Another day on Twitter, another new insane frontier of discourse. You’ve heard of the importance of referring to ladies of the evening as “sex workers”, but did you know that *handclap emoji* drug *handclap emoji* work *handclap emoji* is *handclap emoji* work *handclap emoji*? Shocked? Confused? Welcome to the stage self-described “rave mom” and drug legalisation advocate Hilary Agro:

This kind of violent rhetoric against drug workers is abhorrent.

Most fentanyl sellers are people who use it as well, and they are trying to survive under the same destructive, racist system that replaced opium with morphine, then heroin, then fentanyl: the War on Drugs pic.twitter.com/NJ3rOe0v5S

— Hilary Agro 🍄 (@hilaryagro) April 10, 2023

It’s another silly day on a silly website, but it’s endemic of a liberal worldview that is deathly allergic to the idea of moral responsibility (except of course for those in authority, who are to be blamed for everything).

Drug legalisation is a generally well argued and presented movement, with a set of rhetorical hammer and tongs where anyone not moved by calls for compassion towards the poor helpless druggies, is wallopped with the mallet of “we’re just following the evidence and doing what works”. With your head ringing and your heart strings firmly yanked, it’s easy to stumble into their camp without quite noticing the lack of coherence. Are we legalising drugs because, yes, they’re terrible, but sadly prohibition doesn’t work so we have to make the best of it? Are we legalising drugs because putting people into prison is mean? Are we legalising drugs because they’re fun and who are you to judge anyway? Which is it?

I have no issue with hard questions being asked of drug policy, and there is clearly a strong case to be made that our drug-filled prisons are not helping troubled addicts get clean. But we are not properly scrutinising those advocating for legalisation, who frequently take advantage of this fact to quietly advance very radical and unpopular agendas.

One argument often made is that we regulate many powerful drugs used in medicine without resorting to making them illegal. It’s a good point. There’s a strong case for drugs like cannabis being used to treat pain and other symptoms rather than powerful and addictive opioids. A big part of how legal medicine is regulated is that trading it on the street is illegal, however. A decent subset of “illegal drugs” (like fentanyl and meth) are entirely legal drugs when prescribed by a doctor to a sick patient. That’s not the situation that legalisers are actually advocating for. Rather, as we have seen in many US states, “medical marijuana” is simply a way of cracking open the door to widespread drug use, with US states wishing to legalise it using the medical label as a way to authorise widespread sale and use.

Another argument is that, sadly, prohibition can’t work. Yet, many Asian democracies like South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan manage to have relatively low levels of drug abuse, whilst operating a harsher regime of prohibition than we do. At this stage in the argument (if you’ve managed to keep track of which tack they’re trying from moment to moment), they’ll switch from bailey to motte, abandon all talk of evidence-based policy, and tell you that the lack of drugs in these societies stems from deep cultural differences.

Here, if we keep our wits about us, we can rip aside another veil. In trying to railroad us towards their desired objective, drug legalisers pretend there’s only one option, when in fact there are many, just with different costs attached to them. What they wish to obscure is that prohibition is possible, but that there are trade offs they don’t want to make.

Countries like Japan are able to maintain low rates of drug abuse because they have harsh sentences for dealing as well as possession, because police vigorously enforce these laws, and because Japanese authorities encourage stigma towards drug users. Prohibition doesn’t “work” in the West because most drug users do not face criminal consequences, because our police do not enforce those laws that we do have, and because we do not stigmatise drug use sufficiently. London stinks of cannabis, music festivals have drug testing centres, drug paraphernalia and legal cannabis products are openly traded on the high street. We do not live under drug prohibition. The widespread drug abuse we see is the product of de facto if not de jure decriminalisation and legalisation.

