If dope was legal what would it look like?

Not published. 11 November 2009

I’m asking this question in the business pages, not the news or editorial sections, because I want to discuss this in a cool, dispassionate way rather than with the usual hysteria that surrounds the topic.

There is an increasing volume of opinion that the ‘war on drugs’ has failed. In 14 US states cannabis can be legally sold for ‘medicinal purposes’. The White House recently told the Justice Department not to prosecute users or suppliers of this ‘legal’ pot.

Last month at the Sydney Opera House the Festival of Dangerous Ideas heard speaker after speaker declare that drug prohibition was not working and would ultimately collapse, just like Alcohol Prohibition in the US from 1920 to 1933.

We have to ask, what can we do to rid ourselves of a thousand Al Capones from Mexico and Colombia and every US city, from Afghanistan to the Golden Triangle, from Moscow to Griffiths? Well history has already told us that there will only be one answer to the drugs problem. Tax it.

Just as the end of prohibition saw the re-emergence of the huge American alcohol industry, will we see the drug industry boom world-wide? Will this be the business bonanza of the century, as the billions of illicit dollars become legal trading?

So how would this legal dope work? Well there are plenty of precedents. Australians could buy opium from the local shop until 1906, and heroin was legal here until 1963. A registered heroin addict can already get his methadone at a suburban chemist.

In the UK heroin was supplied under the National Health until the early 1970s, and drug crimes rates were extremely low. Over the years several commissions into drug use have pointed to it as a health rather than a policing problem. Most addicts and smugglers don’t start life as crooks.

All the billions we could save from the relentless crime fighting would more than pay for a network of care centres and rehabilitation clinics.

Tobacco companies already control and collect taxes on vast quantities of their restricted drugs, cigarettes. They would be the obvious distributors of commercially prepared cannabis. Many think they already have the plans in their contingency drawers.

Of course the branding would be discreet, the distribution carefully controlled, with lots of warnings on the packs. But nothing you haven’t seen before. Already the cafes of Amsterdam have their shelves stacked with glass jars of premium blends and the connoisseurs can compare flavour and THC kick without worrying about gangsters or police raids.

As for production, opium and heroin are easy - we already have the globe’s biggest Golden Triangle right here, called Tasmania. We produce 50% of the world’s concentrated poppy straw.

GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson & Johnson, the two multi-national pharmaceutical giants, already have this trade well sewn up. If you want the biggest opiate factory on earth, look no further than our own Port Fairy.

This rather puts us in the box seat, doesn’t it? The 21st century equivalent of the Sheep’s Back could be the Drug Flood.

South America is well set-up for the cocain business, and once the legal taxes started flowing in, it would give Colombia and Peru the sort of advantage that Venezuela has received from its off-shore oil wells.

This is not a spoof, I’m being quite serious here. If - when - the whole drug prohibition industry dies, probably with a whimper rather than a bang, it will be a world-wide economic shock wave. All those unemployed police, empty jails, impoverished gangsters.

And for some it will be a major business opportunity. So think about it.

ray@ebeatty.com