Gone to pot

Faced with further evidence that its drug classification is wholly arbitrary, the UK government took the unpopular but ethical step of...

What? No. I'm pulling your reefers. Of course, the government insisted on doing nothing. Its drug policy is based not on evidence but wholly on moral panic. The panic in question has not abated, so why change?

The authors, led by Bristol University Professor of Psychopharmacology David Nutt, said tobacco and alcohol together accounted for 90 percent of all drug-related deaths in the UK.

Of course, more people drink and smoke than jack up smack, and one could argue that were the latter more widely and easily available, it would close the gap a little (but only a little -- fags and booze kill many, many more than everything else put together, and the figures do not include the collateral damage of boozing: those killed or hurt by drunks). But it is surely impossible to argue that drug policy is based on minimising harm.

During the Scooter Libby case, the concept of jury nullification arose. In this, a jury can find that the person charged has committed the crime they are accused of but can acquit them on the basis that they do not believe what they did should be a crime (among other reasons but this is the pertinent one here). This form of citizen legislation (which only works for the case at hand and does not form a precedent) has a counterpart among citizens' crime calculus, if we can call it that. We all break the law from time to time. There are so many of them, interfering in so many areas of our lives, that we can hardly help it. Try not breaking the speed limit when descending a steep hill; or try to abide by all the bylaws of your municipality, even the ones you've never heard of. I'll bet you place your bin wrongly or some such nonsense, some of the time.

But at least some of us, if not all, break the law on purpose some of the time. Again, sometimes this is something like speeding, where we find the law inconvenient. But sometimes we break laws because we do not think they should be laws. I'm not talking about doing your missus in because you think it should be legal to exterminate scolds.

I smoke pot. I have done for 20-something years, and I expect I'll keep on smoking it until I keel over. I consider it impertinent on the part of the government to illegalise something that is absolutely nothing to do with them. I do not agree that governments have a moral purpose (whereas I do agree that they have a protective purpose) as some argue. I don't believe we have, or should be understood to have, empowered them to reform our characters. I do not believe they should feel free to impose their standards of morality on others. I can allow that a government might regulate television, say, in the name of protecting children from whatever it is we're afraid children shouldn't be confronted with (curiously, they are not permitted to see a cock -- never shown before the watershed -- but violence of all kinds is okay -- often shown if not in programmes then on the news in the early evening) (and I should add that I'm not certain even that governments should regulate broadcast media; the assumption that the media is not responsible enough to regulate itself is not necessarily well founded, but that's a subject for another poast), but that is a narrow preventive measure, to protect children from the harm of broadcasting that is not good for them, not a licence to protect everybody from everything (and again, one can argue, with some force, that parents exist to protect children, not governments).

I do not believe there is any way booze should be legal and marijuana illegal. The only reason for it is wowserism: the belief that others should not have fun that you're not having. And I do not believe that alcohol should be illegal. It's a horribly harmful, family-destroying drug, and if we were entirely sane, we would not go near it, but we are nothing like sane, and it cannot be for the government to force us to become well. The government has an important role in harm prevention: safe drug use programmes have a place and so do laws against drug driving. But it has no right to tell me that I cannot smoke a relatively harmless drug in my own home. (Except of course that because rights are donations from the empowered, they assert the right.) I don't feel any obligation at all to obey the law, and I defy it despite its coercive power.

In principle, a generally lawabiding person like me should not be able to say that. I believe that a system of law is necessary and although I don't feel ours is perfect or anywhere close to it, I do not feel it is so wrong that it merits defiance on principle (if only because it is based in part on humanitarian principles that are admirable). But it has many wrongs embedded in it, and the empowerment of wowsers is one of them.

Not long ago -- although not so much, if at all, these days -- ordinary pot smokers were jailed for possession (I believe our even less enlightened American cousins still do jail those its coppers catch with a bit of weed). They were not harming anyone except that they were customers of a business that involves violence (but the same can be said of many businesses; at least that they in some way involve harm to someone). My life would be blighted; my family destroyed; my chances of finding a decent job ruined. One can ask which would have done the most harm: a few joints or the jail sentence they brought me.

posted by Dr Zen @ 3:54 pm