'YES' says Roger Howard, chief executive of the UK Drug Policy Commission...

 

'Each year, we spend at least £2bn trying to enforce the drug laws and dealing with drug-related crime.

About three million people use drugs each year, yet the police only record about 230,000 drug offences. We have already reached the point where the overwhelming majority of drug taking is not caught or prosecuted.

So we have a choice. We can either continue to spread police resources thinly, catching an occasional drug user.

Or we can focus police time on the criminals who do the most damage: especially the dealers and gangs that use children as look-outs and women as prostitutes or resort to violence.

The priority for users should be treatment if they need it, not a police record. Other countries, like Portugal, have tried this and have reduced the numbers dying from drug use.

Most importantly, they have not seen an increase in drug use. So changing the law has not sent a message that drug use is ‘ok’.

Young people need protection and effective education about drugs. The law should focus on where it can do the most to protect people’s lives.'

 

 

 

'NO' says Max Wind-Cowie, head of progressive conservatism project at Demos

 

 

'THE question isn’t whether drugs should be legalised or not. It’s who should decide whether they’re legalised or not.
The truly offensive thing about the UKDPC’s report – or, perhaps more fairly, the coverage of it – is the absurd notion that ‘experts’ should decide what we do about the difficult and knotty problem of illegal substances.
For many of us, prohibition is not primarily about the “harm” that drugs may or may not do – and it is therefore as impossible to ‘prove’ that drugs should be legalised as it would be to “prove” the existence of God.
Whether or not we, as a community, decide we should prohibit certain substances is a question of the ethical constraints we feel able to place on one-another’s behaviour.
It may well be that at some point the majority of us no longer feel able to morally justify prohibiting cannabis or cocaine – but that will be a judgment for democracy, not for doctors.
And the truth is that, for now at least, the vast majority of people in the UK agree with me that drug-use should remain prohibited. We should respect the moral intuitions of the public, not seek to ‘disprove’ them as though evidence alone were enough to win the argument.'