Back to Prohibition?

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Professor David Nutt – the former government advisor on drug policy – argued in the Guardian yesterday that there is no such thing as a safe level of alcohol consumption. I’m not convinced – as one commenter points out, he uses some anecdotal evidence and an extremely strict definition of ‘safety’ – but for the sake of argument, let’s say that Nutt’s right and alcohol really IS a lot more harmful than we currently think. What would the policy implications be?

For a start, you might want the government to inform people so that they make an informed decision about their drinking. People tend to be distrustful of government information but I suppose it’s worth a shot. It might also encourage rebellious teenagers to drink more, but teenagers like drinking plenty already. Some would want to tax alcohol more highly to discourage drinking. If people are sufficiently informed about the dangers it seems too paternalistic to try to make them act as we’d like them to, but it’s a popular position.

There are plenty of other regulations that people would have across the board, but almost nobody would propose to prohibit alcohol consumption altogether, even if it was shown to be rather more harmful than Nutt is saying. Most people understand that outlawing something altogether makes it more dangerous. As during Prohibition in the US (PDF), a black market would grow (funding organized crime), alcohol would become more dangerous (brewed in people’s bathtubs and cut with things we’d rather not drink), and people would be put into prison for doing things in the privacy of their own home that didn’t really affect anybody but themselves.

On that last point, I hate to think of the social consequences of jailing thousands of people for victimless crimes. Prohibition didn’t work the last time round, and it wouldn’t be any more effective if we suddenly learned that alcohol was a physical evil rather than a moral evil. Most people know these things and accept that even if they hated alcohol’s effect on others, it would be foolish to try to outlaw it.

So why do we have precisely the opposite view of recreational drugs? A social and individual harm reduction policy against a dangerous alcohol would fall far short of outright prohibition. Applying the policy to alcohol has and would be a failure, irrespective of alcohol’s harmfulness. What reason is there to think that cannabis, ecstasy, mephadrone – and even heroin and crack, for that matter – are any different?

Why drugs should be legalized

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Will Seattle take the high road?

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The Seattle Times has come out strongly in favour of the legalization of cannabis, saying, “Marijuana should be legalized, regulated and taxed. The push to repeal federal prohibition should come from the states, and it should begin with the state of Washington.”

Quite right too. It is hard to think of many policies that have failed so abjectly as drug prohibition. Anyone looking for an example of the law of unintended consequences need look know further. As the Seattle Times points out:

It might work in North Korea. But in America, prohibition is the pursuit of the impossible. It does impose huge costs. There has been:

• A cost to the people arrested and stigmatized as criminals, particularly to students who lose university scholarships because of a single conviction;

• A cost in wasted police time, wasted court time and wasted public resources in the building of jails and prisons;

• A cost in disrespect for the law and, in some U.S. cities, the corruption of police departments;

• A cost in lost civil liberties and lost privacy by such measures as the tapping of private telephones and invasion of private homes;

• A cost in the encouragement of criminal lifestyle among youth, and the consequent rise in theft, assault, intimidation, injury and murder, including multinational criminal gangs; and

• A cost in tax revenues lost by federal, state and local governments — revenues that for this state might be on the order of $300 million a year.

Then there’s the fact that both No.10 Downing Street and the White House are currently occupied by people who admit to having used illegal drugs in their youth. Do they believe they should have been prosecuted? I very much doubt it.

Frankly, the case for ending our disastrous experiment with drug prohibition is virtually unanswerable – just as it was for alcohol in America seventy-eight years ago. Let’s hope that Washington State has the courage to set the ball rolling.

What's a Jedi Knight to do?

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The main reason to oppose the intrusive Census 2011 is not privacy. It is also not the cost. It is the existence of the figures themselves.

The Census will have 40-odd questions of varying intrusiveness, including race, civil partnership, and income. The “religion” question is the only optional one. It is compulsory to complete the form – not telling Big Brother who is staying the night at your home on census day will be a criminal offence. 

