My Nasty Drug Habit.

On reflection, I am fairly sure I have a drugs problem; that is to say I find myself trying to make exceptions to my moral code concerning legalising drugs. For years I have maintained the notion that cannabis should be legalised (in fact my first ever proper public speech was about why I believing in decriminalising cannabis). However, I draw the line at cannabis- I do not think I want to decriminalise ectasy or heroin or cocaine. Nor conversely do I want to criminalise alcohol or tobacco.

So the question I am posing myself, and yourself, today is why anyone should draw a distinction between the legal status of illicit substances and what criteria should form these demarcations?

Is it, as the Government seems to accept, the relative danger of the substance. Currently in the UK drugs are classified in this manner; although whether they are correctly classified is an entirely different kettle of fish and one, and one which although I think they may have got it wrong on, I will leave for another day.

It is a fact that alcohol and tobacco kill hundreds of thousands more people than any other drug and indeed probably all the other drugs put together. I have yet to encounter a case in which a person has died directly as a result of smoking cannabis. Similarly, numbers of deaths attributed to harder drugs remain low and considerably lower than alcohol or tobacco. It can be argued that this is because abuse of these harder drugs is far less common due to their illegality. However, I am not sure this is the case for cannabis. As a teenager I have been approached by drug dealers and friends who knew drug dealers, asking if I wanted to purchase cannabis. Whilst there have been occaisons between the ages of 13-17 for me to drink alcohol, (with a dramatic increase this year) either at parties-the booze being nicked off parents-or occaisonally at disreputable venues. Despite this, I would maintain that until recently it would have been much easier for me to regularly smoke cannabis than drink alcohol, and not considerably more expensive. This seems at odds with the argument that health issues caused by illegal substances are less common (and therefore the drug is still more dangerous than alcohol and tobacco and should be illegal) because they are strictly controlled.

My train of thought for believing that cannabis should be legalised has roughly been as follows: people are going to smoke cannabis regardless of whether it is illegal or legal, because it is illegal it is not properly controlled which makes it more dangerous, easier to get hold of for teenagers, perpetuates crime and puts millions of pounds into the pockets of drug dealers, as well as exposing soft drug users to dealers who sell harder drugs. Therefore, it makes sense to legalise cannabis in order to: remove the illegal market in cannabis, prevent more dangerous and stronger strains of cannabis being ab/used, provide revenue for the NHS to make more treatments available and make it as difficult to get hold of as alcohol and tobacco when the venders are strictly monitored.

The problem with this is that by saying 'people are going to smoke cannabis regardless, I do not seem to have much a reason to disagree that 'people are going to pop pills or snort cocaine if they want to'. Granted there might be far less of these people, back to the previous argument about a drugs relative dangers, but this leaves a vast grey area that I cannot quite answer. Upon reflection I think I do want to legalise cannabis because I do not see smoking cannabis as a bad thing, I have no wish to smoke it but if I wanted to smoke it then I would not see the problem with doing so. But why then do I care if people take harder drugs, and I have given several friends grief for taking harder drugs which is something I do have a problem with. Underlying my reasoning for not caring about cannabis is surely the classical liberal line that so long as my actions do not affect someone else then I should be able to do so. But then when I consider harder drugs I think that, even if it does not affect me personally, I do think the state and mankind as a whole has a duty of care to protect a fellow citizen from the horrific cycle of drug abuse. However, does this sentimentality arise from an inherently human compassing for other human's suffering as Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued? Or perhaps because I view a drug addicts actions as an unfree choice, incompatible with the liberal line? Or maybe because I simply find the idea of the horrors of the drug addict's life too horrible to consider and want the state to put an end to it.

Social acceptability is another area frequently raised to explain our classification of different illicit substances. Several colleagues have recently put forward the statement that if alcohol was discovered today then it would be illegal, which is all well and good except for the fact that we have been smoking cannabis-like drugs for centuries, as well as taking hallucinagenics and even cocaine until 70 years ago or so. However, the social argument can be approached in a different way; perhaps the reason why alcohol and tobacco are legal is because they can be enjoyed in moderation and ergo socially. It is true that alcohol and tobacco at the least can avoid obstructing socialising where other, harder drugs might, but can also in fact lubricate conversation and social interaction. Perhaps this is why there is a grey area around cannabis, some people purpout that it can be used in a similarly social manner, whereas others argue that that is an absurd view.

As this blog post extends and extends I realise I must bring this post to a point. During the hours and days of thought, reading, writing and reflection which have provided the background to this arduous(on my part, hopefully not yours!) piece, I have come to the conclusion that our legal system is inherently hypocritical and flawed, which is not necessarily to say it shouldn't be thus. Where we apply certain principles of justice and liberty in some cases, we apply different ones in others. But perhaps this is the wrong way to approach our legal system, instead it may be more accurate to think of our legal leviathan as an organic, living and changing beast. Instead of starting with abstract principles or concepts of justice and trying to manufacture an entire system of wide-reaching laws based on these pure concepts, it might be better to create laws based on their application in our society. You could even go as far as to say that a society's legal system is relative to it's culture. If this is the case then pure, timeless, theoretical concepts of justice and liberty are of no use to us. Instead the power of judical review and judicial precedent are more important; perhaps instead of a moral code we simply conjure ideas of justice based on similar incidents we have experienced and then apply these to new situations. If this is the case then I may have cured my nasty drug habit, instead of concering myself with sticking to one theory of justice, perhaps I should consider the practical applications of these laws in my society and then decide what is the best option.

The problem with this is that I have left the criteria for this judicial ruling undiscovered; the more and more I think about it, the more and more I think that we can never empirically or objectively define or explain morality. Furthermore, morality may be an organic and personal process, a process tied to our culture and personality, influenced by our experiences and informed but not decided by theoretical works on the subject. On that note I am going to rest in my quest to objectively qualify my own moral code and accept that whatever that 'feeling' is, it is telling me that cannabis should be legalised and harder drugs should not.