The Trouble With Drugs
Last Friday, Peter North, on his blog Letters from Limbo, wrote about what he called a ‘leadership vacuum’ over the issue of British drugs policy, which then led on to him railing against the many failings of our political system.
Like so many before him, Peter predictably called for the legalisation of all banned narcotic substances by the State arguing, in classic ‘harm reduction’ style, that what British people really need, rather criminalisation, is ‘better drugs education on how to take them safely and where to get help if needs be’.
Where do I start? There are so many comments and observations by Peter in his piece that I take issue with that it is difficult to know where to begin. I suppose, firstly, it should be made clear that even if we, as a nation, wanted to legalise such substances then we could not due to the binding international treaties which Britain has signed. Before we could begin to initiate legalisation in this country, Britain would have to break from these treaties.
Anyway, putting aside the fascinating issue of international law for the moment, it should also be said that North Jnr doesn’t get off to a fantastic start in his article when he says of drugs that:
The evidence that prohibition is a failed policy mounts up year after year but we remain in a constant state of political paralysis.
I would have thought that it really goes without saying that the banning of drugs such as cannabis and heroin in Britain are not in the slightest like prohibition. However, much like the pressure group, Transform, whose spokesman was given a rather soft interview by Evan Davis on the BBC’s Today programme recently, Peter North seems convinced that the British state somehow acts in a ‘punitive, prohibitionist’ way towards illegal drugs.
Rather than explain this point myself I will directly quote Peter Hitchens from his most recent Mail on Sunday column because he rather handily sums up this false analogy far better than I could:
If only our policies were actually punitive. But drug use and possession are almost entirely unpunished, which is why they carry on growing.
As for ‘prohibition’, the drug lobby uses this expression to mislead the gullible into comparing the winnable struggle against narcotics with the doomed war against booze fought by the ‘Untouchables’ and others in Twenties Chicago.
Alcohol had been legal for centuries, part of the culture of Christian civilisation. You might as well try to make breathing illegal. But cannabis, cocaine and heroin are alien to our world, and could be driven out by firm action.
Actually, US Prohibition recognised that the cause was lost before it began. Congress never made it illegal to drink or keep alcohol, only to sell, transport or make it. Our most important drug laws are utterly unlike Prohibition because they rightly ban possession.
And if our cowardly courts and bureaucratic police would only enforce the existing law, we would see a swift decline in the use of illegal drugs.
They don’t, because our establishment – including the BBC – was itself introduced to drugs in the Sixties and still cannot see why they are wrong.
Despite increasingly frequently assertions from the likes of North Jnr and so many others that Britain has lost the so-called ‘war on drugs’, the fact of the matter is that in reality we’ve never fought one. Instead successive Governments have simply undermined their own laws, demoralised the police and made quite sure that the rules were not enforced, with the intended consequence being the practical legalisation of narcotics by stealth.
Peter North’s assertion that these drugs should be made legal is therefore practically irrelevant. They might as well be considered legal at the moment since prosecution for use is rare, especially among the rich and famous. Even if you are stupid enough to be caught and sentenced by a court of law then the punishment often amounts to nothing more than a smack on wrist.
North Jnr also continues to make the assertion throughout his article that people are going to take drugs anyway, so why bother to stop them? Returning to the aforementioned theme of ‘harm reduction’, again Peter Hitchens was spot on when he said:
Virtually everyone else in the official drug policy establishment is a member of the same faction – the one that believes the best approach to drugs is ‘harm reduction’, that rejects any moral objection to self-stupefaction, or the idea that by disapproval and punishment we could reduce the amount of drug-taking and the number of drug takers.
On the contrary, they work on the basis that drug abuse is more or less inevitable and so must be managed by advice (much as the ‘sex education’ zealots work on the assumption that the young will have sex below the age of consent and without any thought for the consequences, whatever we do or say, and so the only thing we can do is pelt them with condoms and morning-after pills). Doesn’t it occur to them that the adoption of this attitude by Professors and Police officers might actually make drug taking more likely?
Quite so – and I really don’t have much more to add to that particular line of argument except to say that taking the attitude of ‘harm reduction’ is not in the least bit conservative.
It has been duly noted, in the past, that North Jnr likes to lecture people on what is ‘real conservativism’. I suppose I am not really one to talk here since I do a similar sort of thing all the time too. Everyone has an opinion on what conservativism is and means, but it is fair to say that certain stances are more conservative than others – and some not even conservative at all.
Furthermore, very early on in his article we get an indication of why Peter North takes this attitude and just what he thinks of drugs, by way of his observation that ‘people take drugs because, for starters, they’re great’. Later on in the article he readily admits to having taking them in the past, describing them as ‘fun’ and, rather bizarrely, as ‘educational’.
This I think feeds into another important point about the debate on drugs policy – one which I have made before – which is that the majority of the time it is self-serving drug users (or supposedly former users – one never quite knows whether they are being honest about having given up or not) who are calling for their activities to be legalised to suit their own selfish pleasures and needs, even if it means that thousands of other people may in future be condemned to harm and misery.
I have yet to actually meet someone who has not once taken these drugs and yet still wants to legalise them. Perhaps this is because I have not spoken to enough people yet, but it certainly seems to be the case that the vast majority of those advocating legalisation are doing so with wholly selfish intentions.
This is perhaps a little strange because North Jnr accurately describes the way in which such drugs can lead to enormous problems for society as well as the families and friends of users. Yet, he then goes on to make ridiculous statements such as this:
If you had to obtain recreational narcotics from a chemist and there’s a special queue for them with all the other junkies, kids will see that what they’re doing is seriously uncool.
Is he serious? Apparently so. Anyway, and finally, a question that never seems to be have been answered by the pro-legalisation advocates is what exactly would we lose by driving the use of these substances from our society completely?
Moving on from the legality of certain drugs, North Jnr does make a number of good observations about the increasing retreat of the British political system from policies to personalities. However, in one paragraph he writes of politicians that:
They’re afraid of public debate, they’re afraid of real politics and that’s why we get things like ‘constitutional reform’.
While it is certainly true that, in general, many politicians are increasingly scared of public debate and formulating policies, I think it is a mistake by Peter to underestimate the Left and the power and significance they place on ‘constitutional reform’.
Firstly, how exactly can ‘constitutional reform’ not be considered to be ‘real politics’? Okay, so at face value ‘constitutional reform’ may not seem to be important in directly tackling issues such as immigration or economic problems, but its undertaking certainly doesn’t mean that those politicians and parties that pursue it are not interested in politics, real or otherwise.
The many radical and important constitutional changes that have been enacted by New Labour since 1997, under Blair and Brown, have been seen by them as vitally important in achieving their long term goals, whilst undermining traditions and institutions such as the Monarchy for their social and political ends.
Having said that, I think North Jnr is generally right in his analysis that the Government, whether it be Conservative or Labour, is on a countdown to extinction, and that British people are simply waiting for parties and politics of substance to return at Westminster. Let us all hope that such a day, if it ever arrives, comes sooner rather than later.
