Drugs & Harm

Frederik Kaufman analyses the illegality of drugs.

- Frederik Kaufman

The state puts enormous resources into curbing the sale, distribution, and use of certain drugs. Why? The obvious answer is to protect citizens from harm: harm to self, and harm to others. Consider first harm to self. Illegal drug users often harm themselves, even though that’s rarely what they intend. They risk violence, unsafe conditions, overdoses, illness, adulterated drugs, arrest, long lifedestroying prison sentences, poverty, social censure, unemployment, and more. Illegal drug use also risks, and produces, harms to others: it supports gangs, gun use, graft, corruption, criminality – which all cause social instability. It imposes high costs on the health care system, diverts public dollars to prisons, therapy, clinics, law enforcement, with trial after trial overloading the judicial system, not to mention the broken relationships and attendant family problems. These are all significant social costs (although it also follows that a lot of decent jobs depend on illegal drug use). However, these risks and harms are mostly consequences of the drugs in question being illegal, so they cannot themselves be used as reasons for why drugs should be illegal. Therefore, when we ask whether the state should prohibit drugs because of risks of harm to self and others, we must focus carefully on the dangers posed by the drugs themselves, not on the dangers to self and others posed by the illegality of drug use.

Harms to Self

How inherently dangerous are illegal drugs to drug users themselves? Here we need some clinical facts.