Welcome to the big stink. There’s no nice way to say it — London in 2025 is dirty, dysfunctional and reeks of weed. It is not a city in which you can afford a home, start a family, or feel consistently safe. But the answer of its mayor, Sadiq Khan, is not to clean up the city, but to hand it over to its most anti-social denizen, as he calls for the decriminalisation of cannabis.
The first reaction of many will be surprise that the drug remains illegal, as you certainly wouldn’t know it based on its prevalence and the nonchalant confidence with which it is blown into the faces of commuters on a daily basis. The hefty 300 page report produced by his tame London Drugs Commision (why are liberals so in love with lobbying themselves?) cannot really pretend away the medical and social harms of cannabis. Instead there is a lot of hyperventilating about the fact that young black men are regularly stopped and searched on suspicion of cannabis possession, and a lot of waffle about harm reduction and education.
Dig a little deeper into the mountain of verbiage, and one discovers some nasty surprises not broadcast in the press releases. The report clearly and explicitly lays out decriminalisation as a waystation on the road to full recreational legalisation, and discusses in detail the enormous profits (and associated tax revenues) from a legal trade in cannabis. Khan is unilaterally pursuing a radical program of social change, and has long been doing so. He has already launched trial policies of decriminalising the drugs for under 25s in a number of London Boroughs, and his Commision is effectively a taxpayer-funded legalisation campaign. Neither permissive Labour, nor profit-hungry Tories, have stepped in to stop him or force him to enforce the law when in Downing Street.
Britain is not a historically permissive or drug-abusing culture
An academic orthodoxy of permissiveness on drug policy is married to a well-funded lobbying industry. A typical example is the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Industrial Hemp & CBD Products, appropriately chaired by Crispin Blunt MP, is entirely funded by Tenacious Labs, a cannabis company based in Jersey, which runs the APPG directly. A cynical liberal establishment knows it can’t get drug legalisation through the front door, so it instead quietly degrades drug enforcement. Not only does this normalise drug use, it helps create a public perception that enforcement doesn’t work, and other approaches must be tried. This frog-boiling tactic is nowhere more evident than London, where a whole range of anti-social behaviours are tolerated, demoralising and intimidating law-abiding people, and manufacturing passive consent.
It’s striking that the report looks only to international examples of drug liberalisation, yet makes no reference to the many countries that have successfully implemented prohibition. When you look at the policies of the nations with the lowest levels of drug use and abuse, you start to realise that drug prohibition in this country has never been tried, and the war on drugs never fully fought. In Japan, less than 2 per cent of the population has even tried cannabis, as compared to nearly half of Americans, and drug laws are both stricter and more heavily enforced. Campaigners, when they engage with such devastating counter-examples at all, dismiss it as driven by “cultural differences”.
But Britain is not a historically permissive or drug-abusing culture, with drug abuse vanishingly rare as recently as the 1950s. Although elite attitudes shifted in the 60s-70s, the mass prevalence of drugs was the product not of the counterculture, but rather the socioeconomic breakdown of post-industrial communities, as drugs flooded areas where unemployment was rife. The big factor battering away at public attitudes is the vast influence of America’s libertarian, capitalistic cannabis culture, along with its individualist philosophy. This has been accelerated, especially in London, by quasi-criminal subcultures like drill music, alongside imported practices from Jamaica and Somalia.
These huge social changes around drugs are neither positive nor inevitable, as our pallid progressive elites would like to claim. Even leaving aside the considerable evidence of cannabis’s links to paranoia, violence, psychosis and damage to developing brains, the culture and behaviours around it are universally negative. Whilst alcohol, despite its high social costs, has important ritual, cultural and traditional functions, and moderate drinking promotes pro-social behaviours, the reverse is true of cannabis. Weed induces not conviviality, but laziness, it makes public places less pleasant, and it is often consumed not as a social drug, but as a poor man’s antidepressant and anti-anxiety med. Though we should have sympathy with those driven to consume drugs, we must understand the vast moral hazard of normalising or legalising this civilisational toxin.
The vital role of the law in this context is not to solve drug problems on our behalf, but to authorise the public to oppose drug culture, putting the full moral and formal weight of the state behind proper standards of behaviour. Perhaps the most iniquitous part of Khan’s report was its recommendation that permissive ideas about drugs be taught to primary school aged children — it is this insidious, creeping normalisation that makes prohibition impossible. Rather than seeing drugs as just another thing people do, societies that successfully suppress drug use employ shame and disgust towards drug consumption. People lose their jobs over it, their reputations suffer, and the government acts strongly against the promotion of drug culture online.
Reasonable people can disagree about where that line should be drawn, and what degree of tolerance we should extend to human failings. But even without going as far as Japan, there are many areas where shame, strong criminal enforcement, and social regulation could positively transform our culture. Even if we look the other way about drug taking behind closed doors, there should be zero tolerance for those getting high in public. But that can’t just be about punishing working class drug users and the poorest. Middle class indulgences must be quashed too, and an example set. That means no more drug testing and eyes averted at music festivals and high end nightclubs, no more politicians laughing off their cocaine habits.
There is no point arguing about the merits of legalisation. Londoners are already living in that world, one where drug users beg, cry and menace in the streets, where drug deals and cannabis use occur in every public park, where police are invisible and ordinary people vulnerable. It isn’t the Age of Aquarius, but a menacing new reality without grace or decency, in which public life and spaces are slowly taken away from us. The only question we should be asking is how fast we can turn things around — before they get worse.
