A Mighty Blow

Peter Hitchens writes:

If you want to ruin any cause, or put people off any product, surely the best way of doing so is to associate it with old people, especially those trying to be hip and sexy?

I always thought that cigarettes could have been discouraged most effectively by a series of spoof advertisements in which old, wrinkled, sagging people tried grotesquely to be alluring, while smoking. 

People fear being old so much more than they fear death, as death is harder to imagine. Whereas old people (and anybody over about 35 is decrepit in the eyes of the young) are still all over the place. 

So perhaps the entertainer Madonna, now 62, has unwittingly dealt a mighty blow against marijuana legalisation by posing with a spliff sticking out of her mouth, as she holds a tray of marijuana buds and rolling papers. 

She tries hard to look foxy and wicked as she does this, but succeeds only in looking over-eager and pathetic. 

The truth is that there is nothing especially rebellious about smoking dope, which has been wrecking the minds of its users since the early 1960s. 

The police of most major nations, including the UK, stupidly no longer try to enforce the laws against its use. 

Last week, figures for England and Wales showed a near-collapse in the numbers of fines for possession, and of the empty ‘cannabis warnings’ which police officers hand out to pretend they are doing something.

Meanwhile, the miserable absence of research on mental illness and the crime linked to it conceals the terrible damage that this drug is doing to many of its users and to society.

And politicians inside all three major parties foolishly seek to use the virus crisis as a pretext to legalise it, in the hope of raising taxes. 

I’ve tried using facts and reason against this idiotic policy for years, to little effect. 

But perhaps the sight of a 62-year-old woman with a joint between her lips, pretending to be modish, will finally put an end to marijuana’s cool image. 

I can only hope.