Looking through the haze – Issue XXII
It is not the non-existent 'war on
drugs' that has failed; it's de facto decriminalisation.
Cartoon by Crid.
This is an excerpt of an article that features in our 22nd print issue.
One of the well known and almost comical side-effects of cannabis smoking is the loss of short-term memory. Could this explain former Conservative Party leader Lord Hague's recent decision to say for the second time in the last two years that drugs ought to be decriminalised in Britain?
First, a note on terminology. 'Decriminalisation' and 'legalisation' are quite different, though anyone who can't see that the former is an antechamber to the latter is a fool. To decriminalise drugs – all drugs, Lord Hague demands, not just cannabis – means to abolish all criminal penalties for simple possession, though not possession with intent to supply, or manufacturing, as has been the policy in Portugal since 2001. "Doesn't it appear that we already do next to nothing to punish simple possession in Britain," I hear you ask. Indeed, it does. I'll come back to that.
To legalise drugs means to allow them to be sold by corporations, and taxed and regulated like other narcotics. This is the policy in Canada and Uruguay, and the American states of California and Colorado, among others, and the desired policy of a number of Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative MPs and former MPs here.
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