Chairman of the Bar calls for decriminalisation of drug use
Nick Green QC is chairman of the Bar Council, the professional organisation of barristers in the UK. Writing in the organisation’s magazine this month, Green called for the decriminalisation of drugs for personal use, arguing (rightly) that a growing body of evidence supports the proposition that decriminalisation can have a number of positive consequences for drugs users and society. He lists the freeing up of police resources, the reduction of crime and the revolving door of imprisonment as peace dividends of ending the drug war, alongside improved public health. Noting that much of the mass media are given to moralising gestures and the whipping up of panic when it comes to drugs, he argues that the Bar Council, made up of lawyers and counting most judges amongst its ex-members, is in a good position to provide a rational argument, being familiar with both sides of the drug policy argument.
Mr Green’s intervention represents another profession speaking out in support of drug law reform at a time when the tide appears to be turning away from the prohibitionist model that was tried throughout the twentieth century, failed to suppress the flow of illegal drugs and added its own side-effects (including an entrenched criminal market and a global epidemic of injection-driven HIV) to those of the drug problems it was supposed to prevent.
At last – some serious intervention from professionals in our sector. I agree. Why doesn’t the Government think the unthinkable and really look at this. Why should the state pay vast sums to fight a drugs war that just cannot be won?
Here is an important comment extracted from the comments section
heres the Bar Council report
http://www.barcouncil.org.uk/news/chairmans-search/detail.php?id=179
he says:
“It was pleasing to see the new Lord Chancellor, Ken Clarke, advocating prison reform in the media. Inevitably the initial reaction in the Shires was that he had already “lost touch” with “normal people”. In a period of acute fiscal austerity it is essential that politicians seek to do what is right and not what sounds right. So far the new MoJ is making good noises. Initial meetings with the new Lord Chancellor and his team suggest that they are intent on working through issues to see what works. In this, we will support them to the hilt. If the prison population could be reduced from circa 85,000 to 80,000 it could save over £200m per annum, and there is a great deal of research from elsewhere to suggest that a less “bang ’em up” approach to sentencing actually reduces crime. The tabloids’ response, which is to throw more people into custody, simply does not work.
Another political hot potato is drugs. Drug related crime costs the economy about £13bn a year. Again a growing body of comparative evidence suggests that decriminalising personal use can have positive consequences; it can free up huge amounts of police resources, reduce crime and recidivism and improve public health. All this can be achieved without any overall increase in drug usage. If this is so, then it would be rational to follow suit.
A rational approach is not usually the response of large parts of the media when it comes to issues relating to criminal justice. This is something the Bar Council can address. We are apolitical; we act for the prosecution and the defence and most of the judiciary are former members. We can speak out in favour of an approach which urges policies which work and not those which simply play to the gallery. And this will save money and mean that there is less pressure on the justice system.”
NOTICE
Please – if you are interested in this topic – look at the comments. Sackerson makes some good points and provides a link. I shall return to this on Monday
heres the Bar Council report
http://www.barcouncil.org.uk/news/chairmans-search/detail.php?id=179
he says:
“It was pleasing to see the new Lord Chancellor, Ken Clarke, advocating prison reform in the media. Inevitably the initial reaction in the Shires was that he had already “lost touch” with “normal people”. In a period of acute fiscal austerity it is essential that politicians seek to do what is right and not what sounds right. So far the new MoJ is making good noises. Initial meetings with the new Lord Chancellor and his team suggest that they are intent on working through issues to see what works. In this, we will support them to the hilt. If the prison population could be reduced from circa 85,000 to 80,000 it could save over £200m per annum, and there is a great deal of research from elsewhere to suggest that a less “bang ’em up” approach to sentencing actually reduces crime. The tabloids’ response, which is to throw more people into custody, simply does not work.
Another political hot potato is drugs. Drug related crime costs the economy about £13bn a year. Again a growing body of comparative evidence suggests that decriminalising personal use can have positive consequences; it can free up huge amounts of police resources, reduce crime and recidivism and improve public health. All this can be achieved without any overall increase in drug usage. If this is so, then it would be rational to follow suit.
A rational approach is not usually the response of large parts of the media when it comes to issues relating to criminal justice. This is something the Bar Council can address. We are apolitical; we act for the prosecution and the defence and most of the judiciary are former members. We can speak out in favour of an approach which urges policies which work and not those which simply play to the gallery. And this will save money and mean that there is less pressure on the justice system.”
Steve – thanks – have extracted your entire comment and placed it in body of main post. Thank you for taking time to comment
sorry – are we suggesting that ken clarke’s damascene conversion to avoiding imprisoning people is anything other than a cynical money-saving effort???
great clarke moments from the past (no 8 in my series of 2500): describing ambulance staff as glorified taxi drivers. (naturally they were on strike and therefore the latest trotskyites trying to bring down society.
he’s so cuddly i could take him home and cuddle him until his head just popped. you wanna trust him? feel free, but don’t come crying to me when the bar become the latest bunch of people to be described as crypto-anarchists seeking to bring down western capitalism.
I have few doubts that Lord Chancellor Clarke’s interest in gettings lags to make postbags, work and cut prison places is in part motivated by money – but he did seem to be astonished that the prison population had doubled since he last in government as Home Secretary.
The point on drugs is rather more the point I am interested in above.
M’learned friend has opened a can of worms. Those who would welcome liberalisation should first read, in a fair-minded way, the experiences and views of the former Birmingham prison doctor Anthony Daniels, aka the Spectator’s “Theodore Dalrymple.” (See his 1997 City Journal article here: http://www.city-journal.org/html/7_2_a1.html)
Readers may also wish to consider the different reasons for taking drugs. Some in the more successful and privileged levels of society may take them as a pleasure trip to stave off boredom, or to alleviate stress and mental overstimulation as they continue to pursue wealth and fame. A proportion will be caught in the toils of addiction, but their network of friends and their financial resources often (though not always) help cut them free.