The reason activists obscure rather than celebrate the fact we are halfway to legalisation, and seek to label the success of true prohibition as “cultural”, is that they know that the general public — if honestly presented with the trade offs involved — would embrace the Asian model with wild enthusiasm. It’s nice liberal upper middle class people who like getting a bit high at music festivals, or experimenting with drugs at university, or want their children to be able to do these things without criminal sanction, who are really against prohibition — not the working class communities who suffer the worst effects. Class is very much the point here. Returning to Twitter’s main character for the day, Hilary Agro:

Her video shows a good command of the arguments and gets her points across fluently. Pay special attention to something she says early on, though: “under the right conditions of poverty and trauma, certain drugs can be very addictive. But under different conditions, when a person has financial stability, community and meaning in their lives, even the ‘scary’ drugs can be used with no adverse consequences.” This isn’t exactly true of course, as plenty of people with all the “right” circumstances have some genetic or psychological propensity to reckless self-destruction, especially when handed dangerous drugs. Still, she’s actually broadly right: drugs are much less lethal to middle class users. This is exactly what’s behind the differential views of middle class progressives versus the bulk of the electorate, who are largely working or lower middle class.

For parts of the country where jobs have run dry, community spirit has flagged and the search for meaning is a desperate struggle — decaying seaside towns and mining villages, neglected council estates, and communities of all sorts where globalisation has cut them out of prosperity — drugs are not only potentially lethal to the body, but deadly to the spirit. In contrast, the danger of drugs feels manageable to already privileged people with both economic and social capital. Only the uncontrollable externalities of law enforcement and poisonous products present a real threat, so legalisation seems obvious.

For those living in poverty, drugs claim lives, not just through the tragedy of overdose but far more cruelly: personalities disappearing by degrees, cruelty and despair amplified by addiction. Take the almost unreadably horrific story of Finley Boden (a warning to the reader here, the details are incredibly disturbing). His parents were severely addicted to cannabis, a drug regularly presented as harmless and innocuous by those like Hilary Agro. Social workers were aware of his parents’ drug problems even before he was born, and he was taken immediately into care following his birth.

Despite their ongoing addiction, the baby was returned to the couple. He remained with them even though social workers observed their violent behaviour and continued use of cannabis, even witnessing the mother buying drugs. At no point were they investigated or prosecuted by the police for using an illegal drug in the presence of social workers and their infant child. Two days after social workers visited the couple’s home, Finley was dead. A subsequent investigation revealed that he had been beaten and fatally tortured by his parents.

When drugs are legalised, the most vulnerable pay the price

A 2020 study reflects a growing body of research demonstrating the link between cannabis (often framed as a “soft” drug) and violence. According to the paper, violence is generally linked to “marijuana induced paranoia (exaggerated, unfounded distrust) and marijuana induced psychosis (radical personality change, loss of contact with reality)”. Even those sympathetic to legalisation cannot dispute the powerful correlation between cannabis and violence; they have been forced to fall back on claims that cannabis follows rather than causes violence. There is widespread evidence that those informally using cannabis to treat underlying mental illnesses ultimately worsen their conditions, with the 2020 case study noting that “the consumption of marijuana is associated with an increase in violent behaviour over the course of an individual’s lifespan, a high risk of psychosis for frequent users, an increase of cardiovascular diseases, and deterioration in health for individuals who have pre-existing mental health issues such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, social anxiety, and depression” and that in cases of self-medication “it ended up worsening their conditions as time went by”.

What aspect of legalisation, precisely, would help poor, mentally ill, and violent cannabis users? What aspect of it would have prevented the tragedy of baby Finley? Social workers were in large part empowered to remove the child because cannabis is illegal. Certainly it would be welcome if drug users like Finley’s parents had more access to rehab and psychological help, but if drugs like cannabis were legal, how would they be induced to seek it?

The truth is that when drugs are legalised or decriminalised, it is the most vulnerable who pay the price. Legalisers emphasise the risk of overdose, but hand-wave the far greater dangers of anti-social behaviour, violence, and the harms of long-term use. There is no serious reason to think that any of these negatives would improve under legalisation, but there is every reason to think they would get worse. Not only that, when drugs are legal, social workers and the authorities lose leverage to force people to get help. As with so many libertarian causes, it is not (as it presents itself) the cause of the weak, but a campaign on behalf of the pleasures of the powerful.