Mark Thomas Presents the People's Manifesto - Mark Thomas [7]
7
LEGALISE ALL DRUGS
IN ESSENCE, PROHIBITION is not a policy but a wish. Declaring drugs illegal will not make them go away any more than making unicorns legal will make them appear. Prohibition has failed; drugs are everywhere. In most urban areas of Britain it is easier to find illegal drugs than it is to find Kendal Mint Cake.
The problem is that users like drugs, and that makes outlawing them very difficult indeed.
TEN REASONS TO LEGALISE DRUGS.
1. People take drugs. Why turn them into criminals? Save money on prison and spend it on treatment.
2. Spot the flaw in the logic that says: we shall teach drug users a lesson by putting them in prison … where there are no drugs at all.
3. Illegal drugs are often impure. Ecstasy has been found mixed with heroin, making it a gateway drug to addiction, and cocaine is cut with baby milk powder, making life very difficult for liberals boycotting Nestlé products. Ending prohibition should improve drug quality; from a consumer angle this is a huge step forward.
4. Legal heroin can be sold in supermarket pharmacies, so users can get cheap, high-quality drugs and collect Nectar points.
5. Prohibition fuels gangsters, so legalisation means gangsters will lose a major source of money and power. Of course they will seek new illegal markets, but they will struggle to achieve the money and status that coke, crack and smack brought them when reduced to smuggling exotic pets. There is no rebellious cachet in wandering around festival campsites hawking wares with the plaintive cry of, ‘Macaws and parakeets, macaws and parakeets.’
6. For Daily Express readers: if Class A drugs are cheap then users will have to commit less crime to pay for them, and reduced crime levels will bring down the cost of your household insurance.
7. Drug profits are so enormous that the government can produce drugs cheaper than gangsters and still put a whacking tax on them, putting an additionally high ‘wanker tax’ on cocaine.
8. We would need to find a new moral panic to fill the vacuum left by drugs. I suggest beards.
9. The problem with the legalisation of drugs is the free market would then step in, so we could end up with L’Oréal crystal meth at one end of the market and Asda own-brand cocaine at the other. Somewhere in between will be Fairtrade cocaine, with middleclass liberals snorting lines to support collective farmers in Peru. So instead we should nationalise the drug industry. It is sensible and profitable– and nothing is guaranteed to deglamorise drugs quite like a staterun industry.
10. We could buy opium off the farmers in Afghanistan, thus giving them decent money, lessening the grip of the Taliban and enabling troops to come home quicker.
8
THE DAILY MAIL
SHOULD BE FORCED TO
PRINT ON THE FRONT
OF EVERY EDITION THE
WORDS: ‘THIS IS A
FICTIONALISED ACCOUNT OF THE
NEWS AND ANY
RESEMBLANCE TO THE
TRUTH IS ENTIRELY
COINCIDENTAL’
THE DAILY MAIL is not so much a newspaper as spite spat on dead trees. The paper’s founder, Lord Northcliffe, admitted as much when he famously said he gave his readers their ‘daily hate’ and the paper has steadfastly clung to that dictum. Essentially it is a Pravda for Middle England, existing to promote one singular idea: that the hard-working British middle class are being exploited by degenerate, lazy people who are probably poor and frequently foreign, although it has a sideline selling Princess Diana memorial china plates.
The world inhabited by the Daily Mail is brimful of pregnant teenagers, travellers, migrants and homosexuals, often all one entity, conspiring to defraud taxpayers of their money from an increasingly gullible left-wing state, obsessed with political correctness and stopping children singing ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. The cast of villains each has their identifiable wrongs: single mothers sponge off the state, asylum seekers have come to Britain for our generous benefits and teachers in state schools want to give sex education lessons to foetuses so they