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Recently the Inde­pen­dent Sci­en­tific Com­mit­tee on Drugs pub­lished a report in The Lancet rank­ing twenty pop­u­lar recre­ational drugs based on the harm caused to the both user and oth­ers around them. The drugs were judged indi­vid­u­ally on six­teen total harm cri­te­ria cov­er­ing phys­i­cal, psy­cho­log­i­cal, and social harm. The cat­e­gories were then weighted by impor­tance (like­li­hood to cause death is worth more points than like­li­hood to cause fam­ily prob­lems, harm to soci­ety is worse than harm to the indi­vid­ual, etc.) The results ended up rank­ing alco­hol as the most harm­ful by far (72÷100), fol­lowed by a close bat­tle between heroin and crack cocaine (55 and 54/100, respec­tively), then metham­phet­a­mine at the #4 spot (32÷100) and trail­ing off from there down to hal­lu­cino­genic mush­rooms at #20 with 6/100.

These results should be unsur­pris­ing to any­one who has read any sim­i­lar reports in the past. They also line up quite well with the argu­ments often made in favor of loos­en­ing or elim­i­nat­ing exist­ing drug laws (the “alco­hol is legal, why isn’t this?” argu­ment). Unfor­tu­nately they have almost no asso­ci­a­tion with the rank­ings used in mod­ern drug laws almost any­where in the world. In the major­ity of the world alco­hol and tobacco are legal and often sold directly by or under the close watch of the gov­ern­ment, yet in the name of “reduc­ing harm” the major­ity if not all of the rest of the drugs on this list are not only ille­gal but also carry stiff penal­ties for mere possession.

Of course the log­i­cal thing to do when sci­ence indi­cates pol­icy is wrong is to amend pol­icy, right? After all, the UK has a sci­en­tific board involved with their drug pol­icy, unlike the USA where the DEA is free to basi­cally set pol­icy as they see fit (fox watch­ing the hen­house, any­one?). Nope, of course when a gov­ern­ment is shown to be wrong by its sci­en­tists, the first thing they do is fire them, then change the law so they’re not needed, and finally go entirely in the oppo­site direc­tion and not only remove the require­ment that harm be demon­strated but instead assume any newly dis­cov­ered recre­ational drugs should be restricted until they are deter­mined to be OK by unspec­i­fied criteria.

It seems another coun­try is fol­low­ing America’s lead of ignor­ing sci­en­tific evi­dence for polit­i­cal gain: When the sci­en­tists don’t come up with the answers you want, don’t change your ideas, just get rid of the scientists.

I don’t get it. Why is it so hard to get a gov­ern­ment to admit that when com­pared to legal recre­ational drugs many ille­gal ones are less harm­ful, some­times to a sig­nif­i­cant extent?

Here are my thoughts on how to struc­ture sane drug laws:

• NEVER crim­i­nal­ize per­sonal drug pos­ses­sion. All this does is give crim­i­nal records to those who are in most cases oth­er­wise pro­duc­tive mem­bers of soci­ety and restrict those who may have real prob­lems from get­ting help for fear of per­se­cu­tion and/or prosecution.
• Base ALL pol­icy on sci­ence and sci­ence alone. Media and politi­cian fueled fear rarely makes for accu­rate pol­icy, so stan­dards should be set and then fol­lowed with­out spe­cial treat­ment for any substances.
• Reg­u­late the drugs you do allow, but only as nec­es­sary to ensure qual­ity and safety
• Revisit all poli­cies reg­u­larly. New stud­ies bring new evi­dence to light all the time and some­times changes will be needed.

On top of that, some­thing I believe applies to all laws rather than just drug pol­icy, is to have goals for the law based on testable cri­te­ria. If after a cer­tain time the goals have not been met, maybe it’s time for another look. Is the goal still worth­while? How close did this pol­icy come to meet­ing the goal? If it came close, can it be tweaked? If it missed by a lot or made things worse, what’s a dif­fer­ent approach?

Cur­rent pol­icy is sold to us as reduc­ing harm to soci­ety and cut­ting back on crime, when in real­ity it’s wast­ing bil­lions in enforce­ment and cor­rec­tional resources, ruin­ing lives, and fuel­ing an enor­mously prof­itable black mar­ket which funds almost all lev­els of crime. Sci­ence and pol­icy are at odds and two of the most pow­er­ful coun­tries in the world are work­ing to keep it that way. We need to keep pres­sure on our politi­cians to resolve this.

Today is the 75^th anniver­sary of the repeal of Pro­hi­bi­tion.  As a fan of alco­hol in all its forms, I fig­ured I’d write up a bit of his­tory and my thoughts on the lessons of Prohibition.

The roots of Pro­hi­bi­tion can be traced to the mid-1800s when cer­tain Chris­t­ian groups, par­tic­u­larly Methodists and later Bap­tists.  Many states passed dry laws lead­ing up to Decem­ber 1917 when the eigh­teenth amend­ment was pro­posed.  The amend­ment took over a year before it was rat­i­fied in Jan­u­ary of 1919 when Utah approved it.  Rhode Island and Con­necti­cut were the only two states to not rat­ify the amend­ment, and in fact both put out state­ments reject­ing it.

Of course many Amer­i­cans did not like the gov­ern­ment telling them what they could drink, so the new ille­gal sta­tus didn’t really do much except cre­ate a black mar­ket.  Now what comes with a black mar­ket?  That’s right, crime.  If it weren’t for Pro­hi­bi­tion, do you really think gang­sters like Al Capone could have made as much money as they made and had the power that they had?

We all know by now that the gov­ern­ment is slow to real­ize its mis­takes, and even slower when those mis­takes are still being backed by pow­er­ful polit­i­cal groups.  Due to the incred­i­ble influ­ence of the reli­gious groups who sup­ported pro­hi­bi­tion it took four­teen years before the twenty-first amend­ment was pro­posed in Feb­ru­ary of 1933.  Once again, Utah was the state that made it offi­cial by cross­ing the 2/3 require­ment on this day 75 years ago.  South Car­olina rejected the amend­ment and North Carolina’s vot­ers decided against hav­ing a con­ven­tion to con­sider it.

I believe these lessons need to be applied to many other recreational-use drugs such as mar­i­juana.  The mod­ern alco­hol dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem shows how to effi­ciently oper­ate and reg­u­late such drugs, and sales num­bers show how many of us are respon­si­bly using it.  I don’t see any rea­son the same can’t apply to the world’s favorite smok­able plant.

Some argue that legal­iz­ing mar­i­juana for recre­ational use will put every­one in dan­ger with peo­ple work­ing and/or dri­ving stoned.  Again I say just look at alco­hol.  The vast major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion con­sumes it safely and those who don’t are dealt with strictly.  When vapor­ized it has very lit­tle effect on res­pi­ra­tory health (unlike tobacco), not to men­tion it can be eaten, and it is impos­si­ble to over­dose with­out a direct IV injec­tion of THC (unlike alcohol).

It just seems hyp­o­crit­i­cal and point­less to make a safer and more enjoy­able drug ille­gal, fuel­ing a black mar­ket, when we could be reg­u­lat­ing qual­ity and fund­ing projects with taxed while also allow­ing our cit­i­zens to alter their state of mind as they choose.