Go on, legalise drugs – everyone’s up for it

Peter Wilby’s piece in the New Statesman caught my eye this week. Among his various  meanderings, he suggests that large swathes of the political elite have privately come to the view that hard drugs should be legalised – a view they’re unwilling to air in public. I’ve long agreed with them, if indeed his assertion is true, and its only the thought of actually administering “the handover” that gives me reservations. I imagine there would be serious teething problems unravelling an industry so enmeshed in our criminal culture, not to mention how one would regulate import channels which would remain criminal in much of the rest of the world.

Nevertheless, Wilby’s arguments make sense to me, in particular the public health problems caused by the dodgy provenance and manufacturing processes involved in producing much of the stuff consumed weekly in Britain. He compares the ignorance over the constituents of any given drug (i.e. the actual pill one might be about to pop) to not knowing if one was about to buy whiskey or pale ale. Its not; it actually equates to not knowing whether the whiskey you’re buying was produced by a quality and reputable distiller, or knocked up in a lead lined drum using meths and marmite in someone’s garage (my preferred production technique). In all seriousness, that’s a much more frightening analogy than the one he uses.

On a related point, I’ve always wondered whether liberalisation of drugs in this country is just a waiting game. For the younger generation recreational drugs are more of a fact of life than for previous generations. A vast amount of young(ish) people in this country, across all sectors of society, have either taken drugs regularly, tried them occasionally, or know someone well who does – and for the most part with little or no detrimental effect to their wellbeing, productiveness and utility to society. As the political and business elites of our nation become festooned with members of my generation (born in the 1970s) I suspect attitudes to illicit drugs will soften. Or will we simply morph into our parents and continue to lecture our children on what they should and shouldn’t stick in their bodies while taking a drag on our ciggies and another quaff of the hard stuff.