We mentioned this excellent recent article by Mathew Engel in the Financial Times in the miniblog but I thought it was worth posting a scan* of the FT weekend magazine cover.
That this article appeared in the FT is significant given its readership and prestige within the media, and the fact that it made the magazine cover so prominently is testimony to how mainstream the reform arguments have become.
* sorry the scan is a bit rubbish - my only copy got a bit crumpled
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
FT weekend magazine cover story: "Legalise the Lot"
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10 comments:
It's curious, though, isn't it. The ideas are mainstream, as you say, but at the same time absolutely invisible within national politics and government. Why do you think this is and what can be done about it?
not completely invisible but i take your point - front line politics for the two main parties definitely. drug war rhetoric and that whole narrative is deeply entrenched and by its nature hard to change tack on given its moral absolutes. changing views is easy to portray as retreat, weakness in the face of the drug threat or surrender in the 'war'. That said the water is building behind the dam as it were - a critical threshold will be reached soon when the whole edifice will collapse - atipping point is fast approaching when the political benefits of clinging onto the status quo will be outweighed by the obvious gains of pragmatic reform. this will be driven by public opinion and financial imperatives rather than principles I suspect, but the gathering intellectual momentum is important.
Interesting points, Steve. I'm not convinced about 'tipping points' and 'bursting dams', which imply that there will be a dramatic single moment of change. I think the key will be a series of small-scale pragmatic experiments, often localised, which will accumulate over time. In my view, this is the way forward, rather than lobbying at the level of national or supranational policymaking (which seems to be a dead end in reality).
I think it will be a bit of both; we support incremental reforms, but these do ultimately come up against a line in the sand drawn by the MDA and UN treaties - you simply can experiment with any form of legal non-medical supply, and decrim or tolerance can only go so far. As such there will at some point have to be a major legislative shift as the flexibility to explore all options is allowed. this doesn't however mean that the changes will all come at once - these should rightly be cautionary and phased over time. But moving to wards the legal shift that ultimately allows them does fit the tipping point analysis.
looking at the years in the build up to some fo the major social movements of the last century and associated legal reforms (gay rights, civil rights votes for women etc) I sense a similar misplaced pessimism amongst many people re drug laws. No one thought most of these changes would ever happen. And then they did.
Don't get me wrong, I too am optimistic. Prohibition is less than 100 years old, after all, so very far from a deeply entrenched perspective.
Yes Steve, lets string it along until the pension kicks in- we can tell that to those waiting to be flogged, hanged and shot that change needs to be done with caution and over time. THAT IS NO WAY TO RUN A CAMPAIGN - RISE YOUR SIGHTS OR YOU ARE NO BETTER THAN THE REST OF THEM. Freedom NOW
we can try and change media / public opinion - which is inevitably a slow process, especially when you have very limited resources (but we are succeeding), we can lobby parliamentarians (largely pointless without the former) and policy makers, Or we can go to the courts we we are also exploring.
what do you suggest, and how do you want to pay for it? Shouting bad as all the rest doesn't help come up with a more viable strategy.
Legal challenges? I think everyone charged with drug possession should be challenging their prosecution - see drugequality.org.
yup - like the excellent work drugequality, Release and others are doing
'can' in second comment should read 'cannot'
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