A person grandiosely describing himself as
‘Policy Director’ at the Adam Smith Institute has placed an article on the
Internet, under the imprint of that Institute, in which he denounces my new
book on drugs without having read it. Indeed, he proudly announces that he has
not read it, and has no intention of doing so. Is this what ‘Policy Directors’
at the Adam Smith Institute do? Apparently. You may read it
here.
I have this picture in my mind of some teenage
ideologue, barely out of university, brusquely giving orders to a roomful of
cowed and shamefaced policies, which have fallen on hard times and must
therefore submit to this treatment without complaint. ‘Stand there!’ He barks.
‘Underpin this!’. ‘You two! Yes, you, over there! You should be more consistent
with each other!’ The poor policies have been enticed off the street with
promises of warmth, food and wages, and now find that they must pay an awful
price for this. Inwardly, they think bitterly ‘How has it come to this? That I
should be Directed about the place by a person who proudly says he hasn’t read
the books he criticises? ‘ Outwardly, they smile and obey. I rather hope that Unison, or some even more
stroppy trade union, sends an organiser to sign up these poor mishandled
policies, and gets them to stage a strike. My suggested slogan for their
placards, as they picket the Adam Smith Institute, would be ‘No Bloviation
without Cogitation!’ and ‘Read first. Pontificate afterwards!’
I have not, it is true, paid much attention to
the Adam Smith Institute for a while. Though the name suggests an august
establishment, reached by climbing a flight of marble steps and passing through
a pillared classical portico, into a cool and thought-inducing inner courtyard,
I don’t think it quite lives up to its title. If its policies are directed by
the person whose smirking portrait adorns this article, then you might be more
likely to find it, surrounded by 4X4 motor cars, on some industrial estate near
a Motorway interchange and service area on the M25. It has long struck me as a
rather tiresome body which – like the BBC and the fashionable Left – has
confused classical liberalism with conservatism. It therefore has no problem
with the cultural revolution, since (unlike Adam Smith himself, who wrote,
amongst other things ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’) it is uninterested in
the moral conditions without which freedom rapidly becomes licence, and worse.
The author of this attack upon me also appears to
be an enthusiast for Miss Ayn Rand, that anti-religious apostle of the higher
selfishness. So an attack from this quarter isn’t really much different in
quality and nature from the regular assaults I receive from straightforward
leftist cultural revolutionaries, who openly despise conscience, morality and
self-restraint. It is one of the two tragedies of modern conservatism (the
first being that political Toryism is more interested in office than principle)
that the think-tank world is dominated by nominal conservatives who support
intervention abroad and licence at home.
Now, I would be the first to recognise that it is
hard to summarise a book of around 300 pages in a single extract in a
newspaper. I am untroubled by anyone who says that the extract in the Mail on
Sunday did not fully address all the issues involved. But the author of the attack on me must surely
recognise that, until he has read the book, it is unsafe to dismiss it with
words such as these:
But his [my] argument – that cannabis is much
more dangerous than is commonly believed – was staggeringly weak. His
justification for this premise in full: “The cannabis user can cause terrible distress to
others. He could wreck his life and the lives of his friends and close family
through irreversible mental illness. He could destroy his good prospects. Its
use by teenagers is associated with under-achievement in school. Many who fail
in school go on to fail in life, and so become an unquenchable grief to those
who love them, and a costly burden to us all. Campaigners for cannabis legalisation often
claim that the drug, especially in comparison with alcohol, promotes peaceful
behaviour. I am unconvinced by this broad claim, partly because of the frequent
newspaper accounts of violent acts by people who are known cannabis users. . .
. There are also several cases, which I have for
the most part set aside, of killings by mentally ill people who have been
taking cannabis. It is not possible to say whether they were ill
in the first place because of cannabis, or whether they were already ill for
some other reason, and cannabis has made their problems worse.”
