Why Poppers Should Not Be Made Illegal

I read an article recently on poppers and the gay scene in the UK. Poppers are carcinogenic, and some variations of then are now illegal (in the EU, at least). They also significantly suppress the immune system, according to a host of studies. I don’t condone or urge against their use, but I certainly don’t think making them illegal is any solution. I wrote a lengthy comment on the article and have reposted it here, beneath the quote. The article in question is Poppers: the Sweet Smell of Hypocrisy:

Who’d ever thought a little glass bottle could cause so much damage? Originally developed to help people with serious heart conditions, these dangerous drugs are still being sold all over the country – and on the gay scene you can’t miss them. [...]

Despite the massive amount of public resources being ploughed into safer-sex messages targeting Crystal-Meth users, binge drinkers and participants in other more well know high risk sexual behaviours, alarming research carried out by the Medical Research Council and the Terrance Higgins Trust has recently declared that poppers appear to be “the only drug associated with an increased risk of acquiring HIV” and concluded “if you sniff poppers there’s an increased risk of HIV transmission if you have unprotected sex”. In 2007 the Terrance Higgins Trust also released findings of a major new study which discovered 80% of HIV positive men used poppers compared to 58% who remained negative. The connection between HIV and poppers is indisputable.

An interesting article. Making poppers illegal, however, cannot be the solution to stopping people using them. After all, making other drugs illegal has done nothing to stop people using them, with some 30% of the UK population having used an illegal drug at some time in their lives.

There can only be bad outcomes from making poppers illegal. The first is that people will instead get in touch with dealers of some kind to get poppers, rather than getting them from shops. (Unless you believe that in some way making something illegal will reduce demand for it, in which case, please talk to any of the 3% of the [UK] population who used cocaine last year.) Dealer contact will introduce lots of people to illegal markets, where other drugs are easily available and far more tempting (pills and coke will be on sale next to poppers). People will no longer know that what they’re buying are poppers (trading standards do not apply).

Another risk is that in outlawing poppers, there will be more people working out how to make more potent forms of poppers. This is happening with cannabis at the moment (there is a trend towards more potent strains, away from hash and towards skunk), and it happened with alcohol in the US during the 1920s when they prohibited alcohol (everyone went from beers and wines to hard spirits).

These issues are inherent in the nature of banning substances. However, if a ban is to make any difference, police will have to spend serious amounts of time and money cracking down on popper use and sale, which will criminalise potentially some 850 000 people who take poppers each year, and will be a waste of money and time, when such resources could be better spent on a whole range of other things.

It would seem to be a far better proposition to instead licence the sale of such substances and to tax them more heavily. According to a paper published by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, taxes are the most effective way to lower usage of alcohol/tobacco, followed by an advertising ban. It is more effective to try and change people’s minds so that they don’t want to take poppers than to try and stop getting hold of them, and the current and failing war on drugs is a testament to this.