Unusually for books on the topic, Drug Policy includes a chapter on the democratic process and the role played by the public in drug policy formation.1 Author Alison Ritter explores how the public might participate in the decision-making process and identifies several obstacles to participation in contemporary liberal democracies. Justifications for government decisions are based on the strength of the arguments supporting them and on the consent which the electorate gives through the electoral process. Because of the complexity of governing, the technical tasks of policy are left to experts, with input from the bulk of the population largely limited to infrequent elections.

The neologism ‘technocratic’ is used to describe this concentration of decision-making and implies a separation between public consent and policy formation. Delegation to experts results in a distance from the political process and a susceptibility to arguments that promote a simpler, more responsive form of government that expresses the will of the people. Populism can be persuasive, but it relies on emotion and the identification of impediments to the popular will. This reduces the capacity to deal with nuance and complexity in policy areas around which there is no clear consensus and further erodes the capacity of the democratic system to respond to its electorate.

Ritter describes the opportunities provided by deliberative forms of public engagement that enable an informed and considered exchange of opinion. This allows a deeper understanding of the policy issue being considered to emerge, a respect for opposing positions, and a genuine effort to find workable and just solutions to problems.

The opportunities for deliberative input into policymaking are limited, but deliberative democracy can add a further level of legitimacy for policy decisions in that public justification for a position is built through reasoning among equals. Accounts of the origins and development of deliberative democracy emphasise its equally important epistemic and normative aspects: reasons are weighed and their strength is determined through a political process that supports equal participation and produces a collective judgement on the matter being considered.

The deliberative process faces obvious challenges, such as the extent to which voices other than those of the expert can be heard. Public reasoning must give space for ethical positions, values, and philosophical outlooks, which all play just as important a part as science in opinion-forming. It is difficult to integrate input based on scientific knowledge with emotive insight, lived experience, and anecdotal accounts. A process based on the principles of deliberative democracy supports this type of inclusion and ensures that all these perspectives are heard.

Citizens’ assemblies, citizen juries, mini-publics, or other mechanisms for deliberative democracy, invariably focus on topics where there are sharp differences of opinion. The topic of controlled drugs, and how best governments should respond to problems that arise from their use, presents very particular challenges to the deliberative process. There are legitimate ethical, security, and economic considerations while trying to work out the most appropriate path to ensuring the wellbeing of those who use or have used drugs, their families, communities, and society.

Policy formation can be opaque, contingent on economic circumstances, shifts in public opinion or political commitment. While citizens’ assemblies are exciting experiments in participation, no single event will determine policy. What they can do is frame policy problems in new ways and provide a different perspective that empowers decision-makers to consider more ambitious solutions than they might otherwise have done. The Citizens’ Assembly in Ireland in 2023 is the first time the topic of illegal drug use has been considered by this kind of forum. Its findings may well be of international significance.

1    Ritter A (2022) Drug policy. 1st edn. Abingdon: Routledge.