Policy Fight Club - Drugs: Time to Legalise? | 17.05.2011

Policy Exchange's inaugural Fight Club debate was a roaring success, with both sides putting their cases passionately to the audience and the audience in turn extensively probing each of the speakers.
In the red corner, Professor Sir Ian Gilmore suggested that we treat addiction as a health rather than a crime problem. He stressed that drugs themselves were not the problem per se, but the issues that arise as a result of their criminality e.g. having to use dirty needles. Bob Ainsworth stated that his time as a Home Office minister convinced him that the approach we have been following for the past 40 years has failed and that we need to look at how to reduce the level of damage illegal drugs use does. He called for a pragmatic approach based around harm reduction. Finally Tom Lloyd called for control and regulation of drugs by responsible people, in contrast to being in the hands of criminals under current prohibition policy.
In the blue corner, Dr Hans-Christian Raabe pointed to the "public health disasters" of having legally available alcohol and tobacco, arguing that we should learn from that approach in choosing whether or not to legalise drugs. Peter Hitchens condemned the current approach for the tiny proportion of cases of drug possession that ever ended up in court and argued that such an approach to enforcing drug laws meant that a war on drugs does not in actual fact exist.
The opinion of those in the room was pretty one-sided, with 60-70% proclaiming themselves to be pro-legalisation at the start of the event. By the end of the event a few of the already rare pro-criminalisation supporters had crossed the floor, leaving the debate a firm victory for the legalisation side.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• policy exchange
• policy fight club
• drugs
• illegal drugs
• legalization
• legalisation
• prohibition
• war on drugs
• drug war
• criminalisation
• criminalization
• ian gilmore
• bob ainsworth
• tom lloyd
• hans-christian raabe
• peter hitchens