Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 249

Not Nutt

What a day. I had hoped to write a long, thoughtful post on the subject of emigration, pen a few words on the Stanley Spencer paintings from Burghclere, now in Somerset House and soon to go on tour (see it), and the movingly old-fashioned 1956 BBC TV programme that accompanies it, in which Spencer himself appears) - and maybe think in more depth about the Duggan inquest and its implications. Perhaps I might also have tried another disquisition on the distinction between risking your mind taking drugs, because you are a frivolous ingrate,  and  the more calculated risks you must take in life,  which make you a better person.

 

But as my train trundled through the Thames Valley , passing glittering floods and wintry hills, and as  I ploughed through my pile of newspapers, my silenced telephone began to throb. Leaving the quiet carriage, I took the call.

 

Would I take part in a discussion of cannabis laws with Professor David Nutt on Sky TV? But of course. Delighted. When and where? All fixed. I mentally rearranged my day. I did a bit of work on Professor Nutt, and on the subject of cannabis strength which I knew would come up. The TV station involved had a film about cannabis farmers and the high-strength dope they produce.

 

As I sat at my London desk a little later,  a text message arrived. There was something about the wording that seemed a little, well, shamefaced to me. ‘Unfortunately’ and ‘Bad news’ featured in it. Anyway, why a text and not a call? They were ‘unable’ to have me on. Why? I was able to get there. Their building hadn’t ( so far as I could establish) fallen down or been flooded with hot soup. Their satellites were still flying above the earth.

 

A few pointed questions elicited the answer that Professor Nutt wasn’t coming on with me. The exact reason wasn’t available. Indeed, a body called ‘his people’ were blamed for this, rather than the sainted Professor. Well, if I had any ‘people’, which I don’t, I wouldn’t let them turn down TV appearances on my behalf, but never mind.

 

Why wouldn’t he come? Not clear. I, and you, may suspect what we wish. But we do not know and cannot say.  It’s my view he didn’t come very well out of our last broadcast confrontation, a long-ago clash on a bizarre report claiming ( as always ) that the illegal drugs aren’t as bad as we think. The core of the matter, with links to older material, is summed up here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/07/i-am-a-scientist-you-will-obey-professor-nutt-speaks-again.html

 

So, the match was off.  I made it plain that I thought this daft, and was going to write about it. Then I was offered the chance of going on *before* a colleague of Professor Nutt, Professor Val Curran. I said that surely , since she would be the one making the proposition (weaker drug laws), I should go on afterwards, if we couldn’t go on at the same time. The normal rule of debate is, after all,  that opposition replies to proposition.

 

In the end, we were back, almost,  to square one. I was finally invited to go head-to-head against Professor Curran on the Adam Boulton programme at about 1.30 pm today.

 

I haven’t seen a recording of the event, so I can only say that I felt that I was interrupted quite a lot, usually in the middle of making a point. I hope I managed to get that point across even so.  Sometimes these impressions are false, or exaggerated by selective memory. Sometimes they’re not. Anyway, there it is. But it’s a sort of answer to those who say, quite frequently, on Twitter and elsewhere, that they long to see an argument between me and Professor Nutt. So do I. And it’s not my fault that there wasn’t one today.

 

 

I was just about to write about this when Mehdi Hasan (the one who asked to write for the Daily Mail, then violently attacked that paper on Question Time) , whose way with words I have often documented here (for example http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/12/mehdi-hasan-the-pcc-and-me.html , with links contained in it),  chose to make an unprovoked attack on me on Twitter, to which I then had to respond. The nerve of it.

 

GIve and Take - answers to correspondents

Today I think I’ll just give brief answers to correspondents.

 

‘Jack’ says: ‘The Licensing Act 1988 allowed an extra 30 minutes drinking time up to 11 pm, abolished the two-and-a half-hour afternoon break, but cut drinking time on Sundays from five to four hours starting at 3 pm.

The criminal offence of selling alcohol to intoxicated customers or allowing the sale on licensed premises was not relaxed.

Perhaps drinkers ought to use their free will’

 

My recollection is that the break in the afternoon was not two and a half hours but three and a half (between 2.30 p.m. and six p.m.) Sunday drinking was still restricted, far more than it is now, but it did not start at three p.m. there used to be a short two-hour opening at mid-day, and then a 7pm to 10 p.m. opening in the evening.

Reports at the time stated that pubs in England and Wales would now be able to open, if they chose, from 11 a.m. to 11 pm without a break on weekdays, a huge change.

 

Indeed drinkers ought to use their free will, but long experience of the British people, going back to the days of Hogarth and earlier, suggests that many of them refuse to do so. And where men will not place chains upon their own behaviour, others have to do it for them.

 

One again in this discussion( as with drugs) I notice people attempting to claim that the ‘freedom’ to get blotto and ruin your own life and that of others is being falsely equated with the freedoms of speech, thought and assembly. These are opposites. The really funny thing is the absence of applause and thanks from all the ‘wot abaht alcohol and tobacco then, eh? eh? ‘ merchants, who never ever seem to be here when this is under discussion, or to read the things I repeatedly say about the need to restrict alcohol sales.

