Although she is wrong that Peter Hitchens is less famous than his late brother (certainly not in Britain, perhaps in America), Decca Aitkenhead writes:
Peter Hitchens likes to
present himself as the Millwall FC of punditry; no one likes him, and he
doesn't care. He knows his new book about drugs will go down badly among
metropolitan liberals, and says he has "absolutely no chance whatsoever of
influencing anything". Fleet Street's patron saint of lost causes, he
writes: "Almost certainly the battle to halt the spread of mind-altering
drugs is lost." And yet for someone confronting futility and derision, he
appears remarkably cheerful. "Well, it's what I've always dreamed of – of
being the kind of person who gets written about. I dreamed of being part of the
exciting people who were in the arguments."
For the guileless pathos of that statement alone,
I could forgive Hitchens almost anything. You might say there is much to
forgive. Every week in the Mail on Sunday he
delivers a thunderous sermon against the moral degradation of all things
modern, and his latest book, The War We Never Fought, makes some jaw-dropping claims. He
conflates the scourge of drugs with everything from
lottery winners to Oxbridge graduates who haven't heard of Mr Micawber, and has a hilarious gift for the waspish
afterthought, as in: "Teachers are no longer really teachers. If they
acted as if they are, they would probably be prosecuted", or police
officers no longer patrol the streets, because they're too busy "suing
each other for racial or sexual harassment". I can think of no other
contemporary writer who, when describing a member of the dreaded liberal elite,
would add this detail in parenthesis: "She and her second husband (she is
divorced)."
We disagree about almost everything, but I find
him impossible to dislike. In person he is polite and engaged, and in print
always a contrarian but never a controversialist, sincere in beliefs that are
almost as unfashionable on the right as they are anathema to the left. He
champions civil liberties but abhors libertarianism, would like to bring back
hanging and see off pre-marital sex, and is in a perpetual state of lament for
the passing of Christian values, which he dates back to the first world war.
"If anybody else tells me that I think the 1950s were a golden age, I'll
strangle them. I remember the 1950s – chilblains, Wall's ice cream, everybody
smoked. I didn't like the 1950s." Hitchens's golden age was the late
Victorian/early Edwardian era, a period of "How shall I say?
Increasing self-imposed moral conduct."
The War We Never Fought makes a
characteristically counter-intuitive argument. It is nonsense to say the war on
drugs has failed, Hitchens contends, when in actual fact we have never even
tried to wage it. Drug-taking was, in effect, decriminalised by the Misuse of
Drugs Act 1971, ever since when the authorities have deployed the rhetoric
of toughness to conceal the truth that we are free to take drugs with impunity,
knowing our crime will probably be ignored, or at worst not punished but
"treated". It suits the liberal elite to pretend the draconian
rhetoric is true, because it justifies their claim that the law is unjustly
repressive and should be abolished altogether. The solution to the alleged
failure of the war is not to give up and give in, but to start fighting it.
The author's great merit is his honesty.
"Drug-taking," Hitchens writes, "is the purest form of
self-indulgence," for it severs the link between hard work and
reward, making "deferred gratification appear a waste of time and a
foolish rejection of readily available delight". He regards all forms of
self-stupefecation as morally wrong, and unlike others who make the case
against drugs on legal or medical grounds is quite candid: this is ultimately,
he says, a moral argument. The downside is that once he has stated this
position, there is not much more to say. It would barely sustain a column, let
alone a book; you either agree with him, or you do not. So he is drawn into
making all sorts of arguments based on health, science and judicial statistics,
none of which stands up.
Hitchens thinks the legal drug classification
system, under which cannabis is considered less
dangerous than heroin or crack, is "scientifically meaningless". Has
he ever seen someone trying to give up heroin? "No, I can't claim to know
what it looks like, no." Has he ever seen anyone trying to give up
cannabis? "No." Does he think the two are equivalent? "Well,
since I haven't seen either of them, I don't know. But as I don't believe in
addiction, it's of no interest to me."
Hitchens thinks there is no such thing as
addiction? "No, it's just laughable. I believe in free will. People take
drugs because they enjoy it." I agree that many people take drugs such as
cannabis because they like it – but doesn't he wonder why those same people
would never dream of touching heroin? Happy, successful, stable people seldom
inject smack, whereas most junkies suffered catastrophic childhoods, often in
care and often abused. Doesn't that tell us something critically important
about the difference between drugs?
