I read at StopTheDrugWar.org as follows from 3 days ago: “Professor David Nutt, the former head of Britain’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), who was fired late last month by Home Secretary Alan Johnson for criticizing the government’s drug policies as driven by politics instead of science, is now calling for a Royal Commission to study whether to decriminalize marijuana.”

Thank you for the great summary of opinions.

Please accept my apologies for having previously posted under the here irrelevant alias megalithicworld (my hobby) rather than lawpundit (my profession) – I am unable to reconstruct how that happened, but I seem to recall that one had to have a WordPress account to comment – which might explain it.

Proper discussion without quotes and lists is difficult.

I’ve had a look at the CSS of the site, in order to fix a couple of things that have been bothering me:

1. to fix the smileys, so they don’t go to the left of the paragraph, or have padding/grey background/border, go to line 472 of the site’s CSS:

#comments li div img {

and change it to:

#comments li div img.avatar {


2. to add some basic styling to blockquote tags: add the contents of this file to the site CSS.

It should be possible to edit the CSS for Lords of the Blog by going from the WordPress Dashboard page, to Appearance (on the left-hand menu), then Edit CSS.

Firefox and Opera users can also get these fixes by loading the Lords of the Blog user stylesheet. Courtesy of yours truly.

Please explain what the difference is morally between drinking alcohol and smoking a spliff.

Also please explain how the illegality of a drug precludes moderate consumption!

Should be fun!

From our body’s point of view, everything we consume is chemistry. What goes into our lungs, stomachs, veins is all fundamentally a blend of various compounds, and whether they got there from a dinner plate, off at tree, out of a teapot or a test tube makes no difference. Certainly, any number of the innocuous items from the food aisles of Tesco are as “unnatural” and synthesised as any cleaning product or recreational drug. There is no morality to what you consume, whether it’s chocolate or paracetamol.

Many of today’s restricted drugs have had (or still have) respectable positions in any medic’s pharmacopeia (ketamine, amphetamines, MDMA, cocaine, etc.), but society still likes to draw a line between their (medical) use and (recreational) ‘abuse’. As if the pursuit of good feeling, whether it be through relaxation, stimulation, disinhibition, or anaesthesia, were in and of itself some kind of wickedness! Not even the Victorians went so far. It is perfectly acceptable (or at the very least, legal) to seek disinhibition with a glass of wine, or pleasure (akin to sex, apparently) through chocolate, increased libido through aphrodisiacs, or stimulation from caffeine – less so to seek relief in nicotine.

It comes down to individual, private liberty. How we manipulate our own body’s chemistry should be our own business, and not the business of the state, so long as we harm no-one else. In this, I find it amusing that the Conservatives (usually in the front line against the nanny state) are so determined to tell us what we can and can’t do to ourselves. Really, it should be an issue of public health.

In this, our outdated classification system does more harm than good. Teenagers introduced to recreational drugs can see that every weekend, thousands of people from all walks of life go out and take non-addictive drugs like ecstasy with no discernible ill effects, and return to work as normal on Monday. The government is shown to have exaggerated the danger of MDMA, brandishing the vastly atypical yet unmistakable tragedy of Leah Betts as a disincentive. If it’s so simple to see through this transparent lie, how are young people to be truthfully warned of the dangers of addictive substances like crack and heroin, which are in the same category as the relatively harmless e?

There is a notion that if certain drugs were declassified, the nation would fall victim to narcotics, but surely that third of the population (mentioned above) who have tried drugs still hold down jobs and are productive members of society. Our middle class coke users still go to work and pay taxes and even have ‘normal’ families. The Greeks had it right, when they said, “nothing in excess”. Unfortunately, not everyone can hold to this, and their problems can blight their own lives, that of their families, and become burdensome to the state. Indeed, the greatest public health threat facing Britain at the moment is that of obesity, yet no-one suggests outlawing fatty foods – why should we be denied food which we all accept is inherently bad for us?

Let me rephrase that: why should the sensible majority among us be denied the right to ingest substances that we know do us no good?
It is simple. We should not.

