Any Questions?

One of the things I’ve learnt about management is that simply telling people what to do is not a very good way of getting results. And when it comes to telling people not to take drugs, you might as well be making a case for not breathing air. There are certain things it is impossible to outlaw, things that are basic human nature. Sex is one of them. The desire to get off your box is another. I watch my two year old son as he spins around our living room, purposely trying to make himself dizzy. He’s yet to discover the delights of drugs and alcohol, but already he is satisfying a need to upset his usual sensory balance.

People will always have the desire to experiment with drugs and alcohol (I’ll use ‘drugs’ as a catch-all term from hereon, seeing how alcohol is a drug too. As is caffeine. And tobacco. And television) But the issue is that it often isn’t very good for them. And, more importantly perhaps, it isn’t very good for society either. Not that drugs are the cause of crime; they just make for an unproductive work-force. Which will never do in the global marketplace. So drugs have to be dealt with as ‘a problem’.

But if you tell people not to do something, and then they do it (or they hear about one of their friends doing it), and it was actually quite good, and didn’t kill them instantly as they’d been lead to believe, they are not going to suffer moral conflict. They are just going to question why they were told not to do it in the first place. This is why the Leah Betts approach doesn’t work; it only turns young people against their governments (especially when it later turned out that Betts actually died from drinking too much water, not from taking an ecstasy tablet). And the legacy of this great anti-drugs message, in the years that followed the Betts story, into the late 1990’s, ecstasy use hit an all time high. Pun intended.

So what about success stories. The most effective government campaign for reducing drug use ever? Legalising it! Today the Home Office announced that the number of British kids aged 16-24 years who have taken cannabis recently has dropped from 25% to 21% in the past two years. The tactic? Treating them like adults and letting them make their own minds up. Radical, I know.

There are some things that just can’t be done using legal or governmental systems, and controlling drug use is one of them. A few hundred years ago we didn’t just have The State, we had The Church too, and it was The Church that took care of the moral conditioning of society. Now the government tries to do both jobs, and fails consistently. Perhaps they should try thinking outside the box a little, and try some other approaches.

Capitalism, for all its problems, is a very good self-regulating system. If something is expensive, people will be punished for buying it by losing consumer power. This is how goods come in and out of favour. In the 1990’s a tab of ecstasy cost less than a pint of beer in most clubs. This is the sole reason it was so popular at that time. Nothing to do with cultural malaise, or pre-millennium tension, just simple consumer choice.

The problem with using capitalism to curb drug use is that prices are set by supply and demand, and most street drugs are presumably extremely cheap to produce in large quantity, which is why there is such profit to be made dealing them illegally. But the government has a mechanism it can use to artificially inflate the prices of goods it needs to discourage the consumption of – taxation. This is what sets the price of your pint of beer, your gallon of petrol, and your cigarettes. If a market were created whereby it was always cheaper to have a bloody good night on alcohol than on cocaine, then the demand for cocaine would evaporate overnight.

It’s a very simple solution. The reason we don’t do it? We can’t legalise drugs because if we did we’d have no moral outrage left, nothing to declare war on. Governments need bogey men to fight, to convince the people they are necessary. And when we run out of bogey men (Saddam, Osama), we have to declare war on concepts instead (Terror, Drugs, Crime). It makes more sense, from a political position, to declare war on a problem than to solve it. It’s crazy I know, but this is your law. This is your law ON DRUGS. Any Questions?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 9:03 pm and is filed under criminal justice, philosophy, society. 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.