The Psychoactive Substances bill is unenforceable

In January 2016 the Tories succeeded in putting the ridiculously anti-scientific and irrational Psychoactive Substances Act onto the statute books. This ludicrous and highly controversial piece of legislation which bans the use of substances that don't even exist yet was due to come into force in April 2016 but it has been postponed indefinitely because legal and medical experts alike have told the government that it's so poorly written that it's literally unenforceable.

The Irish evidence the Tories ignored

The Psychoactive Substances Act was modelled on a similar "screw the science - let's ban everything" piece of legislation that was passed in Ireland.

The evidence from Ireland is damning. The Irish "let's just ban everything" bill that was introduced in 2010 led to a dramatic increase of synthetic designer drugs usage from 16 to 22% of the teenage population. Since the ban Ireland has experienced the second fastest rate of increased synthetic designer drug usage in the entire EU, and by far the highest overall rate of usage.

Any politician who gives the remotest damn about the legislation they are voting into law must surely consider the consequences of the original bit of legislation it is designed to copy. However it's absolutely clear that hundreds of Tory MPs didn't scrutinise the evidence at all. All those MPs just voted in the way Theresa May told them to regardless of the stack of negative evidence.

If anyone needed any further proof that the right-wing authoritarian prohibitionist mentality is based on ideology and not evidence, then this is it.

Unenforceability

The Irish evidence shows that hardly anyone has been prosecuted under their version of the bill because of difficulties over the term "psychoactive". Unless an expert can be found to prove that the novel compound actually does produce a psychoactive effect, then the prosecution could never succeed.

It's not like it's any kind of surprise that this staggeringly inept piece of legislation is unenforceable, the Tories were warned by their own drug advisers that it would be unenforceable in July 2015, long before they decided to vote it into law regardless.

The fact that Theresa May completely disregarded the concerns of the government's own drugs advisers and pushed ahead with this utterly flawed piece of legislation is bad enough, but the fact that her fellow MPs simply voted such idiocy into law because they were told to by the party whips is probably even worse.

Warped priorities

The gobbledygook legislation leads to a bizarre situation that the first research into the effects of novel compounds that people are taking for recreational purposes won't be to determine whether they're actually safe for human consumption, it'll be to determine whether the compounds have any "psychoactive effects" in order to provide evidence to support prosecution of the vendor, regardless of whether the compound is actually harmful or not!

A piece of legislation which generates such warped research priorities is clearly absurd. However what is even more absurd is the way that Theresa May and the Tories have set the propaganda narrative that this dangerously incoherent, anti-scientific, evidence-ignoring, weird priority creating rubbish is necessary in order to "protect the public".

Regulation vs prohibition

The ban in Ireland led to a wave of closures of so-called "head shops", but the huge rise in usage since the ban came into effect (as detailed above) proves that the ban simply drove the market for novel psychoactive compounds underground.

The rational drugs policy argument is that the sale of recreational drugs should be legalised, taxed and regulated. The tax money could be used to conduct research into the actual effects of the drugs (harms, addictiveness, safe dosage levels etc), provide unbiased safety information for users, enforce market regulation andprovide rehabilitation for the minority who become problem users. Even after taking those costs into account there would be plenty left over from the taxes raised to contribute towards other socially beneficial things like the NHS or the education system.

Nobody sane is arguing for a drugs free-for-all where powerful psychoactive compounds and addictive substances are sold alongside the kids' sweets in supermarkets. The ideal places would be licensed and regulated pharmacists and "head shops".

The prohibitionist ideology results in drugs market being handed over to criminal gangs with no compunctions about selling to children and vulnerable people, drug pushing, hawking adulterated substances and dangerously irregular doses, and pay no tax on their profits either.

Surely if "head shops" are selling potentially dangerous substances, then the rational solution would be to regulate them, rather than introducing legislation designed to put them out of business and transfer control of the entire market to completely unregulated and untaxed black market gangs?

Why do novel designer drugs even exist?

Even if we neglect the fact that this botched piece of legislation is so incoherently drafted that it's unenforceable, the slightest examination of the claim that it's meant to crack down on dangerous "legal highs", presents a huge problem for the ideologically driven prohibitionist to explain.

It's beyond doubt that the rise of synthetic drugs like Spice are a direct consequence of the prohibition of drugs like cannabis (the naturally occurring substance that Spice has been designed to imitate).

If people are taking potentially harmful synthetic drugs to imitate the effects of a relatively harmless naturally occurring substance that humans have been consuming for at least ten thousand years, surely the sensible solution is to end prohibition of the relatively harmless substance rather than hand control of the market for the synthetic substitute over to unregulated, untaxed criminal gangs too?

Swimming against the tide

In seeking to further criminalise people who take psychoactive substances the Westminster political class are swimming against the political tide. Despite decades of fearmongering lies and rhetoric in the pages of the right-wing press, utterly bizarre government propaganda campaigns and absurd anti-drugs propaganda dressed up as independent drugs advice from organisations like Talk to Frank, public opinion is gradually moving against ideological prohibitionism and towards rational drugs policies.

