Image: puliarf/flickr

Over the past few weeks and months stories have been surfacing suggesting that Lance Armstrong, seven time-winner of the Tour de France, cancer survivor, Livestrong founder and inspiration to millions, may have taken performance-enhancing drugs at some point during his career. Given that he’s a professional cyclist, this is hardly a surprise, though it will probably be a disappointment to his fans. But far more important than the question of whether he used illegal performance-boosting drugs or not is the issue of why it matters. Not ‘why it matters to those of us with no interest in professional cycling’, though that’s a fair question too, but why it matters if he took drugs at all. I simply don’t see the problem with having performance-enhancing drugs in sport.

The main objection to these drugs seems to be some hazy notion that it’s ‘cheating’ to take them – you know, because they make athletes perform better than they would have otherwise, in much the same way as, um…training. Or simply taking one or more of the huge number of legal supplements like creatine, a substance which builds muscle mass and is used by huge numbers of professional athletes. So what’s the difference between the legal stuff and all the substances which are banned? What makes creatine OK but anabolic steroids verboten? Sure, creatine can be produced naturally by the human body, but blood doping’s banned, and I’m pretty sure human bodies are capable of producing blood as well.

The principal difference appealed to by supporters of the ban, of course, is that most prohibited performance-enhancing drugs are much more dangerous for those who take them than those substances which are permitted. Now, if I was Reuben then at this point I’d probably launch into an impassioned defence of individual liberty. I might point out that simply making the decision to become a professional sportsperson is taking a serious risk with your health in any case – if you’re an elite gymnast, it’s more likely than not that you’ll get a chronic injury at some point, for example – and that it’s infantilising and unjustifiably authoritarian to ban adults from making lifestyle choices which don’t harm others. And if I was to do all that, then I’d have a point. But it isn’t quite as simple as that. Individual liberty is incredibly important, but we shouldn’t fall into the trap of supposing that the only way someone’s autonomy can be restricted is through the force of law. Banning an athlete by force of law from taking a drug certainly restricts that athlete’s freedom, but so too does pressuring that athlete into taking that same drug if you’re a manipulative coach who cares more about medals than about the lives of the athletes in your care. A restrictive law can enhance freedom if what it’s restricting is the ability of the powerful to control the powerless.

However, while it may not be as simple as ‘legalising all performance-enhancing drugs = more freedom’, a blanket ban on any performance-enhancing substance really doesn’t seem justified on the grounds of personal safety alone. A more nuanced response would be far more appropriate: lift the ban on all performance-enhancing drugs, but make sure all athletes are made fully aware of the side-effects of any drug they’re given so they can make an informed choice, and make them disclose full details of any and all drugs and supplements they’re on, so there’s no longer any incentive to lie. And maybe, in some cases, try and reduce the absurd amounts of prize money so that athletes and coaches alike aren’t so desperate to win that they’ll put lives on the line for it. It’s a difficult issue, and I don’t claim to have all the answers. But just as with recreational drugs, a blanket ban is neither effective nor justified.

This government is not fond of people who disagree with them. Witness the Serious Organised Crime Act (Socpa), the swingeing restrictions on protesting within audible distance of parliament. The government do not like to hear voices of dissent, and especially when those voices join together in a chorus. So with the growing consensus of outrage amongst the scientific community over the treatment of independent scientific advisors, the government must be feeling a whole new wave of nausea and legislation coming on.

In the early days of Blair, Peter Mandelson laid claim to the secularism of Labour: “We don’t do god,” he said. Unfortunately, secularism is not the same as objectivity or fairness. As time wore on what became increasingly apparent was that while the government may not ‘do’ faith it also doesn’t ‘do’ facts or truth. In fact, it doesn’t ‘do’ anything that doesn’t fit the template of policy (and sometimes it just doesn’t do anything at all). Science is about seeking answers, and government, like its incestuous sister PR, is all about hiding them to protect the grand plan / the status quo / the public from themselves.

Now, however, Labour and the Tories are very publicly at odds with some scientists – and if there’s one thing that people in search of ‘the truth’ are not good at doing it’s keeping quiet. So after the government decided to ignore his advice, Professor David Nutt, the leading authority on the harmful effects of drugs, decided to give an academic lecture on the topic (which happens to be his specialism) at a university. Alan Johnson accused him of political lobbying and fired him. If an academic lecture constitutes a political action then the nation is being secretly run by the universities. I for one am relieved by this revelation, for a moment I had thought we were being run by a bunch of fanatics in Westminster.

The government’s drugs policy (and that of the Tories – they’re fairly interchangeable on ‘law and order’) can be summed up as follows: all drugs are bad, except the ones we get large amounts of tax from.

Let me tell you a story – it may seem completely fatuous at first but bear with me… I once went to the hospital for a test. On my appointment card I was told to drink two pints of water an hour before the test. I am a very small person with a very small bladder. Suffice to say it was the closest I have yet come to a near death experience. When I asked the doctor (a scientist) why I needed to drink so much water prior to the test he laughed and said I didn’t need to – the NHS had decided that because most people don’t drink enough water generally they would overstate the amount necessary and ‘simplify’ the instructions to ensure they got the results they needed. This taught me a couple of very valuable lessons:
• Those in authority will tell you whatever they need to to achieve a result;
• Those in authority will assume you are an incorrigible moron unless proven otherwise;
• I should never drink two pints of water and then travel to hospital via a road with one of the largest concentrations of speed bumps in London.

