Some Good May Come

Peter Hitchens writes:

Is there a stupider response to violence on trains than plans for ‘airport-style security’ at stations? If you don’t have such screening at every tiny halt, then it can’t work. It is just collective punishment. If there is anywhere in the country which does need ‘airport-style security’, on the way out as well as on the way in, it is the prisons.

And:

You cannot cure a disease until you know what it is. At last Britain is beginning to grasp that we have many crazy people in our midst, and that they are crazy because they smoke marijuana.

The obvious solution is to enforce our existing severe laws against marijuana possession, so people stop smoking it. This is what they do in civilised, serious countries such as Japan.

But that logical step may be beyond a lot of our political and media elite. It is also unpopular with a lot of people on anti-social media.

It’s easy to explain the elite problem. Our university-educated classes are full of past and present habitual drug abusers, or people who let their children abuse drugs. Or both. They are held back from admitting the truth by their own disgusting selfishness.

But the Twitter warriors – who are frantic to believe that rampage knife attacks are ‘terrorism’ – are just as bad. They go purple in the face when I say that these pointless slaughters are the acts of unhinged people.

There are dozens of examples, but take Valdo Calocane, the culprit of those crazy, horrible killings in Nottingham. His home stank of marijuana. But nobody in authority cared.

The Southport mass killer Axel Rudakubana appears to have once been a bright and pleasant child but his character and appearance changed totally in his early teens, the time at which so many British children meet marijuana at school and fly off the rails, always into slack despondency and often into desperate, incurable mental illness. Choruses of psychiatrists now link this drug with mental illness. Reams of news reports link acts of mad violence with marijuana users.

But as far as I can find out, nobody inquiring into the Southport horror has even asked if Rudakubana took this drug.

Over many years I have found police totally uninterested in the drug use of violent culprits. This is no surprise, as they don’t want to admit that their laziness and laxity, in refusing to enforce the laws against cannabis possession, have aided an explosion in its use.

But the ‘terrorist’ explanation of such events has now suffered a crushing blow. It simply cannot be sustained by any known facts. Even so, everyone but me still tried to believe it when news came in of a knife attack on a train last weekend. I observed how the authorities and media reports struggled to imagine that the Huntingdon train assault was in some way terrorist. But it wasn’t.

Codewords for terror attacks were used by police. Two people were arrested, suggesting some co-ordinated action. Then all this crumbled. No possible terror motive or connection could be discovered. The second suspect was quickly released without charge.

I can’t and won’t discuss the first suspect but will wait with great interest for the investigation and trial which must now follow.

Perhaps, out of all this horror and blood, some good may come.

There cannot be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature.

Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today.

Unlike the Conservative Party, which merely thinks that it is and acts as if it were, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are constitutionally committed to the “free” market. Richard Tice wants to legalise cannabis, Nigel Farage concurs with the Green Party in wanting to legalise drugs across the board, and Lee Anderson signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023. Are those now the views of Ann Widdecombe and Danny Kruger?

Instead, we need a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of two years for a first offence, three years for a second offence, four years for a third offence, and so on. I no longer believe in prison sentences that include the possibility of release in less than 12 months; in that case, then your crime was not bad enough to warrant imprisonment, which the possession of drugs is. We need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one’s premises to be used for illegal drug purposes. And Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought should be taught in schools, as pro-drugs propaganda is routinely.