Reply here

At school, we had a special assembly on drugs this week. It was one of those solemn occasions where a grinning police officer tried to convince you that the odd joint will lead to injecting heroin in a bus station toilet, and that once you’ve injected heroin, it’s only a matter of time before you mug your grandmother and die foaming in a skip. It’s difficult to say whether he believed this nonsense or whether he just enjoyed the theatrical absurdity of it. Either way, it’s rubbish.

Let’s be clear. I don’t take drugs. I have a body that is glorious both by nature and by continual effort. I swim, I lift, I run, and I eat what works for me. I don’t want to ruin any of that with weed, let alone with heroin. But the idea that someone else shouldn’t take drugs because I wouldn’t is an outrage. If you don’t have the right to inject me against my will, I don’t have the right to stop you from injecting yourself. And I certainly don’t think the State has any right to get involved.

The right to bodily autonomy isn’t conditional. It doesn’t disappear the moment someone thinks you’re making a bad decision. If a grown adult wants to get high, and accepts the risks, it’s not my business. It’s not yours either. Liberty doesn’t mean “you’re free to do what I think is sensible.” It means being free to do what you think is worth doing, even if it’s dangerous or just stupid.

Now, are drugs dangerous? Obviously, they are. That’s not the point. I’ll repeat that liberty includes the right to make dangerous decisions. Every moment of pleasure involves a trade-off. Some people ride motorcycles. Some free-climb cliffs. Some eat takeaway curries every night. These things all carry risks. But they also provide meaning, or at least distraction. If someone decides the short-term euphoria of crack is worth more than an extra twenty years of wheezing boredom, that’s his call. He shouldn’t need permission from me or from the Home Secretary.

More than that, the law itself makes drugs more dangerous. If heroin were sold legally in standardised doses at Boots, it wouldn’t be cut with fentanyl, powdered bleach, or whatever the Albanian lads had lying around. You’d know the purity. You’d know the dose. You’d know what you were getting.

As it stands, we’ve got a market driven by the same logic as Prohibition-era bootlegging. High-concentration products dominate because they’re easier to transport. Most people who enjoy caffeine do so in tea and coffee. No one sits down with a jar of caffeine powder and a teaspoon. But the economics of illegality push everything towards maximum strength and minimum safety. In a legal market, you’d see opium teas, not heroin injections. But we’ve decided to criminalise moderation and push users towards extremity.

And then, of course, there are the dealers. Make something illegal, and you don’t get rid of demand—you just hand supply over to criminals. These aren’t people known for their gentle customer service. They enforce contracts with knives and pistols, not the Small Claims Court. The more profitable the market, the more violent the competition. Gangs don’t compete on price and quality. They compete on turf wars and intimidation. We talk about cleaning up the streets—well, perhaps stop financing street violence with drug prohibition.

Prohibition also needs a surveillance state. Real crimes have real victims who go to the police. Drug “crimes” don’t. There is no complainant when two consenting adults swap cash for cocaine. So the police get imaginative. They bug phones. They raid homes. They spy, they snoop, they strip-search. The result is a gross inflation of State power, a slow erosion of the ancient principle that a man’s home is his castle. The War on Drugs has always been a war on due process.

And it’s a war that has failed. Despite billions spent, despite armies of snoops with sniffer dogs, the streets are awash with drugs. According to the Home Office’s own numbers, barely 10% of illegal drugs entering the UK are intercepted. And this is not one of those “but murder still happens, so why bother with laws against that?” arguments. The comparison is false. Murder is a rights violation. Drug use is not. You can’t enforce a prohibition on consensual behaviour without becoming a tyranny, and even then, it doesn’t work.

So what do the authorities do when the street war fails? They move the battle to the banks. Enter the War on Money Laundering. Suddenly, every financial transaction is suspicious. The bank asks what your deposit is for. The car dealer won’t take cash. The State demands to know who gave you what and why. They say it’s to catch drug lords. What they mean is: “We want to track every pound you earn and spend.” The real purpose of the drug war is not to stop drug use—it’s to legitimise total financial surveillance. The authorities aren’t really bothered that you’re taking drugs. They’re bothered that you might be making money without cutting them in for tax.

So far, I’ve been talking about the obviously illegal drugs. But there’s a whole other category—those legal in theory but locked behind a prescription pad. On the arguments made so far, it follows that people should also be free to buy any pharmaceutical product they want without having to grovel to a GP. It’s your body. You should be able to experiment with it. That’s how progress happens. Take Viagra. Originally developed as a heart drug, it only found its true use by accident—because some happy trial volunteer noticed something rising that wasn’t his blood pressure. What other drugs already on the shelf could be doing unexpected things, if people weren’t blocked from trying them? Prescription laws slow down discovery and prevent improvement. If you want medical innovation, start by legalising curiosity.

There’s also the matter of pain. Cancer can be very painful. At the moment in this country, dying people are usually able to get adequate pain relief. But the adverb is “usually,” and the adjective is “adequate.” Which is to say: too often they don’t, and what they do get isn’t enough. There are stupid doctors. Worse, there are sadistic doctors. Some of them won’t prescribe enough morphine, in case the patient “gets addicted.” Others will hand out synthetic opiates that work less well, or simply shut down the patient before he’s had a chance to say goodbye. Even if you want to lie and pretend there’s a moral case for banning crack, there’s none for denying the dying a few moments of comfort before the light goes out. If we’ve invented the drugs, then people should be free to use them—especially those whose lives are already ending. That this still has to be argued shows just how stupid and cruel modern health policy has become.

Or let’s go back to the illegal drugs—amphetamine, for example. Now, I wouldn’t use it. I don’t need it. But several boys in my class are grossly fat and smell like rotting milk. They’re not fat because of some glandular condition. They’re fat because they’re depressed and disorganised. They eat rubbish and they lie around doing nothing, and then they wonder why life feels like a slog. A daily dose of amphetamine would do them no end of good. It would lift the mood, sharpening the mind and stripping fat. Yes, over time, amphetamine can burn holes in your brain and hammer your heart. But life, as said, is trade-offs. And better, in my view, to risk a fried synapse than spend your youth shuffling down corridors and getting in my way like a zeppelin of rancid lard.

And while we’re talking about safety, let’s admit the truth. Even in a legalised system, people will overdose. Some of them will die. Good, I say: I want them to. I want the feeble-minded and the criminal to overdose. It is in the public interest for these people to remove themselves from the gene pool before they pollute it further by reproducing. Average intelligence in this country has been declining since 1900 by about a point per decade. A century of shielding the stupid from the consequences of their actions has removed the natural checks to the fecundity of the unfit that once kept society functional. Modern science is a wonderful thing—but only when it serves the right people. Not when it lets the wrong ones survive and multiply.

Relegalising drugs will not only return to us a lost measure of personal liberty—it will also restore a useful filter. Give the worst among us unlimited access to cheap pharmaceutical-grade heroin, and they will do what they always do: kill themselves. And when they’re gone, we’ll have fewer pointless crimes, and—eventually—a population that is a little less dysfunctional.

The brutal fact is this: a society that allows its least fit members to self-select out of existence becomes smarter, saner, and more stable over time. The War on Drugs has kept them alive. Legalisation might, at last, let them die.

So yes—legalise everything. Heroin. Cocaine. LSD. MDMA. Crack. If it’s your body, it’s your choice. And if you want to turn yourself into a twitching puddle of euphoria, that’s no concern of mine. Just don’t expect sympathy if you wake up in hospital minus a kidney and with eyes that won’t close. Freedom doesn’t come with a safety net.

It comes with consequences.