The legislative tide is turning across the world. Several countries have decriminalised drug use and others have gone further, fully legalising the use of previously banned substances. Uruguay has fully legalised cannabis, Portugal has decriminalised all drugs (leading to a rapid decline in crime and drug related deaths), possession of small amounts of drugs has been decriminalised in Ecuador, the Czech Republic and Costa Rica too, Argentina has recognised the right to take psychoactive substances as a constitutional right, and even in the US (the country that pushed ideologically driven prohibitionism on the rest of the world in the first place) cannabis has been fully legalised in five states, decriminalised in fourteen other states and decriminalised for medical use in eleven others.

In October 2015 the United Nations were due to announce a relaxation in their stance on recreational drugs use, but apparently one country vetoed the change of policy towards the decriminalisation of recreational drugs use. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the country that vetoed the policy change announcement was the United Kingdom, given the way the Westminster establishment seem so desperately keen to swim against the global tide that is flowing towards rational drugs policy and away from ideologically driven prohibitionism.

Conclusion

The fact that such an absurdly incoherent, anti-scientific, evidence-ignoring and unworkable piece of legislation found its way onto the statute books in the first place is damning evidence of Theresa May's incompetence, and the pathetic way in which Tory MPs vote stuff into law without even listening to expert opinion or thinking about whether the legislation is even coherently written, simply because they're told to by the party whips.

Not only are the Tories determined to swim against the tide by bringing in even more ideologically driven right-wing authoritarian prohibitionist policies while much of the rest of the world has finally started listening to expert opinion and begun moving towards rational drugs policies, the legislation the Tories have come up with is so incoherently drafted that it's literally unenforceable!

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 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
         
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How the mainstream media frame the political debate
                
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Margaret Thatcher's toxic neoliberal legacies
  

David Cameron's "national wank register"

On July 22nd 2013 in a desperate attempt to grab headlines and distract attention away for several grotesque conflict of interest scandals at the heart of his government, the Prime Minister David Cameron made a surprise announcement that he wants to ban certain types of pornography and to create a national database of users of online pornography.

Cameron is clearly hoping to deflect attention away from the Lynton Crosby triple conflict of interest scandal, the Tory fracking conflicts of interest scandal and the scandalous state of Tory party funding. His plan is to trick the press and public into focusing criticism on his barmy plans to compel every household in the UK with an Internet connection to state whether or not they wish to access to online pornography, thus creating a government mandated database of people's sexual preferences.

That the timing of this announcement is a smokescreen for these scandals is obvious, but the proposed legislation itself is absolutely dismal stuff.

Unworkability
The most obvious problem with Cameron's plan to regulate the Internet is that it will be yet another bit of government legislation drawn up by people that have no real idea how the Internet works. If the state attempts to force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block access to pornography to their customers unless they are registered on a government database of porn users, people will simply find ways to bypass the system rather than tell the government that they enjoy looking at porn. I can think of several ways of doing this and I'm hardly a computer wizzkid. The most obvious way to bypass such a censorship system would be to use a VPN service (a kind of tunnel under the Internet so that it appears you are browsing from another location in another country). Such overtly invasive legislation is likely to spur the development of Proxy Porn services in exactly the same way the clueless, expensive and unworkable ban on the Pirate Bay torrent listing site simply led to the creation of the Pirate Proxy site.

If you do accidentally chose the wrong option when the government enforce this registration process. Don't worry, just ask your kids, they'll know how to get around it.

Filtering problems
Anyone that has ever experienced Internet filters knows that they are idiosyncratic things, that work by blocking websites that contain swearwords. Some filters have odd ideas about what constitutes a swearword. How about "gay", "lesbian", "trans-sexual", "sex", "teen", "rape", "bondage" and "penetrate". It is easy to imagine how all of these words can be used in entirely non-pornographic contexts. If the filter is set to block these words, sites like LGBT rights sites "discrimination against teenage lesbians" left wing economics sites "percentage of the population trapped in debt bondage" and sports websites " their resilient defence was penetrated just before full time" are going to be caught up in the censorship.
How is the government to ensure that their new "porn firewall" filters are going to function so much better than every other content filter ever devised?
Another factor to consider is that sites like mine, that occasionally discuss themes like pornography (this article for example), but mainly concentrate on politics and economics are likely to get caught up too. If you select to activate the government mandated "porn firewall", you're suddenly going to loose access to a lot of independent blogs that have ever used swearwords or discussed the subject of pornography.

Function creep
There is a strong case to be made that the introduction of a "porn firewall" is just the first step in an effort to control and commercialise the Internet. Once the government have a working mechanism for restricting content they deem to be "unacceptable", the definition of "unacceptable" will simply be changed to include "subversive behaviour", "anarchism" or "economic disruption". Once the government have kicked the door open to Internet censorship, is there really anyone gullible enough to think that they wont use their firewall technology to filter out anything they deem to be against their political interests, or against the interests of their commercial paymasters.

