I Think I Know The Answer

Peter Hitchens writes:

One day, when even the stupidest people grasp that marijuana is a terrifying, deeply dangerous drug, some may remember that I was one of the tiny few who warned against the unhinged, greedy plan to legalise it. This plan can't be far from success, with all its misery of wrecked families, destroyed minds and mad violence.

And one of the bodies which won't be able to escape blame for this avoidable tragedy is the BBC. Of course, nobody in the BBC is a marijuana user. The organisation is wholly drug-free. So the only explanation for its bias on the issue must be stupidity.

Many times on this page I have documented programmes in which the agenda of the drug legalisers has been advanced in discussion programmes and dramas. But last week the BBC came up with something new, which looks suspiciously like censorship.

Many people are now, far too late, waking up to the link between marijuana use and incurable mental illness. An observant few have begun to grasp the even more frightening instances of crazy violence by mentally ill people whose minds have been overthrown by dope.

I owe what follows to an amazing website called News Sniffer, which tracks changes in stories published on the web and later amended. It found that a BBC website report on a crazy killer began by prominently mentioning the killer's use of marijuana – and then dropped it. The mad killer is called Alexander Lewis-Ranwell. He slew twins Dick and Roger Carter, 84, and Anthony Payne, 80, in Exeter in 2019.

All three blameless men died of severe head injuries inflicted by an insane drug abuser who had (as so often) been allowed by the authorities to roam until he committed a serious crime. He has now been classified as insane and 'detained'. But there will be more like him as marijuana use spreads.

The corporation took three days to come up with this excuse for removing the word 'cannabis' from its report: 'This article was produced during an ongoing inquest… and updated to reflect new information. Reference to cannabis was added as part of the custody officer's evidence but, as Lewis-Ranwell's mother's testimony became the focus, we updated our report to show this while keeping references about "drug-induced psychosis".' It would answer no further questions or I would have asked why it could not have used the word 'cannabis' instead of 'drug' in the new version. I think I know the answer.

There cannot be a “free” market in general, yet 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. Contrived in the past, that baleful situation is being contrived again today.

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. No prison sentence should 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 we need Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought to be taught in schools.