Frances Cairncross: Why we should legalise all drugs

'A policy of legalisation might sound outrageous, but it would ultimately cause less social harm than the present ban'

One of the curious things about Prohibition, the ban on the sale of alcohol that lasted from 1920 to 1933 in the United States, was the speed with which it came to an end. At the 1928 presidential election, there was solid popular support for the ban. Four years later, it had evaporated. Looking at the mixed signals about illegal drugs from politicians and the media, one might imagine that we are at a similar tipping point, at least where cannabis is concerned.

A straw: Canada has just become the first country in the world to legalise the use of marijuana for people suffering from chronic or terminal illness. Because the sale of the drug remains illegal (it is prohibited under a 1988 UN convention), the government is in the bizarre position of awarding a contract to a company to farm marijuana for medical use in a disused copper mine in Saskatchewan. In the US, a dozen or so states have referendums on the stocks to permit a softer approach to possession of marijuana. In Britain, police in Brixton are experimentally no longer arresting people caught possessing small amounts of cannabis.

All this is part of a realisation that cannabis and marijuana, its herbal form, are already very widely used. About 40 per cent of young adults in Britain have tried cannabis, and 25 per cent of all adults. No longer is this the pastime of a small minority. Paul Hayes, a senior British probation officer who has recently become head of the Government's new drug-treatment agency, notes that for many social groupings the use of cannabis has become more or less normal behaviour. "The last time anyone offered it to me was after a primary-school parent-teacher association disco, in the home of a rotary Club member, and the person was a detective-sergeant in the Metropolitan Police," he says. "If that's not normalisation, I don't know what is." Wisely, he refused.

I talked to Mr Hayes in the course of researching the articles on illegal drugs that appear in the current issue of The Economist. I set out to write them with a genuinely open mind: although the magazine has backed drug legalisation for more than a decade, I had not previously done a comprehensive study of the case for and against. After visiting the US, Mexico, Switzerland and the Netherlands, I came to the conclusion that the proper policy for governments was to think through a coherent approach to legalisation – to cannabis in the first instance, and then gradually to all other drugs. Outrageous though such a policy might sound, it would ultimately cause less social harm than the present ban does.

Legalisation, it should be said at once, would not be harm-free. For simple agricultural and chemical products, illegal drugs are hugely expensive by the time they reach the street dealer. This mainly reflects the enormous risks involved in growing, transporting and selling them. Remove these risks and the price would fall. Of course, taxes could push the price part of the way back up, as with cigarettes and alcohol – and it would be a good thing if the money went to government rather than to gangsters. But if the tax were too high, a new black market would spring up.

Accompanying the fall in the price would be greater availability (no more mouth-to-mouth transactions with sinister figures in Soho) and more social acceptability. The result would be a rise in drug use, and therefore a rise in the number of people who became dependent on drugs. Moreover, some of these users would suffer physical harm. Drugs seem to have lasting (but badly understood) effects on health, and some, used incompetently, can kill. All this is true for alcohol and nicotine – but it is understandable that voters and politicians hesitate to increase the list of harmful substances that are legally available.

One argument for doing so is philosophical. The philosopher John Stuart Mill believed that the state had no right to intervene to stop individuals doing something that harmed them, if they thereby did no harm to anyone else. "Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign," pronounced Mill. He accepted that some social groups, mainly children, required special protection. And some people argue that drug-takers are also a special class: once addicted, they can no longer make rational choices about whether to harm themselves. Yet society has rejected this argument, notably in the case of nicotine, which kills proportionately more of its users than heroin does its, and which appears to have greater addictive power.

Another argument for legalisation is pragmatic. Drug bans cause enormous harms; and removing them would bring considerable benefits. The harms fall especially on poor countries, and on poor people in rich countries. In developing countries that produce and trade drugs, like Colombia, Mexico and Jamaica (where Tony Blair has just been offering assistance to the police), the trade finances gangs with the money to corrupt police and political institutions. Spraying land to kill crops of coca and opium poisons the land and local people. And drug production encourages local consumption, which (in the case of heroin) helps to spread HIV/Aids.

In rich countries, it is mainly the poor who get picked up by the police for dealing and possessing. The poor suffer most in the US, where a quarter of all prisoners are locked up for drug offences, mainly non-violent. Moreover, a report from the Sentencing Project, a criminal-justice lobby in the US, find that blacks suffer far more than whites: blacks account for 13 per cent of monthly drug users, 35 per cent of those arrested for drug possession, 55 per cent of those convicted; and 74 per cent of those sentenced to prison. In Britain, too, the poor and the non-white are more likely to be jailed for trading in or possessing drugs. The lowliest pushers, at the end of the distribution chain, are the people most likely to be out on the street, rather than safely in a car with a mobile phone.

Not only would these harms diminish if drugs were legal. More important, drugs could be regulated. Precisely because the drug market is illicit, governments cannot set rules that discriminate between availability to adults and to children. They cannot set quality standards, or warn asthma sufferers that it is dangerous to combine ecstasy with using an inhaler, or insist that distributors take responsibility for the way their products are sold. In the case of alcohol and tobacco, such restrictions are possible, and are largely self-policing: no big tobacco or alcohol company wants to be seen to break the law. In the case of drugs, restrictions are impossible, and only the police try to regulate the flow.

This absence of regulation increases the danger of drug-taking to young and incompetent users. A lot of them dabble anyway: 16 per cent of young adults in Britain admit to having tried amphetamines, and 8 per cent to having taken ecstasy. Illegality also puts a premium on strength: it makes more sense to sell drugs in concentrated form. In the same way, during Prohibition, consumption of beer fell, but spirits drinking increased.

How, if drugs were legal, would they be distributed? For the answer, look at the different channels through which legal drugs are distributed today. Caffeine is for sale on any street corner; to buy alcohol, you need proof of age; for Valium, you need a doctor's prescription. Different countries would seek different solutions. Indeed, that is already starting to happen. While Canada starts farming pot in unused mines, the Swiss are debating a proposal to allow farmers to grow cannabis, provided it is sold only to Swiss buyers. A commodity market for opium poppies may be far off into the future, but a common agricultural policy for cannabis? Soon, perhaps, no longer merely a druggy's dream.

Frances Cairncross is Management Editor of 'The Economist'. 'The Case for Legalising Drugs' is in the magazine's current issue