Beginners guide to politics: Drug legalisation, a joint effort

The Yorker politics team knows that university is filled with a lot of opinionated people.

So many in fact that those less interested in the political world can find yourselves stuck in a pub in a heated discussion amongst your friends wishing you’d paid more attention in those “citizenship” classes. As they spiel out phrases such as “Marxism”, “full employment” and “neo-liberalist structures” you’re struggling to keep up.

But fear not, The Yorker’s Rosie Hazell presents a (somewhat whimsical) guide to Politics, so you have the basic facts at your disposal to hold your own with that flag-waving hippie who keeps visiting your kitchen…

Baroness Manningham Buller. It’s not the sort of name you’d associate with someone at the forefront of a drug-legalisation campaign.

However this ex-MI5 chief has been calling for the legalisation of cannabis. She believes that regulation is the only way to control the psychotic effects of drugs, not because she wants it to be easier to light up a spliff on the weekend. Well at least I assume not.

Legalisation would ensure that weed, cannabis, marijuana, pot or whatever else the kids are calling it nowadays doesn’t include components most dangerous to mental health. Christian Guy, the policy director of the centre for Social Justice has retorted, however, saying that “what I am concerned about is the idea that we should stop fighting it and wave the white flag to these criminal gangs.”

Yet it seems to me that drug legalisation would solve the problem of criminal gangs rather than ‘wave the white flag’ to them; criminal gangs are usually built around drug-dealing and with drug-legalisation people will rely so much less on drug dealers. By legalising drugs you take them out of the hands of criminals and into the hands of the law. This has been seen in countries such as Holland, Portugal and Belgium, where relaxed laws have actually improved public health, rather than worsened it.

Baroness Manningham Buller (and I) seem to have a large celebrity following also supporting drug legalisation- Dame Judi Dench, Sting and Sir Richard Branson have all shown support for drug-legalisation. Similarly, and more interestingly, numerous former politicians have shown support for this, including former Swiss president Ruth Dreifuss, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson and former UN secretary general Kofi Annan.

Yet, very few current politicians admit to supporting it. David Cameron famously told Jonathan Ross that he did not believe the problems with drug-misuse could be solved by legalisation. And whilst Nick Clegg supported a motion in favour of drug legalisation while working as a Member of the European Parliament in 2002, he has been decidedly silent on the topic in government.

Is this combined silence on this issue a huge coincidence? Or is there some kind of gagging order against talking about drug legalisation whilst in government? Would the public really be that offended if a politician suggested the legalisation of marijuana might not be such a bad idea? And even if it did mean they were slightly less popular, is it not worth it for saying what you believe and not just what you’re ‘supposed’ to believe?

The reason for this silence is likely down to the influence of what is known as the ‘grey vote’. Politicians are absolutely terrified of old people. Why? Because the vote in huge numbers. At the last General Election, over 75% of people aged over 65 voted, whereas less than half of people aged 18-24 voted. Old people, by in large, do not support drug decriminalisation and in turn are (mostly) absolutely terrified by drugs. Any politician wanting to win an election has to make the elderly happy, so don’t expect to be able to smoke pot in front of a policeman any time soon.

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