Adam Smith Institute

I received an interesting booklet in the post this week from the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, an outfit that presses for reform of drug law in the UK. I can't say I agree with them on every single point – their proposals could, arguably, leave the drug market over-regulated and thus fail to eradicate the deeply harmful illegal trade. But nonetheless, it's good to have someone campaigning for good sense on such an important issue.

The arguments against prohibition are well rehearsed, and will probably not be new to readers of this blog. To sum them up in a series of bullet points (more or less borrowed from the IEA's excellent Prohibitions):

• Prohibition places markets in criminal hands
• It increases the risk of already risky activities
• It criminalizes people who would not otherwise be criminals
• It divert police resources away from activities that actually harm third parties
• It increases public ignorance It doesn't actually work (i.e. if you can't keep drugs out of prisons, how can you keep them out of a free society)

Another interesting point against prohibition, which I had not previously thought about much, is mentioned in Transform's booklet:

[I]llegal markets under prohibition always tend to cause concentration of available drug preparations which are more profitable per unit weight. Just as under alcohol prohibition the trade in beer gave way to more concentrated, profitable and dangerous spirits, the same trend has been observed over the past centuries with opiates – from opium (smoked or in drinkable preparations) to injectable heroin, and more recently with the cannabis market being increasingly saturated with more potent varieties. With coca-based products the transformation has been dramatic... It was prohibition which first cocaine powder onto the streets in the first place, and finally produced high-risk smokable crack.

Wouldn't it be nice if politician's understood and appreciated the law of unintended consequences?

I am not one for being sentimental about the past, but staring into the bottom of my pint, memories flow of a time when things were better than this.

Of course the world has changed somewhat since we had the social divide of a woman’s place in the home and pubs exclusively the domain men. This is no bad thing, and the ready availability of other forms of entertainment from the Internet, DVD Players and affordable televisions the size of children. Vast swathes of the population now prefer watching the latest blockbuster movie with a bottle of wine to going to the pub. Fair enough.

The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) are trying to fight back. They are petitioning the government to limit the ability of supermarkets to make a loss on selling alchol. This is esentially a request for a subsidy and should not be supported. But what can be done to save the great British pub?

A good place to start is reversing the government’s blanket ban on smoking in pubs. At the very least pubs should be able to apply for a license to permit smoking. As well as being a highly illiberal act, the smoking ban has hit pubs hard; with the holy trinity of glorious vices – pint, cigarette and crisps – now one man down.

Tax is another problem. The Government takes over 80 pence in tax for every pint sold in a pub. This is a hefty chunk for the treasury that should be drastically reduced. Why not also lower the drinking age to sixteen at pubs. This would take youth binge drinking out of the private sphere, educating them in the finer points of drinking.

I spent much of my youth in pubs and beer festivals drinking real ale. I have no doubt that if the government simply backed off most pubs would survive. They offer something unique to offer that are being undermined by the public health agenda, obsessive regulation and indefensible taxes.

Imagine my surprise on finding a cogent, well thought out and sensible article at the Guardian's Comment is Free site. But there it is, they've managed to do it.

It is perhaps tasteless to say so, but we are fortunate that we face a social plague very similar to that of gin – the illegal drug trade. And as in the mid-18th century, we see the failure of abolitionist policies to control the menace. The total value of this trade amounts to between £2bn and £6.5bn a year – all untaxed........The total benefit of such legalisation to the Exchequer is likely to be between £3.5bn and £6.3bn a year, including excise duty, VAT and income tax from the dealers and allowing for additional costs.

Quite, in these straitened times, while all are looking for new sources of tax revenue, why don't we legalise something which we know we cannot beat by prohibition? As we've shown by trying said prohibition for the past few decades?

The tax revenue would not be the only benefit, of course. There is the simple civil liberties aspect: my or your desire to ingest oddities carries no diminution of the rights of others, nor threat to their person or property, so it should not be something which is constricted by the law. Legalisation and the subsequent competition amongst legitimate suppliers would lower prices (even with the high tax rates we'd impose) and thus reduce the crime associated with addicts looking for the money with which to score.

Prisons could be filled with real criminals rather than those only damaging themselves, we'd save many billions in policing costs. The quality of the drugs on offer would rise, thus reducing the physical damage that they do and the associated costs to the NHS.

All in all, we reduce the costs to the Exchequer, increase the revenues and advance freedom and liberty in one fell swoop.

It's something of a pity that we've not done it already really, isn't it?

Perhaps this could be one of those Naomi Klein moments, from her book The Shock Doctrine? Where we neo-liberals use a shock, a crisis, to advance our agenda?