ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the attempt to achieve social engineering with regard to states of consciousness through prohibitionist legislation, contrasting the conventional functioning of prohibitive legislation, which aims to prevent the individual from subjecting others to harm in various ways, with the notion that the law has a simultaneous obverse duty to prevent the subject from harming himself/herself too. As various forms of substance prohibition have demonstrated, these bodies of law are very easily evaded and always produce a significant level of contravention, much of which enforcement agencies are tacitly prepared to overlook. While many jurisdictions around the world are beginning to experiment with greater liberality through decriminalization initiatives at varying levels—Portugal, Switzerland, Uruguay, the Netherlands, the city of Vancouver, and some US states—others, led by the UK among the western democracies, are wedded to the view that further repression will achieve at last the elusive goal of a permanently disintoxicated society. Historical precedent overwhelmingly shows this to be a vain hope, and this chapter will deconstruct some of the public arguments deployed in support of the UK Psychoactive Substances Act (2016).
