What Should The Minimum Age For Drugs Be? (Your Radical Questions with Neil Woods)

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0:46Hello and welcome to Your Radical Questions, where we put your questions to our guests. This is your chance to engage directly with the radical people we have on this podcast and ask them about their ideas for the future. Neil Woods is still here with me. He's a former police officer and undercover drugs operative who has now become a campaigner for the legalisation of illegal drugs. Neil joined me for the main episode. It was a fascinating exploration of the many complex issues in this topic. Neil talked about his experience in the police and the events that led to his radical change of mind, as well as his passionate belief that we should legalise both the possession and supply of drugs and task government with the job of regulating them.

1:31If you haven't listened yet, I definitely recommend going back and checking out that episode first. But there's even more to get into in this issue, and I'm glad to say Neil is here to answer the radical questions that you've sent in. Our first question comes from Carol Curtis, who sent in this email. Carol says, I have concern for young people as their brain is still developing towards adulthood. Should the legalising of drugs include an age-related exemption to protect young people at a crucial time in their brain development, along with the offer of a short course in their school curriculum on why and why not we take drugs?

2:10Yes, a great question. And I absolutely agree. The problem is with prohibition is that we have children with easily access to drugs and they're young developing brains and they shouldn't be taking drugs. So we know from the evidence of alcohol regulation in North America that regulation protects young people better than prohibition does. But it becomes a very important question as to what age do you regulate? Because 18 is the traditional age for alcohol, but there is some good evidence that actually for cannabis, it should be older. and there's some suggestion that it should actually be as old as 21 but certainly um following the evidence i think it should be older than 18 and the education well yes absolutely it is much easier to educate about the harms of drugs and how to reduce those harms once you have a regulated supply of those drugs for the adult market because how do you educate accurately

3:21Neil Woods:when you don't know what's in the drugs you know you need to have control of that of that commodity it's interesting because if you're talking about cannabis and it's certainly true the risk of psychosis i think it's greatest up till the age of of 25 and if you're looking about the risk of cannabis induced psychosis that would fall into that bracket. But then we also know that cannabis is the most widely used drug among teenagers. So could you be confident that if you were following a public health perspective and having an age limit in your 20s for cannabis, that that's going to change anything at all in terms of young people, teenagers using cannabis?

3:59Well, it's a judgment call. it will have to be designed very very carefully and mitigate the risk for the age versus the risk of not being able to adequately capture the market because if you look at what happened in Canada I mean you can see what mistakes they made in Canada they made two very significant mistakes one was in pricing they priced it too much they got hungry for the tax benefits too quickly so they didn't capture enough of the illicit market quickly enough. And another thing is they didn't use the knowledge of the people within the illicit cannabis industry for quality, because there's a connoisseur aspect to cannabis consumers.

4:41They know quality and they didn't adequately produce that quality from the government regulated production. We need to capture as much of the illicit market as we can as quickly as we can to take the power away from organised crime but also so that we get some semblance of control over the age of people using it because if you don't if you only capture 50 % of the market initially then you've got 50 % of the market which is illicit and still thriving and still supplying to teenagers so all of those regulatory mechanisms will have to be considered but first and foremost they need to be considered for the health and safety of our young people that needs to be the primary goal and what about the second part of carol's question there about education in schools i mean would you be advocating for a slightly different approach to

5:33Neil Woods:what we currently have yes absolutely because the current approach of how we educate children is you're not allowed to do that and just say no and we know that that doesn't work we need harm reduction advice. We need to be able to explain that if you do take the decision at some point when it's appropriate to consume this, these are the risks and these are how to mitigate those risks. But really, we think you shouldn't be doing that until you're this age for these reasons. Evidence shows if you explain to young people the detail and the reasoning, you will get a much better result than just saying no.

6:09Thank you for those questions, Carol. We've had another question sent in as a voice note from Alistair. Hi Neil, there's some pretty convincing evidence from both Portugal and Switzerland as to the harm reduction and crime reduction that they have achieved through the legalisation of heroin or decriminalisation I should say perhaps. However the Canadian and Oregon experience when trying the same process with marijuana has perhaps proved less successful. Can you dig into why this should be and how they can correct it and other countries can avoid the same pitfalls?

