Too often the debate about drug legalisation seems to exist as if juveniles – young people under the age of 18 – do not exist. Yet drug use invariably begins between the ages of 15 to 17 – sometimes even younger, especially among offender populations (HM Government, 2004). Moreover, the peak age of criminality is around the same age, 15 for boys and 16 for girls, so that if, as is often asserted, drug abuse and crime go together, there is empirical evidence to support it, at least in terms of the ages at which they begin (Farrington, 1997). Patterns of drug use seem also to follow patterns of criminality. That is to say, very few heavy drug users start drug use after the age of 21, in the same way that very few offenders begin their criminal career after the age of 21. A persistent feature of the data on juvenile offenders is that almost all adult offenders were juvenile offenders, and almost all serious adult drug users were juvenile users (West and Farrington, 1977). Not always, but more often than not. The extent of drug use tapers off in the same way that criminality tapers off after the age of about 28 to 30. However, there are differences – the ratio of male:female criminality is about 5:1, whereas for drug use it is about 3:1.

These basic facts provide an important dimension to the debate. If, as stated, drug abuse commonly starts among 15-year-olds, alongside other problems such as crime, then age, and its attendant problems, becomes an important factor. Yet, age has often been ignored, whether by policy makers, prohibitionists or legalisers. Husak (1992), for example, provides an exemplary critique of prohibition as it affects adults, but is strangely silent about children. He is concerned to ‘understand the best principled reasons for denying that adults have a moral right to use any or all of recreational drugs’ (1992, p 5) but says little about whether children are to be excluded. So too Ostrowski (1990), who produces an equally coherent argument on similar lines – that adults have a right to self-ownership of their bodies – but like Husak does no more than briefly mention the problem of juveniles.