That’s it. No survey data, no medical evidence –
nothing, except some specious anecdotes and flimsy correlations. Contrast this
with actual, you know, medical research which says, basically, that it’s not
good for you, but you could do worse. There isn’t a clear link between cannabis
use and violence to others. The risks of psychosis are slim. And Peter Hitchens
may be surprised to learn that there have been several cases of killings by
mentally ill people who have not been taking cannabis as well.’ Can you spot the flaw? Ah, yes. It’s those two
little words ‘in full’. He has not read my case in full. We know he hasn’t because a) he says he hasn’t and b) he
says he isn’t going to. So there! Jolly well shan’t! So he can’t in that case state that he is aware
of my case in full, or purport to rebut it here. Can he? What do they teach
them in those schools?
I recognise, and in my book acknowledge and
discuss the difficulties of obtaining hard, indisputable evidence on this
subject. I do so partly because I listen carefully to my opponents in this
debate and I am aware of how much they rely on two lines of argument – one that
‘correlation is not causation’ and the other, that even the use of those
surveys which tend to suggest that cannabis is dangerous is usually dismissed
as ‘cherry-picking’. You’ll have to read the book to see how I deal with this
problem in detail, and how careful I am to make no claims beyond what the facts
support.
The difficulty is that, confronted with the great
cloud of ‘anecdotal’ evidence such as the fate of Henry Cockburn and many more
like him, and of the mental declines (charted, since my book went to the
printers, in the recent study of Persistent Cannabis Users, and so no longer
‘anecdotal’), and also faced with the extreme difficulty of measuring such
concepts as ‘mental illness’ ‘psychosis’ , ‘schizophrenia’ or ‘paranoia’ , and
combining that with the general lack of enthusiasm among research bodies for
examining the cannabis phenomenon, what should a responsible society do?
My critic thinks we should do nothing.
The jury is out, he says. But what if the jury
never comes back? What if the evidence remains forever anecdotal and dispersed,
and yet in thousands of homes tragedies are unfolding, as catastrophic for
those involved as a terrorist attack would be for a city, but private,
unrecorded, lacking the gravity and the media force to become politically
important? Must we then do nothing, and watch as Hell strides brutally into the
lives of our fellow-creatures? Is no preventive action to be allowed at all?
Apparently so. If it doesn’t affect our Policy Director personally, then it
doesn’t count.
He states, apparently as fact rather than as his
opinion ‘As an adult, I should be able to stick whatever I damn well like into
my body. Provided that I am aware of the risks, nobody is better placed to make
my personal cost/benefit calculation for any given action.’ How grown-up and how awfully brave to swear a bit
while making this declaration. But has it never occurred to this Policy
Director that others, either his close family, or his neighbours, or his work
colleagues, or the taxpayers who may later have to shoulder the potentially
lifelong consequences of the immeasurable risk he takes by sticking ‘what he
likes’ into his body, might have some say in what he does?
Even the most primitive instrumental moral
system, quite uninterested in the abuse of divine gifts or the moral squalor of
deliberate self-stupefaction, might have something to say about that. Listening
to the Policy Director is like watching an infant running gleefully about on a
clifftop, shrieking with innocent laughter as he plays on the lip of death.
Like so many people in our immature society, given responsibilities and
platforms far too early in life to be worthy of them, he has no idea of the
dangers he runs. But we will have to clear up the broken pieces afterwards, if
the dangers turn out to be greater than he thought.
I’ve dealt here at other times with (and so am
not silent about, though I am very bored by) the puerile Nutt-like comparisons
between drug-taking, a meritless activity innocent of skill, self-discipline,
careful training, courage or other moral qualities, and such risky activities
as horse-riding (though as it happens, now you ask me, I would happily see
boxing banned by law). He then diverts into bizarre comparisons such as
‘What about sex with people in high STD risk groups? What about driving to work
instead of getting the train (twelve times less lethal than driving)?' I am
unable to see any particular connection between these two. The first (if, as I
suspect, he means undertaken without careful precautions) would be an act of
self-indulgent folly comparable to drug-taking. The other is a choice
forced on most of those who do it by the simple fact that no train is
available, or they can’t (thanks to the ‘free market ’ which subsidises roads
and cars far more than trains) afford train travel.
