All The Warning

One of this country's leading anti-capitalists, the heir both of the protectionist Tory and of the temperance Liberal roots of the Labour Movement, Peter Hitchens writes:

It will not be long before your home town has special places where drug abusers can poke or snort poison into their bodies. These will be legal and paid for by you and me. It is a stupid idea, of course. People who take such drugs are selfish parasites in need of deterrence, not patients in need of treatment. The nicer we are to them, the more of them there will be, as we have proved conclusively over the past four decades.

But it is getting harder every day to express this opinion, and soon it will be more or less impossible. The British liberal establishment have decided to surrender to the powerful and well-funded lobby that wants to ‘decriminalise’ drugs. They use this clumsy word because international treaties prevent us from actually legalising them. Instead, we just reduce the penalties to nothing (or don’t enforce them) and make them legal in all but name.

Before they can get away with this loathsome scheme, they have to brainwash the public into accepting it. That is why the unpopular newspapers and the BBC have been giving favourable coverage to a plan for ‘drug consumption rooms’ in Brighton. It is also why Portugal’s abandonment of serious drug laws is constantly presented in a kindly light by the establishment media. Many of you will have been brainwashed yourselves. Do you know how many supposedly ‘conservative’ newspapers endorsed the decriminalisation of cannabis years ago?

It is amazing how many otherwise sensible people have already been fooled into accepting the dud arguments for relaxing the law against cannabis, one of the most dangerous drugs in existence. Your children, too, will have been brainwashed at school – where they will have absorbed the moronic argument that because alcohol and tobacco are legal, it is wrong to have laws against dope.

Whenever I have the chance to debate this subject properly, I almost always defeat the drug liberalisers. But that’s the problem. The debate has been shut down, because the liberals control it. Only one side is allowed to be heard. TV and radio won’t let me talk about this. My recent book, showing that the supposed ‘war on drugs’ was abandoned 40 years ago, and that claims of stern ‘prohibition’ are propaganda drivel, was simply not reviewed by most national papers or on the broadcast programmes that discuss such things.

It is not yet too late to stop this process, but a great deal of vigilance will be needed to do so. Otherwise you may wake up one day soon and find a building near you is being openly used by junkies to inject themselves, with police approval. This is all the warning you will get.