There are a lot of people that believe the Internet is far too free, and would like to see the means of information distribution stripped away from bloggers, social network activists, anonymous collectives and the like and returned to the commercial media. The instillation of firewall technology on every Internet connection in the land would be a good place to start for anyone intent on de-democratising the Internet, wouldn't it?.

You only need to look at the Tories attempted backdoor privatisation of the NHS to dispel any doubts that they would try to sneak through unpopular legislation without the public noticing, and what better veneer of acceptability is there than a constant refrain of "protecting our children".

Once the firewall infrastructure is in place to begin blocking particular websites, even if state censorship isn't the principal long-term objective in the first place, the temptation to use the firewall for political or commercial advantage will be impossible to resist.

Hypocrisy

The imposition of a draconian state monitoring and censorship regime is completely at odds with all of David Cameron's "Big Society" rhetoric. Here's a reminder of how he defined "the Big Society" in a "business in the community speech" in 2012:

"I say that the core belief - in social responsibility, not state control - is something we're never going to change."

Cameron's announcement of the creation of a vast government imposed porn monitoring bureaucracy is a clear demonstration that the Tories have either changed their stance on state control, or that the statement was just another empty piece of Tory rhetoric in the first place. Whatever the case, the quoted statement is rendered a lie by this legislation. Just another lie to add to David Cameron's long, long list.

Does nobody remember David Cameron's pre-election pledges to "sweep away the nanny state". Well I find it difficult to think of anything more invasively nannying than forcing people to seek permission from the government in order to have a wank! Cameron's "national wank register" is just another demonstration that he will say anything in order to win votes, but then do the polar opposite once in power. 

It is clear that all that Tory talk of rights and responsibilities is just so much empty rhetoric to justify whatever policies they are pushing at the time. If they really believed what they say about personal responsibility being preferable to state control, surely they would leave it up to parents to install porn blockers, rather than making everyone that wants to look at videos of naked people register on a government mandated database?

Invasion of privacy
The idea of a vast government database recording the personal sexual preferences of every household in the UK is absolutely appalling stuff. Even if you disapprove of adults using the Internet to view pornography, surely you've got to admit that a government register of pornography users is a step too far, especially given the UK state's long track record of losing sensitive private data.

Still, from a government that uses the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" justification in Parliament to excuse their massive spying campaign against millions of innocent people and their collusion with the American spy agencies, we shouldn't be surprised that David Cameron doesn't give the slightest shit about privacy considerations.

Of course, in a world of Google tracking and mass state surveillance, there is no such thing as privacy on the Internet. However, there is a big difference between knowing that Google algorithms are recording your search preferences or that GCHQ spies could conceivably trawl your browsing history, to actually having to register with the government as a porn user in order to watch a few porn clips on the Internet.

Absurdity
The proposal to ban certain types of pornography is ludicrous. There are countless film and TV series which include simulated rape scenes. Are Cameron's sexual thought police going to arrest people for possession of The Clockwork Orange or Straw Dogs on DVD, or for re-watching that episode of Cracker where Jimmy Beck rapes Panhaligon?

If not, why not? How are the authorities supposed to differentiate between legitimate simulated rape and forbidden simulated rape? What's to stop a rape porn enthusiast enjoying rape scenes in the scores of films that include simulated rape? If enjoying rape scenes in mainstream films is to be made illegal too, what would be the methodology for determining whether a person has experienced any kind of sexual stimulation at simulated rape scenes in commercially available films? Or are all mainstream films that include simulated rape to be banned too? If so, how would that be done?

Given that the Tory government have slashed over 10,000 front line police since they came to power in 2010, do the remaining police not have enough to do solving and prosecuting real rapes (for which prosecution and conviction rates are appallingly low), real murders and real child abuse without having to waste their time on policing David Cameron's new batch of sexual preference thought-crimes and figuring out whether someone got turned on or not by the rape scene in the Hollywood film they downloaded?

Discrimination
This is a clear case to be made that legislation to ban "extreme porn" is an attack on the BDSM community. I certainly don't go in for domination or sado-masochism stuff, but I don't see why people that do like sexual power play or consensual violence should be discriminated against with legislation which prevents them from filming or publishing their consensual sexual activities.

Another factor to consider is all of the protecting women rhetoric. If consensual male on female sexual violence is to be banned, how about the surprisingly popular female domination genre? Is the viewing of female on male consensual sexual violence to be made unlawful too? If not, why not?

Is the government's position to be defined as watching male on female consensual whipping and choking is so beyond the pale that it must be banned, but female on male consensual whipping and choking is perfectly permissible (as long as you register with the government as a porn user beforehand)?

Just to reiterate, I don't find the idea of simulated sexual violence at all stimulating, in fact I find it mildly repulsive, however my squeamishness is absolutely no basis for me to declare what other consenting adults should and shouldn't be allowed to get up to. If parents don't want their kids to see such stuff, surely the responsibility is on them to set up appropriate internet filters, rather than imploring the government to infringe on the liberties of those people that do enjoy such things.

Ideological posturing
Just as I'm no fan of BDSM stuff, I do not like and have never looked at "simulated rape porn". However, if viewing such stuff is to be criminalised, I believe that there is an strong obligation on the government to actually prove a causal link between such images and incidents of actual rape if that is the justification they are going to use to criminalise it.

