After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation

By Stephen Rolles

Global drug policy is rooted in a laudable urge to address the very real harms that non-medical psychoactive drugs can create. Such concerns have driven a prohibitionist global agenda: an agenda that gives clear and direct moral authority to those who support it, while casting those who are against it as ethically and politically irresponsible. However, such binary thinking can be problematic. By defining the most stringent prohibition as the most moral position, it makes nuanced consideration of the impacts of prohibition difficult. In particular, it makes it very difficult to look at and learn from the impacts and achievements of prohibition. Historic attempts to do so have foundered on a sense that analysing prohibition means questioning prohibition, and that questioning prohibition is in itself an immoral act—one that allies the questioner with the well known infamies of the world’s illegal drug trade. Ironically, supporting the status quo perpetuates that trade, and the harms that it creates.

It is not the purpose of this report to revisit these various findings; they are freely and easily available elsewhere. Rather, we seek to reconsider the management of illicit drugs in the light of the experience that they represent and embody. Using that experience, we will set out a blueprint for non-medical drug management policies that will minimise the harms that such drug use creates, both on a personal and on a societal level. In short, our goal is to define a set of practical and effective risk and harm management and reduction policies. Such policies will represent a clear and positive step towards the positive outcomes that prohibition has tried, and failed, to achieve. A strictly prohibitionist stance would understand them to be immoral, because they call for the legally regulated production and availability of many currently proscribed drugs. Transform’s position is, in fact, driven by an ethics of effectiveness, and as such represent an attempt to re-frame the global harm management debate in exclusively practical terms

London: Transform Drug Policy Foundation, 2009. 232p.