In response to Stephen Bush’s column (Opinion, January 21) and Mike Davis’s letter (January 28) on shaming drug users, I’m sceptical that this would work.
We can see many parallels with other issues for which shaming consumers for behaviour that had damaging downstream consequences has not worked for decades.
Fast fashion is one — an enormously environmentally damaging and exploitative industry. Have any campaigns that try to shame consumers into not buying these goods moved the needle? Or is the industry booming, with economic factors and consumer culture trumping shame?
I’m also reminded of Aldous Huxley’s autobiographical book The Doors of Perception where he writes: “That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.”
Through millennia of culture, we have deemed some ways of “escape” culturally acceptable and legal, and somewhat arbitrarily, others shameful and illegal.
Professor David Nutt’s study in 2010 on the harm caused by all drugs was politically and culturally inconvenient, ranking alcohol and tobacco as more harmful than cannabis and ecstasy.
Prohibition has well and truly failed and there is a great need for more enlightened, evidence-based policy that takes harm across the entire system seriously.
Some substances may be irredeemable — simply too harmful from crop to consumer to consider legalising, industrialising and taxing. Others may be redeemable.
That might end, for example, the farce that is the UK’s current approach to cannabis for one — widely used, unpoliced, untaxed.
David Hepburn
London N4, UK