Summary:
Counter-narcotics efforts have failed to reduce demand for illicit drugs over several decades and come at great cost to the public, both in the expense of policing and prisons as well as the social impact of crime and punishment associated with the trade. It is time for an alternative approach, inspired by the Covid testing regime, where the focus shifts to identifying and fining drug takers, not dealers.
Policy:
While many people have called for the decriminalisation or legalisation of some narcotics, few countries have done this and, those that have, have only legalised the lower classed drugs. The UK government continues to criminalise narcotics and the annual costs, both social and financial, remain high, with minimal impact achieved in terms of ending the trade.
I therefore propose an alternative approach to combatting the illegal narcotics trade, inspired by the response to Covid 19: testing.
Instead of going after drug dealers and drug smugglers with expensive police operations, followed by expensive prosecutions and expensive prison sentences, target users instead, fining those who test positive for drugs.
The system would be similar in some ways to the current approach to speeding; if motorists are caught speeding, they get points on their license or pay a fine, and if it happens multiple times, they have to go on a speed awareness course.
With drugs, the police would deliver spot tests to people to see if they had drugs in their system, and which ones. If someone was found to have drugs in their system, they would receive an instant fine, which would start at, say, £250 for cannabis, or £1,000 for cocaine. Each time they tested positive, the fine would increase, and those who tested positive once would be subject to more frequent tests in future.
This idea combines both criminology and economic thinking.
From the criminology perspective, it makes the risk of getting caught much higher – testing would be widespread and targeted via analysis of most likely users. The timing would also be random, so people could not plan time off drugs in advance of a test.
From an economic perspective, it simply makes the drug habit more expensive. As drugs are costly anyway, at the start it may not make much difference, but as the fines increase it can start to make the habit too costly to continue. For those with so much wealth they don’t care, then at least the public purse gets some revenue from the fines, in effect an alternative form of VAT on illegal drug purchases.
Testing positive would not lead to a criminal record and would not be shared with anyone else, it would solely lead to a fine; lives shouldn’t be ruined by taking drugs, the aim of this proposal is to disincentivise the user, not to criminalise them, while at the same time therefore decreasing the social as well as financial cost of illegal narcotics policing.
The major challenge to implementation would be how to administer the tests, from both a legal and human rights point of view, but such problems are not insurmountable; for example, companies and universities could state in their contracts that they would only accept staff and students who agreed to be tested at random as part of this scheme.
Also, anyone in possession of a driving license could be made subject to the random testing programme; we mandate MOTs for cars, we have speed cameras on roads, and people can be stopped and searched, and stopped and breathalysed, so introducing a drugs test seems a natural additional test.
Some of the widespread Covid testing facilities currently in use should be able to be adapted to deliver the tests; that would provide an enduring role and enduring funding for those labs, to ensure we maintain testing capacity, which can quickly be adapted to whatever virus, bacteria or other disease emerges in future outbreaks.
A big advantage with drugs is that they stay in the system for days or months after they have been taken, leaving an evidence trail that testing can pick up. So, rather than having to find people in possession as the police currently do, police would have a much longer window to identify illegal users and fine them.
The revenue received from fines would go back into the police budget and into funding rehabilitation programmes for serious drug addicts. By shifting away from a focus on policing and imprisoning dealers and instead leveraging more levers on consumers to shift behaviour, demand for drugs, the costs of counter-narcotics to the public purse, and the social impact of narcotics should all decrease, providing wider benefits for society.
Any rational person has to admit that the ‘war on drugs’ is not really working, so it is time that we tried an alternative. This proposal is a chance for the state to save money on policing and raise revenue from drug fines, all the while helping to reduce drug use among the population without legalising the trade.
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