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Re: drugs...? pathetic

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Wow, good topic. I've found a gap in the emails I have to write, so I thought I'd pitch in with a bit of mischief in mind.

Seems to me there's three separate questions going on here:

1. What should our public attitude to drugs be?

2. What should our personal attitude to drug use be?

3. Should these two be the same?

I'm not sure about 2. and 3. other than in 2. I dislike drugs because they often represent (Balzac's cool phrasing) the abdication of the will. But then I dislike for exactly the same reason compulsive anything, like drinking, smoking or chocolate cravings when given in to. But that's personal - I can understand times when other people don't really want to be in charge of themselves anymore.

But I do have thought on 1. - Paternalism, libertarianism, legality

Let's not be disingeneous here. Drugs are bad for you, kids. They are also bad for the people around you if you use them or get addicted (crime, disease-spreading, general ugliness of people off their heads).

The same is true about booze, fags, junk food and promiscuity, though. Drunks break things that don't belong to them, fight sober passers-by, leave bodily fluids everywhere, damage their livers, faces, stomaches etc. and require medical treatment which costs tax money.

Smokers get ill, get expensive diseases, litter everywhere, spread mercury and arsenic residue, smell bad and make me want to smoke when I'm in the pub.

Junk food makes you fat, leaves you malnourished, gives you expensive diseases, leads to the re-engineering of train and bus seats, makes you sweat nasty chemical residues and gives you bad breath.

Promiscuity (especially when young) gives women a higher chance of cervical and womb cancer, often does damage to still-growing body parts (I've surprised myself - I'm actually too coy to describe this bit), raises - ironically - both the incidence of sickly children due to younger mothers, and also sterility in later life, and leads to you being called names. Men get off much more lightly, but I'd say it gives you a screwed up idea of what women are there for, cuts out 50% of the best friends you can have (since you tend to see women as objects rather than people) and can quite often lead to unplanned fatherhood or disease, both of which have to be paid for.

So let's just say there are many things which are bad, which people should not do if they want the ideal, damage-free life for themselves or other people, but some of which are legal and others are not.

And that's the point. In a liberal country, legality has very little to do with whether people do something. People take drugs, binge drink, sleep around, sky-dive, vote LibDem. All very dangerous, all done, some legal, some not.

Drugs aren't bad in themselves (nothing inanimate can be - a sword can defend or oppress, drugs can alleviate pain or torture) it's just the propensity to cause other things when misused by humans that make them bad. But legalisation or semi-legalisation has not helped alleviate those issues when it has been tried. Amsterdam has not found a reduction in AIDS with their needle schemes. Quite often addicts have been found selling the needles to richer addicts who can't be bothered or don't want to be seen at the needle centres, and using the money to buy more drugs (this has also happened in the pilot UK scheme in Brighton). The methadone treatment scheme in Glasgow has coincided with a huge increase in addiction, and now there's a methadone market and addiction problem as well. Crime hasn't dropped.

Plenty of legal things are rife with crime, extortion, violence. Talk to any bar owner, nightclub promoter, taxi firm manager, kebab van man etc. Licensing and legality haven't stopped the nasty stuff.

In my opinion legalisation would simply say that the government reckoned drugs were morally alright. Which they personally might - cocaine residues were found in every MP's lavatory in the House of Commons and MEP's WC in the European Parliament building when the last survey was done - but publically cannot without a major change in ideology.

So really it's a practical matter - are you prepared to do what's necessary to stop people harming themselves with drugs etc.? It would have to be very paternal indeed, and probably quite violent to work. I am quite libertarian in personal life, but I have no problem with hard paternalism in the public space. The problem is to decide which kind of concern drugs represent. And junk food, booze, fags, underage sex, sky-diving, promiscuity etc.

If it's a personal matter, nothing should be done by the government, the government's toleration and needle schemes should be written off as failing to meet their objectives, and actually stepping beyond the state's remit for action, and society should be left to work out its drug problems one family or town at a time with meetings, leaflets, local initiatives, charity work etc.

If it's a public concern, it should be fought properly. If you don't think that - despite billions of quid in education and awareness campaigns - people are making the right choice, force them. Don't waste any more money on counselling or needle schemes. Get Special Branch and MI5 to switch operations from preventing shipments to poisoning them. If 50% of drugs will kill you instantly, and you have no way of knowing which batches are poisoned, or what poisons are being used (I'm sure the army have got some nice, unknown, difficult-to-test-for ones) you'll stop taking them pretty sharpishly. If you take them and die, well you were breaking the law, harming others, and you can't say you weren't warned, educated, begged, bribed, offered help, and finally told not to do so. States have laws. Live within them, argue for them to be changed, or leave.

I tend towards the former, not the latter, view though. At least in most cases. In a place like Loughborough, with crap jobs, nothing to do, and huge swathes of unemployment, spending your time stoned is actually quite a rational response. (I don't by the way - nothing stronger than painkillers and the occasional beer for years). The other (better from my point of view) response is education. But that's not for everybody... Once you've educated people to the dangers, and tried to stop dealers threatening people into buying, I think you've pretty much fulfilled your duty to other people. If they still do it, it's their choice. You should be able, I think, to harm yourself in the privacy of your own home. But not in the street. If druggies start damaging your interests by what they do, you have to fight them as if they are dealers themselves. They chose the damn stuff...

The question is where you draw that line, how sensitive you want to be about your interests. Be interesting to hear where people draw that line.

Rab.



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