Legal not Commercial

Regulate the market for some drugs

Walk around any town in Britain and you can smell how the war on drugs is going. The police, rightly, focus on seizing the most addictive substances and arresting the addicts of those, who commit the bulk of property crimes. If you’re a weed smoker, or you take ketamine or ecstasy on the weekend you’re unlikely to fall foul of the law and for good reason: unlike heroin and crack addicts you’re not a big social problem.

The IEA estimated the size of the UK’s market for cannabis to be £2.6 billion in 2017 which is £3.5 billion in today’s pounds. While we’re not trying to stop this trade in any serious way, the pretence that we are means that all this money flows to petty criminals. Given the state of the public finances is that a good choice?

We could use this money to help those whose lives are derailed by drug use. It could fund a functioning child mental health system, something we lack at present, which could intervene before young people turn to drugs as way of coping with other issues.

That being said, we should be respectful of the free market and what it could do to us if let loose on this product line. Legalisation should come with safeguards to minimise the chance of recreational drug users becoming problem ones. There is a way to do this though, and it maximises the revenue raised: the government becomes the monopoly seller of marijuana, ecstasy, ketamine and psychedelics.

The disadvantages of state monopolies, lack of innovation, occasional shortages, etc are upsides in this case - the goal is not, as it would be in a fully legal market, to sell as much as possible but to raise revenue from light, recreational use while minimising consumption at levels likely to lead to health problems. There’d be no advertising and no actor in the system with an incentive for users to consume more drugs than are compatible with a healthy and productive life.

A direct payment system (drugs.gov) could help to keep people on the recreational side of the divide. The drift into a problematic drug habit runs through self deception but here the app you buy with tells you how much you’ve bought recently, how your use compares with others, whether your consumption is steady or increasing. In the case of ketamine, a warning that you personally are on a trajectory that will lead to medical problems would be more powerful than our current untargeted messaging about the side effects of sustained use.

Prices could also scale, so every purchase of drugs raises the price you pay next time unless you wait for it to drop back down. As well as discouraging high consumption this would also make it unviable to be an illegal reseller of legally obtained supply. The goal should be to find the balance where the general price point is low enough to drive out illegal supply while heavy personal use is made prohibitively expensive.

Just because we’ve given up trying police public recreational drug use doesn’t mean we have to embrace it. I think it should be legal to smoke weed in the privacy of your home but I don’t want you walking past my kids on the street with a joint in your hand. Here, paradoxically, a legal regime allows us to be more restrictive than prohibition. We could give the police discretionary power to remove a citizen’s right to buy drugs. Anyone caught smoking in public has their face scanned and a ban on further purchase applied - it could be done on a phone in seconds. This would be a far more effective deterrent than the status quo where theoretically you could face criminal sanction for smoking in public but realistically you never will.

Almost three million people use drugs according to the crime survey of England and Wales and yet we’re not living through a crisis of drug related harms because the vast majority of those people are doing so occasionally while otherwise living respectable lives. Over two thirds of them used drugs less frequently than once a month while for just under half it was only once or twice a year. There’s no sign that prohibition is holding down that level of consumption either; four out of ten adults in the survey said it would be very or fairly easy to obtain drugs within 24 hours.

We have a fiscal crisis and we have a way to take billions of pounds out of the pockets of criminals and put them straight into the treasury. Legal but not commercial supply has safeguards to ensure that drug use does not cross over from recreational to problematic and is confined to appropriate places and times. We’re already suffering what downsides there are of widespread recreational drug use - let’s admit that and enjoy the upside too.