Keeping up with the designers

Libertarian types, being interested in preserving people's right to do themselves harm in any innovative way possible, seem to have a problem with governments making new designer drugs illegal, such as the recent fate of the "legal high" cannabis substitute Kronic. (Well, correct me if I wrong, libertarian inclined readers.) Never mind that no one knows quite what they are getting when they buy this product, and that we get statements from people who know such as this:

Professor Jon Currie, who directs the Department of Addiction Medicine at Melbourne's St Vincent's Hospital, says he is now seeing one or two cases each week in emergency from people seeking help because of Kronic.

Presumably, libertarian types think it reasonable that food manufacturers have to list ingredients and thereby warn of possible side effects, particularly for those unfortunate enough to have peanut allergies. If so, I wonder what grounds they use to justify a legal recreational drug manufacturer being able to sell its mystery ingredient product that seemingly has a good chance of sending a fair few of its users to the emergency department of the hospital.

The other argument I am guessing they would run against banning is to argue for legalisation for all recreational drugs that it is a substitute for, and then the market for Kronic would fall apart anyway. However, given that I have read somewhere that Kronic and its ilk are popular with outback miners, one has to bear in mind that there is a significant group of employers who have legitimate reason not to have their employees doing things like turn up for work to drive their (I'm guessing) 30 tonne trucks while still having last night's THC at high levels in their bloodstream. In other words, there is reason to suspect that there would still be a market for a legal alternative to cannabis, at least for one which would not test positive for cannabinoids.

Anyway, this is all a bit of a preamble to an interesting short article at Nature by a UK forensic scientist arguing that other designer drugs - ones related to amphetamines - also deserve legal banning, simply because they are too dangerous.

He acknowledges that this is not without complications. As he notes, making a drug illegal often makes it more dangerous, because illegal drug manufacturers tend not to worry too much about quality control (to put it mildly.)

Of course, you could argue that the market for new dangerous drugs eventually sorts itself out. If enough users end up in hospital, eventually it will become unpopular within the drug taking community anyway. But do we really want such Darwinian free market methods be the guide for such matters? Certainly, the parents or other close relatives of victims of a new drug would find it hard to accept, unless they are libertarian purists.

What bothers me most about libertarian arguments along these lines (including their attitude to tobacco) is not so much their defence of people to self harm, but that they blithely also condone the effective exploitation of such people by manufacturers of dangerous products for profit. This is particularly objectionable when the product carries a high degree of addictivity, such as tobacco, and is one that is known to be particularly attractive to teenagers, who tend not to have the best developed set of skills for anything, let along starting addictions.

I mean, if the argument was only ever about, say, the wisdom of making illegal the consumption of a magic mushroom that everyone could pick out of their garden, then this aspect of the libertarian argument would not be such an issue. You could say the same about the right of people to grown their own marijuana, I suppose. Yet I bet that in those places that do have very relaxed attitudes to small amount of cultivation for personal use, the illegal trade of larger quantities does not magically fall away.

So the argument about relaxing drug laws is never simply about what people want to do for themselves; it's about the broader questions of how it affects society overall, including safety at work, on the roads and economic productivity generally, and how do you treat the manufacturers of dangerous compounds who are happy to take money with no regard for the health consequences of consuming their product.*


* What about alcohol, I hear you say. Well, it certainly has no parallel with Kronic manufacturers: you know exactly what you are getting and at what strength when you buy any legally sold alcohol. Alcohol is tightly regulated, and governments do discourage its overuse. But you always have the argument that is a product capable of safe consumption. Yes, so is cannabis for most people, I know; yet the evidence of the danger it does represent even for moderate use at some strengths, particularly for young users, continues to accumulate.