It is absolutely clear that the Cameron's stance is built on empty ideological posturing because he fails to provide causal links whilst championing baseless anti-porn rubbish like this:

"The government today has made a significant step forward in preventing rapists using rape pornography to legitimise and strategise their crimes."

The anti-porn movement are insistent that porn is related with rape and misogyny, however they steadfastly refuse to provide anything resembling a causal link. 

I feel no obligation to provide empirical counter-evidence against such obvious moralistic posturing (if they want to make such assertions the onus is on them to prove their assertions, not on us to disprove them), however I believe it is worth noting the remarkable correlation between countries with draconian anti-porn legislation and those with the weakest women's rights. 

It is also worth noting that recorded incidences of rape in the UK have gradually fallen at the same time as access to online and hardcore porn has grown. Surely if the anti-porn proposition (that porn causes rape) were true, the opposite would be expected.

To put it crudely, perhaps it is better that people with extremely strong sexual urges are at home wanking over online smut, rather than out prowling the streets at night? Perhaps removing their access to porn, based on nothing more than ideological posturing might drive them back onto the streets to inflict their forbidden sexual fantasies on real people?

If the government, at the behest of the anti-porn lobby want to use this porn ► misogyny ► rape narrative to justify prohibitive measures, surely they must provide some kind of empirical proof, otherwise their legislation is founded on nothing more than lazy ideological posturing.

Moral puritanism
The Tories often pretend that they are a libertarian party, but policies like prohibition of categories of porn arbitrarily deemed offensive and the creation of a vast porn-users database totally shatter that myth. It should be absolutely clear from their other prohibitionist policies on drug use, that certain areas of Tory policy are extremely authoritarian and driven purely by moral puritanism. The recent decision to criminalise the mild stimulant khat is a clear example. The scientific evidence shows that khat is significantly safer than cigarettes or alcohol, yet the Tories decided to ban it simply because they see it as a subversive drug  used mainly by dodgy foreign types.

There is very little crossover between my left-libertarian views and those of the neoliberal economist Milton Friedman, however one area of agreement is on the immorality and socio-economic folly of prohibition. Here's his view on prohibition:

"It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else. Most of the arrests for drugs are for possession by casual users. Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me."

Precisely the same arguments can be used against banning certain types of pornography, or the imposition of draconian illiberal measures such as a government register of porn users.

The really sad thing is that the Tories believe in Friedman's absurd brand of neoliberal pseudo-economics with a fervour akin to that of the religiously indoctrinated, but when it comes to one of the few sensible positions the Godfather of their professed ideology held, they ignore it completely in favour of authoritarian moral puritanism.

Poor choice of council

I've already mentioned the shrill anti-porn fanatics that insist that porn causes rape, when the evidence seems to suggest precisely the opposite. This is an example of extremely poor choice of council, however there is an even more insidious force pushing this legislation: The Daily Mail.

The most stunning thing about the government's decision to yield to the Daily Mail's anti-porn campaign is the raving hypocrisy of the Daily Mail. One only needs to look at the "sidebar of shame" on the right hand side of the Daily Mail website to see a perfect illustration of this hypocrisy. Here we have an organisation that routinely violates the privacy of women and girls and contributes to the sexualisation of teenage and underage girls by purchasing and publishing reams of paparazzi photos, simultaneously demanding that the government ban adults from viewing activities undertaken between consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes.

Take the story of Ellie Fanning for example. The Daily Mail basically stole a picture of this 14 year old off Instagram and posted it to their "sidebar of shame" and adorned the image with comments such as "teenager Ellie Fanning shows off her womanly curves" which infest a picture of nothing more than a child in fancy dress with perverted sexual undercurrents. This is what the Daily Mail Reporter website said about the story:

"If you pull a picture of a pubescent teenager from the Internet and write about how she’s ageing nicely, or growing up fast, or that she has enviable curves then you’re directly contributing to a culture of sexualisation and child abuse."

The Ellie Fanning case is not the only one. The Daily Mail has also run stories with perverted sexual undertones about numerous other underage girls such as Charlotte Church and Emily Watson (when they were teenagers).

So here we have a publication that regularly violates the privacy of teenagers through paparazzi culture and directly contributes to the culture of child sexualisation and child abuse, hypocritically pressurising the government into banning adults from viewing other consenting adults engage in sexual activity and to create a national register of porn users.

Surely the stench of self-righteous hypocrisy should have been enough for someone at Tory party central office to advise Cameron to distance himself from the Daily Mail campaign, instead of jumping on their grotesquely hypocritical bandwagon.

Porn in parliament
Last but not least I'd like to draw your attention to a story that broke in February 2013. Analysis of parliamentary computers showed that they were used to access all kinds of smut over the course of seven months.

The websites browsed included hardcore porn, sado-masochism, foot fetishism, gay cruising, fat fetishism, male adultery, polish porn and cat fetish (!) websites. The male adultery site (which hooks up married men with women seeking sex) had over 52,000 pageviews!

