Would moves to legally regulated drug markets increase drug use?
There is barely any research or evidence to support any position on this, and the variables and issues are numerous and complex. Changes in policy will have differing effects depending on the drug in question, the people who use it and the communities they live in, and the methods chosen to regulate it. The ‘best guess’ is that casual, experimental and essentially non-problematic drug uses would rise – at least in the short term. However any negative outcomes associated with this rise would be more than mitigated by the reduction in harm associated with ‘hard core’ compulsive, problematic drug use.
The deterrent effects of prohibition are poorly supported by the evidence. The response of Government to questioning on these claimed benefits has been to restate a belief’ in such effects rather than to produce any evidence to support them. No research in this area has been commissioned or published by Government despite its centrality to the entire prohibitionist paradigm, and public commitments to do so. The limited research that has been done does not demonstrate any significant regional or national correlation between the intensity of enforcement and levels of use or misuse, suggesting any deterrence effect is marginal, especially for key populations responsible for causing most harms. Reinforcing the view that criminalisation is not the best way to deal with drug use/misuse is a recent report published by the Cato Institute that reviews the impacts of drug decriminalisation in Portugal . The paper concludes that the change in laws has been overwhemlingly successful, and has not l
