SCOTLAND

Making it OK to take drugs won’t make taking drugs OK

I recently lunched with a journalist from a leading broadsheet. We were talking generally about drugs when he said that, as far as he was concerned, all of the harmful effects of illegal drugs were a direct result of the illegality of the substances involved. But would legalisation offer a solution to the drug problem? In the case of cannabis there is a view that this is a drug which, in itself, causes little or no harm. Yet as a result of possessing, selling or growing the drug you can experience the significant pain of acquiring a police record, being fined or receiving a substantial prison sentence.
But is cannabis really the harmless drug that we have taken it for?
Recent research from Sweden, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands has caused many people to revise their opinion of our favourite, and supposedly least harmful, illegal drug. The Dutch study followed 4000 people over a three-year period and found that those who developed serious psychotic symptoms were 23 times more likely to have used cannabis. In the Swedish study, those who used cannabis were found to be four times more likely to develop schizophrenia than their non cannabis-smoking peers, while the New Zealand study appeared to show that the younger the age at which cannabis use was initiated, the greater the likelihood that an individual would go on to experience significant mental-health problems.
These are sobering findings when you think that cannabis is used by more than three million people in the UK . When you consider that it is a powerful drug that is often used in large dosages by young people, whose brains are still in the process of developing, in a way it would be surprising if it were not causing some of the users serious psychological harm.

But if cannabis is not the harmless drug that we have taken it to be, what about heroin and cocaine? These are the drugs that the Home Office regards as causing the most damage to individual users and to society at large. How much of that harm arises as a result of the drugs illegality? Senior police officers are among those who say that if you legalise heroin and cocaine, addicts would not have to turn to crime to fund their drug habit and, as a result, we would see a marked reduction in crime across the country.
But what would be the likely impact of legalising heroin and cocaine? One possible consequence would be an increase in the number of people using those drugs. People who favour legalisation argue there would be no significant increase in use under full legalisation. However, almost all of the drugs that you can think of that are currently illegal are a good deal more pleasurable to use, at least initially, than alcohol and tobacco. As a result, if you made heroin and cocaine legal, you have to wonder what would stop many more people at least experimenting with their use.
While only a proportion of these people will go on to develop longer-term problems associated with drug use, these are highly addictive substances, therefore that proportion could be quite large . Under a fully legalised regime then, whilst the level of crime might drop substantially, the costs to health care may increase massively.

Celebrities such as Boy George, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Ozzy Osbourne and numerous others have shown us that even where individuals can pay for the drugs they are using, they can still get into serious difficulty. Each of these individuals will have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds to bring about their eventual recovery. For most addicts that would be a cost that would have to be met by the nation’s health and social care services.
Illegal drugs have the capacity to bring limited pleasure and limitless pain. If all drugs were legal the pleasure for some would undoubtedly increase, but it would be naïve in the extreme to suppose that the harm would be eradicated as a result of legalisation.
At the moment, in Scotland, there are around 50,000 heroin addicts. If heroin were legally available, we may see less crime but we might also see the number of users move closer to the 250,000 mark, which is the estimated number of Scots who are already thought to have a problem with alcohol.

It is a sobering thought to ponder what life in Scotland would look like with a quarter of a million heroin addicts.

Neil McKeganey
22 May 2005

http://www.sundayherald.com/49889

home / Previous viewpoint