Given that we are supposed to be in the grip of a libertarian cabal, the Government is giving awfully mixed signals when it comes to that vital frontier of personal freedom: lifestyle.
On the one hand, Liz Truss seems to be walking back the latest diet campaign and there is chatter about repealing the sugar tax. There are also promising reports that might can the next anti-smoking crusade – although she should go further, scrapping plan packaging and capitalising on Brexit to lift the ban on menthols (and my beloved kreteks).
Yet on the other, we have Suella Braverman calling for weed to be uprated to a Class A drug, following calls for the same from a group of Conservative PCCs at last week’s conference in Birmingham.
In fairness to the Government, Downing Street has reportedly rejected the idea. But it’s worth reiterating why what the Metro calls “giving cannabis same legal class as heroin, cocaine and pills” would be such a bad idea.
There is, of course, a principled libertarian case against any move to increase the legal penalties for weed use. But anybody interested in those arguments knows them back to front already.
In fact, simply making marijuana Class A would be a mistake even if a) you accept that controlling such substances is good and b) that fresh evidence suggests it is more dangerous that it was in the past. At least, it is if you believe in the underlying logic of the drug classification system.
As I have argued before, Class A is already pretty much a nonsense category. No rational system for classifying controlled substances, either by harm to the user or the broader social ills caused by the supply chain, would put heroin, cocaine, and ecstasy in the same tier.
Just about the only thing lending Class A a shred of credibility is the fact that weed isn’t in it; indeed, a lot of people seem to mentally separate ‘weed’ from ‘drugs’. This is a big achievement for the legalisation movement, of course, and bad news if you want to reduce consumption. But it is good news if your goal is to avoid marijuana becoming a ‘gateway drug’ to other substances.
Were the Home Secretary and her PPC allies to get their way, it wouldn’t make weed any scarier or less accessible. But all of a sudden MDMA and coke would no longer be class apart. If you’re smoking a joint, as far as the law is concerned you might as well do a line or pop a pill. Is that really what Braverman wants to achieve?
Perhaps there is an evidence-based case for overhauling the current classifications. But evidence has to cut in both directions. Are the same people who want to uprate weed prepared to downrate ecstasy, which the then-head of the government drug advisory body once rightly described as no more dangerous than horse-riding?
In a sensible category system, Class A would contain crack, heroin, and whatever else belongs in the basket of really scary drugs we absolutely don’t want people using, and would then scale downwards in some evidence-backed fashion, whether that be based on health risks, social costs, or whatever else.
Merely putting weed in the same category as heroin, on the other hand, would make a joke of the whole thing.