6:52Neil Woods:Thank you. So many people who don't want to reform drug policy at all will point at the experience of Oregon in the United States as an example of why we shouldn't. So what happened in Oregon is that they didn't take legal control. This is not legal regulation we're talking about. They decriminalised possession. but unlike Portugal that put in various social measures to help people who were using drugs problematically they didn't do that in Oregon they just decriminalized possession so people started using drugs publicly where that it was inappropriate to do so there was no safe consumption rooms like they have like we have the thistle in Glasgow or they have in many European cities or in Canada, they didn't have the sort of wraparound social care that you need in order to tackle problematic drug use.

7:41Neil Woods:Because decriminalisation in of itself isn't enough. What Portugal did was a complete package. They didn't do that in Oregon. And there isn't necessarily the philosophy of the social safety net in the United States, which necessarily catered for that shift. Now, there was a lot of misinformation about Oregon, though, saying that there was an increase in drug deaths. But the increase in drug deaths in Oregon only matched all of the other states that surrounded it. So it wasn't caused by decriminalisation. It was caused by synthetic opioids, different types of synthetic opioids coming into the American market.

8:22Neil Woods:And the caller rightfully pointed to Switzerland as being the place where they've legally regulated heroin. They haven't done that in Portugal. They haven't taken legal control of heroin in Portugal. That is something that they could do to reduce their deaths even more. And it's something that they could do to reduce the power of organised crime. So I was speaking to a friend of mine, the chief of police, uniformed police in Lisbon. And, you know, as a chief of police, he said, I would never go back to criminalising people for using drugs. No way. You know, that was creating huge amounts of work for police that was getting nowhere.

9:01And we had a robust debate because he still targets drug dealers. So he's still targeting the supply. He says, but it's much easier to do that because we're not using resources on people who just use drugs. Of course, it was a robust debate because my argument is, of course, that the police job would be even easier if they had a legally regulated market and they didn't have to chase the dealers and of course he agreed that there would certainly be less workload upon police if that was the case. But this whole approach requires so much wholesale change in societal attitudes to drugs in the way that we have an infrastructure around people using drugs.

9:45You know there's examples that you use in Oregon you know there weren't restrictions on where and how you could take it it's a big ask to ask a society to make so many changes isn't it yeah and it's a change in many regards of course um i mean if you're looking at at it just in a civil service finances point of view for example there's lots of evidence which makes it clear that a health approach is cheaper than a criminal justice approach and you know that this change this

10:13Neil Woods:drug policy change it's not the huge beer moth that that you that it sounds like when you when When you have the headline, you know, former undercover cop calls for the legalisation of drugs. What I'm talking about is lots of incremental stages and breaking this down into its constituent parts. Each drug is a different problem. And you tackle each problem according to the best evidence. Canada, though, Canada had problems. And Canada doesn't have the kind of cultural background that a state like Oregon has. Well, Canada has actually been a shining light of harm reduction for a very long time. They were one of the first countries to have safe consumption rooms, overdose prevention sites where people can use more safely.

10:54Neil Woods:They have experimented with some aspects of legal regulation. Obviously, they have legal regulation of cannabis, but they haven't had enough buy-in when they've had an experiment with legal regulation of some other substances as an experiment in British Columbia. The political momentum for broader legal regulation has stuttered a little bit. There are people actually coming up for trial for providing safe supply in British Columbia for the sake of keeping people alive and safe from organised crime. And they're brave people, but they're now facing the wrath of the justice system. They've not supplied for profit.

11:34Neil Woods:They've been supplying to try and keep people alive. Thank you for that voice note, Alistair. Our next question is from Christine Davis. How does Neil suggest we allay the fears and change the minds of those who still view prohibited drugs as a dangerous evil, which should always be illegal, bearing in mind that alcohol and tobacco are legal and heavily taxed? I think the majority of UK citizens will see the merits of this huge change once they've had a chance to think it through. Yeah, the word evil is an interesting word because in the single convention, the word evil was used about drugs. and this moral judgment is the heart of this international drug policy and it's all based on racism you know cocaine wasn't banned until in the Jim Crow era it was a way to send black people to prison opium wasn't banned until Chinese workers had finished building the railways and there were inconvenient people in the job market you know cannabis wasn't banned until it was in the Great Depression and Mexican workers you know it was all about criminalizing groups of people, it's prejudice which is built into the entire system.

