The question of “legalising” drugs

 We frequently hear calls for the legalisation or decriminalisation of drugs. The arguments are usually the same: criminalisation hasn’t worked, the “war on drugs” has failed and we should be considering “harm minimisation” programs rather than arrests and convictions.

Some people advocate simply decriminalising possession for personal use; others believe all drugs should be legally available.

Of course when people talk about legalising drugs, they are talking about the drugs that are currently illegal, not the medicinal pharmaceuticals that we use every day. These drugs are “legal” but not legal in the sense that the advocates of legalisation mean of being able to be manufactured and sold at will.

Ironically, these so-called "legal" drugs are strictly regulated. Drugs must be tested for years and pass rigorous tests before they are allowed to be marketed. When they are sold, unless they are almost completely harmless like aspirin or Paracetamol, they must be prescribed by a doctor and dispensed by a chemist. Those regulations are backed up by a system of legal liability. If a person suffers detrimental side-effects from a drug they can sue. If the chemist dispensed the wrong drug or the wrong dosage, they can be sued; if the doctor prescribed the wrong drug, they can be sued: and if they were not at fault – the drug company itself can be sued, and many have been - in multi-million dollar legal actions.

Of course when people talk about “legalising all drugs” they are not suggesting that pharmaceuticals in general should be freely available for anyone to manufacture, sell and purchase over the counter without any sort of controls.

What they are talking about is legalising so-called recreational drugs and this is what leads us into an absurdity.

Legalising so-called “recreational” drugs, would lead to a ridiculous double standard where, to get a blood-pressure or cholesterol drug, you had to go to a doctor and a chemist, but you could buy drugs with known side-effects and the even the potential for a fatal overdose over the counter - without any need for a prescription or any sort of medical examination. It would also mean that people could manufacture these drugs in any sort of back-yard lab they wished and not be breaking the law. And of course there would be no legal recourse in the case of side-effects or death. There would be grounds to sue either the dealer or the drug manufacturer as they would have no duty-of-care to begin with.

Some advocates suggest that, if recreational drugs were legalised, then major drug companies might start to manufacture them, guaranteeing the quality and ensuring that they were “safe.” This, of course, is a pipe-dream.  The drugs that currently illegal could never obtain certification by the FDA or TGA for public use for the simple reason that they’re NOT safe. There is no safe version of them and even if one could determine a “safe dose” of these drugs, you could not monitor their usage unless you went down the path of having people get a prescription specifying the correct dosage from their GP. However, no GP would ever prescribe these drugs because they have no medical value.

   

The question for a pharmaceutical company that was even thinking about manufacturing these drugs would be how they could protect themselves from the inevitable law-suits when people had adverse reactions. To put it simply, no drug company would be crazy enough to manufacture the drugs that currently illegal because they would be wiped out in litigation that made the billion dollar James Hardie asbestos case look like pocket-money.

Similarly, whereas chemists and supermarkets are happy to have headache tablets, and hay-fever capsules on their shelves, available without prescription, they would never be stupid enough to sell marijuana, MBA, opiates, methamphetamines or anything else, because they would  be sued the first time someone commits suicide, lapses into schizophrenia, turns violent or depressed, or even just become an addict. Not even a corner shop would risk it. Remember that a pub or a bar that serves alcohol to a person who is already intoxicated can be sued if that person subsequently causes a serious car accident so retailers can be held responsible for the results of intoxicants they sell.

The result is that even if you “legalise” illegal drugs, the scenario under which they are made and distributed will be almost exactly the same as what exists now - people growing or synthesising the drugs in a kind of cottage industry and selling them anonymously either in person or over the Net with no legal liability. Drug takers will never have any guarantee as to the purity or safety of these drugs because no legal safety standard or method of regulating their manufacture can ever exist.

So, in the end, removing criminal sanctions against manufacturing, transporting, selling or possessing drugs may stop people going to prison, but it is never going to reduce the instances of death by overdose or suicide, mental illness including depression and schizophrenia, family breakdown, relationship breakdown and career breakdown. The current laws against drug cultivation and synthesis are the same laws that prevent Pfizer, Sigma or Bayer from marketing a drug that causes detrimental side-effects. Similarly, the laws that prevent the distribution and sale of illegal drugs are the same laws that prevent people from selling foods with botulism or toys with toxic chemicals in them. How could we - why would we - exempt one particular set of products from those laws, especially when the harm they do is so manifest, so visible, and greater than all the other dangerous products combined?