Lower down, drugs licit and otherwise are a form of medication against unrelenting misery, even if that misery is carpeted and centrally heated. And they are a trap, just as much as the benefits system. They destroy initiative and ambition. This gestalt of hopeless idleness and fuddled fecklessness is then passed on to another generation, with the addition of negligent and abusive parenting. My teaching assistant also works in the evenings at a chemist, and told me yesterday how she was struck that practically everyone in Quinton (west Birmingham) was on a drug she didn’t recognise, so she Googled it up and discovered it was an antidepressant.
When I was at school, the futurologist’s choice was Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984. We now have a miserable coalition of both. Speaking of coalitions, there is a most unfortunate agreement between a government wanting to save money and so eyeing the allegedly unwinnable war on drugs, and a social elite (including members of the government) who grew up with drugs-for-fun and don’t see why anybody should be allowed to prevent one doing as one wishes. This glosses over the obligation to set an example to the less fortunate and to succour them. Much of the libertarian philosophy I read today seems to be a clever gloss on callous selfishness.
Sackerson – Thank you for your very thorough and thoughtful posting – appreciated.
In return – may I ask, if you have time, to listen to a podcast which I did with a US federal judge John Cane. It is worth listening to.
Shall do. I reserve the right of reply dot dot dot.
OK, have now skimmed the transcript (for which, thanks). Now let’s have a look at some of these worms wriggling out of the can:
Racism: yes, a lot of non-whites in jail. Connect that to justice being like the Ritz. Also (maybe) more usage at the desperate end, and less ability to stay out of sight of the cops – no haciendas to fall apart on. And please consider what I have heard black colleagues in the looked after child system say more than once: the whites permit the plague of drugs, because it keeps the blacks down.
Judge Kane compares the “unwinnable” war on drugs to Prohibition. I understand that by and large, Prohibition worked. It was repealed after the Great Crash because the government needed a way to raise more revenue.
Legalisation means pure drugs, clean needles – point taken, so to speak. But I expect customers also got clean straw during the Gin Epidemic. “If it is available like an aspirin, then there is no market for it.” May I ‘umbly draw His Honor’s attention to the aforesaid epidemic.
Prisons are overcrowded: build more. This freeing of offenders for reasons of accommodation is part of the feedback system that tells the offender that the law has no teeth and will only gum you gently after the 150th offence. A firm – and class-blind – approach would send the message very quickly. I read not so long ago about a magistrate in a Scottish court (in the 60s?) who warned publicly that carrying a knife would be punished as severely as possible; the next offender got 10 years; knife crime ceased abruptly, immediately and for the remainder of the magistrate’s time on the Bench.
Prisons are expensive: not so much as crime. Cost of a year at Her Majesty’s pleasure £30k, savings in costs of crime £300k I have read recently. Perhaps a proportion of insurance premiums should be hypothecated to the prison system so the connexion might be made more explicit.
Legalisation means “no need to rob”. So how come liquor store robberies?
The war on drugs is unwinnable in the same sense that the war on murder, robbery etc are unwinnable. What you don’t see in advance is what will happen when the restraints are off; but we have historical precedent to teach us. The judge speaks of a steady 1.7% addiction rate to heroin and opium, but forgets (a) that there are now many other drugs available and (b) that in a far wealthier and more leisured society legalisation and ready supply could spread use and multiply addicts much, much faster.
Doubtless I’ll be told how pernicious tobacco and alcohol are; I agree, and I am also in favour of increasing restriction on both. The former shortened both my parent’s lives by some 20 years, I believe; and I recall when the latter was available from pub, offies and vintners, but not from supermarkets, garages, post offices etc and often at all hours. I recall one of my looked after children went home to celebrate his father’s release from prison; the poor sap of an adult drank everything in the house and then went out and got caught stealing a bottle of vodka from his local shop. Back in the jug agane.
I think the real driver in all this handwringing declamation of failure is the reluctance of the authorities to prosecute famous people as they will in cases of tax evasion.
Now, Charon will you read Daniels for me?
[…] Nick Green QC, Chairman of the Bar has come out in favour of de-criminalising drugs. There are cogent arguments for and against. I noted this yesterday […]
Sackerson – absolutely. I shall do so on Monday. I had rather a good lunch and another one tomorrow. Serious stuff requires sobriety! Thank you again – reasoned arguments advanced, shared by many.
Most information I have read indicates that about 90% of aquisitive crime is drug orientated. Some might propose other figures but it`s definitely a big number. It provides criminal gangs with hundreds of £millions annually. Apart from the “rich” most addicts are offered any form of medical intervention only after entering the criminal justice system. Supplying Class A in prescribed doses at regulated concentrations at registered premises [pharmacies?] with appropriate safeguards must be an improvement on the ramshackle current approach. There is a risk of course of increasing addiction but I consider that more theoretical than realistic. However to expect politicians to contemplate this course, at least in public, when they`ve played with cannabis like a yo yo; class B, class C and back to class B and the current worship of methadone “treatment” is particularly unrealistic.
“…to expect politicians to contemplate this course, at least in public, when they`ve played with cannabis like a yo yo; class B, class C and back to class B and the current worship of methadone “treatment” is particularly unrealistic.”
… and especially when they have white nostrils themselves, JP.
*huge round of applause for sackerson* i’m reading that blog!
regret i must take issue with you on:
‘Much of the libertarian philosophy I read today seems to be a clever gloss on callous selfishness.’
never noticed the clever gloss, myself.