Fact and Logic

Peter Hitchens writes:

The real drivers of drug crime in this country are the smug and self-satisfied people who buy and use illegal drugs. Yet, somehow, they are the ones who get away with it, even though their actions are severe crimes – in theory. 

This has long been my view, but I was moved and pleased to hear Baroness Newlove, cruelly robbed of her brave husband by the violent crime from which nobody is now safe, making this point in the House of Lords. Alas, her powerful words received little attention. Could this be because parts of our media are corrupted by widespread drug abuse? I could not possibly say.  

She condemned ‘the middle-class drug users who are funding this wave of violence. City workers who drink their Fairtrade coffee out of a reusable cup during the week think nothing of the supply chain of the stuff they snort up their noses at the weekend. In my view, they are as guilty as the moped riders’.

It is that point about the Fairtrade coffee that seems to me to be so important. People consider themselves to be right-on about climate change and third world poverty and recycle religiously, because they think these things are ethical and good.

Likewise they noisily despise the big greed lobbies which push tobacco, dubious pills, greasy fast food and sugar-laden drinks. Yet I suspect that, to a man and a woman, they are all in favour of the fashionable campaign to ‘decriminalise’ or ‘regulate’ illegal drugs, especially the ones they like to take.

Do they not know that a billionaire lobby (I call it Big Dope) stands behind the campaign to legalise marijuana? Do they not know that this campaign is terrified of the growing mountains of research which link this supposedly soft drug with permanent mental illness? And what do they think will be next, once the Big Dope lobby has succeeded, and cannabis is in high street shops, advertised everywhere, and freely available on the internet? 

They will say: ‘But wouldn’t you rather these things were sold legally than in the hands of gangsters?’ No, I wouldn’t. Gangsters are foul and dangerous, but they don’t have one 50th of the power, wealth or ability which cynical businessmen have to sell and spread their nasty products. Like tobacco, cannabis and cocaine can never be safe. Let us not make the mistake of making them legal, too. 

Would cigarettes kill more or fewer people if tobacco were illegal, had never been advertised, could not be sold in shops and was only sold by gangsters? Plainly, they would kill many fewer people. Does ‘regulating’ them now, as the legalisers urge we should do with drugs, make cigarettes less deadly? No, it does not. They kill just the same. 

We go on all the time about cartels and evil dealers and how they should be stamped out. But they never are. This is because we forget the fact that the source of all this crime is in our midst. It is the thousands of selfish people, with more money than sense, who buy illegal drugs and sustain the whole great stinking heap of wickedness which they bring into being. 

They should be made to be ashamed of themselves, and to fear the law, made for the benefit of all, which they callously break.

And:

Who can fail to be moved by parents who believe that cannabis oil will help their stricken children? And who cannot be sympathetic to sufferers from MS and similar afflictions who believe that the drug in some form is good for them? But compassion should not close our minds to fact and logic. 

You should know some important things. Cannabis has risks, which may well outweigh any good it does. The British Government has no hardline dogmatic objection to testing the medical properties of cannabis. It has licensed at least two drugs made from the cannabis plant, and there is a special legal cannabis farm at a secret location in Kent, to supply the makers of one of them.

But perhaps, above all, note that the American Keith Stroup, a veteran campaigner for legal marijuana for recreational purposes, gave the game away long ago. In a February 6, 1979 interview with the American university newspaper The Emory Wheel, he said he and his comrades planned to use medical marijuana as a red herring to get pot a good name. It may have been the biggest red herring ever.