Why We Need To Go Back

Peter Hitchens writes:

Five people have been prosecuted for supplying drugs to Hollywood actor Matthew Perry. One of them, Jasveen Sangha, has just been locked up for 15 years. I begin to wish I had been tougher on the late Mr Perry the only time we met, in a debate on drugs in a BBC studio in 2013.

What if I had got through to him and he had broken away from all the flatterers and dealers who crowd around the rich and famous? He might be alive, and the futile, vengeful frenzy of the state against his suppliers might never have happened.

Is there anything more pointless than our obsession with ‘evil dealers’ – when those dealers would have no customers if we hadn’t given up prosecuting drug possession? Who finances the vast global drug disaster? Dealers?

No, their customers do it.

Mr Perry, who died of a drug overdose aged 54 in October 2023, was much loved by millions. They greatly enjoyed his portrayal of the character Chandler Bing in the TV series Friends.

I wasn’t one of them, when we met. I had not watched an episode of Friends in my life and I had never heard of him. I was astonished to find he had a presidential-size entourage so big it took up an entire green room at BBC HQ. I was much more worried about my other opponent, the formidable drug liberalisation campaigner Molly Meacher, who looks like a harmless nice old lady doing her knitting but who floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.

But here was this Chandler Perry, or Perry Bing, or whoever he was, and he wanted a fight. That suited me. I rather liked him and much regret his passing. He was obviously an intelligent, charming man. My genuine sympathies go to his family.

I’d often hoped someone might arrange a return match. But it never happened, and if it had, the great majority of any audience, in the studio or at home, would have backed him against me.

For there are multitudes who live their lives on the same basis, that they can’t stop themselves hurting themselves because they enjoy the things that hurt them.

And the reason a lot of people supported him is this: people really don’t want to be told that they have free will. Where they do bad things, or things they are a bit ashamed of, it is reassuring to believe that they have some sort of disease and can’t control their desires.

Someone had persuaded Mr Perry this was so and he believed it. In fact, he believed that it was medically and scientifically proven – which I don’t think it is.

Since our clash, which was a bit sarcastic but by no means savage, I have become even more of a hate figure than I was already. Large numbers take Matthew Perry’s view that they are forced by addictions into harming themselves. They are furious with me for telling them they are mistaken.

Many, many personal tragedies have already resulted from this view. It has dominated the drug policies of the Western nations since the 1960s, changing medical and legal attitudes to drug abuse.

So many more tragedies are yet to come. We will not prevent them by locking up the dealers who take advantage of them. There will always be other dealers, taking bigger risks and charging higher prices.

But we might avoid some of them by ceasing to accept the excuse that ‘I can’t stop myself’. Yes, they can.

There cannot be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. 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 included 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 Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought should be taught in schools. He also writes:

Back in May 1991, I watched the then Soviet Union shoot Britain’s Helen Sharman into space from its remarkably crude and simple launchpad in Kazakhstan. The real name of this mysterious place was Leninsk, not Baikonur, a town many miles away.

It was surrounded by a 10ft-wall and had a pleasant park, complete with Ferris wheel, next to the Syr Daria river.

This was risky, devil-may-care Soviet technology and the small number of spectators were allowed far closer to the launchpad than we would have been in the US. Given that 120 people had been burned to death there in a missile accident in 1960, this wasn’t reassuring. I won’t forget it quickly. The growling thunder and the shaking of the earth as the ancient, crude, triple rocket lifted off was like the end of the world.

I recall thinking that the giant effort needed to lift the tiny capsule into orbit showed how extraordinarily tough the earth’s atmosphere is, and suggested that perhaps we were not really meant to try to break through it.

Not long before, I had been to the museum in northern Moscow where they still keep the charred, scarred, sphere in which Yuri Gagarin came safely back to our planet after his 1961 single orbit.

I gulped, never having grasped until then just what a primitive and perilous thing it was to plunge back through this amazingly thin but terrifyingly tough defensive barrier.

The distances are startlingly short. The beginning of outer space is the Karman Line, about 62 miles up. Meteorites frizzle and evaporate on their way in, just below that level. So would returning spacecraft, if they did not have superb heat shields. Gagarin flew only 200 miles above the earth, but if anything had gone wrong it might as well have been a million miles.

Is all this risk worth it? The first landing on the Moon was thrilling and haunts me still, but why do we need to go back?

Well, it beats going to war. Ours is an improbably dominant species. Far from having been seen off by something much bigger, and endowed with fangs, or claws, or talons, or venom, or what have you, we alone have been to the Moon. Within two generations of that, though, we are afraid of words. Either we go to back to the Moon, and then to Mars and beyond, or we accept that we have entered our decline, the endpoint of which could only be extinction. Space is being both privatised and militarised, a very common combination but always a lethal one, and that by the country that does not recognise it as a common resource for all humanity. There needs to be a return to President Eisenhower’s proposal, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 22 September 1960, for the principles of the Antarctic Treaty to be extended to Outer Space.

If God had not intended us to be a spacefaring species, then He would never have put anything up there for us to find. People who think that these missions impoverish anyone, even as an initial outlay, do not understand how the money supply works. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, Britain has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect.

Why, though, spend that currency on this? Welcome to the Anthropocene, that is why. Life is the geological force that shapes the Earth, and the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere, not least by the uniquely human phenomenon of economic growth, so that human mastery of nuclear processes is beginning to create resources through the transmutation of elements, enabling us, among other things, to explore space and to exploit the resources of the Solar System. Vladimir Vernadsky and Krafft Ehricke will yet have their day. They may be having it now.

“To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man,” said Leon Trotsky. “Dominion,” says the God of the Bible. Dominion over the beasts, thus over the land, and thus over everything on and under the land. Dominion over the fish, thus over the waters, and thus over everything in and under the waters. And dominion over the birds, thus over the sky, and thus over everything in the sky, as far up as the sky goes, and the sky goes up a very long way.

That dominion is entrusted so that we might “be fruitful and multiply”. Entrusted as it is to the whole human race, its purpose is, “To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man.” Celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. That means growth, industry, what someone once nearly called “the white heat of technology”, and the equitable distribution of their fruits among and within the nations of the world, for everyone to enjoy at least the standard of living that we ourselves already enjoyed.