Perhaps David Cameron should have thought about getting his own house in order before imposing his draconian regulations on our houses. I mean, if the Houses of Parliament are full of MPs cruising hardcore porn sites and arranging their extramarital affairs, then what kind of right have they got to tell us that we can't look at certain kinds of images they find offensive, or that we must register with the state in order to view sexual images.

I find it pretty difficult to imagine any sexual activity that can be done between consenting adults that is as offensive as the idea of MPs arranging their extramarital affairs on parliamentary computers, whilst claiming a salary at the taxpayers' expense (and probably the cost of their second home too, which they use as a fuckpad to meet the women off thier adultery website).

Conclusion
David Cameron's decision to ban the kinds of hardcore porn he deems offensive without evidence stinks of knee-jerk ideological posturing and moral puritanism; the display of contempt for privacy is concerning; the idea of a government register of porn users demonstrates that all the Tory talk of small-state conservatism and "rolling back the nanny state" is empty hot air; taking moral advice from the Daily Mail is ludicrous; the stance on simulated rape is totally unworkable; the scope for function creep is sinister; the police shouldn't be made to waste their time on policing things that David Cameron has classified as sexual thought crime (simulated rape) when Britain has one of the lowest levels of (actual) rape conviction in the developed world; the contents of parliamentary computers demonstrate than not just a few MPs would be extremely hypocritical to support this anti-porn legislation; and the whole idea is technically unworkable, meaning that it will just be a hugely expensive failure anyway.

The only way that the announcement of this anti-porn policy can be seen as a success is that it distracted me into writing this article instead of focusing on the ongoing corruption scandals at the heart of the Tory party. However in mitigation of the fact I've been distracted into writing about porn, in the time it took me to write this article, over 2,000 people have shared the Facebook memes I've created about the Tory corruption scandals and I'm concluding this article by drawing your attention back to the scandals once again. Please take a moment to read one (or more) of the following in order to couter-balance David Cameron's smokescreening ploy.

• The Lynton Crosby triple conflict of interest scandal
• The Tory fracking vested interest scandal
• The scandalous state of Tory party donations

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Ganja and gun crime

In September 2012 the Guardian reported that a high ranking police chief from Merseyside was using a rise in cannabis related violent crime to demand stiffer sentencing for cannabis related offences. Assistant Chief Constable Andy Ward was quoted as saying:

"Criminals who have previously been involved in something else are drifting into the cannabis world … The amount of money being made by criminals should be reflected in the sentencing."

This news is the perfect example of how under the prohibitionist system, the distribution of a virtually harmless drug that causes people to generally chill out and be extremely non-violent is causing a surge in violent and gun related crime. In fact it is extremely difficult to understand how this rise in prohibitionism related violence be seen as a case for even more prohibitionism instead of an argument against the folly of basing our laws on outdated moralistic puritanical principles.

If police spent a little more time investigating real crimes (like gun
crime), rather than enforcing insane prohibitionist morality
then perhaps gun crime wouldn't be on the rise?

Prohibitionism is one subject on which virtually all politically minded people agree. From leftie liberals to right-wing neoliberal apologists (his opposition to drug prohibition was one of the very few things that Milton Friedman was spot-on about): Pretty much anyone with the mental faculties to cut through irrational propaganda comes to accept that basing socio-economic policy on absurd and arbitrary puritanical notions is insane. 

Once you understand that the side effects of violence, criminality, tax-dodging, contamination, sale to minors... are significantly more appalling than the effects of the drug itself (even if you uncritically accept the worst case scenario hysteria about the psychological consequences); it is impossible to overlook the fact that gun crime and territorial warfare are far worse than the premature triggering of underlying mental health problems in a tiny minority of users. 

It is incredible that high ranking police officers and the political classes are so myopic and reactionary that they still believe that prohibitionism can work. So incredible in fact that it is probably worthwhile to consider reasons why they publicly support a stance that they know to be utterly irrational.

Police chiefs could use rising prohibitionism related crime in order to call for more funding for armed police units and drugs squads, extra cash that would come in extremely useful given the across the board cuts in police funding under the Tory led coalition government. The payoff for politicians "maintaining the lie" is less obvious, the tabloid press continue to propagandise against drugs, however ever growing proportions of their readership are critical of the stance, especially in the online editions; elderly people usually have more reactionary attitudes towards drugs and they are also more likely to vote; but the biggest factor is probably the fact that so many of the political classes have vested interests in the financial beneficiaries of cannabis prohibitionism such as alcohol and tobacco companies, the pharmaceutical industry, the legal industry and private security outsourcing companies.

The anachronistic prohibitionist stance has resulted in a situation where the distribution of a virtually harmless drug is resulting in rising gun crime and gang warfare. If the relatively harmless drug was produced legally, in carefully regulated factories or growing co-operatives with freedom for people to home grow small supplies for personal consumption, leaving the police to focus on resolving real crimes (like gun crime) rather than spending tens of thousands of man hours and millions of pounds hunting down the location of these cannabis growing facilities, does anyone seriously believe gun crime would be on the rise? 