Why does the government need to know? To justify interfering, nannying, taxing, fining and legislating. The Census is there to help the government regulate. And, as Ronald Reagan taught us: “The nine most dangerous words in the English language are: I am from the government and I’m here to help”.

One hero who realised this was Sir John Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong’s Financial Secretary between 1961 and 1971. He was was largely responsible for Hong-Kong’s economic miracle due to his policy of non-interference in the economy. He famously refused to gather all but the most superficial of statistics. When asked what poor countries could do to grow rich, he recommended to abolish the office for national statistics. Statistics would lead the state to fiddle about remedying perceived ills, simultaneously hindering the ability of the market economy to work. A delegation sent by Whitehall to investigate the apparent non collection of statistics was sent back home on the first plane by Cowperthwaite.

So, what to do? Now, as then, it is a criminal offence not to fill in the form. Now, as then, it is the ONS’s policy to only prosecute where there is sufficient evidence to prosecute. In fact, out of the 3 million people who mislaid the form in 2001, only 38 were successfully prosecuted. And most of those were quite extreme cases where census field staff had been intimidated or abused. There is no reason why that number would be higher for the 2011 Census. The Coalition would not survive widespread unrest resulting from mass prosecutions. In fact, whilst in opposition the Conservatives opposed the intrusive questions.

Of course, some of us will want to be counted. The 390,000 Jedi Knights who declared themselves in the 2001 Census will want to stand up for their rights, and be counted as such again.

Think piece: It's freedom we need, not the nanny state

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Some people might actually benefit from the nanny state, but who decides what is in people’s interests and whether individuals can be coerced will forever separate libertarians from paternalists.

Paternalism, or (as it is now called, in a strange shift of gender and status) “the nanny state”, has always had its defenders amongst the elite. After all, it is the elite who define what is good; what is virtuous. It is little surprise that they would seek to defend their mores, even to the point of crushing the individual freedoms of others.

Over time, this has taken many forms. Most Greek city-states confined women to the household and reserved the public space for males; for three centuries, any sign of deviating from religious orthodoxy in the Kingdom of Spain was investigated by the Inquisition; sodomy is illegal in around 70 countries.

These were not mere acts of cruelty; on the contrary, they are promoted for the supposed good of both society and those directly affected. The Greeks wanted to preserve women’s honour; the inquisition sought to save heretics from eternal damnation; those who ban homosexuality consider it to be a moral corruption and also harmful to the participants. [Continue reading]

A British Bill of Rights?

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David Cameron has said that the government will establish a commission to consider a ‘British bill of rights’, according to PoliticsHome. On the face of it that sounds like a good thing – after all, we could certainly do with a bit more protection from big, intrusive government, keen as it always is to restrict our liberties and interfere in our lives.

And while the US Bill of Rights may not have protected Americans from the massive expansion of the federal government, it has at least ensured that considerations about liberty are always part of the debate. How nice it would be to having something similar here.

But I’m skeptical of Cameron’s plans on two counts. Firstly, this idea seems to have been brought forward in response to the Supreme Court’s decision that sex offenders should be able to appeal against being kept on the sex offenders’ register for life, with Cameron saying, “I think it's about time we started making sure decisions are made in this parliament rather than in the courts.” So this Bill of Rights may be more a sop to the populist press than a binding, principled commitment to liberty and the rule of law.

On the other hand, there’s a real danger that any Bill of Rights drafted today would be hijacked by the left-wing human rights lobby, which is seemingly incapable of differentiating between genuine rights (which ensure one’s freedom from arbitrary, tyrannical government) and social entitlements (which demand that wealth be transferred from others to oneself). But as Jacob Mchangama pointed out in his excellent briefing paper, The War on Capitalism, there’s a huge difference:

The ideological bias in favour of central planning and against capitalism of much of the human rights movement is a serious impediment to the effective promotion and implementation of human rights. If human rights become part of partisan politics they lose their moral power as generally recognized norms, which serve to restrain governments from arbitrary and authoritarian practices and to shame governments that engage in such actions. That is precisely the function of freedom rights and is what makes these rights capable of judicial and universal application regardless of whether political power is held by social democrats or classical liberals.

