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.

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A Four Class Society

Back in 1997, John Prescott (the greedy fat pig who now claims to have bulimia) told us that ‘we are all middle-class now’. Spoken genuinely or an attempt to curry favour with Tony Blair – who knows or frankly cares, because either way reality tells an entirely different story.

New Labour’s ‘classless’ social concept was and always will be a façade and a lie. In whatever society you choose to consider humanity has and always will organise itself into classes. It is in our tribal nature to do so. No amount of social engineering can or will ever do away with this reality.

British society, like all others, still maintains degrees of class; it’s just that they have been noticeably transformed in more recent times. Largely gone are the days of the working, middle and upper classes. Relative economic affluence and prosperity for all has done away with the need for those terms, as did the destruction of the British manufacturing sector in the 1980s and the current rise of tertiary service industries.

Where once class was based upon economic well-being and means by which the man on the street earned his living, now class and our society revolve around the struggle for power, prestige and the ability to influence others. Thus people in Britain can now be categorised into roughly four different classes: the Elite, the Underclass, the Welfare class and Everyone Else.

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Our Increasingly Violent Society

It seems that rarely a day goes by without another senseless and preventable murder taking place in Britain.

Yesterday, a man died in a London hospital a week after being stabbed and punched by two youths he confronted over throwing litter through his car window. At the weekend, Garry Newlove, died of injuries sustained when he approached a gang of teenagers who were damaging property in the road outside his house.

Sadly, it would seem that these attacks are becoming far more frequent and in certain areas almost common place. This is especially true of the big cities such as London, Nottingham, Manchester and Birmingham.

It is arguable that the increase in violence could be perceptive; that because the media now reports on these cases more widely and regularly than in the past, then people fear a threat which is, in reality, not actually increasing. However, I do not accept that to be true. Independent crime surveys continue to show a substantial increase in violent crime, with even the Government’s own manipulated figures showing a worryingly rapid rise.

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