Professor Alex Stevens:

The first question related to the tacit acceptance of the existence of a drug market, while the second concerned the effectiveness of low-level drug policing in dealing with supply. I have never really understood the argument that decriminalisation is a passive or tacit acceptance of drug use, and that is for two reasons. For one, do people not know that this is happening in any event? Whether we decriminalise possession or not, we all know there is a large and growing international market in illicit substances, and whether we decriminalise it makes no difference to the existence of that. I do not really understand, therefore, what we are not accepting. Is it the reality that there is a growing market?

Another aspect of that argument about tacit acceptance is that with decriminalisation there is nothing to stop law enforcement agencies continuing to pursue those people who are involved in the production, trafficking and distribution of these substances. There is nothing to say that if we decriminalise possession, we will have to accept that violent actors will provide these substances. One can target the most violent actors and train the market to adopt less violent means of supplying these substances. That has been done in several places in the world, including New York, which expressly based its policing strategies on taking out the most violent actors. While there was a tacit acceptance there would still be drugs on the market, there was an active process of weeding out the most violent actors. I do not think this "tacit acceptance" argument flies. It does not correspond with the reality that there is going to be a market for illicit substances, and one can still do something about that, even in the context of decriminalisation.

On the effectiveness of continued criminalisation in assisting the police in their efforts to limit the scale of the illicit market, I have talked to police officers who are involved in the attempts to control illicit markets and they tell me that the information they get from people at the lowest level of the market is often unreliable and not especially useful. The market is highly fragmented and has a high number of levels in it. You have to go a long way from the person who has got less than 1 oz of cannabis or a score of heroin in their pocket to find anyone who has any substantial influence on the importation of kilograms of these substances into the market. Effective drug policing involves costly, intensive, long-term supervision of very sophisticated criminal gangs. That is a totally different operation from the sorts of information that are got from the lowest level of the market. I do not buy the argument, therefore, that decriminalisation of low-level possession is going to make a dent in the ability of law enforcement agencies to interdict large volumes of substances coming into countries.