Causes madness: to legislatorsA report released today by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee goes to quite some fervent length to describe the current drug laws as arbitrary, non-scientific, pointless and ineffective.

It's nothing the esteemed Poorhouse readers probably didn't already know, but it's always nice to see it written down. Especially by a committee of MPs - the very people that keep these stupid laws in action against all evidence and common sense. The question on our lips is of course, following this period of sane analysis, are they going to change them?

The report paints a quite terrifying picture of the Government's only expert advisors on drugs (the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs) being entirely chaotic, acting inappropriately and giving politically tainted advice. The people involved in the committee often don't seem to appreciate either the purpose they are there to serve, or indeed the entire point of the existence of the committee. This leads to great confusion, ineffective and incorrect choices of activities and a worrying level of complacency for a supposedly "independent" body.

Furthermore, the laws they do advise on simply don't work. The laws are supposedly in place to stop people using certain drugs. Any UK citizen can probably see the total failure of that goal just by walking down the street. They might also be pleased to learn that despite the immense health, financial and social cost of implementing the current drug laws, there is essentially no evidence they even have an effect. To quote the report:

"We have found no solid evidence to support the existence of a deterrent effect, despite the fact that it appears to underpin the Government’s policy on classification."

UK citizens, and anyone else with a concern for others, should be appalled that this system has been left in place for over thirty years and is continuing strongly today.

Furthermore there is great inconsistency and randomness within the innards of the classifications. In the UK, illegal drugs are classified as either A, B or C due supposedly to their harmfulness. Whether this is harm to the user, society at large, or both is something unspecified, and even the Government and the ACMD can't agree amongst themselves. In either case, it is downright false.

As an example, recently the law was "clarified" (i.e. effectively changed, but without due process) by the determination that certain (not the most toxic) magic mushrooms should be placed in class A. This is the most harmful category, so they now feature alongside such supposed horrors as crack and heroin. Noone, anywhere, appears to have a clue why this would be. Paul Flynn MP put it extremely politely, saying "The policy appears to have been driven by something other than evidence". National statistics suggest that there has been one solitary death from magic mushrooms in eight years as opposed to around 6000 for say heroin. There is evidence to suggest that not only are more people's lives being ruined by the addition of a criminal record and potentially 7 years in prison for simply happening to have a mushroom in their pocket, but people are moving onto legal alternatives, including more toxically dangerous mushrooms. The drugs laws are again causing unnecessary harm in many spheres.

For anyone interested in the Chairman of the ACMD's expert opinion on why on earth mushrooms should be in the most dangerous and highly penalised category, they are as follows:

"I have no idea what was going through the minds of the group who put it in Class A in 1970 and 1971....It is there because it is there".

So be reassured if you happen to suffer the legal consequences - you're in prison because you are there.

It goes on to give evidence that alcohol and tobacco would, on the merits of the claimed yardstick of "harm", should be classed amongst the illegal drugs under somewhere around class B. But they're not - and we don't really have an explanation as to why, not least given that they cause "approximately 40 times the total number of deaths from all illegal drugs combined" according to one set of evidence given to the Committee.

The Committee's recommendations then? In summary, severely shake up the ACMD so it knows what it is doing and ensure it does it in a fair unbiased and effect way. Review the classification systems that forms our drug laws urgently so they make some kind of sense. In their words again:

"A more scientifically based scale of harm would have greater credibility than the current system where the placing of drugs in particular categories is ultimately a political decision."

They suggest a "decoupling" of scales, such that you have one scale that tells you the relative harms of drugs (including alcohol and tobacco) and an entirely different one that tells you how long you will get put in jail for for using them. In alcohol and tobacco's case, despite their high position on the harm scale, this would be never.

Whilst the Poorhouse is delighted to see (yet more) official recognition that currently the drug law punishments are arbitrary, unscientific and unfair, it is hard to see how the second scale would be constructed. If the punishment is not related to the harmfulness of the drug use, then what should it be related to? It sounds entirely like a workaround for the fact that politicians are too timid to either give drugs a sensible legal and highly regulated status in a way designed to reduce harm caused to the user and society by their use (which could well include some deterrence based campaigns), or start imprisoning users of two of the most harmful drugs; alcohol and tobacco.

If policy is to be based on evidence, then why the need for the workaround?

As a final note, something highly relevant that the report does not really touch upon is the fact that different laws can in themselves make drugs safer or more dangerous to use. For instance, the legal insistence that supplies of alcohol come from licensed retailers and are labelled with information regarding their alcohol content lets users at least know the contents of the bottle and make an informed choice of how much to use. However, an illegal drug such as cannabis is - due solely to the law of the land - forced onto the black market where no safety or quality control checks can be done. No labelling is to be found, so anyone choosing to use cannabis may receive a lungful of weakly concentrated intoxicants, a mega blast of mind-blowing "skunk" or indeed a cannabis-free brown lump filled with boot polish. This is clear harm maximisation.

Any rating of the drug harm must include the legislative factor above; and - to state the obvious (or is it?) - drug laws should be formed with the purpose of minimising any harm a drug might cause to both to a prospective user and to those around them.