelics were entirely harmless, and even after watching several of my fellow classmates confined to mental wards for psychotic episodes, I persisted in believing that it was at least "mostly harmless".
I first began to shift my perspective when I encountered the writing of Peter Hitchens. Most people first learn of his far more charismatic and belligerent brother, the famous late antitheist and world-famous contrarian journalist. Peter on the other hand, is a wonderfully antiquated relic of a man, the last High Tory in all of England, a creature of church and crown, temperance and tolerance, a stern conservative moral conscience. He has written and spoken extensively about drugs and the laws which govern them, advocating a strict prohibition. I scoffed at first, but naturally intrigued by his intransigence, I set about discovering what I could on the matter. It turns out that his arguments go beyond the usual conservative jibber-jabber, and into fresh and contrarian territory.
His grand thesis, laid out over several books written in the last twenty-odd years, has focused on documenting the decline of British culture and institutions in fascinating and depressing detail. Every custom from the parliament to the pulpit has been pulled down, and even customs regarding respect of the dead have dissolved into a postmodern morasse of simpering solipsism, as the sceptered isle "sinks giggling into the sea". You see, in doing his autopsy while the corpse is still fresh, Hitchens has managed to disturb everyone who still thinks the old bag is alive and kicking. But true to the sharpness of wit with which his family is associated, and in firm old fashioned journalistic tradition, he has managed to perform a sensitive dissection.
Where this criss-crosses with drugs is that the decline of the British police's effectiveness (he argues due to a gradual abandonment of traditional policing strategies, such as regular solo foot patrols, and an over-reliance on data-driven and paperwork beladen procedure) has been accompanied by a weakening of the judicial punishments which back up police action. Since 1972, the United Kingdom has been refusing to apply the laws against possession by relaxing sentencing guidelines to the point that one may avoid jailtime for possession of up to 6kg of cannabis. This is the result of a rather louche and lackadaisical attitude among many of the more enlightened legal and political elites on the topic of drug consumption.
He puts it down to the fact that since the early sixties, the consumption of psychedelic drugs became something of a rite of passage among university students, which has now left an indelible mark on the ruling classes - namely that none of them deem these substances dangerous, and being the ones who broke the law, do not believe that they ought to be punished for it.This is the crux of the argument - that England and Wales has not been enforcing the laws on its books. For most of the public, the understanding is that the law is what the authorities enforce. But as anyone familiar with policy or legal procedure will tell you, the law is a faint guideline when enforcement becomes selective.
So while the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs has held every nation since then to the task of providing legislation, it has no instrument to require their enforcement. This is the loophole exploited by the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Czechia, Uruguay, and even states within the United States, the very originator of the Single Convention. Many of these countries have avoided enforcing the laws on their books going back the start of the 1970s, yet despite this, the entire world is saturated in propaganda declaring the "War on Drugs" to have been "lost". As Peter Hitchens argues rather well, it has simply never been fought.
In the following articles, I will lay out the practices of several countries' approaches to drug policy, and show what it looks like to enforce prohibition seriously. For these examples, one must look east, to nations such as Japan and South Korea. While many nations in East asia prosecute their war on drugs in a brutal and murderous fashion, these two nations show that with the right combination of public relations, education and strict legal enforcement, drug use can be kept extraordinarily low.