Britain is becoming an outlier on drugs liberalisation. Why?
For April, WW's read-of-the-month thinks about why there's no traction for legalising cannabis in Britain.
Read of the Month aims to signpost the most interesting think-tank reports. The idea is to highlight output that tells us something about what is going on in the policy world, and to think about what the downstream effects might be.
What's the report?
High Societies – from The Social Market Foundation
What does it say?
While governments across the world liberalise drug policies, the UK remains intransigent in its prohibition position. This is despite public opinion that is increasingly receptive to progressive change.
This report looks at countries from across the world who have legalised or decriminalised cannabis, and assess the outcomes associated with different approaches across domains of health, crime and the economy. It makes the case that British policy makers should pay particularly close attention to countries like Uruguay, who have taken a ‘health over profit’ model, which, according to the report, does the best job of maintaining public health as a priority through the process of liberalisation.
Some thoughts
This is a compelling report that does a good job of comparing the different ways in which countries are going about reforming their policies’ on drugs. What follows is in no way meant to disparage the content…
It’s just that when I was reading the report, all I could think was… “this just isn’t going to happen is it”.
The Conservative Party aren’t interested in drug policy reform. Neither are the Labour Party under Keir Starmer, and nor were they under any other left-of-centre faction. Not only are we not ready to adopt the Uruguayan model (or any other), we’re not even ready to acknowledge the problems with our current approach. ‘The War on Drugs has failed’ is a sentence that will get you hundreds of thousands of retweets from around the world, but not one that will get you a hearing in British politics.
Why is Britain becoming such an outlier on this?
A few weeks ago this blog outlined an approach for dealing with questions of this kind. We basically argued that if you’re looking to explain a way in which Britain’s policy landscape is weird in the micro, start by thinking the ways we’re weird in the macro. And I can’t help but think that a few of Britain’s big, macro-weirdnesses are relevant here.
One of the main ways that weed-legalisation gained momentum in the US was ballot-initiatives in individual states. Gradually, over the last decade, legal cannabis has spread across America jurisdiction by jurisdiction. In Britain… we have no possibility of this. We don’t have devolved powers to the extent that regions can set their own criminal law – and we don’t have mechanisms that allow regular people, through campaigning, to bring about local referenda.
Our democracy is far more of a closed shop, and as such, we can only achieve drugs reform if it becomes an elite agenda. And despite the drug habits of our elites, there are no signs of that happening at present.
The reasons for this are themselves interesting from a comparative perspective. In the US, campaigners have been able to tie drug prohibition to other agendas, such as police reform, prisons reform and racial equality, in a way that means that politicians who want to be seen as taking those issues seriously have to take a position on drug prohibition.
This work has not been done in the UK. Furthermore, whilst racism is no less of an issue, the extent of incarceration in this country, and the fact that our police are less prone to orgiastic displays of violence than their US counterparts, mean that these dovetailing agendas have lower salience in the political centre.
A final thing to note in relation to why Britain isn’t liberalising its drugs policy relates to our nation’s drugs culture. By international standards, this isn’t really a nation of stoners. Just 3.8% of people regularly smoke cannabis in the UK, versus 11.5% of Americans. By contrast, this is a country who take hard drugs far more than most similar nations. We are the cocaine capital of Europe.
But harder drugs aren’t really the ones that are being talked about in liberalisation discussions. So we come to the simplest explanation of all as to why we seem to be sticking with prohibition for drugs like marijuana… it’s an issue that impacts fewer people here than it does elsewhere.
The SMF have produced a valuable resource here for any political movement that wants to get serious about ending the absurd status quo when it comes to British drugs policy. Whether any such movement is going to come along though… well I can’t help but be pessimistic about that prospect.
But then again – the SMF is a solidly plugged in centrist think-tank. If they’re thinking it, maybe others are to? British liberals can but hope.