In fact the banning of naturally occurring drugs such as opium leads to greater use of more concentrated (and more dangerous) forms (in the case of opium, heroin) because they are more compact and easy to transport, as was demonstrated by the shift in consumption to hard spirits by American drinkers during prohibition, and by the increase in strength of cannabis that was widely reported a couple of years ago.

As many of the contributions overlap, rather than do a commentary on each one, I thought it may be helpful if I summarise what I see as the key points.

There appears to be a consensus that the present situation is a mess and largely untenable. CRAiG summarises the reasons why the present system fails: cost, public health and liberty. Croft also offers a powerful critique. Megalithicworld provides a detailed summation of the situation in the USA. He also touches upon a rather pertinent point, which is that sending someone to prison may not be the best way of ending drug abuse. Experience elsewhere (Portugal – mentioned by Troika21 and megalithicworld – and Switzerland), as well as some experiements in the UK, show what can be done through an alternative approach. What happens elsewhere tends to reinforce the point made by Thomas, namely that there may be a case for making drugs available as part of a routine medical treatment. I do, though, agree with franksummers3ba that the best way forward is through international agreement. I do not underestimate the sheer difficulty of achieving agreement, but it is clearly the only way ultimately that we can truly solve the problem.

What, though, can we do in the UK? I take the point made by Kyle Mulholland: ‘From a moral perspective, legalization of all drugs really does stink. But I wonder, would it decrease use? If so, maybe we should look at it’. Tim fears that legalizing drugs may send out the wrong message and possibly lead to an increase in use, unless the legislation is implemented with extreme care, control and communication. ‘Maybe a steady trickle of legalisation, drowned out by a steady torrent of informative communication is the route’. This ties in with Alex Bennee’s point, which I endorse, that the most effective preventative against drug use is education. As he says, it has been shown to work with smoking (with some judicious or not so judicious use of the tax regime and social manipulation). Liam makes a not unrelated point, in that law by itself achieves little if there is not a recognition of wrong-doing. A number of respondents make the case that it should not just be drug use that is legalised, but that there should be some licensed outlets for its use: the comments of Jonathan Hogg and Alex Bennee are particularly pertinent here, as are those of Chris K., Croft and stephenpaterson. Here, I come back to my point about international agreement. Designated shops in Holland can sell cannabis, but the Dutch Government is now contemplating restricting purchase to Dutch nationals: apparently, the shops attract a large number of tourists.

Though there is clearly dissatisfaction with the existing situation, there are problems with straightforward decriminalisation. Practical problems are raised by Chris K. and tobedwithatrollope. ladytizzy contends that ‘the issues of classification apear to me to be motivated primarily by ideology rather than good science’. Croft argues a similar point. The way forward, then, appears to be to pursue the good science. As Tony Woolf says, we need a dispassionate and scientific assessment of the effects of changing legislation. tobedwithatrollope would like to see at least half-a-dozen well-designed and well-funded research studies that help establish, for instance, acceptable maximum limits for operating vehicles and machinery. I tend to agree with CRAiG and Alex Bennee that the time has come for a Royal Commission, or something similar. At the moment, we tend to hide behind the ideology and appear to be rather desparate to avoid tackling the issue. A Royal Commission may be the way to address the issues – of the sort raised in the comments – and, at best, identify the way forward and, at least, ensure that the relevant material is drawn together and on the public record.

I appreciate I may not have done justice to all the comments, but let me reiterate my thanks to everyone for contributing. I have learned a lot from the responses.

There is philosophical truth in what you say.

A criminal is not a felon until tried before a court of law. Up to that point the felon is suspected of a crime.

When the felon is incarcerated the needs of the law have been fulfilled but from the felons perspective he is being punished for being caught.

This is why parole boards must be satisfied that the felon is truly sorry for the crime they committed.

War On String May Be Unwinnable, Says Cat General
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/37503

None of this is to say I am in favor of controls. (Indeed, dried poppy is virtually uncontrolled as it is and ought to remain so.) It is just to point out that the natural/synthetic distinction doesn’t track a distinction in potency or potential harm.