[This is a YouTube script that contains some of the material found in The War on Sin, a much bigger page, far too big to make into one video]

Most of the harm caused by drugs in the world today is caused by the war on drugs. No other commodity offers anything like the profit margins that the drug trade offers. No legitimate product would be grown on secret farms in war-zones and then exported on the insides of airline passengers to be sold on the worst streets in town by nasty little toerags protected by overpaid untrained armed guards who can't shoot straight. Not even lucky white heather. The peculiar marketing methods are all caused by the illegal status of the product, as were the peculiar distribution methods of the prohibition era. These days Canadian Club and Bacardi do not enter the US in speedboats like they did in the prohibition era. Legitimate businesses can use legitimate means of distribution and they don't have to out-source their policing to armed thugs. If drugs were not illegal they would be considerably cheaper because distribution costs would be much lower and there would be genuine free market competition. Cheaper drugs would be considerably less glamorous and exclusive when available to all, even those who look like undercover police officers. Cheaper drugs would not require people to give up work and take to crime, even addicts can hold down jobs when their drugs are ubiquitous and relatively cheap, just look at cigarette smokers, they manage to do it.

Of course many people hold their hands up in horror at the thought of legalized drugs because they are wedded to the notion that drugs are sinful, even if they are embarrassed by that thought and try to hide the true reasons for their disgust behind a smokescreen. But if we think about this logically for a few moments we should come to recognize that not everything that is not against the law is actually compulsory. There are many things which I regard as wrong and I would be happy to see disappear that I do not seek to make illegal, many of them because I know any attempt to ban them would create more harm than good.

Mopeds, country music, warbling sopranos, morris dancing, celery, homoeopathy, astrology, Katie-Two-Names-Price. Aggh!

If there was never another hip-hop record made I would not grieve but I recognize that attempting to ban it would make hip-hop culture almost ubiquitous and would undermine the credibility of the state.

Americans in the twentieth century conducted “the noble experiment” of alcohol prohibition. It didn't work. Alcohol consumption did not go down, alcohol related problems did not go away and there were thousands of people turned into criminals by the process. The war on drugs is motivated by the same pattern of thinking, the concept of sin. The war on drugs is not working. The prisons of the world are filled with low level criminals, many people have had their lives blighted by convictions for entirely trivial offences against other people's ill-thought-out morals. And for what? Drugs are freely available in large quantities and relatively stable prices throughout the world. More people can get cannabis if they want it than can have access to reliable broadband. It is time to declare an end to the war on drugs and fight instead the notion of sin. Not sin itself but the fatuous notion of what constitutes sin. To many people today sins are self-evident and no thinking is required to decide that they are disgusting and should be stopped.

Sins are pleasures that God-fearing people are afraid to admit to. It's that simple. Drugs are illegal not because they are dangerous but because they are pleasurable. Pleasures which cannot be claimed by God are those most likely to be classed as sins. If Jesus had smoked cannabis then it would not have been a sin, but he didn't — so it is. Now clearly Jesus did drink wine so making a case against wine is difficult, but he was never reported as being drunk so drunkenness can be called a sin. Anything which is pleasurable has to be either godly and holy or a wicked sin, in the case of sex the same act can be the greatest of godly activities, a sacred duty indeed, or the most heinous of sins depending upon who is doing it.

We don't need to have drugs made illegal to crack down on the negative aspects of drug use. If somebody is a petty thief because they are addicted to drugs we can cope with that, the last time I checked theft was illegal, even in Scandinavia. The courts are able to cope with alcoholics and drunks who cause problems for other people without having their drug made illegal.

The misuse of drugs is not a drug problem it is a problem of human behaviour, just as dangerous driving is not a car problem, rape is a problem in the minds of men and not in the clothes of women and guns don't kill people, people do. Life cannot be made risk-free by banning things.

If you are still clinging to the idea that drugs are illegal because they are harmful just consider the story of industrial and denatured alcohol, this is ordinary ethanol, regular and fully drinkable but very pure alcohol manufactured industrially on a large scale at a very low cost which is deliberately poisoned in order to make it less likely to be drunk. Imagine taking a shot of industrial grade rectified spirit, pure ethanol, pour it into a glass, top it up with orange juice, stick in your screwdriver and give it a stir. You've invented a cocktail, all you need is a name for it. During the prohibition era in America the law insisted that the amount of poison added to industrial alcohol was increased because so much bootleg alcohol which was on sale started out as industrial alcohol. The US government were deliberately and consciously poisoning its citizens, people they had no regard for because they classed them as criminals and sinners who deserved to fry in hell anyway. One of the cheapest ways to make alcohol dangerous to drink is by adding methanol, a closely related alcohol which has the minor drawback of making people who drink it go blind. This is simply evil. These days less puritanical and evil governments who face problems with people drinking industrial alcohol follow the principle of at least doing no harm and forbid the addition of any poisons to industrial alcohol and instead rely on the addition of incredibly bitter tasting chemicals which are harmless but repulsive, rather like most of the people who try to drink the stuff in the first place.

Democratic societies need to grow some backbone and accept that life requires toleration of things we don't like, as long as activities do not impinge on the rights of other people to a significant degree we should tolerate them. The significant degree qualification is important here, because everything impinges to some degree, brightly coloured anoraks and cagoules make the countryside unattractive, fireworks cause litter and noise nuisance, other people's clothes or lack of clothes can cause shock or outrage, almost every activity has some fallout with other people, the thing to bear in mind is whether or not that fallout is really significant, and sometimes even when it is significant, such as when there is a major diversion caused by a crowd we must balance the rights of the crowd against the rights of those outside the crowd. It is legitimate to close the city centre once or twice per year for a major charity fun run, it would not be legitimate to close the city twelve times a week for small private family funerals or to allow a drunk to walk down the middle of a motorway offering chips to passing motorists.

We need to understand toleration, this is a very important middle way between the intolerable which we must forbid and the things which we celebrate. Toleration is not black or white it is grey. There is an option between banning something and making it compulsory. We must resist the siren voices who demand that we have to celebrate everything which isn't illegal. I don't need to celebrate religious diversity and I don't need to celebrate sexual diversity any more than I need to cheer for Manchester City or pretend I enjoy hip-hop, or celery.