The implications of the legalisation of drugs go well beyond the impact on crime, or the position of juveniles; they enter the very nature of society itself. I want to look at the likely impact of the various proposals, beginning with the wider picture, then looking at the implications legalisation might have for individual users, finally turning to the way the commercial institutions are likely to respond. I want to begin with an assessment of the prohibitionists’ fears of a threat to society and the individual user.

The community

In the US, James Inciardi and Duane McBride (1991, p 49) put the matter this way when they say: ‘Considerable evidence exists to suggest that the legalisation of drugs would create behavioural and public health problems to a degree that would far outweigh the current consequences of drug prohibition.’ James Q. Wilson feared that without prohibition ‘we will have consigned millions of people, hundreds of thousands of infants and hundreds of neighbourhoods to a life of oblivion and disease’ (quoted in Lowinson, 2005, p 1397). Or again, he said that prohibition was justified, or rather legalisation was not justified, because ‘to the lives and families destroyed by alcohol we will have added countless more destroyed by cocaine, heroin and whatever else a basement scientist can invent’ (Wilson, 1995, p 338). Inciardi and McBride see drug use as a mode of adaptation to the disadvantages of ghetto life, in which case they say that without prohibition, drug use would produce a nightmare for the underclass. ‘Legalisation’, they say, ‘becomes an elitist and racist policy, and would increase levels of dependence in the ghetto where it would serve to legitimate the chemical destruction of an urban generation and culture’ (Inciardi and McBride, 1989, p 279). Strong stuff indeed, and a quote worth repeating.

In the UK, support for the prohibitionist view is found in Lord Windelsham’s speech to the House of Lords in the Second Reading of the Misuse of Drugs Bill, later the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act. He said that the guiding principles in the government’s mind were that society has a right to use the criminal law to protect itself from forces that may threaten its existence as a politically, socially or economically viable order. He further justified prohibition: ‘We cannot stand by and watch appalled and uncomprehending while a disabling and unnatural habit flourishes in our society’ (Hansard, 1971).