Vicious, Brutal and Cruel

Damien Bendall was a heavy user of cannabis and cocaine, because of course he was. Not only does cannabis cause one third of psychosis cases in London, but what authority does Sadiq Khan have to decriminalise it? There have only ever been three Mayors of London. If the office were vested with this much power, then imagine what the two previous holders might have done with it.

I have been both to university and to prison, and I have still never taken an illegal drug in my life. The treatment of such behaviour as normal is based on extrapolation from the wildly untypical experience of the people who decide these things. Drugs-based blackmail is fundamental to political power in this country.

Michael Gove was described in edited Fleet Street copy as having been on “ a cocaine binge” this May. He and Boris Johnson, who is no longer an American citizen, have lied on their United States visa applications. They are not the only ones, although presumably no one will bother in future. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng was obviously off his face at the funeral of the late Queen. The Truss Government was so awash with cocaine that it scandalised the servants.

Intentionally or otherwise, and for all his faults, Jeremy Corbyn threatened to destroy that Blairite lifestyle by creating an economic order in which no one would have felt the need to become a drug mule or, say, a rent boy. Therefore terrified of economic equality, the lifestyle liberals turned on him as they had not turned on any other politician in living memory. And here we are.

Any economic arrangement is a political choice, and there cannot be a “ free” market in general but not in, among other things, drugs. 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.

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 Peter Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought should be taught in schools, as pro-drugs propaganda is routinely.