The Green Light: How legalising and regulating cannabis will reduce crime, protect children and improve safety

A new paper by Daniel Pryor, a Research Economist and the Head of Programmes at the ASI, and Liz McCulloch, Director of Policy at the drug reform advocacy group Volteface, makes the case for legalising cannabis:

• Britain is falling behind the rest of the world on recreational cannabis legalisation. Canada, ten US states and Uruguay have already legalised the drug for recreational use. Other US states and countries are close to legalisation.

• Legalisation is supported by MPs and Police & Crime Commissioners from across parties, and a majority of the UK public. 

• The UK’s current approach to cannabis is generating misery, fuelling gang violence and increasing knife crime. It is now easier for children to get cannabis than alcohol, and most often dangerous skunk that dominates the illegal market. One-third of Brits have used the drug at some point in their life. Drug law enforcement depends on where you live and your ethnicity, undermining the rule of law.

• The evidence for legalisation is overwhelming. It would protect children, eliminate the criminal—and often violent—market, encourage safer cannabis consumption, and educate people about the effects of cannabis, leading to more informed choices. By contrast, decriminalisation would fail to tackle many of the harms associated with the prohibition of cannabis.

The ASI has developed a Six Point Plan for Cannabis Legalisation: 

1. Private enterprise: The free market should be responsible for cannabis production and retail to ensure providers are responsive to consumer-wants and to avoid shortages driving a persistent black market. Recreational cannabis could be sold in dedicated licensed stores, behind the counter by trained staff in pharmacies like Boots and mobile apps to compete with drug dealers.

2. Advertising and branding: Some forms of advertising and branded packaging should be allowed—as in many US states—in order to signal quality, consistency, and safety, giving legal products another advantage over the black market.

3. Consumption: Edibles and vaping cannabis products should also be allowed to help people move away from tobacco joints.

4. Taxation: The taxation of cannabis must be low enough to ensure the final product is as cheap as illicit cannabis, or risk continuation of the black market like in California. High potency cannabis (skunk) should be taxed more than lower potency varieties, encouraging consumers to switch to safer products. 

5. Education: Users should be presented with the latest evidence on the health effects of cannabis at point-of-sale - like in Canada.

6. Criminal justice: Those currently or previously involved in the illegal cannabis industry should have pathways to transfer in to the regulated, legal market. The Government should also expunge previous cannabis convictions, where appropriate, in order to limit the damage that criminal records cause to the life chances of low-risk offenders.

The Tide Effect

The people of California have just voted to legalise cannabis – a decision which will have immense repercussions both in America and around the world, while efforts are already underway in Canada to legally regulate the cannabis market. The Tide Effect argues strongly that the UK should follow suit, and that the legalisation of cannabis here is both overdue and imperative.

The eight main points outlined in The Tide Effect are:

1. The government strategy is based around three main pillars: reducing demand, restricting supply and building recovery. All three are failing.

2. Regulation is substantially more desirable than simple decriminalisation or unregulated legalisation, because only regulation addresses all four key issues: ensuring that the product meets acceptable standards of quality and purity; removing criminal gangs from the equation as far as possible; raising revenue for the Treasury through point-of-sale taxation; and best protecting public health.

3. The entire language used to address cannabis-related issues needs to change. Language poses a barrier every bit as formidable as legislation does. The opponents of legalisation have long been able to reinforce their position by using the words of public fear
   – ‘illegal,’ ‘criminal’, ‘dangerous’, and so on. Only by using the language of public health, consumer rights and harm reduction, the same language used about alcohol and tobacco, can we move towards regulation.

4. The scale of a legalised industry will be huge. The US market is estimated to be worth $25bn by the time of the next election in 2020. A similarly regulated UK market could be worth around £7bn per annum.

5. Legally regulating cannabis will allow long-term studies of its health effects not currently possible. The effects of both tobacco and alcohol are well understood because of the amount of scientific scrutiny brought to bear on them.

6. Many shifts in public policy are prompted, or at least prodded, by an emotional response on the part of the public. Greater efforts must be made to show that the cannabis issue also has a human aspect to which many people respond.

7. Any campaign to legalise cannabis must be multifaceted, involving public support, media analysis and political engagement. 

8.  Responsibility for cannabis policy should be moved primarily to the department for Health, while the role of the Home Office should change from enforcement of prohibition to enforcement of regulation and licensing. 

Read the full paper here. 

Sinnovation: Risk reduction in vice

• In a complex world, there will be times when our actions have consequences that we could not have foreseen, however good our intentions were. This complexity is one of the major challenges in public policy: it is what divides people with similar goals, and what demands rigorous analysis of public policy.
• Most people fall somewhere in between paternalism and libertarianism. They regret the harms that alcohol and tobacco cause to heavy users, but also believe that those users should have the right to take those if they are aware of the harms and aren’t hurting other people. For these people, though they are not libertarians, liberal harm reduction is the key – not rigid prohibitionism.
• For the authors of the papers in this book, government bans on harmful behaviour do not automatically reduce harm. Indeed, because of the complexity of society and the difficulty of making good public policy, these bans (or other restrictions) may have the opposite effect, and increase harm to the public.
• By stifling innovation, regulation may freeze products in a state that is far less safe than free-wheeling capitalism would otherwise provide. Given that most smokers or drinkers would prefer not to die young or suffer from chronic illnesses, there is a clear (and perhaps very strong) profit incentive for the firm that can replicate the experience of smoking a cigarette without producing the harm that cigarettes do.
• A ‘permissionless innovation’ approach may be the best way forward. In this framework, firms are free to innovate and markets anything they like to consumers, with the proviso that untested products must be explicitly marketed as such, with the firm forced to pay the price if and when things go wrong. A regulatory approach on this basis would create a pathway for new reduced-risk products that were, if not 100% safe (such a thing is impossible), a lot safer than the things they were replacing

Read the paper in full here.