Inconvenient Truths

“Based on what we have learned, the UK will continue to advocate a balanced, evidence-based approach to the misuse of drugs internationally.”

“Based on what we have learned, the UK will continue to advocate a balanced, evidence-based approach to the misuse of drugs internationally.”

In October of this year, the UK Home Office published a 55 page report with the snappy title of “Drugs: International Comparators”, wherein more enlightened sectors of the political establishment woke up to what many of us already knew.

The headline grabber was that, irrespective of how harsh the punishments meted out for using and supplying drugs, they have next to no impact whatsoever on users and dealers. While this may seem obvious to many reading this, it has come of something of a shock to HM Government who for the past forty years have based drug policy on the fiction that the way to reduce consumption is to continually up the ante with severity of punishment.

Obviously, this is embarrassing for a government utterly convinced that everything they do is the right thing. It’s doubly embarrassing because the report comes not from some “loony left wing think tank”, but from within their own ranks.

And this explains why they tried to bury the report - which has been ready for publication since June of this year - and saw the Conservatives employ every trick in the book in an attempt to demolish the perfectly pragmatic points made.

Much of the report doesn’t really concern us here, as there is a lot of talk about “hard” drugs and as such is beyond the remit of Soft Secrets. However, there is also a fair amount of interesting debate material focussed on cannabis. Let’s consider some of it.

The authors of the report travelled to a number of places during the course of their investigations. Two specific destinations are of interest here: Colorado and Washington State. 

In both States, the voters were asked a simple question: “Should marijuana be legal?” and given a straightforward yes/no option. 56% in Washington and 55% in Colorado voted “yes” (making the 55-45 vote split almost identical to the result of the Scottish Independence Referendum in September, though that result went the government’s way). The report supplies a nifty graph illustrating that in 1970, when the same question was asked, the response was over 80% “no”. 

My, how times have changed.

Our government is always telling us that the population at large don’t want legalisation of cannabis. That’s the drum the American government were banging as well. Clearly, this is another piece of dishonest political rhetoric (basically, a lie) promoted by successive ruling elites as a strategy for holding onto power: “people are ignorant; they bought the lie before, they’ll buy it again”.

My, how wrong could they be?

The fact of the matter is that the American public overall - not just in Colorado and WS - are broadly very supportive of the move, particularly as applied to medical marijuana. Just remember, this is one of the most conservative countries in the world. 

But these states have fully legalised cannabis, and there is less than zero chance of that happening here where our blinkered and despotic government feel perfectly entitled to tell Colorado and WS they’ve got it wrong (something the equally blinkered and despotic Federal U.S. Government no doubt completely agree with and would overturn given the chance at the earliest opportunity).

The voting public here in the UK need to drag the government – kicking and screaming, no doubt – into the 21st century. Twenty years ago, cannabis legalisation in America would have been unthinkable. Carpe diem!

Dr Dee

See for yourself here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/368489/DrugsInternationalComparators.pdf