Now, onto the meat of drug policy – what an independent Wales could do differently.
Let’s assume that recreational drugs which are currently illegal remain illegal after independence. What strategies would be available to an independent Wales in order to to “win” the domestic front in the War on Drugs?
Firstly, it’s worth deciding what “winning” the War on Drugs looks like.
Global Examples
- Illegal in name only: Costa Rica – While drugs haven’t been decriminalised in Costa Rica, there’s a legal ban on using or possessing them which, in practice, isn’t enforced. There are criminal penalties for the cultivation, manufacture, sale and trafficking of drugs.
- Administrative Punishment: Portugal – Probably the most well-known example of decriminalisation in Europe, though not the most liberal. Drug possession is still an offence, but is punished through fines, withdrawal of civil privileges or referral to drug treatment/counselling instead of going through the criminal courts. The threshold amount for punishment for possession is 10 days supply for personal use – which has been argued is too low.
- Leave it to the judge: Uruguay – Uruguay has never criminalised drug possession and it’s often left to a judge to decide whether the amount of drugs involved in a case is a criminal matter or not. Cannabis was legalised in 2013, with public sales beginning in 2017.
Conclusions
It has been argued, as in Scotland, that decriminalisation would be an “evidence-based approach” to the drug problem.
Even the UK Parliament’s Scottish Affairs Committee concluded in 2019 that “statutory decriminalisation is a preferable solution which removes the legal ambiguities inherent in non-statutory approaches (to drug decriminalisation)”.
The evidence is pointing towards the current criminal justice-based approach not being very effective.
That said, this isn’t as cut and dry as some of us might like to think it is as decriminalisation may just be sweeping the problem under the carpet. While decriminalisation puts the experience of the recreational drug user and drug addict first, it still ignores the elephant in the room: that the market would remain unregulated and run by criminals.
There are similar arguments to be made concerning sex work; you can decriminalise it, but if some sex workers are trafficked here by organised crime gangs are you just looking the other way while people are exploited?
