This response is mainly directed towards the comments made by DR HC Raabe. The most useful aspect of his contribution is that it encapsulates the ubiquitous yet fundamental misunderstandings on this subject. To be blunt so much discussion on this subject is based upon a few simplistic arguments that are recited without any real thought or study ever having been applied to the problem. Sir Ian’s piece unfortunately set this up because whilst it is actually a very good summary of the arguments in favour of the need for reform; nevertheless falls into the trap of making some of the same errors as Dr Raabe makes. At least Sir Ian aspires to make a positive change, yet critics like Dr Raabe are actually arguing for an unconscionable state of affairs to continue or worsen. I sense more than a touch of piety overarching Dr Raabe’s views, I should make it clear that it is not ‘controlled drug’ use per se that is the legitimate concern of the law, but only the misuse of any drugs that gives rise to social harm. In fact, sensible peaceful use of drugs is arguably as much of a social benefit as any claim to class it as morally repugnant. The danger of imposing any religious or moral imperative into this subject is that this is a highly contentious matter as regards respecting difference, choices and personal autonomy. By denying access to certain drugs we actually control the mind states and modalities of thought that these substances facilitate – there is no absolute monopoly on truth in this arena; chemical moderation of consciousness is a legitimate area of interest for both scientific and subjective personal experience and study using drugs that are known to be relatively safe when used appropriately.
It’s easy to recognise when people are reciting propaganda and not really au fait with their subject because they use expressions such as ‘war on drugs’, ‘illicit drugs’, ‘legalising drugs’, ‘de-criminalising drugs’ etc – these concepts are completely meaningless. Has nobody stopped to think what this is about? It actually isn’t even about drugs, and let us be clear about one thing, drugs do not have legal agency and therefore they cannot be legal, illegal, criminal, decriminalised or anything else for that matter. Harmful drugs are supposed to be designated to be ‘controlled drugs’, but that does not mean that they are controlled. Not at all, whilst this first appears to be semantic, it’s actually a vital distinction to point out that it is persons who are controlled with respect to drugs, not the other way round. The whole reversal of subject and object and regulation that is pervasive amongst prohibitionist construct and sadly believed by most reformists is at the root of two evils. Firstly it should be painfully obvious to anyone with a real concern in this area that it is people, not substances that are being treated to inequality of treatment without any rational basis for it. An off-license who repeatedly sells alcohol to underage kids gets modest fines imposed, a cannabis user who self-medicates gets their doors kicked in and their lives ruined.

I am in touch with various persons who are suffering profound consequences as a result of their choice to use cannabis as medicine, even where those who were prescribed it by hospital consultants and yet the PCT refuses fund it. I am talking about being imprisoned without access to safe health care, having tenancies for entire families taken away at the behest of the police and local authorities, excellent workers being made unemployed/unemployable and even children being removed from families for frankly no good reason at all. My view is that this is happening because people want to profit from drugs, and I am not talking about these hapless cannabis users and small-time growers, but those who would try and get exclusive commercial monopolies to essentially sell the same drug at vastly inflated prices. We now have Professor Les Iversen, the chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, supporting the absurd notion that herbal cannabis has no medical value, yet Sativex (which is very high strength cannabis in alcohol, produced by GW Pharmaceuticals) is deemed fine for specific medical uses.

But why is there no differentiation between peaceful uses of drugs and anti-social ones? The law is supposed to target the latter, and indeed that is the point of the Misuse of Drugs Act. It is because the point I made about the reversal of the person with the drug in contemporary discourse and even in the application of the law, this point that so many dismiss as semantic actually lends credence to the fiction that the law is an instrument of prohibition, when it is not. There is no crime of using drugs, seriously there isn’t (except opium). The law is supposed to regulate property interests in ‘controlled drugs’ (and this category is supposed to include being ANY drug that causes social harm), to address harms caused by misuse, not simply to stop all use. It is the failure of policy to accurately reflect the law that is at the heart of almost all drug-misuse related harmful activities. The fiction that drugs can be legal or illegal allows two very nasty things to happen: firstly, the law is used as a blunt on/off tool that cannot be used to regulate sensibly people using drugs by differentiating between those that cause harm from those that do not (this despite the law itself having numerous regulatory powers under sections 7, 22 and 31 of the Misuse of Drugs Act), and secondly that vast majority of drug misuse is being claimed to be outside the jurisdiction of the very law there to protect against such misuse upon the spurious premise that this is misuse of ‘legal drugs’. It is this indivisibility of the lie that is ‘illicit drugs’ that reduces human agency to that of a slave or object, and this is why Dr Raabe’s contribution is actually offensive and nonsensical. Even if we ignore the misconstruction and cut to the content, it’s simply madness to imagine that policies constructed via a belief in an artificial divide can ever be rational, for one the whole ethos of having an outcome-based (ie evidential) policy has already been lost by declaring drugs to be a priori acceptable or unacceptable. The reality is that we have a drug dealing protection racket being official policy enforced by criminal law, thus creating insane monopolies for alcohol and tobacco dealing to thrive because the competition from better and safer drugs is denied. One simply cannot look at alcohol related harms and say well that’s what happens with a regulated market, its nonsense; alcohol is harming the nation to a huge extent because it is the only drug in town. If persons were regulated with respect to harmful drugs, starting from rescuing the essential threshold of proportionate interference into personal liberty, then the harms caused by any individual form of drug misuse would be less. Firstly there would be a rational and believable form of regulation and education, thus allowing people to mix and match drugs sensibly and not in ignorance as it is now. We would avoid all the paradoxes of consequences of prohibition policy and start to respect the autonomy of adults again – right now there is a wanton disregard for such respect, even to the point of arresting people who are peacefully engaged with spiritual and reflective practices using plants and drugs that have been used by various indigenous ancient societies for thousands of years for such purposes (eg peyote, ayahuasca, psilocybin fungi all declared to be class A drugs with no regulatory apparatus being applied to persons wanting to utilise these plants).

Competing interests: None declared