 

‘Paul P’ asks about church bells. Churches are well known to have bells, which are rung from time to time. If you don’t want to have to listen to church bells, don’t buy or rent a house next to a church. There’s no comparison between this and having noisy fireworks, audible for hundreds of yards, imposed on you without warning or choice by twerps who’ve never for a moment considered that others don’t share their joy in the ‘new year’, or wish to listen to loud bangs.

 

Gadjp Dilo writes :’ Sleep being 'impossible from 11.30 till 12.30', it's that's all that happens, seems a fairly small price to pay’

 

To which I reply, a small price to pay for what? I get nothing in return for this. I am woken from sleep, which I desire, to listen to noise, which I do not desire.  Sleep is a precious possession which, once lost, cannot be replaced.

 

He adds ‘.. in some Mediterranean countries it's a right of passage to let off bangers in town squares at any hour of the night.’

 

Eh? A ‘rite of passage’, the phrase he must be hunting for,  is a Baptism, a Wedding or a Funeral. The meaningless change of the calendar does not remotely compare to such events, significant alterations in the lives of all involved,  which in any case take place in the daytime.

 

Maybe what he says is true about bangers in town squares. I don’t live on or near a town square but in a family suburb deliberately placed a long way from such things.

 

He adds:’ Don't forget, with so many people rejecting religion all that's left are little-signifying dates.’

 

No doubt. The question is ‘is this a good thing?’

 

Then he complains :’Ted Heath 'of accursed memory'? Not a wholly effective leader, certainly, but dare one ask how far we have to go back until we find a Tory who you don't consider 'useless'?’

 

Heath was a very effective leader, who chained this country to the EU, as he was determined to do. It was his main aim and he succeeded in it. It is what he should be remembered for.  It is not about ‘effectiveness’, but about what effects he sought and achieved.  The Tory Party was never any good. It has always been an engine for obtaining office for the sons of gentlemen, at any price, utterly unprincipled and so devoid of its own ideas that is quite happy to surrender to the spirit of the age.

If readers here would clear their minds of the banal and wholly false belief that I seek to return to the past, they might actually understand the points I make.

 

 Michael Williamson writes : ‘The point is, if you support this action (the 1915 licensing laws), then you cannot in all honesty complain about what subsequent governments have done in interfering in our private lives. This was the start of the belief that governments can do whatever they want whether we approve of it or not.’

 

I don’t agree. Drunkenness is not private. The drunkard horribly demoralises, disrupts and affects the lives of his own family (most tragically of the children forced to witness these frightful scenes and the violence often involved) , of his neighbours, of his work colleagues, of the people who have to share buses and trains and streets and public lavatories and cafes and libraries and shops with him. Even if he is wholly solitary ( and few are, certainly to start with) he battens on the rest of us.  He is a public menace. How do people manage to persuade themselves that self-stupefaction is some sort of historic liberty ( or even ‘human right’) . It is a curse, and a deeply immoral and selfish act, anything but private. The Temperance Movement, now either mocked or forgotten, was a noble cause which save many people from horrible fates. It needs to be re-founded.

 

In a semi-literate posting which suggests he does not himself read many books, ‘E’ urges : ‘He (me) certainly needs to stop trying to publicizing his books which no one apart from him appears to have heard of far less read.’

 

That, my dear ‘E’, is why I publicise them.

 

Mr David Wiseacre animadverts(the only word for it) on the Scottish tradition of Hogmanay, adding : ‘The first-foot is supposed to set the luck for the rest of the year. Traditionally, tall dark men are preferred as the first-foot. Could you imagine the look of disdain on Mr Hitchen's face were his neighbours to embark on such a practice.’

 

No, you couldn’t . If I move to Scotland, then I will of course adapt to the local customs. But Mr Wiseacre must understand that Hogmanay is a *Scottish* custom, not an *English* one. I live in *England*.  Indeed, he will find explained in the article on which he comments the history of the ‘new year’ in England, which was not even an official holiday until 40 years ago, and which was not an occasion for midnight fireworks until the year 2000.

 

I’m grateful to Peter Preston for challenging the bullying tone of ‘Henri Noel’, who seems to think he or others have some sort of right to force others to be merry ( itsef a contradiction in terms).

 

I have no doubt that in a more primitive society (such as we once had, and such as we will soon have again) people like me were also routinely clubbed to death for being a bit different. My mistake was obviously to think that this ‘tradition’ was a bad thing.

 

Can people please stop saying that I’m ‘grump’ or suggesting that my attitude is akin to that of Scrooge. Scrooge hated Christmas precisely because it was a season of goodwill. He began that fateful evening by insulting and ejecting men who came to him seeking charity. The new year has nothing to do with charity.  

