This Wise Opinion

Peter Hitchens writes:

A huge part of the misery and crime which plague our country is linked to the abuse of illegal drugs. Marijuana users, especially, are common among the culprits of horrible, violent crimes and terrorist acts.

The families and neighbours of heroin users know in grim detail that these selfish people are capable of robbing those closest to them.

Even official statistics are beginning to note that the dangerous drivers who kill and injure so many are, in growing numbers of cases, under the influence of such drugs.

But the police and courts do nothing to prosecute the serious crime of drug possession, the only proven way to combat the problem.

At a lower level, many families face endless tragedy because a child has become a habitual drug user and so ruined his life and theirs, education wasted, hopes gone, the people involved husks of their former selves.

In many cases the victims of these disasters struggle to obtain mental treatment for the drug abuser himself. Where they can get such treatment, it means lifelong use of potent anti-psychotic medication which irreversibly changes the lives of those who take it, in many unpleasant ways.

I report on this often here and beg, without success, for authority to take it seriously. Instead, a greasy fog of marijuana smoke spreads across our cities, nothing is done, nothing is researched. And a noisy lobby seeks to make it worse by claiming - laughably - that drug users in this country live under cruel persecution.

Where might you turn for solace and comfort, if you were one of the many victims of the uncontrolled spread of drugs in our society? Well, not to Parliament and not to the Tory Party.

Last week, a report on drugs from the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee was published. It accepted almost every nostrum of drug liberals.

It swallowed the idea that drug abuse is not a crime (though it is according to the law of the land). Instead, apparently it is a sort of disease, which must be treated, with free substitute drugs, paid for by mugging the taxpayer, and special places to take illegal drugs cleanly. These schemes have only one real effect – they mock the law. What's more, many of them have been semi-officially followed in this country for decades. They help to cause the mess we are in.

This talk of 'treatment' is insulting to the truly sick. How sufferers from cancer must wish they could give cancer up, as drug abusers can give up drugs if they want to and often do.

How the truly ill must wish they had been offered the choice of whether to become ill, as drug abusers may choose between taking their illegal poisons and not taking them.

This committee, though it contains several Labour MPs, is dominated by members who claim to be 'Conservative'. If any of them dissented, I see no sign of it in the report and can find no evidence that they did.

I did try to get them to at least examine a proper conservative approach, used in Japan and South Korea.

In these modern democracies, anti-drug laws are enforced and drug use is much lower. But I never heard from them again after I submitted written evidence about this – although I have written a substantial book on this subject.

Instead of visiting Tokyo and Seoul to see, they spent £60,000 on visiting Uruguay (!)

There they found an 'experiment' in legalising marijuana has flopped, as they all do. I could have told them for nothing.

I CAN understand that some MPs wish to adopt this soppy, failed view of the drug problem. It is a common and fashionable point of view even if 60 years of experience have proved it woefully wrong.

What makes me furious is that among these MPs not one voice was raised in favour of the simple policy (abandoned here years ago) of enforcing the laws against drug possession.

Proper conservatism has just died among MPs of all parties, apparently including noisy pseudo-tough figures such as the 'Red Wall' Tory Lee Anderson, a member of the committee.

Back in 2002, when the same committee made its first foray into this subject this century, a brave woman, Dame Angela Watkinson (then MP for Upminster), defied the majority, including her Tory colleague and future leader David Cameron. She opposed what she called 'a policy of surrender and defeat'.

I do not know how many millions of British people agree with me and her about this. I would reckon there must be millions of us. But how is it that this wise opinion has, in 2023, not one single ally or friend in Parliament?