The solution to this insanity is simple:

Legalise, tax, regulate and rehabilitate.

These measures will more than pay for themselves in both economic and social benefits.

The Minimum Alcohol Pricing farce

The price of four tins of Tennent's lager looks set
to rocket to £3.50 under the new minimum pricing rules.

The SNP led Scottish government have just introduced minimum alcohol pricing (50p a unit) as a response to widespread alcohol problems in Scotland and the Tory led coalition is intent on introducing similar price fixing measures (40p a unit) in England and Wales.

The Minimum Alcohol Pricing bill passed through the Scottish Parliament with a landslide 86 - 1 majority vote in support of draconian price fixing measures, meaning that in Scotland the cost of a four pack of lager is set to rise to an eye watering £3.50. The Scottish Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon justified the move with some absurd projected figures gleaned from a flawed study by Sheffield University, which conveniently told the Scottish government that commissioned and paid for the report exactly what they wanted to hear. The study was flawed because it failed to factor in several seemingly obvious negative socio-economic consequences of alcohol price fixing.

The Tory led Westminster Coalition also seem determined to push through alcohol price fixing measures with Theresa May acting as the Tory cheerleader for the scheme. The only voices of concern from the political establishment have been raised by the Labour party, who have estimated that Minimum Pricing in Scotland could create an estimated £125 million profit windfall for the alcohol industry, whilst providing no direct support to the police, health service and social services that spend £billions dealing with alcohol related problems such as late night disorder, liver disease and domestic violence.

It seems absurd that the beneficiaries of this policy which is supposedly aimed at reducing consumption will be the alcohol industry and the alcohol retailers that have created the majority of the alcohol related socio-economic problems, whilst the sectors that have actually spent decades dealing with the consequences will see none of the extra revenue.

Socio-Economic evidence

The whole idea of Minimum Alcohol Pricing is absolutely absurd, a vast amount of socio-economic evidence points to the fact that problematic drinking is a geo-cultural problem, not a problem of pricing.

If we look at countries with higher alcohol prices than the UK such as Norway, Denmark and Finland we find that they have lower average rates of alcohol consumption yet all of them have significantly higher rates of alcoholism and alcohol related deaths. In fact, within the European Union there seems to be more of a positive correlation between high alcohol prices and incidence of alcohol related deaths, than a correlation between alcohol consumption and alcohol related deaths!

If higher prices led to lower levels of excessive
drinking and alcohol related deaths, one would
 expect this graph to be the other way around.

The comparison with Denmark makes a very interesting case, they have significantly higher alcohol prices yet their levels of alcohol consumption are almost identical to the UK. The remarkable difference is in the rates of alcoholism and the incidence of alcohol related deaths, which are both vastly higher in Denmark than in the UK. If higher alcohol pricing was a real deterrent to problematic drinking, one would expect the UK to have a higher incidence alcohol related deaths than Denmark where alcohol is significantly more expensive.

Another interesting comparison can be made between the UK and Spain. Spain has significantly lower alcohol prices, yet their average levels of consumption, rates of problematic drinking and incidence of alcohol related deaths are all significantly lower. Visit Spain and you will not see Spanish people staggering, pissing, spewing and fighting all over the street (the people behaving like that are generally British tourists getting "shitfaced" on all the cheap booze). In Spain there are fewer heavy drinkers than in the UK (and those that do drink heavily tend to maintain better control of their behaviour), average alcohol consumption is lower and the alcohol related death rate is only 36% of the rate in the UK. Alcohol prices are significantly lower in Spain, yet the average consumption of alcohol is also significantly lower. If we are to accept the politicians' simplistic view that price is the principle determining factor in alcohol consumption rates, one would expect average alcohol consumption to be higher in Spain where it is cheaper, yet it is significantly lower.

Portugal also provides some interesting evidence, where the average alcohol price is similar to Spain, but their average consumption rate is the highest amongst the 13 western European nations under consideration. One would expect the country with the highest average consumption rate to also have one of the highest rates of alcohol related death, however the Portuguese death rate is almost identical to the UK death rate and a fraction of the death rate of other nations with much lower rates of average alcohol consumption such as France, Germany, Denmark, Austria and Norway.

Norway has by far the highest alcohol pricing at 234% of the European average and more than double the UK rate which has pushed consumption to the lowest level by far of the 13 countries, however their alcohol related death rate is much higher than the UK rate. When you take a closer look at the stats it is actually possible to determine a weak correlation between higher alcohol prices and higher rates of alcohol related death. I don't have the time or the budget to carry out a proper statistical analysis to see if there is a causal link, all I can do is suggest potential causes. The higher alcohol prices in these economies could have come about due to political attempts to reduce the alcohol problems through price manipulation or the prohibitive stance has caused increases in excessive consumption (as the criminalisation of certain addictive drugs has created an exponential growth in the number of addicts, Heroin in the UK for example) or the correlation could be a statistically irrelevant coincidence.