"Yeah, but ultimately, so what? All these
people would be helped by a properly enforced law which punished them for doing
it, because then fewer would do it, and they'd be rescued from it." If the
horror of heroin addiction is insufficient to deter someone from shooting up,
the prospect of being arrested is unlikely to put them off. But Hitchens
places unfathomable faith in the power of the law to control human
behaviour.
He also places great importance on the
function of the law to express society's disapproval. How can we expect parents
to stop their children taking cannabis, he argues, when the drug's status as
"soft" – and by implication therefore harmless – is enshrined in law?
But society disapproves of lots of things, without making them illegal; he
isn't calling for marital infidelity to be outlawed, say, so why drugs?
"It's a question of practicality. How would you enforce such a law?"
That's precisely the argument made against drug prohibition. "But who says
it's unenforceable? No one has tried. Possession of drugs is an objective act,
possible to prove in a court of law." But so is extra-marital sex, when it
results in pregnancy; with DNA testing, every adulterous parent could be
brought bang to rights. "Well, I suppose so, but I'm not in favour of
that. I don't think that it's a sensible or proper use of policing." Which
is exactly what people say about the law against cannabis.
In an ideal world, Hitchens would outlaw alcohol
and tobacco too, but as it is he takes the eminently pragmatic view that both
drugs are too entrenched in our culture to be banned. He applauds our laws
controlling their sale for achieving valuable harm reduction – yet when the
same principle of harm reduction is applied to other drugs, he is incensed.
"Have you looked at the Talk
to Frank website? Have you looked at the thing? Financed by you and
me!"
Although he does drink, he hasn't been drunk
since he was 15. On the other hand, he needs a strong caffeine hit every
morning before he can start writing, and drinks coffee while we talk. If a
stimulant that "severs the link between hard work and reward" is
immoral, why is that OK? "Caffeine? Come on. It's just not a serious
point. I mean, come on. Caffeine!" But that's exactly what people say
about cannabis. "Well, it may be what they would say about it, but it
wouldn't be true. There is no case of anybody taking all their clothes off and
swimming naked in an English river after drinking coffee."
If his argument is fundamentally about morals,
and he believes all drugs are by definition as bad as each other, their impact
on a user's behaviour is logically neither here nor there. But Hitchens cites
swimming in a freezing cold river because this was one of the things a friend's
son did while in the grip of a psychosis triggered, Hitchens believes, by
smoking cannabis. Hitchens is not faking his anguish at the boy's fate; his
eyes well with tears as he talks about him. But it's here that his whole
argument becomes increasingly inconsistent.
Hitchens doesn't believe in addiction, because it
cannot be objectively proven by any scientific test. For the same reason, he
refuses to recognise other "modern" medical conditions such as ADHD
or dyslexia, which he dismisses as "disreputable, unscientific
rubbish". But no objective test exists for schizophrenia and psychosis
either, their diagnoses depending upon definitions so subjective that they
change according to the whim of whichever doctors are put in charge of making
them up. And yet, time and again, Hitchens cites their grave risk as the reason
why cannabis should be illegal.
"To say that I can't give you an objective
description is not axiomatically to say that they don't exist," he
protests – and he may well be right. But that's what people say about dyslexia.
"Well, it may be, but they are wrong."
Hitchens quotes with approval Toby Young's claim
that cannabis did him far more harm than cocaine – but then dismisses as
delusional Young's insistence that cocaine did him no harm. If I were to tell
him that I'd taken lots of drugs in my youth, and suffered irreparable mental damage,
what would he say? "I would say: 'What a pity.'" And if I told him
they had done me no harm at all? "I would say: 'How can you know?'"
Leaving aside the self-evident bias in these responses, by his own logic I
might have been much less happy, successful or intelligent had I never taken
drugs. "I accept the possibility," he concedes reluctantly. "But
it's bull."
"Those who do not wish to listen to the
informed and cogent warnings of leading scientists," he writes, "will
find excuses not to do so." But isn't that exactly what he does, whenever
any leading scientist – Professor David Nutt, say – presents data he doesn't like? "I
do not think that Professor Nutt's statements on the dangers of drugs are
cogent," Hitchens retorts testily, rather proving the point. He accuses
Nutt of "mixing the subjective with the objective", but I think a
psychologist would probably call this projection. Where is the reputable
scientific justification for his insistence that cannabis sends people mad, and
is "one of the most dangerous drugs known to man"?
"I'm a propagandist," he shrugs.
Round and round we go, not getting very far.
