Support for reform: The Unusual Suspects

Drug law reform is often pigeonholed as the preserve of Guardian reading liberal-lefty types. The reality, as a recent blog post on the Canadian shotgun blog (part of the Western Standard) highlights, is that there are many more unusual suspects - of conservative political leaning - who also have strongly held and often vocal views in support of drug policy and law reform. The shotgun blog provides a interesting list of some of these, including individuals such prominent conservative commentator William F Buckley, conservative newspaper the Ottawa Citizen, and conservative think tank the Cato institute.

The list also includes a quote from the late Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman.

‘There is, in my opinion, no government policy that is as immoral as drug prohibition...’
(Friedman and Freedom, March 15, 2002). Whilst he arguably came more from a libertarian than conservative perspective his stance, about which he wrote many times still surprises many. (Friedman’s views on drug prohibition are considered in this piece by Johann Hari in the Independent from 2006 posted on the blog)

America’s Cato Institute, a public policy think tank, is yet another supporter of reform.

‘In spite of the greatest anti-drug enforcement effort in U.S. history, the drug problem is worse than ever. What should be done now? ... The status quo is intolerable--everyone agrees on that. But there are only two alternatives: further escalate the war on drugs, or legalize them. Once the public grasps the consequences of escalation, legalization may win out by default.’ (Thinking about drug legalization, May 25, 1989)

Back in the UK we also have number of supporters from possibly surprising corners of the political and intellectual map.

The Economist, a UK publication with a circulation of 1.2 million (over half being in the US) is respected and widely read by those with a serious interest in economics around the world from all political persuasions, despite its generally right leaning economic perspective. It has been and outspoken advocate of legally regulated drug markets for decades.

“The role of government should be to prevent the most chaotic drug users from harming others – by robbing or by driving while drugged, for instance – and to regulate drug markets to ensure minimum quality and safe distribution. The first task is hard if law enforcers are preoccupied with stopping all drug use; the second, impossible as long as drugs are illegal."

The Economist, editorial. From Issue entitled: ‘Time to legalise all drugs’ – 28/06/01

In stark contrast to the populist drug war rhetoric regularly deployed by current shadow Home Secretary David Davis, the now Conservative party leader David Cameron was a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2002 during its detailed inquiry into UK drug policy and supported the recommendation that:

“the Government initiates a discussion within the [UN] Commission on Narcotic Drugs of alternative ways—including the possibility of legalisation and regulation—to tackle the global drugs dilemma” (paragraph 267).

He also, notably given the current political shenanigans, supported the calls for reclassification of cannabis from B to C, and ecstasy from A to B.

Conservative front bencher and former cabinet member Alan Duncan MP, is also a proponent of reform:

"The only completely effective way to ameliorate the drug problem, and especially the crime which results from it, is to bring the industry into the open by legalising the distribution and consumption of all dangerous drugs, or at the very least by decriminalising their consumption."

‘The Legalisation of Drugs' in ‘Saturn's Children'. Read the complete chapter here.

Of course support for a more rational approach to drug strategy can be seen across the political spectrum. There are in fact supporters of pragmatic reform from all parties.

Clearly the reform argument does not fit easily into either the right/left political divide nor an libertarian/authoritarian one. Some of the false assumptions about the political fault lines in this debate are explored in Transform’s recent publication ‘After the War on Drugs Tools for Debate’:

‘Some advocates of reform envisage replacing prohibition with a libertarian regime, others with more draconian forms of social control. The reform argument itself is non-partisan – it is simply a pragmatic position led by evidence of effectiveness and public health/harm reduction principles. Calling for legally regulated drugs markets is actually the rational and moderate position between the ideological poles of absolute prohibition and free market libertarianism.’

The one reason I will miss Milton Firedman

A nice opinion piece in today's Independent from Johann Hari - a long time advoicate of drug law reform andsupporter of Transform (you can read his archive of drug articles here)

Normally we would just post a link but since he rang up to check a few facts in the piece, I hope he wont mind us posting the complete article. For the record Transform doesnt have a view on Milton's political position beyond the drugs issue, but he did once send us a very nice letter offering his support.

The one reason I will miss Milton Friedman
Johann Hari, The Independent, 23 Nov 2006
He offered the most devastating slap-downs of the “war on drugs” ever written

Even in death, the right misses the point. Milton Friedman – the Messiah of Monetarism, saviour of small-state conservatism – is about to be buried, but his mourners have conspicuously failed to laud his one great argument.


In the past week, his conservative obituarists have concentrated on the slew of issues he got wrong, lathering praise on his demonstrably false belief that a limp, slashed-back state delivers greater social mobility and a broader middle class than a mixed social democratic economy. Just compare Sweden to Texas to test that one – or look at the collapse in Latin American growth since Friedmanomics forced out Keynesianism. Yet on one issue, Friedman applied the forensic brilliance of his brain to a deserving purpose. Over forty years, he offered the most devastating slap-downs of the “war on drugs” ever written.


Friedman was a child when alcohol was criminalised in America. The Prohibitionist crusade to banish the “demon rum” and dry out the United States lasted until he was in his twenties. The lessons lasted his lifetime. He saw that even when you use force – the police and army – to try to physically prevent people from using a popular intoxicant, you don’t actually reduce its use very much. “I wasn't very old and was not much of a drinker but there was no difficulty in finding speakeasies,” he explained. The most generous estimate is that alcohol consumption fell by a fifth initially, and then rose to pre-prohibition levels as people discovered surreptitious channels for a mouthful of moonshine.


