…………All Drugs Were Free and Legal

Now there’s a revolutionary concept !  I would suggest that we even take this one step further and make it all readily available for the asking, drugs, syringes, whatever they want, the lot, on the National Health Service. What about the cost you cry; the suffering, the degradation, the mess (you can bet it will always be the cost that will get pride of place !). I must be mad, evil, uncaring - or possibly even quite dispassionately logical.

The process of Evolution – regardless of whether or not you happen to believe in it, because its existence is not dependent on your belief - goes on all around us. To take a leaf out of the average news-reader’s book, you know – Buckingham Palace says…… etc. – and use an anthropomorphism,  nature decrees that the fittest shall preferentially survive at the expense of those that are not so fit. Fit, in this context, basically means a measure of suitability for the environmental niche in which whichever species we are considering currently finds itself. It can be observed that it has, over the years, become one of the primary aims of the human race to thwart the intentions of nature as much and as often as it can. From this, of course, you can readily deduce that human beings, particularly political human beings, love to interfere or, to put it bluntly poke their noses into as many things that are not their concern as they possibly can.

There are, and indeed always have been, those amongst us whose only joy is to tell every body else what to do. Many of them become, by various and sometimes devious means, leaders of society at which point they inflict their views and rules on the rest of us with varying degrees of ferocity. Law-making is the fastest growing business on the planet and world wide the number of laws increases at an exponentially increasing and apparently quite unstoppable rate. It is interesting to observe that most laws throw up more problems than they solve and it is equally interesting to ponder just for whose benefit most of them are made. Laws and drugs are made for each other. There’s somebody over there enjoying something that we are not – we’ll soon stop that! There’s someone else over there who is soon going to self destruct – we can’t have that! People pleasing themselves about whether what they are doing to themselves is life threatening – the very idea !  These people are deviant we must make them fit in. Oh yes, - how?

The taking of drugs in any form, be it nicotine, alcohol, so called recreational drugs and on to the hard core drugs such as  heroine, is escapism. Escape from what, you might well ask. Well, although it may be something quite discrete and profound, it doesn’t have to be. It may just be the day to day routine – your lifestyle and all that that implies. It may be an uncontrollable (and therefore quite stupid) curiosity. A young prowling leopard who goes and sniffs at a basking crocodile on the river bank will likely get eaten before it has the opportunity to procreate more equally stupid leopards. Whatever else it is it will also be that you are (as was the leopard), for whatever reason and to whatever degree, less than fit for the environmental niche – the society no less - in which you find yourself. Left to nature you would suffer the consequences, as more primitive man, left to his own devices, undoubtedly often did. Well, we can’t have that either, can we?

More primitive man did not, of course, have the pure stuff, so there was less risk - which was some protection. Now, the only protection is interference – legislation. But what good does it do, does it solve the problem and what are the consequences ? First and foremost it is abundantly clear that it doesn’t solve the problem. Drug use, in spite of every effort, is increasing. Human nature being what it is, of course, making something illegal immediately magnifies its attraction by astronomic proportions and reason ceases to be a factor in any discussion. Does it do any good ? Well, it keeps the various law enforcement agencies in work although I think that there would be little chance of them becoming unemployed without it. It may slow down the rate at which addicts die, but that, from the point of view of consequential prolongation of suffering is a two edged sword. I see no real resultant good. Finally, then, what are the consequences of legislation; and here we can really have a ball.

Legislation doesn’t, and indeed hasn’t, restricted supplies; the country is awash with drugs. What it does do is channelize supply and unfortunately, if inevitably, these channels will be criminal. This, too, will keep the various law enforcement agencies in work. Prices will be controlled by criminals who are well outside the remit of the monopolies commission, can operate as much resale price maintenance as they choose, can set there own mark-ups with no fear of recrimination and, indeed, pay no vat or tax on the profits. Competition will be, and is, dealt with without recourse to law – frequently by the very simple and very effective means of shooting the competition.  The gun laws haven’t worked either but then only an idiot would ever have thought that they would and there are plenty of those in the business of passing the legislation. The consumers faced with the cost of their habit have to foot the bill and usually, in the absence of private means, the only way of doing this is to turn to crime. This again keeps the various law enforcement agencies in work but in the end solves nothing – let them out and they are at it again. I am not saying that there are no successes but the relative percentage is minimal.

