Drug policy: a debate we must have

The third assumption is made explicit in the title of the Roundtable Report. "The Prohibition of Illicit Drugs is Killing and Criminalising Our Children, And We Are All Letting it Happen." Those at the Roundtable would prefer that our children buy reasonable strength drugs from the nice people at the corner store, who won't rip them off and won't add any nasties.

What mother or father of a schoolchild would be happy for drugs to be readily available over-the-counter? What are we teaching schoolchildren about the morality of drugs if we legalise them? Just watch the numbers of young addicts grow.

The reality of drug use starts with a personal decision and which on our penchant for risk taking. Supporters of harm minimisation ignore the fact that drug addiction always asks more and more of the individual until they are consumed by the drug.

Once you take a drug, it never gets any better, does it? Unless you're talking about giving it up. So why legalise it in the first place. Sure we need to look at how we deal with addiction, but let's leave those well enough alone. Everyone wants to minimise the harm that is caused by drugs in society. But we do need to consider seriously whether addiction in itself is a harm, and whether maintaining people in a state of addiction leads to harm, both to the individuals concerned and to society as a whole.

Unfortunately, an addiction bureaucracy has now developed, which is incapable of honestly questioning harm minimisation.

What is worse, it dolls up these tenets as hard science. At best, studies into harm minimisation policies will be confounded by human variables and their conclusions will be fuzzy. And they will always overlook immeasurable outcomes such as long-term mental health, well-being, and quality of life.

More insidiously, 'harm minimisation is an ideological position that claims a monopoly over both compassion and 'the evidence' in the drug debate. I have no problem with the idea of having an ideological position. It is pretty obvious that I have one myself. Strictly speaking, an ideological position is the result of a priori moral principles. We certainly can't derive moral principles from scientific data - science doesn't tell us anything about the right thing to do. David Hume made that point a long time ago.

A problem arises when one side says its ideological position is the direct result of scientific investigation and thus the matter is closed. That is precisely the moment when the matter should be thrown open. I do not have the answer to the problem of drugs in our society, but I have some questions to ask about the assumptions of harm minimisation.