A vested interest

Maybe not all of you will be aware of this, but I have been a staunch advocate of the legalisation of drugs for a while now. It's something I'm quite passionate about. One of the most successful student articles I ever wrote - for The Alligator at the time of David Nutt's sacking - was on the subject. It has proven so popular that the editors have republished it twice.

More recently, I actually raised the issue with a prominent libertarian Tory MP - Douglas Carswell - in front of a gaggle of other politicians, journalists, lobbyists and so on. He kept going on about the importance of freer financial markets, whilst occasionally dismissing drugs legalisation types as crazies - presumably just for effect. Lots of people had questions about financial markets, but I had a different one - I wanted to know about the drugs.

The response I got was surprising. First I was dismissed - the drugs question was apparently a very 'undergraduate' question to ask. Then I was told that it wasn't important. Douglas Carswell, understandably I suppose, quite frankly admitted that he wasn't going to risk his career trying to legalise drugs. He'd much rather tinker around with the regulation of banks. Essentially his point was this; 'serious' people aren't interested in the drugs debate. Serious people like the niggardly details of finance. Drug users like drugs.

It's a common attitude, and one that I find quite perverse. I have never understood why it should matter if you only want to legalise drugs to make it easier for you to take them. That you have a vested interest might motivate you to be dishonest in your advocacy, but it doesn't automatically make you wrong. To put it in terms a Tory would understand - most of the people who want to repeal the fox hunting ban quite want to kill foxes. That doesn't make them wrong. Equally, if Winston Churchill had owned a rather lucrative Polish sausage factory, would that have compromised his pro-war stance against Hitler? Almost any policy will benefit some special interest group or other; some policies are still right.

Most people recognise that, but apparently not in the case of drugs. Time and time again when I bring this up, I quickly find myself distracted from actually debating the issue. I'm not allowed to talk about Columbia, Mexico, Afghanistan, Burma or any of the other places destroyed by the drugs war. I'm not allowed to talk about the costs of the market being unregulated, of the cost of drugs being cut with rat poison, ground up glass and probably even oregano. I can't talk about the astonishing rates of imprisonment that prohibition necessitates. Instead of all that, I have to talk about the slight predilection I had for cannabis whilst in Canada four years ago.

Yet the fact that I might want to take drugs has never been the driving force behind my desire to legalise them. Somehow I doubt it is for James Delingpole or for The Economist either (nice though it is to imagine their office operating in a funk of green smoke). More and more reasonable people are standing up against prohibition. Douglas Carswell might not be keen, but this country is desperately crying out for a politician to stand up with us. Legalising drugs isn't a policy that will only benefit a few hippies; it is very much a policy for serious people.

And as if just to prove that, in addition to all the evidence about crime, public health, tax revenues and so on, the International Herald Tribune adds this; legalizing drugs creates jobs. Not just any jobs, but journalism jobs. Astonishingly, advertising for medical marijuana firms is driving a boom in local newspapers in Colorado, allowing them to recruit for the first time in years.

If that doesn't give me a vested interest in the matter, I don't know what does.