Social rights, on the other hand, institutionalize a vision of society based on a specific political agenda, which excludes political pluralism and undermines the rule of law and separation of powers. Moreover, rather than restraining government action, social rights require governments to take prime responsibility for large parts of human life that would otherwise be left to the individual. Ultimately, therefore, social rights endanger the freedom secured by freedom rights. Such a development is unacceptable and represents a huge step backwards from the hard-won liberty enjoyed by many people all over the world. It is therefore high time that advocates of human rights resist their politicization and focus their energy on fighting for the right of everyone to live in freedom. To that end, freedom rights should be embraced and social rights rejected.

To sum up, a British Bill of Rights devoted to the protecting the individual against the state would be a very good thing. But a Bill of Rights designed to make political populism easier, or to constitutionally entrench the welfare state, would be a strike against liberty and very much a step in the wrong direction.

Why do we oppose the nanny state?

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The philosopher Alain de Botton claims that the nanny state isn't quite so bad. His argument is as follows: libertarians believe the state should restrict itself to preventing harm to others and not to doing things to us "for our own good". Libertarians therefore pity religious societies with strict moral codes. We too don't live in a free society because commercial advertising means we don't live in a "netural public space" in which every corporate advertisement would be balanced out by an opposite moralising one. De Botton then goes on to suggest that the way around this is to drop our apprehensions about losing liberty and accept that sometimes we really do want to be saved from ourselves. Given this, he asks what's so bad about occasional state nannying.

The glaring problem is that de Botton mistakenly conflates the state and society: most libertarians have no problem with nannies, only with the nanny state. There's nothing wrong with religion or moralisers in society, but there is a problem when they capture the state and use its ability to exercise legitimate violence to force the rest of society to follow their own personal morality.

Trying to achieve a "neutral public space" would involve the very illiberal measures of having to restrict an individual or society from advertising. It would be like legally gagging someone screaming in the street in order to scream the opposite message. Furthermore, this gagging and the promotion of the opposite message would have to be done with that person's money taken through taxation!

A society with advertising and religions trying to convert me is perfectly acceptable: PepsiCo or Jehovah's Witnesses have every right to try. But the state adopting a moral position is a worrying symptom of its capture. Boosted by state power, nannies become something altogether more worrying, with the potential for violence to enforce their moral code. We may well like to be saved from ourselves, but it's rather like comparing a nanny who cannot beat you with one who can. We already have the rest of society peacefully lecturing and cajoling us, so I'd rather not have to tolerate a violent nanny.

What makes the nanny state so bad, de Botton asks? The state.

In which I disagree with one of my colleagues

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No, don't worry, my disagreeing with a colleague here at the ASI is not presaging our turning into a political party: it is possible to have disagreements without turning into the ferrets fighting in a sack which is the definition of a political party. The disagreement is with this piece.

In it Henry Oliver praises the movement to produce cohabitation rights. I would like to disagree vehemently. Offering up ones's gonads on a regular basis does not secure you a right to property. Nor does sharing a bed, a breakfast table nor even the joint production of children. What does secure you rights to property is the signing of a contract. And we have a contrat that covers these issues of gonads, offspring and property, it's called marriage. We have an entirely secular form of it, something that is available to any opposite sex couple of any race creed or colour and I can see no reason at all why those who wish to make contractual their relationship should not use it nor any why those who do not wish to do so should be forced, by legislation, to do so.

After all, the social history of the last hundred years or so could be largely written as a description of the retreat from the State telling us with whom we may have sex, where and when, and in what legal arrangement we must be when we do.

I do understand the conservative objections to this view: that cohabitation, or even some form of marriage light, would be damaging to hte institution of marriage. But I reject them as I'm not a conservative but a classical liberal. We only have the right to interfere in the affairs of others when they are harming others by their actions or restricting the freedoms of others similarly. Determining by legislation who gets to keep the parrot after a couple of years of consensual sex does not meet that test. 