Comparisons of Western European economies shows that while there is weak correlation between alcohol price and alcohol consumption,  there is also a positive correlation between high alcohol prices and higher instances of alcohol related deaths and no correlation between average alcohol consumption and the instance of alcohol related deaths.

I believe that the incidence of alcohol problems actually has much more to do with the "culture of drinking" than it has to do with the price of the alcohol. The stats in the illustration above lend some support to my view, especially the significantly higher rates of alcohol related deaths in countries with similar or significantly higher alcohol prices than the UK (Denmark, Norway, Finland, Belgium & Sweden).

To resort to using a bit of "common sense" anecdotal evidence for a while I'm going to talk about Spain. It is customary in Mediterranean countries like Spain to serve alcohol with food (Tapas or other snacks), which "soaks up" the alcohol resulting in fewer people getting paralytically drunk. Spanish people also tend to drink more slowly than British people. I believe this is due to the strong influence of many decades of restrictive UK licencing laws on the British drinking mentality. These restrictive laws ended up incentivising pub goers to drink as much as they could before the pub closed, a haste that has remained part of the British drinking culture despite subsequent relaxations in the licencing laws. There is more of a relaxed attitude towards drinking in southern Europe, where drinking sessions are not treated like races with kudos to the fastest and heaviest drinkers. In Southern Europe there is also much more social stigma associated with getting leglessly drunk, vomiting, getting into drunken fights or spending the night in a jail cell, things that seem to be much more common amongst younger British drinkers, judging by the difference between the carnage in British high streets and hospitals late at night and the relative calm in the Mediterranean towns (the ones that don't suffer a seasonal influx of British tourists at least).

Adverse consequences

The cited positive consequences of this Scottish alcohol price fixing scheme are that there will supposedly be an estimated 300 fewer alcohol related deaths and 6,500 fewer alcohol related hospitalisations over the next decade, however the study hasn't properly considered what seem like obvious adverse consequences to the massive inflation of alcohol costs. Namely increases in alcohol smuggling, bootlegging, home brewing and poverty within families with one or more alcoholics. That the study has only managed to project relatively small socio-economic benefits is worrying, especially since the study failed to consider several potential (and extremely likely) adverse impacts.

I believe studies should be carried out to determine the adverse effects of introducing Alcohol price fixing legislation in Scotland before the scheme is rolled out elsewhere. If the adverse effects are not properly studied before legislation is rolled out elsewhere in the UK we can assume that the policy is ideologically driven not evidence based. The areas than need to be studied are:

Alcohol smuggling: Huge increases in legitimate "over the counter" alcohol prices will almost certainly lead to a corresponding increase in  alcohol smuggling from outside the price fixing zone. The scale of alcohol and tobacco smuggling from the continent was estimated at £5.5 billion in lost tax revenues back in 2008. Studies must be carried out to determine the volume of alcohol transferred from outside the price fixing zone and comparisons made with the cited reductions in legitimate alcohol sales. If measures are not undertaken to assess the increases in cross border transfers into the price fixing zone and the scale of lost tax revenues, and these figures are not offset against the claimed reductions in legitimate "over the counter" sales, any cited benefits to the price fixing legislation cannot be accepted as reliable.

Bootlegging: There is already a large problem with the illegal trade in counterfeit alcohol in the UK. Measures designed to massively increase the sale price of legitimate alcohol supplies will almost certainly incentivise more criminals to enter the counterfeiting racket in search of larger profit margins. It would be extremely difficult to determine the scale of the increase and the adverse consequences of  increased consumption of potentially dangerous bootleg alcohol, since the illicit trade in bootleg alcohol goes largely unmonitored.

Increased family poverty: It seems likely that a large proportion of "problem drinkers" will continue to consume excessive amounts of alcohol, simply expending more of their family budget on alcohol purchases and consequentially reducing the amount that is spent on meeting their children's needs. At a time when family budgets and disposable income are already being squeezed through austerity and economic stagflation a large increase in expenditure on alcohol is likely to have severe adverse effects on families that are unfortunate enough to have one or more alcoholics.

Home Brewing: As alcohol prices become increasingly unaffordable it seems likely that many people will turn to the cheaper option of brewing their own juice. I don't think this consequence would be anything like as harmful as the others mentioned, however the lack of consideration of a seemingly obvious consequence highlights yet another flaw in the University of Sheffield study. If there is a rise in home brewing, this rise must be offset against claimed reductions in consumption of "over the counter" alcohol and the lost tax revenue must also be taken into consideration.

Alternatives 

There are countless viable alternatives to a blanket  price hike for all alcohol consumers. The most obvious place to start would be better enforcement of existing laws and the introduction of new laws and regulations aimed at curbing problematic drinking behaviour. The problem with this approach is obvious. Any coherent integrated strategy to reduce problematic alcohol consumption would take a lot of man hours to enforce. With the Tory led coalition pushing through severe ideologically driven cutbacks in policing, the health service and social services it is extremely difficult to imagine where these man hours would come from. Here are a few alternative proposals to a draconian catch-all penalty for alcohol consumers.

