The politics of illegal drugs and legal highs

Worldwide, narcotics laws vary. But India’s are among the most confusing. An individual can be arrested and refused bail because someone else was carrying a prohibited substance, cannabis.

Mind you, cannabis is recommended for consumption in multiple religious texts, starting with the Vedas, and variants are sold from government-run shops in several states. Millions of Indians consume it openly on a regular basis, for reasons ranging from religious, to recreational and medical.

Civilised countries everywhere have started to decriminalise recreational use. You can call it ganja, bhang, hasheesh, charas, grass, dagga, or marijuana— the names themselves indicate the width of its global use. Apart from recreational usage, it’s prescribed to cancer patients and amputees, as a painkiller, an anti-nausea specific, and an appetite-stimulant.
 

The global market is estimated at over $25 billion. Recreational cannabis is legally available in Canada, and the US, with listed cannabis marketers. Recreational use is legal in most of Latin America and the Caribbean. In Holland, it is sold in coffee-shops. It is legal to grow, and to carry up to 3 grams for personal consumption in Luxembourg and Belgium. Germany ignores possession of up to 6 grams. The Austrians refer users to healthcare services, rather than terming it a criminal offence. The UK issues a warning for first offence of possession, and fines for subsequent offences.

This indicates variations and contradictions in worldwide laws. But nowhere else in the world is anybody arrested for not carrying cannabis. To add to the confusion, bhang is ritually consumed by hundreds of millions on Holi. The government tom-toms the organisation of out-of-turn Kumbh Melas, where thousands smoke it openly. The prime minister offers public prayers at Kedarnath, whose presiding deity, Shiva, is seen by devotees as the chief patron of the drug.

It would make sense for the law to be rewritten to allow recreational and medical use. The drug could then be taxed. It could be branded with Geographical Indicators like Darjeeling tea, or champagne to emphasise the strong branding of renowned cultivation centres like Manali, Kedarnath,  Wayanad , Manipur. This would fuel tourism as well. Bio-research into variants and slick packaging for value-addition could enable the creation of franchised chains.

There are several reasons why such legalisation will not happen, despite being an obvious way to hike revenues. One is, the individuals running the ban machinery stand to lose if the drug is legalised; the exchequer would gain but officials running the prohibition machinery would lose. Hence, there’s always internal pushback against lifting prohibitions.

This is generically true everywhere for all goods and services, which are in demand but prohibited. It could be sex-work, alcohol, porn, or gold. Once something is banned, the state ceases to make revenues and instead spends to enforce the ban. But since demand exists, those who provide it mark up the price and pay off the officials tasked to enforce the ban.

The other reason, more specific to India, is political dopamine. Physical dopamine is a neurotransmitter, carrying messages through the nervous system. It is produced naturally by the body and released to signify pleasure, when some activity is “approved”. This could be as diverse as drinking wine, eating steak, solving differential equations, taking cold baths, lifting weights, having sex, beating up people who follow different religions — anything a given individual finds pleasurable.

Dopamine drives addiction — whether it’s smoking, or running marathons, dopamine tells the body what is fun. One problem for addicts is that an addict needs progressively more of the drug to trigger dopamine release.

This is just as true for addictive political messaging. If a political party offers vikas, it may trigger enough political dopamine to win an election. But next time round, simply vikas may not be enough. If outrage is the preferred trigger for releasing more political dopamine, it’s necessary to keep offering more cause for outrage, or more creative variations of outrage. Cannabis, which has been lauded as an aid to creative thought for millennia, triggers the release of physical dopamine. It’s truly creative to use its absence to trigger political dopamine instead.