on: Regulate Cannabis, Reduce Slavery?

Hi Reader Friend,

We are gearing up for a ‘circuit breaker’ lock down in Wales, so don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me in the next two weeks - I may be melting under homeschooling, dishes, and toys.

Today’s newsletter may be controversial - it will be controversial. I have chatted with lots of people, read lots of information, and listened to lots of podcasts. I’m not making a blanket statement that regulating cannabis is the way forward on every front, but I am saying that it seems it would reduce the opportunity for modern slavery and human trafficking. This is by no means an exhaustive analysis on the subject; there is so much more out there on the arguments for and against legalisation. This article is meant to touch purely on cannabis's production/sale and its affect on victims of modern slavery and human trafficking.

Have a read. See what you think. Leave me a comment. And please subscribe!

These letters will always be free, but if you ever feel like giving me a boost, feel free to ‘buy me a coffee’ here.

Lauren

---

Cannabis production, supply, and sale are topics with heated opinions, facts, and emotions. Arguments for and against the legalisation and regulation of cannabis both have strong points that lead to difficulties when it comes to forming policies that protect users from the dangerous side effects of the drug. Recently, another component that has been added to the argument for regulating cannabis is the safeguarding of vulnerable people that are often used in the production and sale of cannabis.

Currently, the UK has prohibited the production, sale, and distribution of cannabis. However, it is widely known that cannabis continues to be used in the UK, regardless of its illegality, and that many are advocating for its legalisation. It is estimated that the UK drug market has a current value of 9.4 billion pounds and the cannabis industry alone is worth 2 billion pounds. People are certainly using cannabis in the UK, but who’s producing and selling it? Criminals, traffickers, and gangs have practically been handed an easy way to make a lot of profit. As long as they can stay under cover and avoid detection, they can rake in money. ‘Because there is no legal way to obtain cannabis in the UK, buyers have to get it from the illegal market,’ further explained Harvey Slade, researcher for Transform Drugs Policy Foundation. ‘Producers aren’t held accountable by any labour standards and aren’t taxed.’

Research by Transform Drugs Policy Foundation has found that ‘1,853 potential victims of trafficking or slavery were referred to the UK’s National Referral Mechanism (the government’s process for identifying victims of modern slavery) in 2019, specifically in relation to forced cannabis cultivation or county lines drug supply. Over 60% of these were children. A total of 10,627 referrals were made in 2019, meaning that the illegal drug trade makes up nearly a fifth of human trafficking and slavery in the UK.’

In terms of drug the trade in the UK, ‘exploitation’ often involves human trafficking and modern slavery. Typically, traffickers prey on vulnerable people - perhaps homeless adults, asylum seekers, children, or mentally unwell individuals - and manipulate, force, or coerce them into working in conditions that are abusive, manipulative, and secretive. Vulnerable people are easy to groom and control, making them prime candidates for modern slavery in drug production.

Victims may be forced to work on drug ‘farms’ and transport and sale drugs. They work long hours, often in a locked suburban townhouse or flat, with little or no pay. Their identification, if they have any, might be taken off them to control their impulses to go to the authorities. There is a growing proportion of young Vietnamese males that are being trafficked into the drug trade in the UK. Traffickers will control them by threatening to report them to the Home Office and have them deported or imprisoned for criminal activity. The following is account of one such boy from an excerpt from The Guardian:

‘Minh was 16 when he arrived in the UK. When he emerged from the back of a lorry somewhere near Dover in June 2013, he had no idea where he was or where he had been since he left Vietnam. He only knew he was here to work. His memories of the three months he spent locked in the house are fractured and distorted by the fear, loneliness and stress that consumed him. His only visitors were Vietnamese men who would appear at the house every few weeks to check he was looking after the plants properly. They barely talked to him, leaving boxes of frozen meat that he heated up in an old microwave in the kitchen. They always locked the door behind them when they left. Apart from that, he was always alone Behind the blackout blinds, days merged into night and back to day. Inside, Minh sat in the dark and the filth. He was hungry all the time, and terrified his food would run out. After a few days, the sweet, thick stench of the cannabis buds was overpowering, making him sick with headaches and nausea. He knew he would be in terrible trouble if the plants died, so every day he carried buckets of water upstairs to the plants and mixed chemicals into the soil. Once, he says, he tried to get away, but was caught and brought back to the house, and was made to understand that he’d be killed if he tried to escape again. “It was like another kind of world,” he says. “I didn’t really even feel human. I understood very quickly that the plants were more valuable than my life.” The day of the police raid marked the end of Minh’s enslavement and his liberation from his traffickers. But his ordeal was not over. Instead, Minh would find himself trapped in a system that treated him as a criminal rather than a victim.’

The links between cannabis production and modern slavery/human trafficking in the UK is unarguable. What is debatable is how to address the problem.

Many oppose the legalisation and regulation of cannabis with arguments that it is a gateway drug that leads to use of ‘harder’ drugs, it can negatively impact the development of a child’s brain, can cause psychosis, and will encourage more widespread use. Each of those arguments are valid concerns that must be addressed with due care if cannabis was to be regulated. When I spoke to Harvey Slade about these worries, he suggested managing risk through education, packaging, regulation, and age minimums for usage. Just like alcohol and tobacco, there is no way to completely protect people from substances, but there are ways to minimise the dangers.

There are equally as many arguments for the legalisation and regulation of cannabis – medical treatment, taxation, freeing up law enforcement, and safe packaging and production. Transform Drugs Policy Foundation wrapped it up succinctly when they stated, ‘By legally regulating the drug trade, both the opportunity and profit motive for organised crime will diminish and the scope for trafficking and exploitation will reduce significantly.’

When I spoke to Jacob Hawley, host of the BBC On Drugs Podcast, he expressed how he didn’t think regulating cannabis would necessarily solve the problem of modern slavery in the drug trade. ‘The reality is that so many products and commodities are made using some kind of unethical production. You basically go down this rabbit hole of ‘what abouttery’ until you get to ‘well maybe we should defund capitalism so that all products are made in a way that is safe and doesn’t exploit vulnerable people’ and obviously that’s the right thing to do but it doesn’t happen overnight.’

However, he went on to say, ‘if you have a legalised point of sale then production can be controlled and monitored, to an extent.’

Legalisation would by no means be a quick or total fix, but it would at least take much of the control of the drug trade out of criminal hands, reducing the number of people exploited through cannabis production and sale.