Sunday 5 June 2011

The War On Drugs Has Not Been Lost

It has never been fought.

The only exception to this was Jim Callaghan's period as Home Secretary, ridiculed and reviled to this day by the pro-poison lobby, people in thrall to the memory of the wildly overrated, though only too influential, Roy Jenkins.

We need a single category of illegal drug, with a crackdown on the possession of drugs, including a mandatory sentence of three months for a second offence, six months for a third offence, one year for a fourth offence, and so on.

Only a Labour Home Secretary, and subsequent Labour Prime Minister, has ever even attempted to come close to fighting the war on drugs. Eradicating drugs, prostitution and pornography is, like restricting alcohol and gambling, an attack on the "free" market, and firmly in the tradition of the Labour Movement's pioneers.

Ed Miliband, over to you.

4 comments:

  1. The war on drugs should never be fought. It should be stopped & all drugs should be legalised & available for adults just as tobacco & alcohol are.

    The 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act is the most destructive piece of legislation on the books today. From countries like Afghanistan & Mexico, to our own working class, ordinary people have been brutalised by the military-industrial complex in order to prevent human beings from exercising a legitimate consumer preference.

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  2. Yes. Working class. Lots of ordinary people like to take a pill, a cheeky line of coke or smoke some cannabis to liven up their weekend. I'm not one of these people & haven't been for years but I know some of them. They work & pay tax. They do not deserve to be punished by moralists for possesion of drugs & deserve the standard consumer protections they enjoy when purchasing alcohol, tobacco or any other consumer product.

    I would also add that it is people who don't use drugs but live in working class areas who bear the brunt of street drug dealing. Places like Brixton & Moss Side would be a lot safer to walk around if drugs were sold by cafes or pharmacies instead of by petty criminals.

    I bet if heroin was legal & a lot cheaper there would be a lot less burglary as well. Burglary that tends to happen at the rough end of town.

    Anyway, who do you think walks away from the legal economy to get involved with the drugs trade? Middle-class kids? Maybe, but not so much as the working class.

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  3. I have yet to see any advocate of the 'war on drugs' admit the simple fact that the most dangerous single chemical commonly available in Western society, the most uniformly disastrous in its effects on the workplace and on marriages, the most injurious to physical and mental health, the most frequently abused on a per capita rate, and probably the one with the fewest beneficent side-effects (whatever might occasionally be maintained to the contrary in 'scientific research' funded by booze-barons), is ... alcohol.

    And we know - don't we? - what happened when America embarked on the 'noble experiment' of forbidding that. Is Mr Lindsay craving a similar situation with the forbidding of drugs in Britain?

    To put it bluntly, American civilisation has not even begun to recover from the benefits to organised crime, and from the absolute contempt for the legal system, which prohibition of booze managed to create in a mere 13 years. You don't have to take my word for it.

    You merely have to read Chesterton on the subject. Or Belloc. Or Christopher Hollis. Or any other Catholic who was in America for all or part of the Prohibition period. This period ended 78 years ago, when even the most meddlesome American politicians (FDR for one) realised that the best hope of a general solution to the alcohol problem - for a country inhabited, alas, by fallen human beings rather than archangels - was to tax the grog rather than to ban it. Not even the most power-maddened American legislator now wants to restore Prohibition to pre-1933 levels (though the occasional county remains, theoretically, 'dry' even now).

    Of course, it would also help to read about the body-count which the USA's literally deranged 'war on drugs' has lately engendered in Mexico. Is Mr Lindsay really expecting us to believe that that war 'has never been fought'?

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