Legalising Drugs In The UK: A Radical Gamble
Last Sunday BBC Radio Four’s Broadcasting House invited ‘thinking out of the box’ suggestions for public expenditure cuts. They gave air time to Danny Kushlick’s economic case for legalising drugs.
But his speculation that £10 billion per annum could be saved is gamble that I suspect no sound minded bookie would set the odds for nor any gambler put his money on.
Certainly not after they had examined the assumptions and the factors involved.
For cutting existing budgets and speculating about accrued savings from changing the law are quite different things. First they’d see you can’t cut what you are not spending – you can only cut money where money is.
For Danny’s prediction was not based on a £10 billion cut in existing spending -actual drugs policy expenditure is only around £1.2 billion for the whole of the UK, the bulk of this being spent on drugs treatment, not enforcement; while expenditure for policing the drugs law is estimated at £2.3 billion. Since Danny did not say he planned to dispense with treatment nor did he suggest that the management and regulation of legalised use of drugs would be cost free policing wise, then this cannot be where any of his savings are coming from. (After all managed and regulated alcohol is hardly cost free health or policing wise).
Danny’s prediction rests on the doubtful idea that the bulk of crime and health costs of drug use are the direct outcome of our current drugs control law (The Misuse of Drugs Act). Prior to opening a book on the speculated financial gains to the country the bookies would need to take a close look at quite how Danny had arrived at his £20 billion ‘cost of running the current regime’.
After a bit of searching they would find this figure was taken from Cabinet Strategy Unit blue skies thinking back in 2003 and their economic modelling of the annual reactive costs of problem drug use (not of our drugs control system or ‘prohibition’ as it is often termed). Problem drug users, the Unit set out to demonstrate, incur most of the crime, health and social costs of all drug use, adding up to some £20 billion. The Unit’s model postulated that cost savings on all these fronts could be brought about by ‘treatment’ induced behaviour change – and by retaining users in treatment – not by legalisation.
So Danny’s heroic £10 billion a year saving depends on the untested and unlikely premise that once drugs were sold or available legally there would be a fundamental change in problem drug users’ behaviour .
Yet there is no evidence at all to suggest that either legality or illegality are causative factors for addiction or that legalisation would have a transformational potential on dependency behaviour.
One look by the bookies at the results of the recent free heroin prescribing trials would confirm this. For even freely dispensed drugs of the most desirable kind given out under the most benign of circumstances – in this case twice daily 450mg free doses of legal heroin didn’t get the addicts off their street heroin – or off any other drugs use (crack cocaine, alcohol, and cannabis). It only reduced it. Nor did it prevent overdose/near death incidents.
Then the bookie would have to factor in the cost to the taxpayer of these hand outs of £15,000 per addict per year (and that is without the additional costs of their crack cocaine, alcohol and cannabis requirements). Without further handouts (which would be medically dicey and ethically questionable) the taxpayers could only hope for a reduction in, not the elimination of drugs related crime.
It might also occur to the practical bookie that legalising drugs (whether through sale or dispensing) would not make much difference to another set of reactive costs – incapacity and welfare dependency costs. Legalisation would make no difference at all to an estimated current cost of £3 billion plus a year incurred by the present number of (327,000) problem drug addicts’ welfare dependency.
The fact is that the limited tax revenues of a licensed state run trade (Danny judged cannabis taxation would bring in a maximum of £1.5 billion) has to be set against all these continuing costs. Would it be sufficient to warrant continuing problem drug use costs to the state as well as the unfactored risk costs of changing the law?
For unless the state literally gave drugs away or sold them cheaply, risking, in the process, massively increased use and dependency, dependent drugs users would still have to steal to pay for their fix. What’s more they would still end up in prison or at least in the criminal justice system being prosecuted for stealing , for their ‘drugs related acquisitive crime’ offences (only 10 per cent are in prison for actual drugs offences – a fact Danny neatly omitted).
Alternatively, if the state set a high price and/ or circumscribed sales in other ways – by strict limitations on sale amounts, on licensing hours and on age limits - to control for the risk of massively increased use, it would leave the field wide open to a black market drugs trade. That this would be as highly adaptable and as unscrupulous as before, targeting the addict, the poor, the young and the vulnerable even more ruthlessly, is a reasonable assumption.
So the judgement for the bookies would be whether a £1.5 billion per annum drugs tax would outweigh the continuing cost of problem drug users, warrant the new risks and leave the government in credit at all, let alone by £10 billion.
I doubt they’d be certain enough to set any odds at all.
2009 Edition United Kingdom Drug Situation – UK Focal point of drugs – annual report to EMCDDA
The Lancet Volume 375, Issue 9729, 29 May 2010-4 June 2010, Pages 1885-1895
Topics: 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, 2010, abuse, ACMD, Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, alcohol, Britain, cannabis, Class, conservatives, controversy, Danny Kushlick, David Nutt, drug, drug classifications, Drug misuse, drugs, ecstasy, England, excessive, gateway, Glasgow, Gordon Brown, Governance, government, Great Britain, harmful substances, health care, Health Care, home grown herb, illegal, illegal drugs, legal, legal drugs, legalize, LSD, Martin Rees, moniter, monitor, news, panic attacks, politics, schizophrenia, science, scientific citizen, society, tax, technology, tobacco, U.K., UK, United Kingdom
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