Getting around the drugs laws?

A conversation got me thinking; what is it we seek to control through drugs laws? Is it the substance in question itself, as the system for enforcement would have it - since it prohibits specific substances. Is it the effects of taking certain substances? And if so, is it the health effects, the social effects or the immediate short term effects of taking those substances?

It seems to me that the latter, the short term usually neurological effects that people seek, are mostly benign. People don't do drugs in order to hurt themselves, to bring on short term pain, usually, but in order to give them a particular desirable feeling - often of wellbeing, escape from some painful reality, sometimes of added confidence, at other times of empathy for others, sometimes merely relaxation, or extra energy. All these seem like legitimate feelings and effects for people to want to seek. And sure, they can be gained by all sorts of ways other than by taking drugs - though possibly with more difficulty and less convenience.

But is it actually immoral to take substances to achieve such ends? Clearly not, as many legal substances can do the same things and we don't necessarily proscribe chocolate (the theobromides - poisonous to dogs for example - promote wellbeing), coffee (the caffeine is the most commonly used stimulant on earth) or St John's Wort (an ancient treatment for depression, possibly an "over the counter" SSRI). Heck, humanity might not have survived so long without the supposed aphrodisiac effects of many natural and often exotic foodstuffs and supplements.

Anyway, the point is that we put all sorts of things, natural and synthetic, from oysters to Horlicks, into our bodies in an attempt to achieve certain feelings. And there are "chemists" out there, a whole industry, constantly trying to reproduce some of the effects of illegal substances without actually using any illegal substances. The science will likely always be one step ahead of the legislators, so I have no doubt that these concoctions are achieving more than a placebo effect. You can buy them on the internet for next day delivery from online stores that have forums that people join to say how much they enjoyed them or not. Just like eBay or Tesco online.

But whilst they may be legal, are they safe? They certainly don't have much of a regulatory framework or testing regime to prove themselves. Yet they are legal when many proscribed drugs have had centuries, even millennia of use for us to examine for evidence about their safety.

Why is heroin so intrinsically bad when common lore at least says that our longest reigning monarch to date ran the empire on an opium concoction; even a Roman emperor kept the northern Germanic tribes at bay whilst writing a classic tome about his predecessors while taking opium. Tales tell of how the first president of the United States kept himself in balance with cannabis and that the slavery campaigner William Wilberforce similarly emancipated half the world while toking. Some of our greatest poets seem to have had a penchant for mind-bending substances - would we have denied the world their art worried about what they may have been taking when producing it? And, just as today, throughout history there have been chemists, alchemists, trying to find such things as the elixir of youth.

So on the one hand we have all these relatively natural substances - opium, cannabis, coca, certain fungi and so on - used for millennia and with relatively well researched evidence about their effectiveness, the dosages at which they are safe (from experience if nothing else) and the circumstances in which they may not be, and they are illegal. Even the main active ingredients in some synthesized drugs like ecstasy have a hundred year history since it was patented my Merck and has been tested off and on for different uses - a drug waiting for something to cure! On the other we have perfectly legal concoctions, though nobody but the creator and I suppose a DEA investigator if they wanted to check, knows what's in them, they have little research history and for all we know they might be toilet cleaner and arsenic.

The devil you know, versus the devil you don't? I know which I would consider safer. Drugs laws are pointless. They criminalize the wrong people. And in the process drive the whole thing underground into a system controlled by organized crime - killing far more people in that process, from failed narco-states to street gangs in Manchester or London. And that criminalization makes it all the harder for people to seek help or even to be open about their use, often until it's too late. We know it would be possible to maintain a fairly humdrum ordinary existence even addicted to opium if it were available, regulated and quality controlled, for before the Harrison narcotics acts in the US that started the "war on drugs" we know that the preponderance of addicts were white upper and upper middle class women, like Queen Victoria mentioned above. We don't know that about the toilet cleaner and arsenic concoction deemed legal - albeit by default probably - and I think I know what I would rather my friends and family were taking if they were that way inclined.

When reputable science puts ecstasy nearly twenty places below alcohol and tobacco in the list of the most harmful substances and yet its supply can get you a life sentence who do we think these laws are serving?