Nuisance duty: Instead of introducing price fixing measures that would benefit the breweries more than anyone, the government could consider a "nuisance duty" on alcohol sales to provide funding for late night policing to discourage crime and disorderly behavior, public education and health service and social services interventions to help people suffering from alcohol addiction. Surely the beneficiaries of hikes in the price of alcohol should be the services that deal with the fallout, rather than the companies that have already profited enormously from creating this wave of problematic behavior.

Eduacation and rehabilitation: In all walks of life education and rehabilitation are better and cheaper deterrents than draconian punishment. People that cause trouble through problematic drinking should be compelled to at least learn the basics of responsible drinking and socially acceptable behavior before they are hit with financial sanctions and prison sentences.

Public order: Police should be given powers to compel problematic drinkers to undergo alcohol education and rehabilitation, repeat offenders would then face fines and detention for committing drunken public order offences.

Health sanctions: People that repeatedly turn up at hospitals in drunken states should be made to pay a "drunkenness levy". The foundation of the NHS is free health care at the point of need so imposing draconian levies for absolutely everyone that turns up drunk at at hospital would be unfair, since people do tend to have accidents when they are drunk, however repeat offenders should be compelled to undergo alcohol education and rehabilitation and if they still carry on offending they should have to pay a significant contribution towards their health care costs. If people abuse the system by regularly getting leglessly drunk and then taking up the time of paramedics and hospital staff, they are effectively stealing resources from the people that don't abuse the system so they should be made to pay.

The importance of food: Public drinking establishments should be given incentives to provide food. Drinking on an empty stomach is notoriously dangerous, pretty much everyone has made the mistake of feeding hunger with booze and suffered the consequences at least once. A culture shift towards providing alcohol and food together (as the Spanish do with Tapas) could be surprisingly effective in alleviating some of the worst public order problems.

Culture shift: Public figures and the media should run a campaign against problematic drinking. People should be made to feel ashamed and socially stigmatised if they repeatedly cause drunken chaos. For too long people have been normalised to wild and aggressive drunken behaviour in public places. There needs to be a culture shift towards social stigmatisation of excessive drunken behaviour, without a change in the current permissive attitude towards drunken chaos, problematic drinkers will continue to feel that there is nothing particularly wrong with their unruly and intimidating behaviour.

The proposals I have outlined are aimed at educating people that are in danger of becoming problematic drinkers, reforming their behaviour and then penalising those that continue with their problematic drinking. I think that this kind of approach would both be more effective and fairer than an across the board sanction against all drinkers. However I have little faith that such policies will be pursued since the introduction of a catch-all disincentive is obviously cheaper and easier to do than attempting an integrated effort to change the problematic drinking culture, so that is why we are set to be lumbered with it.

Motivation

It seems that the politicians that are pushing these price fixing schemes are motivated by their desire to "do something" about the manifest alcohol problems in the UK, however the act of just "doing something" doesn't help if the thing that is being done is some kind of ill conceived, poorly justified knee-jerk response to the problem. I believe that coordinated measures to combat the binge drinking culture and to focus upon problematic drinkers would be far more effective than a blanket price hike for all consumers.

The problem is, that an integrated holistic approach to the problem would be both much more difficult to achieve and a lot less visible than simply making a big fuss about voting through a basic price fixing scheme to penalise all drinkers without regard for the negative consequences.

The worst aspect of the alcohol price fixing legislation is that the main beneficiaries look set to be the breweries and the alcohol retailers that did so much to create the problems in the first place. With no stipulation that the extra cost to the consumer goes towards preventative services, it could be considered that the supporters of minimum alcohol pricing are engaging in gesture politics and actually care more about protecting the interests of the alcohol industry than they do about offering genuine solutions to the manifest alcohol related problems in the UK.

One of the craziest things about alcohol price fixing is that the Tories are pushing it. For the last two years they have been behaving like rabid neoliberals most of the time (privatise everything even the police, cut wages, cut pensions, attack labour rights, slash government spending, cut taxes for corporations and the rich, donate £40bn to the IMF.....) yet price fixing is absolutely against the neoliberal free-market ideology.

I wonder what is going on? Maybe Victorian style moral puritanism is the one thing that trumps neoliberal pseudo-economic dogma in the Tory mind.

Conclusion

The socio-economic evidence that drinking problems are a cultural problem, not a pricing problem is all around. The study that is being used to justify the scheme is flawed, in that it doesn't consider what seem to be obvious negative consequences such as increased family poverty, smuggling and bootlegging and lost tax revenues. An across the board price hike will end up financially penalising moderate drinkers as well as problematic drinkers and the big financial beneficiaries of the scheme look set to be the brewery industry, not the services that are put under immense strain by the British binge drinking culture. Overall, minimum alcohol pricing is nothing more than ill conceived, poorly justified, empty gesture politics. It is of utmost importance that the negative consequences of this Scottish alcohol price fixing experiment are carefully monitored before this kind of knee-jerk, ideologically driven moral puritanism is rolled out elsewhere.

See also

Neo-Victorianism, nostalgia or revisionism

No new ideas, just more Tory cuts

The austerity death cycle

What is happening in Spain