But while prohibition didn’t succeed in the fantasies of its fans that it would “end alcoholism”, it did succeed gloriously in one respect. It handed a massive, popular industry to armed criminal gangs, who succeeded to ramp up the murder rate up by 78 percent and make a mockery of the rule of law. “We had this spectacle of Al Capone, of the hijackings, of the gang wars...” Friedman wrote. “Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse - for both the addict and the rest of us.”


Friedman saw – way ahead of almost any other commentator – how prohibiting cannabis, cocaine and heroin would spawn a thousand Capones. He warned, “Al Capone epitomizes our earlier attempt at Prohibition; the Crips and Bloods epitomize this one.” The old Chicago gangster famously gunned down six of his alcohol-hawking competitors on the St Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929. But in the age of drug prohibition, there are equivalent dealer shoot-outs every minute of the day in South Central Los Angeles – and Hackney, and Bogata, and Kabul. People without recourse to the law will protect their property with hard ammunition. Late in his life, Friedman calculated that 10,000 people were dying every year in the US alone as a direct result of these killings, equivalent to more than three September 11ths. Most were bystanders caught in the cross-fire.


And by globalising this Puritan war on drugs, the US government has globalised this gangsterism. Friedman warned that the war on drugs has “undermined the very foundations of Colombian society” and “condemned hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Colombians to violent death.” I have just returned from Mexico, which is rapidly Colombianizing, with whole areas controlled by dealers who bribe or out-gun the police force and terrorize the local population. The same thing is happening on a huge scale in Afghanistan. “By what right do we destroy other people’s countries just because we cannot enforce our own laws?” Friedman asked.


But armed gangsters are not the only species of crime generated by prohibition. In his careful, methodical style, Friedman proved that criminalising drugs causes an explosion in muggings and burglary, making us all victims of this war at some time in our lives. How? A kilo of heroin passes through six different dealers in the supply chain before it reaches the veins of a Londoner. Each link in the chain demands a fat fee for risking jail. This means heroin costs 3000 percent more than it would in a legal, risk-free market – and a heroin addict must steal 3000 percent more to buy it. 3000 percent more grannies mugged, 3000 percent more homes burgled.


That’s why so many police officers are now coming out in favour of unpicking hardline prohibition and prescribing heroin to addicts, with Howard Roberts, the deputy chief constable of Nottinghamshire, joining the queue yesterday. They know from the experience in Switzerland – an ultra-conservative country that now nonetheless prescribes heroin – that it a silver bullet (or syringe?), bringing crime rates crashing down.


This does not mean Friedman was in favour of drugs. One of the biggest problem with the legalization brand is that it is still contaminated by the legacy of idiots like Timothy O’Leary, who though drugs use was an active good, an act of liberation. (Go visit a heroin addict in rehab and tell them how liberated they are). By contrast, Friedman thought (rightly) that heavy drug use – whether it was alcoholism, cannabis-addiction or junkiedom – was a human disaster. He once told Bill Bennett, Bush Snr’s drugs tsar, “You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are a scourge that is devastating our society. Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favour are a major source of the evils you deplore.”


Friedman proved, for example, that prohibition changes the way people use drugs, making many people use stronger, more dangerous variants than they would in a legal market. During alcohol prohibition, moonshine eclipsed beer; during drug prohibition, crack is eclipsing coke. He called his rule explaining this curious historical fact “the Iron Law of Prohibition”: the harder the police crack down on a substance, the more concentrated the substance will become.


Why? If you run a bootleg bar in Prohibition-era Chicago and you are going to make a gallon of alcoholic drink, you could make a gallon of beer, which one person can drink and constitutes one sale – or you can make a gallon of pucheen, which is so strong it takes thirty people to drink it and constitutes thirty sales. Prohibition encourages you produce and provide the stronger, more harmful drink. If you are a drug dealer in Hackney, you can use the kilo of cocaine you own to sell to casual coke users who will snort it and come back a month later – or you can microwave it into crack, which is far more addictive, and you will have your customer coming back for more in a few hours. Prohibition encourages you to produce and provide the more harmful drug.


For Friedman, the solution was stark: take drugs back from criminals and hand them to doctors, pharmacists, and off-licenses. Legalize. Chronic drug use will be a problem whatever we do, but adding a vast layer of criminality, making the drugs more toxic, and squandering £20bn on enforcing prohibition that could be spent on prescription and rehab, only exacerbates the problem. “Drugs are a tragedy for addicts,” he said. “But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike.”


Some people imagine that after drug prohibition ends, drug use will become rampant, with Chigwell housewives shooting up next to the chintzy ironing board. No historical analogy is perfect, but with one of his extraordinary dense statistical analyses, Friedman showed that the fears at the end of alcohol prohibition – that everyone would be glugging gin the moment they could freely buy it – proved to be false. In fact, alcohol use went back to pre-Prohibition levels, and has been falling since, with a brief spike in the Second World War. He also showed that the vast majority of criminals who had bartered in alcohol did not simply move into another form of crime, but went legit when the temptations of such a profitable criminal market disappeared.


Today, an end to drug prohibition seems like a distant fantasy. But in 1924, even as vociferous a wet as Clarence Darrow was in despair, writing that it would require “a political revolution” to legalize alcohol in the US. Within a decade, it was done. We are approaching a tipping-point in the drugs debate, when failure becomes undeniable. As we wait, I can still hear Milton Friedman in one of his last interviews: “In the meantime, should we allow the killing to go on in the ghettos? 10,000 additional murders a year? In the meantime, should we continue to destroy Colombia and Afghanistan?”


POSTSCRIPT: You can send comments on this article for publication in the Indie to letters -at- independent.co.uk or j.hari -at - independent.co.uk