It’s a week since the publication of Tony Sewell’s report on racial inequality and the debate is still raging. The idea of Britain being a decent place for ethnic minorities to live in has proved so controversial that no one has really picked up on one of its most striking recommendations: to refer those caught with small amounts of cannabis to treatment centres rather than to criminalise them. Laws on class B drugs account for almost half of prosecutions of ethnic minorities, as well as accounting for most stop-and-searches. A change in approach, the report concluded, could have a beneficial effect.
The government won’t go down this route, though. I am told the prime minister has “no interest in the decriminalisation agenda”. Priti Patel, the home secretary, is equally hardline. But abroad, the mood is changing. Canada legalised cannabis three years ago. Some 16 American states have done the same (including New York last Wednesday), and the Democratic majority in the US senate is expected to bring forward a bill this month to decriminalise it nationwide. Mexico’s senate is about to approve similar legalisation there.
Public opinion is moving and Britain is not exempt. A YouGov poll this week found majority support for cannabis legalisation. Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, pledged to set up a commission to look at the decriminalisation of cannabis if re-elected next month. But those who have known Boris Johnson for years are adamant he won’t be swayed. One friend recalls how, when The Daily Telegraph backed legalisation of cannabis on libertarian grounds, Johnson, its star columnist, was “resistant to the idea”.
At first this seems surprising. Johnson is a liberal by instinct: his brand of Merry England conservatism is one you could imagine being extended to marijuana.
He confesses to having smoked dope as a youngster. But far from being a liberal on the matter, he is greatly exercised about the damage drugs do. One former City Hall colleague says “he has a particular conviction that drugs lie behind not just crime but a host of social problems”.
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His strategy is to disrupt the supply of drugs and to push down the demand for them. As one government figure puts it: “Suppressing demand is the key to success.” The police have had some success against the dealers. About a quarter of so-called county lines, the networks by which drugs are spread from big cities to small towns, have been closed down. At the same time efforts are being made to reduce demand through better provision of treatment for addicts, particularly ex-offenders.
There is also talk in Whitehall of a communications campaign to deter drug use. One of those involved tells me that “those people who are taking coke at dinner parties don’t connect that with the bloodshed on the streets”. The Times reported last month on a series of adverts planned to stigmatise middle-class drug use. Such an approach comes with political risks. It will invite questions about ministers’ past use of drugs. When Ann Widdecombe, the then shadow home secretary, announced a zero-tolerance policy for cannabis in 2000, eight of her Tory frontbench colleagues confessed to having used the drug in their youth. David Cameron’s bid for the Conservative leadership in 2005 was almost derailed by the question of whether he had taken drugs and Michael Gove stumbled at the start of the 2019 contest when he had to admit to having taken cocaine.
One of the strongest arguments against legalisation is that its track record is decidedly mixed. When Canada became the first leading economy to legalise in 2018, it was predicted there would be a “green rush” — a cannabis-inspired economic boom. That has not materialised. Nor has legalisation destroyed the illegal market, as many of its proponents claimed it would. In the first year after the law change, fewer than a third of Canadian cannabis smokers obtained all of their supplies legally. Sales of legal cannabis in Canada have more than doubled in the past two years but the legal industry is still having to cut prices to compete with the illegal one.
One of the arguments for legalisation, as opposed to decriminalisation, has been the tax revenues it would generate. The tax base of western economies like Britain has been eroding in recent years. People are drinking and smoking less, and the internet is making it harder to tax: a 100-room hotel is far easier to tax than 100 rooms on AirBnB. One of the things that got cannabis legalisation over the line in New York was the hole left in the state’s finances by the Covid crisis.
A sophisticated black market, though, makes it difficult for legal drugs to compete. New York originally intended to tax cannabis sales at 20 per cent but concern that this would make the legal market uncompetitive led to the rate being cut to 13 per cent.
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In California, the attorney-general is coming under pressure from the legal marijuana industry to take a more aggressive approach to the illicit one, which is still two to three times bigger. Yet a return to vigorous law enforcement risks reviving tensions between the authorities and younger people that legalisation was meant to end. Without that, though, it is hard to see how the legal industry can rout an illicit one that is selling drugs at half the price. If cannabis legalisation can’t kill off the illegal market, then one of the strongest arguments for it falls away.
Last year, California raised $1 billion from cannabis taxes, an increase of more than a third from the year before. But this money must be seen in the context of a state budget of more than $200 billion. In American states that have legalised the drug for recreational use, cannabis taxes make up less than two per cent of tax revenues. So, while legalisation might provide a boost to government coffers it’s likely to be marginal. It becomes hard to argue that the extra money is worth the health problems associated with its use.
If there is to be a shift in drug policy in Britain, it will only come after a country or state has demonstrated how legalisation can both crush the illegal market, breaking the link between drugs and crime, and raise significant tax revenue. The early signs are that it may prove impossible to do both. In which case, expect our status quo on drugs to remain as the least worst option.
James Forsyth is political editor of The Spectator