Beguiled By Assurances

Julian Assange has had a stroke. Peter Hitchens writes:

Beguiled by assurances from the US government that they will not be too horrid to Julian Assange during the decades of hard prison time he faces in America, our judges on Friday allowed his extradition. A pity.

This is a totally political case that ought to have been thrown out on sight by the English courts. Mr Assange is, in the end, a journalist doing his job, and if he can be dragged off to some Federal dungeon then any UK journalist who unveils embarrassing facts about the American state is not safe from this sort of thing.

Our Prime Minister is himself a former journalist, and there may still be enough of the trouble-making spirit in him to see that this is plain wrong. I do hope so. When Theresa May rightly blocked the court-approved extradition of Gary McKinnon to the USA in 2012, the American government did not take elaborate revenge on us. They muttered and grumbled, but in the end the Americans respect nations that stand up to them rather more than they respect those that bow down to them.

The Prime Minister should refuse to allow Mr Assange to be sent to the US, and he should be released from the ridiculously harsh, cruelly prolonged imprisonment in Belmarsh, which he has endured for far too long.

And: 

Who else remembers the one-time Met Police Commissioner Ian Blair threatening in 2005 to crack down on middle-class cocaine users? Or Sajid Javid, when he was Home Secretary, making the same threat in 2018? 

Now the Prime Minister dons a police woolly hat and declares that he will ‘look at taking away passports and driving licences’ from such people. As on previous occasions, see if this happens. Bizarrely, he thinks that we still lock people up ‘again and again’ for ‘using’ drugs, a claim I’d like to see evidence for.

Meanwhile, the de facto decriminalisation of drug possession continues. This is why his pledge to stamp out so-called ‘county lines’ (macho, pseudo-American police-speak for ‘small-town drug dealers’) will never succeed. If you don’t stamp out the demand, you will never stamp out the supply. 

If we want to get anywhere, we should copy Japan and South Korea, where they prosecute drug abusers for possession, not just for dealing. Drug use would dive if we applied the existing law, just as drink driving hugely diminished when they brought in the breathalyser.