If people want a contractual relationship to surround their romantic one we have one available called marriage. If they do not want such, which clearly those who have not spent 15 minutes at the Registry Office do not, then we should not force them into it.

It’s here to stay and we need effective laws to govern it.

And in what parallel universe can a classical liberal support this notion? Something exists so we must govern it?

Something exists that harms others so we must govern it is just fine and dandy. Something exists therefore it must be governed, something exists therefore there must be laws about it, takes us further down the road to the insistence that there must be laws about everything. Further down that desperately undesirable road where every action is determined by law and thus by the politicians that frame that law. Or worse, to becoming more like France.

To the police minister, Nick Herbert MP

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Dear Nick,

When we were both in the think-tank business, we used to end up agreeing how distant state agencies could be from the needs of the public whom they are supposed to be. Now that you are the police minister, here is a little example that you might be able to do something about.

Listen to the first few minutes of this programme presented by Kate Silverton (pictured) on Radio 5 at the weekend. Basically, she was driving along and was pulled over by the police and questioned. Being stopped by police is a worrying thing and she was shaken by it. She was even more alarmed when they demanded her identification. (She only had her BBC business card – the officers laughed when they realized who it was.)

All that was wrong was that one of her tail lights was out, and as they looked around the car, they pointed out at one of the headlights was a bit iffy too. The sort of thing that could have been sorted with a cheery "Well, Miss Silverton, will you promise me you'll take it in and get those bulbs fixed before you drive anywhere tomorrow night? Yes, well that's just fine, take care, and have a nice evening."

But no, Kate says she sat there trembling as they ominously checked in to see if she or her car had any 'previous'. Treating her as if she was, or could be, a criminal – over a dud light. She couldn't sleep after the incident and was still shaking, she said, as she thought about it.

It's no wonder that people are getting hostile to the police. It's really time you told them to lay off the bully-boy tactics and sent them all to charm school. Then we might all start to think of the police as on the same side as we are, and help them do their job, rather than start shaking when we recall our encounters with them.

Best wishes

Eamonn

Most of the time, nudging's just another word for nannying

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All newly qualified drivers will be required to decide whether to donate their organs in the event of their death in a controversial move to boost the number of transplants. The plan, due to take effect in July, is the latest initiative to emerge from the government's 'nudge unit', formally known as the Behavioural Insight Team, which aims to change people's behaviour without resorting to legislation.

I still remain doubtful about this initiative. True, if you ask people whether they would like to donate their organs, about 70% say yes. But only a tiny fraction actually do anything about it. By giving people the choice at key stages in their lives – when they get a driving licence, for example – many more will tick the box. And that has to be good, hasn't it?

Well yes, provided the choice that people are given is benign, and remains a genuine choice. No sooner was the 'nudge' philosophy circulating than various advisers to the last government were proposing that smokers should be required to fill out a 28-page form before buying a packet of gaspers, and other such nonsense. That's a case of people still having some choice – but the choice being skewed beyond reason and endurance. I am hardly free if my preferred choices are made hugely inconvenient, or if I am subjected to public humiliation and personal abuse for making them. Drinkers and fatty-food lovers be aware.

But then, how far should politicians deign to 'nudge' us into the 'right' actions – including actions that we say we would like to take, even if in the event we can't actually be bothered? One can see the general public benefits of people being nudged into donating their organs, so there is some case for that. There is a lot less general public benefit in nudging people into people smoking, drinking and eating less, or popping fewer illicit pills and taking more exercise, for that matter. These are things that affect mostly the individual, not the public.Nevertheless, politicians feel they have a right, even a duty, to bring about a change in these and other parts of our lifestyle, just because they think it would be 'better' for us. Maybe it would, but if our sloth and gluttony don't affect anyone else, what business is it of the government to stop us, or even nudge us?

And where does the interference based on 'behavioural insight' actually end? I can foresee some future government that thinks capitalism is undesirable trying to nudge us out of it by ritually humiliating a few entrepreneurs. Indeed, when I look at the attitudes and actions of Business Secretary Vince Cable, I think this might already have started to happen.