Dan Hannan on Cocaine Ethics
From Dan Hannan’s Blog
Helen Mirren has revealed that she went off cocaine for a rather unusual reason. Not because it was damaging her health or causing her nostrils to merge, nor because she had qualms about breaking the law, nor yet because she was setting a bad example. No, she stopped snorting when she read that Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war-criminal, had been supporting himself in Bolivia partly from the profits of her habit.
The more I think about this, the more I admire her. I am, as long-standing readers will know, a drippy liberal when it comes to drugs. But the moral case against encouraging cocaine traffic strikes me as hard to answer.
My choice of drug is alcohol, and had I been living in the 1920s America, I would have been funding the likes of Al Capone to enjoy my pleasure, a man who murdered his opponents. By that reckoning, there would have been a moral case against encouraging alcohol traffic, yes?
Well, no. We know today that people can trade alcohol without violence. There are breweries making beer selling to pubs that compete on price, quality and convenience. We don’t have repeats of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
What actually happens is that when something is made illegal that people freely trade, it ends up being run by people who are prepared to use violence, and funded by people who can’t exactly invest their money in legitimate businesses.
If cocaine were legal in 1983 (when Mirren claims to have quit it), Klaus Barbie probably wouldn’t have been involved in it. You’d have UK and US brands and the last thing that they would want is any connection with a Nazi war criminal (and legal products would mean that the trade would be far more transparant so former war criminals would keep themselves away from it).
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Yes, isn’t that the point that Dan is making? You seem to be trying to disagree with him, and yet his point is exactly about ’smuggled’ cocaine.
“If there is a less ethical product than smuggled cocaine, I have yet to hear of it.”
Thanks for the comment, Grey,
That’s not how I read it as he very much refers to it being a thirsty drug and how forests are being cleared to make it, which is the same thing regardless of whether it’s legal or illegal.