Reenigne blog

Some people who know me in person might be surprised to learn that I think drugs should be legalized. After all, I'm not a user of illegal drugs or a die-hard libertarian (though I am finding that I have increasing sympathies for some libertarian points of view as I get older). In fact, this is something that I've changed my mind on in the past - in secondary school I thought they should remain illegal because it makes it easier for impressionable teenagers (like myself) to say "no" to them (however, I did somehow manage to avoid trying cigarettes in secondary school.)

Some things I've learnt since then which have contributed to me changing my mind:

• To get people to stop taking drugs, treating addiction as a medical conditional rather than a crime is much more effective.
• To get people to avoid taking them in the first place, making sure everybody is informed about their effects would much more effective.
• The cost in terms of police, courts and prisons is much greater than the costs to society in terms of loss of productivity and medical costs related to drug usage and addiction.
• Making drugs illegal creates an enormous black market, leading to a great increase in crime and a flow of wealth to unscrupulous individuals (drug kingpins certainly don't want drugs to be legalized - it would destroy their monopolies.)
• Stories of innocent people being killed in mistaken "no-knock" drug raids.
• The existence of illegal drugs makes it very easy for dishonest police officers to frame an innocent person - just plant some illegal drugs on the person you want to imprison (or their house/car/belonging).
• It is now de-facto illegal to drive across the US with large quantities of cash - it can be confiscated by police if found during an unrelated stop, and forfeited even if nobody is convicted of any crime.
• The fact that the people convicted of drug crimes are overwhelmingly poor, causing the drug war to be a massive poverty trap.
• The horrible racist and protectionist reasons marijuana (specifically) was originally prohibited.
• The general principle that sane adults should be solely responsible for what they put into their bodies.
• The fact that banning some difficult-to-obtain but mostly harmless drugs has created a market for easy-to-make but much more harmful drugs. Legal drugs are likely to be safer for drug users in other ways too - illegal drugs are sometimes contaminated and sometimes of unknown purity.
• The fact that Portugal has decriminalized drugs with great success.
• Drug laws inconvenience law-abiding people too - you can't stock up on decongestant if your whole family has colds, since (to discourage methamphetamine production) you're only allowed to buy a small amount in any given period of time. Also, shops are forbidden from stocking such "drug paraphernalia" as tiny plastic bags.
• It seems that cannabis (in particular) is actually a very useful medicine for some conditions (such as reducing the side-effects of chemotherapy).

Since only a few of these are specific to marijuana, I'm in favor of legalizing all illegal drugs and taxing them at a rate which neutralizes as closely as possible the harm that they cause to society (thus avoiding a perverse incentive for governments to either encourage or prohibit drug use). However, there are some drugs which are so harmful that taking them should be evidence that a person is not sufficiently sane to make such decisions - people taking those drugs should be committed, not imprisoned.

If it's legal to sell harmful drugs then it wouldn't make much sense for it to be illegal to sell beneficial drugs without a prescription. So, along with legalizing currently illegal drugs I would also get rid of prescription requirements (although having a prescription from a doctor for a potentially harmful drug would still be a very good idea just as a matter of common sense). Having FDA approval for a drug would no longer be necessary in order for doctors to prescribe it or for pharmacies to sell it, but I imagine the FDA would continue to exist as a voluntary safety testing and labeling scheme, and most sensible people would avoid taking drugs which had not been declared as safe (or whose side-effects do not outweigh their benefits) except when circumstances warrant it (such as it being the last hope of curing an otherwise incurable disease). There should be some kind of public awareness campaign so that people know what mark to look for when they are buying such things. To avoid the safer drugs being more expensive, the costs of FDA labeling should be borne publicly.

Such a system would also be much more sensible for small scale food manufacturers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 25th, 2011 at 4:00 pm and is filed under philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.