Like many contentious social issues, positions on drug policy are often aligned with political outlooks. While what are described as cultural issues have blurred the traditional dividing line between left and right, we can still speak about coherent political philosophies. Politics, at least in the developed world, can be understood as competition between liberal and conversative world outlooks. Liberals comprise two camps: one libertarian, which is liberal on economic issues and protective of individual liberty; and one which is social democratic, also keen to guard personal freedoms but in favour of an interventionist state to offset the consequences of market failures. Conservatives emphasise the value of stability and see government’s role as supporting societal anchors such as the family, personal responsibility, self-reliance, and respect for tradition. Personal freedom is an essential aspect of conservative philosophy, but the state has the right to intervene to prevent behaviour deemed harmful to the individual or the community.

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Over the past several decades we’ve seen how these, admittedly loosely defined, political outlooks are reflected in stances taken on the legal status of drugs and the sanctions used to control their use, the response to problematic use, and the attention given to the adverse consequences of using illegal substances. Liberals argue that an individual’s behaviour is their own concern and the state has no business interfering if no harm is being done to others. Further, criminalisation is a cruel reaction to personal preferences and merely enriches those who operate outside the law. While libertarians might have no truck with state support for treatment and harm reduction interventions, like social democrats they acknowledge that drug use is a feature of contemporary life and its suppression is both counterproductive and unethical.

Liberals tend to take a common position on a famous historical experiment that attempted to alter a population’s substance use behaviour. Prohibition in America (1920–1933) is often seen as a historical catastrophe, a blunt policy instrument and a futile attempt by an overreaching state heavily influenced by a political movement that was puritanical, intolerant of alternative world views, and imbued with evangelical zealotry. A recent comparative history of prohibition and temperance movements in different parts of the world challenges this consensus.1 It puts the American prohibition period in the context of a diverse international response to alcohol-related harm. Temperance in the 19th and early 20th centuries was aligned with abolitionism, anticolonialism, and organised labour, and was a humane and often politically radical response to a major social problem. Major pro-temperance and prohibition figures such as Frederick Douglass, Hjalmar Branting, founder of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, and Emile Vandervelde, founder of the Belgian Labour Party, would be highly regarded by today’s champions of progressive causes.

All facets need to be considered in discussions around regulation of both legal substances and those that are currently controlled. Commercial interest in one or other side of the debate adds a further layer of complexity. It is often difficult to determine how personal freedoms are best served, but we have to make sure that contributions are based on rigour and respect for facts. When protagonists on one or other side of a debate refer to historical events, they should treat them with the same respect as epidemiological or other evidence. Assertions need to be challenged, even if they refer to the distant past. While we should also avoid anachronistic comparisons, it if fair to say that today’s defenders of human rights would be in good company with the leaders of prohibition and temperance movements of the past. They may have used different language, but they too were committed to the rights of the individual, building a collective approach to health and wellbeing and bravely challenging powerful interests to create a better society. 
 

1 Schrad ML (2021) Smashing the liquor machine: a global history of prohibition. New York: Oxford University Press.