Now here are two statements:
1. Drugs such as cannabis, LSD and ecstasy are statistically less dangerous to your health than alcohol and tobacco
2. The money you spend on cannabis, LSD and ecstasy is likely to go to morally reprehensible people (possibly even more morally reprehensible than the government).
Those two statements weren’t too difficult to understand were they? Then why is it that the government thinks that the general populus is too stupid to be able to hold both statements in their head at the same time and weigh them against each other to make a decision?

Alan Johnson said that in firing Professor Nutt he was bending to the will of the people – that the people think drugs are bad. However, Johnson also thinks those same people are too stupid to be able to understand even basic science.

I for one am sick of being patronised and being spoon-fed half-truths, spin and soundbites. If the leading expert in the field tells you something you don’t want to hear you have every right to disagree with him (granted on non-scientific grounds – moral, political, whatever… and that’s the big problem, no-one from the government has yet explained what their grounds are…). But you don’t have the right to stifle his voice and to punish him for exercising his democratic right to freedom of expression.

I can handle conflicting ideas, I think most people can. This government may treat us like children and that may make us behave like them at times, but there is still one vital difference between the taxpayer and children: children can’t vote.

Anybody who has ever smoked a spliff will have been feeling rather righteous this week. Professor David Nutt was forced to resign following his comments suggsting that certain illegal drugs were less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco. In the aftermath there has been a great deal of public acrimony between scientists and politicians, largely presented in terms vituous scientists dutifully drawing conclusions from the evidence, ranged up against politicians who have been contaminating the issue with, um politics.

The watchword throughout this all has been ‘evidence based policy’. For people who have long believed in legalising soft and/or hard drugs it is an appealing rallying cry, quite simply because the evidence of hazard for a number of substances is somewhat thin on the ground. Indeed in the past few days a full 6k or so people have joined a facebook group calling for Professor Nutt’s reinstatement and for an ‘evidence based policy’ on drugs.

Meanwhile the governments failure to follow the advice of scientists over the reclassifiction of cannabis several years ago has once again been brought to the fore. Nutt was quoted in the Telegraph as saying:

“Gordon Brown’s government is the first in the ACMD’s 37-year history to ignore our advice. Have we got worse scientists? No, in fact we are more rigorous than ever, which means there must be something else happening and it is a political decision.”

A political decision? Heaven forbid. You could be forgiven for thinking, from Nutt’s deep aggrevation that the government had ignored scientific advice for the first time in 37 years, that the scientists themselves had stood for office and been elected by the people.

Indeed, while I would support drug legalisation, I have always seen the notion of ‘evidence based policy’ as rather silly. Of course one can talk about ‘evidence backed policy. One might suggest that where the government wishes to achieve particular aims they might look to evidence to see if those aims should be achieved. But the idea that policy can be ‘based’ on evidence – especially in the way this idea has been articulated regarding the drugs debate – goes a step further. It suggests that we approach the science and the empirical data as though it were a magic 8 ball that can give us a yes/no on the case for legalising certain drugs. Quite simply, you cannot get an ought from an is.

Those who, like me, support drug liberalisation, but who have jumped on the ‘evidence based’ bandwagon would do well to ask themseles a coupe of questions.
A) When I first decided weed should be legal, had I studiously considered the empirical evidence?
B) If data did demonstrate a substantial health risk would I switch my support to criminalisation?

In my case the answer would be no to both. And this is because I support liberalisation on grounds of personal Liberty. Central to the question of drug legalisation is the role that the state, and the role of criminal law within society. To pretend – now that the evidence is on our side – that legalisation is simply a matter of good science, is a cowardly flight from politics.

I love it when people comment here. Not least if they are oppositional. Yet today a commenter by the name of David Raynes seized my attention. He had not taken kindly to the post below by my fellow Third Estater Salman and, amongst other things, his attitude to the legality of cannabis. In fact he accused Salman of ‘irresponsible journalism’ and told us remarkably that ‘anything we do or say that affects the drug using culture will aggravate the problem’. Assuming that this is THE David Raynes – and one cannot be sure on the internet – he is not an insignificant fellow. In fact he has articles on BBC news and in the Guardian pushing a hard line on drugs prevention, and is apparently on the International Task Force on Strategic Drug Policy and executive councillor to the National Drug Prevention Alliance.

I decided to take a look at the NDPA website, expecting to find some kind of slick quango. In fact it appears to be a rather cranky website run by… cranks. It tells that as an organisation it ‘supports laws and justice systems which reinforce drug free and wholly healthy lifestyles’. Most amusing is its coverage of cannabis. Weed, it tells us, can cause boys to ‘become more feminine.’ Meanwhile it explains that “Even on one or two joints a month, a cannabis personality develops. Users become inflexible, can’t plan their days properly, cant take criticisma and feel misunderstood. Trying to talk sense to them becomes a futile exercise.”

