THE Economist, magazine of choice for the globalising liberal elite, has this week called for the legalising of cocaine. That’s right. Its leading article asserted: ‘The most effective single way to reduce the death, violence and corruption would be to legalise and regulate the production and consumption of cocaine. This would eliminate the price premium that motivates the world’s most violent criminals. Consumers could be sure of dosage and quality – an incentive to shun dangerous illegal concoctions. Prisons would be emptier and the criminal justice system could focus on deadlier synthetics.’
The magazine is cross that President Trump is fighting a hot war against drug-smugglers in the Caribbean and that he has called Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, a ‘narco-terrorist’. It sees the ever-slicker worldwide trade in drugs as now unstoppable. It advocates a policy of ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’ – and says very little about what effect their grand plan would have on our fraying society and its ailing health services. Perhaps it is just me but I detect a batsqueak of envy when the magazine says: ‘Cocaine and synthetic opioids generate staggering profits.’ It’s not called the Economist for nothing!
As is customary with the left, soft or otherwise, moral confusion and a lack of common sense drives the magazine’s argument – and sinks it. It rightly says that the consumption of illegal drugs, particularly cocaine used in admixture with other narcotics, kills hundreds of thousands of people in America and consumption of the drug is booming in Europe. Back in the days when Britain offered evidence of cocaine use to a European study, London came out as the cocaine capital of Europe. Last year the Office of National Statistics reported that drug poisoning deaths were at a 30-year high and deaths from cocaine had soared 30 per cent, and were ten times higher than a decade previously. So in other words, a highly addictive drug had become more prevalent and deadly in a culture that, over those years, had taken an ever-more liberal line over personal usage – and you cannot get much more liberal than legalising the drug. It seems reasonable to conclude, then, that the magazine’s plan would create many more users and addicts: ‘Look mum, they sell it on the internet!’
Then there is the moral confusion. Cocaine is regarded by medical authorities as a dangerous and highly addictive drug with many seriously adverse side-effects. The NHS lists a range from paranoia and heart disease to impotence and the destruction of the soft tissue inside the nose. The Royal College of Psychiatrists enlarges on this and warns of high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes, lung diseases, blood diseases and, indeed, ‘sudden death’. Yet the Economist breezily suggests that after legalising cocaine its production, having been removed from the hands of gangsters and errant chemists, be handed over to licensed manufacturers to make a pretty penny off the poisoning of customers. Perhaps it will next advocate having burglaries ‘regulated’ by removal companies – that seems on a similar moral trajectory. Yet if the prospect of legalised cocaine fell into the laps of Big Pharma’s executives, you can be sure it would be grasped with alacrity and never mind how many hospital beds it would cause to be occupied, how many new rehab clinics and addiction counselling centres it would cause to be built – let the British taxpayer worry about that vast sum. I find it hard to believe the big drug firms have not already ‘wargamed’ such a scenario – and rubbed their hands together. When you remember that most of the target market and damaged people will be young, the idea becomes even more repellent: a study by the Centre for Social Justice last year found that legalising cannabis would lead 24 per cent of 18-24-year-olds to try the drug for the first time. We can reasonably expect a similar surge from cocaine appearing in the legal marketplace.
Look at the US experience of marijuana: since 2012 more than 20 states have legalised dope. Use of the drug has rocketed seven-fold since the Noughties and financial argument for legalisation, huge tax returns to blow on big government, failed to arrive as market saturation drove down prices. But it created a skunk-stinking dystopia of demotivated potheads and caused a massive increase in mental illness, just as marijuana decriminalisation has created here.
The Economist has also failed to consider the central fallacy of drug legalisation: that it will ‘cut crime and reduce usage’. If cocaine were to be legalised criminals would not say aw shucks and get a proper job, they would move into other areas, most likely taking advantage of the new laws around manufacturing cocaine to create super-drugs that fall outside the authorities’ ambit but appeal strongly to young cocaine addicts looking for a stronger high. The authorities would struggle to stay ahead in a battle in which their only weapon against gangsters is legalising ever-stronger drugs (the Economist is a shrine to federalist Europe; it makes you wonder how Brussels’s health and safety will tackle cocaine hydrochloride: who will be the ‘EU responsible person’ listed on packets of the drug?) That is to say nothing of the crimes, violence and bad behaviour that will be committed by users of legalised cocaine. Additionally, as so often with ‘social reforms’ beloved of the left-wing elite, it will be the poor and their communities that will be hit hardest by negative consequences.
And crack cocaine, the bastard form of the drug that is cooked and smoked and considered its most addictive form and most damaging to lungs, will not vanish in a puff of legalisation.
Ultimately, if a society is to remain civilised it must protect itself and its young from the poison of street drugs, not encourage their use through legal mandate. Elite liberals are apt to say that ‘the war on drugs has failed’. That is like saying that the war on crime itself has failed, as if the problem of human good and evil can be sorted out and tidied away with a few acts of parliament. It doesn’t work like that. Trump, with his new anti-drugs policy, seems to have grasped this.
The battle to re-civilise Britain and purge it of its drug problem begins with just such a change in policy. Liberal policing of ‘personal usage’ has created the huge market for cocaine that the Economist reports on.
Yet if lawyers, teachers, politicians, journalists, scientists and other middle-class professionals who take cocaine recreationally at the weekend thought they – or their children – were really risking being dragged to a cell and thence to a court of law, disgrace and above all damage to their income or careers, they would think twice about being involved – thus the taboo that used to surround street drugs would appear again and a great part of the problem would police itself, as was formerly the case.
But this would take a willing political class. Sir Sadiq Khan, lamentable mayor of London, appears keen on decriminalising drugs, which for him I suppose is another way of vandalising the capital of a country he evidently despises. Though drug decriminalisation is not on MPs’ agenda the mistaken policy of going easy on personal use has not been reversed. It is to be hoped that future governments see the light and take a strong line. After all, in the background of all this are pushy and shadowy and not so shadowy pro-drug forces which would delight in legalisation. Just look at the lunacy here.
The Economist’s proposal is wrong and dangerous, and will result in more misery and problems, not less.
