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Every few months in British Politics a policy debate is stripped of all reality and turned into a Facebook post from someone’s uncle. This time it’s the Green Party’s drugs policy.
If you believed the reaction from parts of the Labour party and half the commentariat, the Greens have announced a national “give your toddler crack day”. Apparently parks will be full of government issued heroin and year 8s will be hotboxing maths classrooms while Zack Polanski personally rolls the zoots.
It’s unserious, it’s dishonest, and it avoids the only question that matters: what do we do about the fact that our current drug policy is killing people?
The Greens’ proposal is not radical permissiveness. It’s a public health approach that recognises prohibition has failed. Because that is the starting point. Not vibes. Not “the message it sends”. Not whether certain politicians feel uncomfortable saying the word cocaine on the BBC. People are dying and the system we have now isn’t preventing that.
According to the Office for National Statistics, 5,565 people died from drug poisoning in England and Wales in 2024, the highest number since records began. The rate has now been rising for more than a decade. If prohibition worked, Britain would have some of the lowest drug death rates in Europe. Instead, parts of the UK, particularly Scotland, have the highest.
Behind every one of those statistics is a family getting a phone call they never imagined receiving. Partners finding someone unresponsive on a bedroom floor. People dying alone because they are afraid to call for help in case the police turn up instead of an ambulance. That is the system we are defending.
The instinct behind making drugs completely illegal is understandable. If banning dangerous substances stopped people using them, most of us would support that without hesitation. The problem is the evidence simply does not support that hope. Decades of research have repeatedly reached the same conclusion. Criminalisation does not significantly reduce levels of drug use, but it does increase the harms associated with it.
Crucially, evidence from countries that have decriminalised drugs suggests that reform does not lead to dramatic increases in overall drug consumption. In Portugal, overall use remained broadly stable after reform while deaths and infections fell sharply.
The first thing to say is that the Greens are not proposing a free for all. They are proposing to treat drug use as a health issue instead of a criminal one. That means decriminalising possession for personal use so that people are not dragged through the courts for having a substance in their pocket. It means regulated markets for some drugs, starting with cannabis, and proper treatment services, harm reduction, medical support and education.
In other words, a system designed to reduce harm rather than pretend the problem does not exist.
Right now the illegal drug market is controlled by organised crime. The global drug trade is worth hundreds of billions of pounds every year. Prohibition does not eliminate that market. It guarantees that criminals control it. As economists and criminologists have pointed out for decades, when a widely demanded product is illegal the market does not disappear. It simply becomes unregulated and violent.
When drug markets are illegal, disputes are settled through violence rather than regulation. Removing organised crime from supply chains is therefore not only a public health issue but a public safety one. That means violence in supply chains, county lines exploitation, and contaminated supply because there is no quality control and no regulation.
When you remove the legal market, you do not remove demand. You simply hand supply to whoever is willing to operate outside the law. If you care about safe streets, organised crime and protecting young people from exploitation, it is difficult to argue that handing the entire drug market to criminal gangs is a sensible policy.
Regulation undercuts that.
It means known strength and purity instead of mystery powders cut with whatever increases profit. It means age verification. It means safety information. It means tax revenue going to the public purse instead of gangs.
Regulated markets also make youth protections enforceable. Dealers do not ask for ID. Licensed retailers do. Evidence from legal cannabis markets in North America suggests youth access has not increased following regulation.
If the goal is genuinely to reduce community harm, it’s hard to argue that the current model is working.
If someone assaults someone while drunk, we do not ban alcohol. We prosecute assault. If someone drives dangerously while high, we prosecute dangerous driving. If someone neglects their children because of substance dependence, social services intervene. We do not pre-emptively criminalise every adult who drinks because some people become violent when drunk. We recognise the harm is in the behaviour, not the mere act of consumption.
Drug policy reform simply applies that same logic.
The strength is unknown. The contents are unknown. There is no age verification, no safety information and no quality control. If you wanted to design a system that maximised risk, it would look very much like the one we currently have.
There is a basic reality that British drug policy refuses to acknowledge: people take drugs regardless of the law. History has shown that repeatedly. Teenagers can often obtain drugs more easily than alcohol precisely because the illegal market operates without age checks or regulation. Regulation creates barriers. Prohibition removes them. We have learned this lesson before.
Alcohol prohibition in the United States did not create a sober society. It created organised crime, unsafe supply chains and stronger alcohol. Eventually we stopped pretending that banning a substance makes it disappear and moved to regulation.
Now alcohol is taxed, labelled, age restricted and sold through licensed premises. It still causes harm, hospital admissions, addiction, deaths and domestic violence. But those harms are mitigated by the fact it is regulated and that people can access support without being treated as criminals.
Regulating a substance is not the same as endorsing it. Governments regulate alcohol and tobacco not because they are harmless, but because pretending they do not exist would create greater harm. Drug policy reform simply applies that same logic to substances we have arbitrarily decided to treat differently. The word “arbitrary” matters, because the current system is soaked in class hypocrisy.
Drug use exists in every social class in Britain. The difference is not who uses drugs. The difference is who gets punished for it. Cocaine in the toilets at Westminster is a punchline. Possession in a working-class area is a criminal record. A wealthy person can frame their drug use as a stress problem, a party phase or a youthful mistake. A poor person gets stop and searched, processed through the courts and locked out of employment. These disparities are also racialised: in England and Wales, Black people are far more likely to be stopped and searched for drugs despite similar levels of use across ethnic groups.
