Thanks Andrew.

Dinhaan’s and Atman’s posts came in after I replied to yours and I did not think that they justified a reply.

I did say that it had not done me any harm but “what’s the problem “is your addition. Moody’s article was about harm reduction, not much about legalization, and about improving our collective knowledge which was what I was responding to.

I thought it important to make a statement about long-term light use as a balance to some of the more hysterical accounts we hear.

Moody’s article I thought was very balanced and I agree with him that we should collect as much information as possible and be careful about the way in which we present this in the interest of harm reduction.

I would certainly caution anyone under the age of 24 about anything but very light use and I would adopt a similar approach with alcohol use, which of course is much more of a problem. I would also caution anyone about heavy use.

You have used the word illicit a couple of times in reference to my use, and I would like to point out that this is not correct when it applies to use in the privacy of one’s own home in the part of Australia in which I live. Hard –line approaches, as the American alcohol prohibition exercise demonstrated, is not likely to be successful.

Moving from the specific to the general, I remember with nostalgia the heady years of 2000 and 2001, when Australia threw the biggest and most successful multicultural party in the world’s history and celebrated Reconciliation and our Centenary.

Our society then seemed to be confident, mature, tolerant and understanding of diversity. I get the feeling that in the short space of 4 years we have as a nation become more intolerant and authoritarian which I think is a great pity for a country with the reputation for tolerance, an easy going lifestyle and a fair go for all.

One important issue in the dope/booze/substance debate is the consideration of chain of custody/chain of liability. The legal precedents being set both here and overseas on the issue of product liability in relation to tobacco and, to a lesser extent, alcohol, need to be extended to the party drugs including hooch. Sure Tobacco and alcohol cause huge costs to the community but the user generally pays for this through the taxes on the product.

And in most cases the consumer tends to buy the same product off the same supplier for long enough to overcome "remoteness of damage" questions. So if they stay alive long enough they might recover some of that money through litigation to ease the discomfort of their final squalid years.

Not so the party drugs. To say that there is no quality control is no minor understatement. There is no record of transactions from producer to vendor so there is no ability to determine liability or to extract sufficient revenue to cover those future costs to the community. Indeed, given the proportion of house breakins that fund the initial purchase, we can conclude that the community is already subsidising the product purchase as well as the future liability.

So what to do?

Legalise the product and tax it. But also attach very high penalties for untaxed, undocumented purchases. Require all legal users to supply a six monthly blood and hair test and provide receipts that confirm the legality of the supplies that have produced the blood levels etc, and identify the supply chain. And finally, ensure that those who purchase outside the system, or grow their own without paying the tax, surrender their medicare entitlements until they can demonstrate 10 years of clean blood tests.

If the community is expected to pay then it must be on the community's terms. No one has a right to demand a blank cheque from the tax pie.

Picking up Perseus’ point, legalization of cannabis is such an obvious approach I fail to understand why we do not have the gumption to do it. I understand that tincture of cannabis was freely available in chemist shops in the 1940s before we like sheep jumped on the bandwagon of prohibition.

As the product is generally acknowledged not to be as harmful as tobacco and alcohol, why not legalize it? “Because we have two legalized drugs does not make it sensible to legalize a third” is the stock answer. But we already have the third in common use – 15% of adult users was Moody’s figure, compared with about 20% for tobacco.

The benefits of legalization are numerous, including quality control, statistics, allowing a significant proportion of the population to become ‘legal’, greater respect for the law, greater cooperation with police, reduction in organized crime, reduction in petty crime, removing attachment of purchase from hard drug dealers, removal of big profits to law breaking cultivators, cheaper product (even after hefty tax), greater revenue for the state, more employment, a boost for farmers and market gardeners, availability of product for medicinal purposes, etc., etc.

I’m not sure about Perseus’ draconian control measures but even that would be better than the existing counter-productive, ridiculous situation. I seem to remember that making your own booze was illegal a few years ago, but that seems to have eased without too many problems.

Will it happen? It’s probably too logical an answer and too unpalatable to hard-line moralists who know what is best for everyone else. But perhaps one day…..

Stan, here’s a 250 word economic analysis;

It’s extremely expensive to run a legitimate business which mass produces pharmaceuticals. Business costs, income taxes, regulatory compliance, insurance etc cost far more than ingredients. Legalising a drug will add huge overheads to its cost unless its production is completely unregulated – which in this day and age is not possible. As a simple example consider the cost in producing a $2.50 bottle of water; it contains less than 1 cent worth of water, the manufacturer probably only gets a business return of about 10%, the rest goes on overheads.

As for taxes to pay for social and health costs, the taxes on alcohol and tobacco aren’t anywhere near enough to cover their true costs, and if they were to be taxed in full there would be an illegal market for these as well.

Hence the true “user pays” cost of legal dope would be many times that of the illicit product, so the illegal market would still thrive.

The only way you cold legalise dope was if the taxpayer covered most of the cost. Our taxes hardly cover the cost of the health or education systems, so why should they pay for more recreational drugs ? Current law enforcement and rehabilitation costs would be much smaller than the full legalisation cost, so in pure economic terms it doesn’t make sense. Of course if we turned back the clock to 1940 levels of healthcare, education, insurance, consumer protection etc the situation might be different

AndrewM

We could simply grow our own for personal use.

Interesting point, AndrewM. I have a nagging half recollection that the analyses that indicated alcohol and tobacco taxes didn't cover their costs were done without proper discounting. That is, they simply added up the current amount of tax and the current expenditure on related health costs etc. If anyone can confirm otherwise then please let us know.

This is problematic because todays health costs are the consequence of past consumption. So todays tax revenue should be treated as an insurance premium against future expenses. So a "true and fair" accounting for the cost recovery would be to put the annual tax revenue into an income earning fund (it would double every 10 years at 7.4% interest)until drawn down by the health system.

Also, a smokers health problems tend to occur earlier than the "normal" problems of old age and this creates a tendency to regard the smoke related costs as mutually exclusive when they are not. The death from tobacco related causes precludes a death from other causes. So it seems entirely appropriate to include the revenue from a smokers medicare levy etc in the cost recovery equation for tobacco. Ditto for other substances.

Legalisation of hooch and other party drugs would not work unless the health system is properly insulated from unfunded, uncertified consumption. It is an equity issue. If people demand a particular lifestyle choice then they cannot expect non-users to subsidise that choice