This book has grown out of a chapter I wrote for a third edition of a text entitled Drugs and Crime (Bean, 2008), the chapter a response to a stinging criticism from a reviewer who thought that there was something amiss with an earlier edition, which did not examine the justification for linking drugs to crime. Meeting that criticism led to a greater awareness of the subject matter, which has grown and developed over time. Yet when I looked closely at the literature, it was astonishing that in spite of public concern about the drugs problem, and many suggestions to solve it, little real interest has been shown in the UK in what can be called the ‘legalisation debate’. Hopefully this short book will remedy that and provoke further interest.

Another difficulty has been the lack of an agreed or accepted definition for many of the terms. For example, ‘legalisation’ is often used to include proposals in opposition to current government policy, while ‘prohibition’ has begun to mean more than controlling drugs through the law, and to include ‘decriminalisation’, which is also used in the debates about changing the classification of drugs such as cannabis. Or it has come to approximate to ‘medicalisation’, meaning the supply of drugs by and through the medical profession. And this on top of the initial problems of defining a ‘drug’. In what follows, I have tried to be rather more precise, trying to impose some order on what is often a chaotic use of language, but not always succeeding in that sometimes it has been convenient to refer to legalisation and prohibition in the same form as above.

The aim throughout is theoretical, not empirical, although I shall draw on the empirical literature where appropriate. I want to examine some of the proposals surrounding the ‘legalisation debate’ and do so with reference to the literature. Some clarification is needed about what is considered. First to say what is not. I have not dealt with that part of the debate centring on the proscription of drugs in certain types of employment, or the use of drug tests to determine drug use, or the offence of driving under the influence of drugs. I assume that no one disputes that driving or flying an aeroplane under the influence of drugs, or being under the influence in similarly hazardous occupations, should continue to be prohibited.