The war on drugs has never been a war on drugs. It has been a war on certain people. Sociologists have long described drug enforcement as a form of “[selective criminalisation](https://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/publications/cjm/article/theory-and-politics-criminalisation-0#:~:text=A critical understanding of criminalisation,conservative%2C technocratic or administrative persuasion.&text=Edwin Lemert (1967) Human Deviance,Justice Matters and is available.)”, where laws are applied unevenly across class and geography.
A public health approach changes that because it removes the police as the primary response and replaces them with healthcare. And that matters, because punishment does not treat addiction. It entrenches it.
Addiction specialists increasingly treat substance dependence as a medical and social condition shaped by trauma, mental health and economic hardship rather than simply a failure of willpower.
A criminal record makes stable housing harder to get. It makes employment harder to get. It makes recovery harder. If your actual goal is to reduce drug harm, this is a spectacularly counterproductive way of going about it.
There is also an economic argument that people who claim to care about taxpayers’ money suddenly lose interest in. The UK spends around £1.4 billion every year enforcing drug laws policing, courts and prisons. Yet drugs remain widely available in every town and city in the country.
Home Office data shows that the majority of recorded drug offences in England and Wales are for simple possession, not trafficking. The means enormous amounts of police time are spent processing people who use drugs rather than dismantling the networks that profit from them.
Also, a regulated cannabis market alone would generate significant tax revenue, create jobs and free up police time to deal with actual violent crime and thefts.
Places that have already legalised cannabis have demonstrated this clearly. In Colorado, cannabis taxes generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every year. In Canada, the legal cannabis industry now supports tens of thousands of jobs and has displaced a significant portion of the illegal market.
At the moment, that wealth flows directly to organised crime. So when people talk about drug policy reform as if it is some reckless social experiment, what they are actually defending is an incredibly expensive failure. And we do not even have to guess what happens when countries try something different.
Portugal decriminalised drugs in 2001 after facing severe heroin addiction and rising overdose drugs deaths during the 1990s. Possession for personal use was moved out of the criminal courts and handled through "dissuasion commissions” made up of health and social care professionals.
The result was not chaos. Drug use did not explode, and Portugal did not become a “drug tourism” hub as critics predicted. [Drug deaths fell dramatically.](https://drugpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/dpa-drug-decriminalization-portugal-health-human-centered-approach_0.pdf?) HIV infections from injecting drugs dropped by more than 90%. Portugal now has one of the lowest drug mortality rates in Europe.
The UK, which has stuck with prohibition, has one of the highest.
It is also worth saying something that often gets lost in these debates. Drug policy reform does not mean drug use disappears. In some places where reforms have been introduced, levels of certain drug use have remained similar or even increased. But the goal of a public health approach is not to pretend drug use can be eliminated entirely. It is to reduce the harm associated with drug use and make it possible for people to access help without fear of punishment. Addiction and harmful drug use are rarely caused by drugs alone. They are shaped by poverty, trauma, poor mental health, unstable housing and social isolation. Changing the law cannot solve those problems on its own. That is why reform has to come alongside investment in treatment services, mental health support, housing and community stability. Decriminalisation is not a cure for addiction. It is a foundation for a system that treats addiction as a problem to be addressed, rather than a crime to be punished.
If prohibition is the tough, responsible approach, why are the countries that moved away from it seeing better outcomes?
More than anything, this debate is about how we understand human beings. A punitive model says: if you are struggling with substance use, you are a problem to be managed. A health model says: you are a person who deserves care.
Those two approaches produce completely different outcomes.
We do not arrest people for having eating disorders. We do not send people to court for self harm. We recognise those as health issues that require support. Drug dependence should be treated with the same seriousness and compassion.
And for those who use drugs recreationally, the question is even simpler.In a free society adults are allowed to make decisions about their own bodies. We allow people to drink, to smoke, to gamble and to eat themselves into ill health. The state’s role is simply to reduce harm.
What frustrates me most about the reaction to the Greens’ policy is not that people disagree. It is that so many of the loudest voices are not engaging with the reality of the system we already have.They are defending a status quo in which drugs are widely available, children can access them, the supply is unregulated, addiction is punished instead of treated, and thousands of people die. And they are calling that the “safe” option.
It is not safe, it’s familiar. And those aren’t the same thing.
Once you accept the basic reality that prohibition does not eliminate drug use, the rest follows very quickly. You can have an illegal market run by criminals, or you can have a regulated market with age checks, access to treatment and profit for the public purse.
None of this is a fringe position. Public health bodies, addiction specialists and a growing number of law enforcement professionals have been making this argument for years. You cannot have a drug free society simply by passing a law. Britain has tried prohibition for more than fifty years. Drugs are still here. Organised crime is thriving. And thousands of people die every year.
Calling that the responsible option does not make it true.
So no, the Greens are not trying to get your children addicted to heroin.
They are talking about policy to create a system in which fewer people die, fewer lives are derailed by criminal records, fewer families lose someone to a contaminated supply, and more people who need help actually receive it.
None of this should be radical. It is simply what happens when policy is guided by evidence rather than moral panic.
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