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.

Click here to continue reading the article…

Reclassifying Cannabis

Gordon Brown told the House of Commons today that the Government would research and look carefully at the reclassification of Cannabis from a Class C drug to Class B. In other words, they might reclassify; they might not.

However, regardless of whether Cannabis is classified as Class B or C is largely irrelevant. More often than not, drugs laws are not enforced at a low or personal level. Individual users are rarely prosecuted, if ever, and it is only large scale importers and distributors or dealers that are sporadically targeted.

Celebrity addicts such as Kate Moss and Pete Doherty regularly flout the law without any consequence, other than the minor inconvenience of a court appearance which invariably leads to nothing. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that Pete Doherty is now better known for his drug abuse than his music. Such behaviour and lack of any retribution sends out completely the wrong signals about drug use to ordinary people who read about it in the media.

The use of illegal drugs needs to actually be enforced by the police – though unfortunately this seems unlikely in the foreseeable future since most of our political classes and the liberal media probably have used or continue to use these substances themselves, and so have little or no interest in discouraging their misuse.

Labour’s announcement is nothing more than another meaningless gesture that will do nothing to actually solve the growing drugs problem in Britain.