And he opines: ‘He [me] might believe that the
pleasure that some people take from driving is more important than the pleasure
that some people take from using cocaine.’ Might I? What is he talking about? I don’t. On
what basis can he suggest that I might? As it happens, I loathe driving and do
it only when I must, though I recognise that some people enjoy it. Though very
few people, I think, drive primarily
for pleasure, not is it an activity which needs to be justified by the pleasure
it gives or doesn’t give. After misrepresenting my position on alcohol, and
then claiming that I am inconsistent because his mistaken version of my
position is inconsistent, the Policy Director declares ‘ If he does, then he is
simply advocating for a law based on Peter Hitchens’s own preferences, and is
certainly not a serious thinker.’
I don’t much care if the Policy Director believes
I am a ‘serious thinker’ or not. Accolades and criticisms of this kind are only
valid when the person involved has proved that he is qualified to issue them. I
see little evidence of serious thought, or even of unserious thought, in this
construction. But the jibe about ‘preferences’ is surely without merit. Here am
I, trying through open debate to influence a free society in a direction which
I think wise. I think it wise because I think it would be beneficial to many
people. I present in my book, which the Policy Director will not read, both
moral (for those who understand them) and utilitarian arguments (for those who
are open to them) to explain the basis of this opinion. To that extent, and to
that extent only, I am advocating (not ‘advocating for’, this is a redundancy,
as this lofty critic of my writing abilities should surely know) laws based on
my own preferences. But isn’t that what everyone does, who enters the debate
about how we should govern ourselves?
Amusingly, the Policy Director (having criticised
my writing), then pronounces (or perhaps directs) that my writings should be
‘mocked’ and ‘ignored’. Well, as Bertie Wooster almost said of Roderick Spode
when he found that Spode was simultaneously leading a fascist organisation and
designing frilly ladies’ underwear , ‘One or the other, Mr Policy Director. But
not both.’ There’s even this priceless barb: ‘Apparently
Hitchens has admitted trying 'illegal drugs'. Why hasn't he handed himself into
the authorities?’ Well, since my (many times stated) argument
relies rather heavily on the proposition that the authorities cannot be
bothered to prosecute current offences of drug possession where there is clear
material evidence of it, what logic or consistency would require me to, or even
remotely suggest that I should, turn myself in to the police over an offence
committed in (I think) 1965 for which there is no such evidence?
Talking of prosecutions, a reading of my book,
when it comes out, will set him right on another point. He says: ‘Even still,
it's quite an overstatement to say that there is a “de facto decriminalization”
of drugs in Britain. There are over 10,000 people in jail in the UK for
specific drugs offences, and many more for drugs-related offences.’ Yes, but what offences are these? And what, more
importantly, are they not? A large part of my argument is that the de facto
decriminalisation of drug possession has been accompanied by a propaganda
hysteria against ‘evil dealers’, and that the misrepresentation of cannabis as
‘soft’ has been necessarily accompanied by the portrayal of heroin and cocaine
as bogeymen, rather than as substances comparable to cannabis, equally
dangerous in their different ways, or (in my view) in some ways less dangerous
because the damage they do is not always so irreversible. Thus it is still
quite possible to go to prison for selling or growing drugs which it is
effectively legal to consume. I agree that this is absurd, but it is an
absurdity rooted in the whole nature of covert, rather than overt,
decriminalisation. My book will explain this to those who choose to read it,
but not to those who do not.
I will however, provide here a sneak preview of
the closing words of the preface: ‘I can only hope that this book manages to
open a few generous minds to the truth, while preparing myself for the usual
abuse.’