Hitchens maintains that it's practically impossible to get locked up for possession,
and that even dealers are unlucky to wind up in jail. That might come as a
surprise to 16% of the prison population. Between 1998 and 2006, the number of
people sent to prison for drug offences increased by 91%, whereas the increase
for other offenders was just 53%, according to Alex Stevens, professor of
criminal justice and author of Drugs,
Crime and Public Health. Doesn't that sound like a war being waged on
drugs?
"Criminal statistics are easy to
misread," cautions Hitchens, and he is right. But in the absence of any
definitive factual consensus, his argument looks more like an article of faith
than an empirical thesis.
The war on drugs is a lot like abortion, both
debates being framed in legal and medical terms, but really motivated by
something much more primitive. Hitchens invokes morality, and deserves credit
for coming closer to the truth than most, but ultimately I think it boils down
not to morals so much as emotions. His position is just as inconsistent,
subjective and contradictory as everyone else's, but makes perfect sense as an
expression of how he feels about the world.
It was Hitchens's defining misfortune, almost 61
years ago, to be born the younger brother of the more
famous writer Christopher. "When you're a small child, and you have a
brother, you want to catch up with them. I just wanted to be as big as, be as
strong as, all the things a younger brother feels." Hitchens owed his
first job – in 1973, on the Socialist Worker – to Christopher's connections,
and was a loyal young apprentice to his brother's revolutionary leftwing
politics. But he could never compete with his mercurial sibling's legendary
charisma, leaving a rightward march back towards their parents' parochial,
blimpish politics as the only available alternative. In 1977, he joined the
Daily Express, where he toiled away as a worthy if unglamorous reporter until
Richard Desmond's arrival propelled him – a conscientious objector to
pornography – into the arms of the Mail on Sunday and a weekly column where he
could be as unlike his brother as humanly possible.
If Christopher was louche, hedonistic and
iconoclastic, Hitchens would be fastidious, puritanical and Christian. Why else
would his latest book condemn rock music as tantamount to a narcotic,
"sometimes a stimulant and sometimes a depressant, but always influential
over the moods of its listeners," when he must know the same could be said
of opera or Elgar? Only his heart, not his head, could write that Toby Young
was "lucky" not to wind up in a locked psychiatric ward after smoking
cannabis, for even the most alarmist interpretation of the medical data does not
declare psychosis the most likely consequence. For Hitchens, drugs are really a
metaphor for what he calls the "cultural revolution" of the 60s,
which swept aside what was left of the England he now longs for.
Christopher died of cancer last year, after a
lifetime of heavy drinking and smoking, but even in death his memory still
tends to eclipse his younger brother's presence. "This is an amazing and
unique experience to have an interview in which nobody has brought up my
brother until I do it!" he says, but his laughter sounds more
peevish than amused. Christopher had published his memoir only a year before
his death. "One of the problems of having Christopher as a brother is that
you felt that the writing about our family was writing about his
family. He forgot he was also writing about mine." Hitchens would much
rather the world did not know that their father drank to excess.
The two brothers were never close in adulthood,
for along with their politics, their lifestyles also parted company; unlike the
twice-married, atheist Christopher, Hitchens is a devout church-going Anglican
and lives with his wife and three children in Oxford. But his politics today
share something important with the communism of his old revolutionary self.
Just as Marxism only makes sense if you believe basic human impulses can be
eradicated in the interest of a greater good, the same is true of Hitchens's
faith in the power of the law to defeat a basic human instinct for
intoxification. "I'm not a utopian! I'm not a perfectionist!" he
protests, but perhaps a touch too much. As with most of his political
positions, his argument for a drugs prohibition makes sense – as long as you
have never met an actual human being.
I ask him if he has ever broken the law himself.
"Oh yes," he replies, as quick as a flash, he often broke it during
revolutionary protests in his youth. Why didn't the threat of penalty deter
him? He thinks for a moment. "When I was in my law-breaking phase I was
the kind of person who should have been locked up. I was the kind of person who
should be locked up, and possibly strung up. It would have been the only
language I understood."
I ask why he thinks people always say he is
humourless, when it seems to me that while he is certainly irony-free, he can
be very funny. "Hmm, probably unintentionally," he murmurs. "I
have no sense of humour. You know that."
I don't think he believes that for a minute.
"Oh, I'm a horrible, brutal, sexist, racist, homophobic monster."
That's not a self-appraisal but a self-defence mechanism, isn't it?
"Well, there you are then. Alternatively,
none of that is true."
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