Polly Toynbee manages to rather shock me this morning by talking a certain amount of sense. She points out that it is not actually drugs that are the problem but prohibition. Of course, all of this is wrapped in the usual “America is the problem, Europe together can solve it” rhetoric but she does manage to note some interesting points:
1) Regulation and legislation can make problems worse.
2) Markets exist even when banned.
3) Free markets can provide better results than banned or regulated ones.
4) People do things for reasons of profit rather than for social reasons or benefits.
5) Businesses are attracted by making profits. The larger the profit the more effort they will put into supplying a market.
6) People will do what they want to do even if the Nanny State tells them not to.
7) Stopping people from doing what they want to do can produce worse results than simply allowing them to do it in the first place.

Well, you get the picture. She’s managing to note, after all of these years, the points that motivate Libertarians and even used to motivate the founders of her paper, the Manchester Liberals. We might even hope that having noted these points in extremis that they percolate through to the rest of her thoughts and writings. Well, yes, I know, but we can hope.

I would add two little talking points, the first from an old post of mine:

One can also take a more libertarian view, as I do. The biggest argument against the general legalisation of narcotics is the ” But what will happen when it’s sold on street corners ? “. To which the answer is ” It used to be “.
No drug wars, no overdoses as drugs were pure and consistent in dosage, no hundreds of billions spent on interdiction, no ” War on Drugs “, no RICO, no property confiscations on suspicion rather than conviction, no trampling on constitutional rights and no diseases spread by infected syringes. And did society fall apart ? Was it a time of regression ?
I would note that the average dosage of narcotics in mid 19 th century Britain was 127 doses per head per year. That’s man, woman and child. One can have all sorts of arguments about the Victorians and colonialism but it is worth noting that the basis for modern society, the huge explosion of wealth of the industrial revolution and the Empire were all built by those who we would today consider hopeless drug addicts.

The second may be little more than an urban legend so if a reader can provide me with the accurate figures I would be most grateful. It is that if the NHS were to purchase pharmaceutical heroin (as it actually does) from the largest legitimate suppliers, the poppy farmers of Tasmania, and then sell it at the standard prescription price (my apologies, I’ve been out of the UK so long I no longer know what that is), they would actually be making a profit on the deal.