12:44And it is upon that prejudice that the moral judgment sits.

12:48Neil Woods:So I think we need to unpick that and be aware of the impacts of that. So that racism is still in the DNA of the policy now. You know, you are eight times more likely to be stopped searching for drugs if you're black than if you're white. It's not just about racism though, is it? I mean, there are some people who think wanting to be intoxicated is morally wrong. And perhaps those people might have been part of the temperance movement that led to prohibition in America in the early 20th century. It's not just about racism. No, it's not just about racism. There are some people who just see it as immoral behaviour.

13:21But, you know, even if you judge it as immoral behaviour, it doesn't necessarily mean it should be illegal. The most important thing is preservation of life.

13:31Neil Woods:And from whatever your religious or moral standpoint, I think that has to be the overarching consideration. And so for the preservation of life, We should follow the best evidence. Thank you so much for that question. Our next question is from Stephen. At a basic level in the legalisation debate, I'm often not clear if its advocates favour discouraging access to or limiting the availability of Class A drugs in the belief that under legislation this is possible or perhaps easier or unlimited availability of Class A drugs and then mitigate the harms through education, treatment or other measures.

14:11Do they recommend interventions in the market, such as quality control, taxation or age-related sale or not? Again, either option is problematic. Interventions create a new black market. No interventions create a unique tax and regulation free marketplace for a dangerous commodity. It's a complicated question and I appreciate it. But I think my answer might be quite simple here, because the debate is often simplified unhelpfully into a policy which should reduce the numbers of people using drugs. And that that is often the strength of the argument from the prohibitionist, that we must reduce the numbers, just the numbers, and that prohibition does this best.

14:58Well, I don't think prohibition does reduce the numbers the best because we have examples of legal regulation where we can reduce the numbers. But the numbers of people using drugs is not the most important thing. The numbers of people coming to harm, the numbers of people using drugs problematically is the number that we should be watching. And so the mechanisms that we want, legal regulation, the quality of the product, who it can be sold to and where, in what format, in what method, at what time of day, all of these kind of issues you can control through regulation. but you can't control through prohibition and once you create a situation where by removing the criminality you reduce the stigma significantly reduce the stigma then people can seek help and we can work and constantly adapt the best ways for people to receive that help so we're in suddenly we're in a learning process we have a regulatory system where we can learn and adapt the best ways to look after people.

16:06In some instances, we might decide that we need to try and reduce the numbers of people using. And so we will use regulatory measures to do that. And there are some drugs that we will want to do that. Other drugs, we might not be so concerned about reducing numbers, but we need to tweak it in other ways. And we also, then we want to educate people on the best way to use these drugs and help them with their decision-making process. And this show is called Radical, and I'm a big fan of the show, so I'm very honoured to be asked to be on it. But I would argue that what I'm proposing is not radical, that prohibition is a radical experiment.

16:49It's a recent experiment in human history that has gone drastically, catastrophically wrong. We have empowered the very worst elements of our society and grown the power of organised crime. Well, we're very glad that you joined us on Radical. Thanks for all your questions and thank you for answering them, Neil Woods. There'll be another episode of Radical on Thursday, but for now, it's goodbye. Thank you.

17:18Please welcome your Any Questions panel. Hello, I'm Alex Forsyth, host of Radio 4's Any Questions. If you don't know the programme, this is what it's about. every Friday I'm joined by politicians journalists and public figures who answer questions directly from a live audience giving you real views, real challenges and real conversations about the issues shaping our lives we take our lively debate to communities across the UK where they get to ask the questions about the topics that matter the most, live political debate where the audience drives the agenda any questions every Friday night at 8pm on Radio 4 or subscribe on BBC Sounds so that you never miss an episode.

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