The permissive lobby and libertarians have been advocating for the legalization of drugs for ages. Central to the reasoning of the permissive policy lobby are what can be called here the 'no worse' and 'not proven' arguments. The first one maintains that since the harm done by any illicit drug is no worse than the harm done by legal drugs such as alcohol and tobacco, they should all have the same legal status.
The 'not proven' argument concedes that a certain amount of harm is done by illicit drugs, but maintains that any harm so far merely indicated as possible but not conclusively proven should be ignored. This approach disregards the great volume of side effects that laboratory experiments have shown to be likely or possible but have not yet confirmed. It also disregards proven side effects, and their potential for further harm.
The 'no worse' argument is sometimes presented in tandem with the 'not proven' argument: for example, the claim that since it has not been proven that heroin is worse than alcohol, heroin should be given equivalent legal status. Or, as another example, the fallacy that cannabis has not been proved to be worse than alcohol and tobacco taken together--an argument presented in the 1990 Australian Capital Territory Report as a basis for its recommendation to make the use of cannabis no longer a criminal offence. (Bowman & Sanson-Fisher, 1994)
The question of harm is critical to the evaluation of drug policy, and no proposal for change to any kind of permissive policy can avoid the question of the risk of harm to individuals and society as a whole. In the last two decades the advance in scientific knowledge about the harmful effects of various illicit drugs has posed difficulties for the permissive lobby. Nobody can.......