Law enforcement does have some successes but the main result of this is to bring about an increase in production to compensate. Since in every field of human endeavour that you care to consider we always over compensate and go to extremes we can safely assume (and quite correctly) that the increase in production will be in excess of that required. This will need even more customers ……….. One of the more interesting things about the human species is that except in very material fields such as Science and Technology in all their various forms, it never learns. If you ban anything its popularity will go out through the roof; if an item is in short supply everyone will want some; if a significant percentage of a population really want something then they will get it - as that idiot Home Secretary who stood up in the House of Commons and announced that we would never have CB Radio in this country discovered. And to think that they shunted him off to Brussells, where he could do even more damage, and gave him a knighthood for his trouble – absolutely pathetic really, isn’t it ?

Banning CB radio didn’t work – making it legal reduced it to insignificance. In the USA Prohibition didn’t work, removing it resulted in an ordered framework operating within which most people are mostly happy most of the time. Banning drugs will not work either, but it will take the more stupid elements of our society who, almost inevitably are the ones in charge, some time before it penetrates their thick sculls – just as it eventually did with CB Radio here and Prohibition in the US. And, of course, there are plenty of other examples. Remove all of the restrictions as I suggested at the top of the piece and what will be the benefits ?

Well, for a start most of the drug related crime will disappear. The vast majority of drug related crimes concern supply and finding the wherewithall to finance the habit. If we were to follow my suggestions all of the criminal elements involved in transportation and supply will go out of business. The growers will become legal overnight, which might put the price up, but the inevitable competition should compensate. If the stuff is available free, and without question, through official sources there will be no profit and therefore no incentive for the criminals to remain in the business. They may move on to fresh fields but there again they may not. The various law enforcement agencies will think it’s Xmas, although the reduction in overtime may cause a bit of a backlash. It’s even possible that detection rates might rise !  Most of the rehabilitation centres can close. There will be more room in the prisons for serious criminals. The Health Service will be relieved of the burden of treatment of those who as soon as they are out of sight will relapse and start again. The overall saving will more than pay for the free supply of drugs, particularly as the demand will inevitably soon start to dwindle as users die off.

At this point we let nature take its course. It will not be very pleasant. When nature does what it has to do it never is very pleasant – which is another reason why we continually try to thwart so many natural processes. There will be a lot of drugs related deaths, particularly initially as the natural consequences of an unlimited supply of potentially lethal material to an uninhibited user base kicks in. Some of this will be very public and all of it will generate a lot of publicity. The media will have a field day. But the effect on the public at large will be likely to be crushing and immediate – a turn off.  Where this is not so then once again nature will take its course and well within a generation the problem, although it will never go away entirely, will largely disappear from view, cease to be the sort of problem it is today, cost very little to run and will fall into equilibrium with the rest of society’s activities.

One side effect of this is that our ‘sportspeople’ will be able to drug themselves up to the eyeballs. It will be no use the various governing bodies who, even with the support of law, have been unable to prevent the whole sordid mess from spiralling out of control, trying to control a situation where the law says nothing. For a number of very different reasons I do not find this too worrying. There is very little sport left. It has, in all its various forms, mostly degenerated into business, a means of earning a living, mass spectacular entertainment. The Olympic Games has become a travesty of what its founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin actually intended – but that, again, is another story. Since these activities are no longer sport, frequently no longer sporting and are supported, on the whole, by a following who care not how their chosen idol(s) win as long as they do win then the question of drugs becomes largely irrelevant.

With restrictions lifted, and in the intensely competitive atmosphere of win at all costs, or bust, which is so prevalent in many of these sideshows today, there is no doubt that the abusers will kill themselves pretty quickly. The result could well be of benefit to the whole of this side of the entertainments industry. It’s quite frightening to think about, actually, but this is the way that nature will work to get rid of a problem if allowed to go about its business unhindered. What is more to the point is that although nature may take a little time to achieve results such results are likely to be much more certain and much more effective than anything we can do on our own.

Well, there it is then, there really is no good reason to wait. The anti-drugs laws are not working and a great deal of history says that they never will. A very large section of society, even if for the wrong reasons,  doesn’t want them. A very large number of pernicious problems would disappear with them if they went. An enormous amount of wasted man hours and money would be saved. The primary problem itself  would cease to feed on itself and, with nature’s help, largely vanish into the night. What are we waiting for ?

But our leaders LIKE making laws and they haven’t either the brains or the guts to repeal the ones we already have – so it won’t happen!!