Johann Hari

I'm a bit ill at the moment - don't drink the Venezuelan water, folks! - so I'm calling a (justified) sickie.

But wanted to post a few thoughts about drugs and alcohol:

This has been the summer of alcoholic discontent, when the British people finally woke up – with a dry mouth and thudding headache – to the fact we have a national problem with booze. From the teens with chirosis of the liver hurling their way into casualty to the vomitathons in every city centre on a Saturday night, it is hard to ignore the victims of alcohol in this country. So where are the prohibitionists? All you people who believe that cannabis, ecstasy and heroin should be driven underground with countless police hours, military operations and tax-pounds because they also cause terrible harm – why aren’t you calling for a ban on alcohol too?

The answer is obvious. Everybody knows that, although the problems caused by alcohol can be real and crippling, prohibition is even worse. When it was tried in the United States in the early twentieth century, few people stopped drinking. The only ‘achievement’ of the ban-the-demon-rum brigade was to hand a massive and profitable industry to armed gangsters, who proceeded to flood the country with guns, corrupt the police, and claim even more victims than alcohol itself.

Exactly the same truths apply to drug prohibition. We have not stopped people using drugs: since prohibition began to be violently enforced across the globe by Richard Nixon, drug use has increased by a factor of nearly fifty. All we have achieved is to hand a $500bn-a-year industry – and a whopping 8% of world trade – to armed gangs who are wreaking chaos across the globe.

Yet the prohibitionists use every new piece of (very real) evidence that cannabis, ecstasy and cocaine cause severe physical harm if over-used to claim that prohibition is right, right, right. The fact that they do not - they cannot - do the same with every piece of evidence about alcohol (just as harmful, just as life-destroying) shows the intellectual weakness of their case. Why? Because it is a tactic acknowledgement that, if harmful substances were not already banned, nobody would respond by introducing the massive, failing architecture of prohibition afresh.

So every time you are arguing with a drug prohibitionist, ask a simple question:

"Alcohol does horrific harm to people who use it habitually. Are you in favour of the prohibition of alcohol? If not, why?"

Every reason they will give in response - millions of people already use it, prohibition does more harm than good, alcohol can be used in moderation, there are many non-problematic drinkers - is also true of cannabis, ecstasy, coke and heroin.