The drug wars don’t work, they just make it worse
If I were to use this space to discreetly hint that I, from time to time, might smoke the odd joint, I would seem edgy, cool, a little bit daring. But if I were to state that on Fridays I like to take contacts out for lunch and enjoy a glass or perhaps even a bottle of wine, I would appear lazy, dissolute and, crucially, old fashioned. And if I were to admit that I might, in the past, have shared a cigarette when I wanted to impress someone, I would reveal myself as pathetic, a little seedy even.
Of course, any of these behaviours is harmful to me personally, which is one reason why global governments’ “war on drugs” is a battle on two fronts. There is the global fight against legal but harmful drug usage: the Institute of Alcohol Studies estimates that in the UK, alcohol usage costs the country £7.3bn a year in lost productivity, while hangovers cost somewhere between £1.2bn and £1.4bn a year. In the United States, the CDC calculates that tobacco usage costs more than $240bn in increased healthcare spending, close to $185bn in lost productivity from smoking-related illness, and almost the same amount thanks to premature death.
Then there is the fight that we more commonly associate with the phrase “war on drugs”: the battle to reduce the use of drugs that are both illegal and harmful. The British government puts the cost of illegal drugs to the UK economy at about £20bn a year, while the US Office of National Drug Control Policy’s most recent estimate put the cost of illegal drug usage at $120bn. In 2017, the Trump White House put the cost of opioid addiction, which cannot be neatly split into “illegal” and “legal” boxes, at $504bn in 2015.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Stephen Bush