All this would be rather laughable if they and their spokespeople were not being quoted by the likes of the Guardian and the BBC as though they had something serious and worthwhile to contribute to the drugs debate.

“The spice extends life, the spice expands consciousness, the spice is vital to space travel.” At least that’s according to Virginia Madsen in the opening monologue of David Lynch’s cult classic, Dune. In reality, Spice does not extend life, it does not expand consciousness and, unless NASA has come up with some new propulsion technology they’ve yet to divulge, it is not vital to space travel. Spice just gets you high. A mixture of herbs and chemicals sealed in a space-age bag, it is sold in head shops and on the internet as a legal alternative to cannabis. Now I have to admit, until a few hours ago, I had never heard of Spice. It could have been a made up drug. Like cake. But with the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs today calling for the concoction to be banned, Spice has been all over the news.

It could be that Professor David Nutt, chairman of the advisory council, had some bad acid at Woodstock. Or it could just be that he’s a confused individual. The same man who earlier this year said ecstasy is “no more dangerous than horse riding”, today recommended banning Spice on the grounds that it can cause “paranoia and panic attacks.” Much like alcohol can cause vomiting, embarrassingly over-affectionate behaviour, singing at unreasonable volumes and the odd knifing outside a pub. Indeed it was Nutt himself who, only in 2006, posed the question that teeth-grinding ravers have been asking themselves for decades: “Why is ecstasy illegal when alcohol, a considerably more harmful drug, is not?” Sound reasoning, but a confusing message.

The government has flip-flopped on the issue of drugs over the last few years, knocking cannabis one letter down the alphabet, then upgrading it again when they realised it might send a few kids crazy. The message, however, from governments around the world, ever since the US spearheaded a campaign of hysteria best demonstrated by the film Reefer Madness, has always been consistent. Drugs are bad. Professor Nutt’s approach to the legality of recreational substances, be they smoked, sniffed, snorted, swallowed or injected into the eyeballs, is actually refreshingly nuanced. What’s confusing about his latest soundbites, however, is that he actually thinks banning Spice might help.

There is no doubt that, like alcohol and tobacco, illegal drugs have side-effects. From being unable to get a stiffy to becoming a stiff, they range from the mildly irritating to the genuinely dangerous. Banning drugs, however, has never proved a successful deterrent. Gordon Brown’s justification for the reclassification of cannabis this year was not just that the new stronger strains could cause mental health problems, but that it was a “gateway drug”.

Cannabis is a gateway drug. It’s not a gateway drug because kids taking their first toke behind the bike sheds immediately feel like racking up a line of coke, anymore than someone drinking their first pint wants to nip to the toilets for a wee and a fix of heroin. Its potential as a gateway drug arises because dealers selling cannabis will often sell harder drugs. And if they don’t sell harder drugs, chances are they know someone who does. It is precisely cannabis’s illegal status that opens a gateway for users to this black market and provides access to drugs they might not otherwise encounter. Needless to say, if cannabis were legal, if it were sold in shops, taxed, regulated by the government and removed from the streets, parks and schoolyards, the gates would be much easier to close.

The war on drugs, like the war on terror, is unwinnable. Decades of paying corrupt and bankrupt governments in Latin America to destroy coca plantations upon which the livelihoods of some of the poorest depend, of boarding boats and border checks, of funding the Taliban and locking up teenagers for committing the victimless crime of recreation, have failed to make a dent on supply or demand. Banning a substance will not prevent its use. If there’s a market for it, it will be bought and sold, whether the government permits it or not. As it stands, the main market for Spice, which has similar effects to cannabis but is more expensive, is people who are willing to pay a little bit more for their fun to avoid breaking the law. It is possible that banning it will reduce its use. But only because, with its main selling point removed, people will choose to smoke cannabis instead.

The answer to the most harmful effects of drugs, then, cannot be in prevention. It has to be in cure. Only through legalisation, regulation, and legitimate licensed sale, can the majority of drugs be made safe. If one accepts that people will smoke cannabis or take ecstasy regardless of the law – and they will – then surely it is preferable for those users to know the strength of the weed they’re puffing or exactly what’s in the pill they’re popping. The argument that legalising it will increase its use falls flat when one looks at the Dutch example. Amsterdam’s famous coffeeshops are packed with foreign tourists, but less than 3% of Dutch people over the age of 11 smoke weed themselves. Compare that to just under 30% of Britons aged 16-24 and 14% aged 25-34 who smoked it in the last year alone.

That does not mean that we should make highly addictive substances, like heroin and crack cocaine, that have the potential to destroy communities, freely available. But there is no sense in turning users into criminals, pushing them under the radar, beyond the pale and beyond help. Portugal’s move to decriminalise drugs in an effort to manage the problem is the perfect example of the way to approach the issue. The British government’s hysteria was a bad trip from the start and Professor Nutt’s call today to make Spice illegal is another misguided step on a road that’s going nowhere. Spice might not extend life, expand consciousness or facilitate space travel, but it gets you high. Unlike Spice, banning it will have very little effect.