Legalising Drugs

I usually steer clear of the detritus of passing political arguments but the drug advice board thing happened just as I'd finished reading Misha Glenny's McMafia: Serious Organised Crime and my brain was in that mode. This is about legalisation, not about whether the Government were right to sack their advisor.

Any product which costs almost nothing to make, has a high consumer value and requires almost no start-up capital and expertise to make is going to be interesting to organised crime. Especially if there are significant excises, customs and sales taxes – which allow criminals to undercut the legal price and still make super-profits. Criminals don't (at least in Europe) make cigarettes, because although a pack of twenty costs almost nothing to produce, you need a lot of money and expertise to set up the factories to make the things. Plus you have to haul a lot of tobacco leaf around. By contrast, the largest LSD factory in Europe in the 1980's was a small house in a sleepy south-west London suburb (Operation Julie). Nobody saw a thing for years.

Any product where there is a significant difference in the taxation imposed by nearby countries with leaky borders or bribable customs officials will also attract the criminals. Tax arbitrage is an easy source of super-profits for the bad guys as well as Barclays Capital Markets. Cigarette smuggling is still a popular sport along the Italian coastline.

Criminals love drugs because the margins are phenomenal and the production and set-up costs are minimal. They like diamonds, illegal immigrants, small electronics, CD's and DVD's for the same reason. Luxury goods – Louis Voitton and Rolex knock-offs – are not much more difficult once you have found your Chinese manufacturer. The work is all about logistics and security: that's why a gang can switch from drugs to people to counterfeit so quickly. Once you have the logistics in place and the guards bribed, you can move almost anything.

Legalising the substance will not remove the criminals from the trade. In fact, it will start a round of violence the like of which we have only seen at the movies, as gangs fight for control of the sale of something that is just too profitable to ignore. Worse, enforcing any licensing regime (for quality, manufacture or distribution) simply turns the British Government into another drug dealer enforcing its right to be in sole control of the trade and making sure it gets its cut. The accompanying corruption of public servants and the Police would make the 1960's pornography scandals look like your maiden Aunt's tea-party.

The debate is often about the absolute or relative harms caused by the drugs, but that's not the real issue. The real issue is about the damage to society caused by the organised crime that will follow legalisation.

(If there are genuine medical benefits for some people from marijuana, then let's confirm it and prescribe if it makes sense. What on earth the medicinal benefits from speed, crack, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, ketamine or skunk could be I have no idea.)

Maybe we de-criminalise use but criminalise manufacture and supply as the Dutch do. I suspect the liberalisers would be happy with this. But wait, drivers of taxis, private cars, buses, trains, lorries and cranes have got to be clean and sober. So have doctors, policemen, nurses, teachers, judges and Court officers, customs and excise staff, air traffic controllers, airline pilots, the guys who run power stations, oil refineries and the various power grids, anyone who works power tools or on a construction site... I'd rather like to believe that the guys who designed the buildings I work in and the lifts I use weren't stoned at the time, and triple that for any crucial software that runs anything... The legislation making drugs illegal would be replaced by legislation making it illegal or sackable for various employees to be caught under the influence.

You see where this is going? Given how long drugs stay in the system, the only people who will be able to take drugs without fear of losing their jobs will be the unskilled, unemployed and low-paid. Which is not what the skilled, employed, high-paid liberalisers want: they want to get high as well. But most of them won't be able to because of the jobs they do and because their employers don't want them coming in wasted. And so we get back more or less to the same frustrations we had at the start, except the entire underclass is now wasted all the time and their children go into school smelling of last night's skunk. Legally.

And no, this is England, land of the binge-drinker and exporter of drunken louts to the world. The English are not going to do drugs like the self-respecting middle-class Dutch do: they are going to do drugs like they do booze. Which is going to be a really pretty sight.