 

First of all, my attitude is that the peace and sleep of others are precious, and that you need a better excuse than the change of calendar to destroy either of them. I hoped some people might even have the sense to see that this was a plea to consider the possibility that letting off explosives at midnight isn’t necessary and might be left out of their future celebrations. Can they really not mark the ‘festival’ they seem to think so important, without suburban gunpowder parties? If not, why not? Do they really think themselves so sovereign that they can blithely rob others of peace and repose for a few minutes passing pleasure?  What morally illiterate, selfish four-letter men they must be.

 

My congratulations to ‘Kevin, for splatting one of our more obtuse contributors (who would probably have been against midnight fireworks if I had been for them) by saying : ‘Just one day of the year, eh? Well, just imagine, your local vicar skeet shooting the selected works of famous literary atheists, from the roof of his vestry, in his annual effort to spread the Christian message to a less than interested flock, early each Christmas morn. See how that grabs you.’

 

Ed writes : ‘"1949

George Orwell’s “Thought Police” = uniformed thugs who drag “thought criminals” off to the cells to be tortured.

2014

Peter Hitchens’s “Thought Police” = women with opinions."

Ah, the willful and stubborn obtuseness of the left.’

 

Actually, the phrase ‘Thought Police’ (while originating with Orwell) now has a general application to those who would seek to intimidate or control the thoughts of others. Orwell never foresaw(though Huxley did) that soft methods of thought control would ultimately be more effective than the rubber truncheon and the torture chamber.  Also, when he says ‘Women with opinions’, is he suggesting that all women share these batty flat-earth views? Or that no men do? In my experience, Flat Earth Feminism is the province of concrete-headed zealots of both sexes. Why? Because it is a useful tool for intimidating the cowardly and confidence-free institutions of civil society, because its demands are limitless and can never be met even by the most grovelling obeisance, and because nobody, not even the silent can ever be sure they have not transgressed against it(making it a wonderful instrument of lawless tyranny).The left have learned a lot about methods. Their aims are the same. Their means are far more subtle. I don’t object to these flat-earth feminist opinions because women hold them, but because they are idiotic, and threaten freedom of thought and speech.  

 

I was grateful of the post from Mrs B, and glad also that several of you posted about the horrible effect which fireworks have on pets, to whom nobody can explain what is going on and who are made extremely nervous by repeated loud bangs, which they instinctively. I imagine that to them it is much as it would be for humans if mysterious, unexplained air raid alarms were constantly sounding, and there was nobody to tell them when they might stop or what they might portend.

 

I had been concerned about ‘Stephen’ who has suddenly become a frequent and active contributor here. There were occasional flashes of what might have been  intelligence(though these were combined with unscrupulous techniques of argument). But when he posted ‘Re. Fireworks, instead of yapping I would just buy a set of good earplugs?!’, I knew for certain that we had a candidate member for the Lasagne League. What a profoundly stupid, pompous thing to say. I hope this repulsive little twerp now goes away and does not come back.

 

Andrew Pitt writes : ‘But is New Year wholly separate from Christmas? Is it not marking the turning of the Christian calendar? And was it not marked in the past by the ringing of church bells? A very long peal was rung in Dorothy L Sayers's 'The Nine Tailors'. Perhaps we might see an appreciation of the book one day from Mr Hitchens? It's merely an entertainment and a very good picture of the fen country.’

 

I must say I thought I *had* written about the Nine Tailors. Can anyone else recall? The ‘new year’ has no feast or other day attached to it in the Christian calendar, though many days between Christmas and Epiphany do, starting with St Stephen’s, continuing through the Circumcision of Christ , St John, and of course Holy Innocents’ Day, now the most important of all as it is a way of commemorating the slaughter of the aborted, our greatest single modern crime. Some churches ring bells that night. Some do not. Bell-ringing is not in itself sacramental or even necessarily Christian, and I suspect many modern ringers never otherwise enter a church. As for the Nine Tailors, my memory is that the church of Fenchurch St Paul was not especially close to the houses of the village. Had it been, I doubt whether the kindly vicar would have permitted a lengthy late-night peal.

 

In reply to Bob, son of Bob – does he really think that Douglas Hurd would have been able to pursue his relaxation of licensing laws without the support of the Prime Minister - particularly that Prime Minister? Excuses are made for the over-rated Lady Thatcher about grammar schools (she could have resigned, and in any case was not premier but a very junior Cabinet member) or over the EU( actually she was for it until quite late,  campaigned vigorously for it in the 1975 referendum, and was bamboozled by Nigel Lawson over his shadowing of the Deutschemark).  I have seen no suggestion of the faintest friction between Lady Thatcher and her ministers over the licensing laws, or over her other attack on Christian Britain, the Sunday Trading liberalisation.

 

‘Isaac’ posts sarcastically : ‘The lamented Thames Conservancy would be the body that prevented the Thames floods of 1928 and 1947 would it?

Perhaps Associated Newspapers clippings of the above were destroyed in the Great Flood of July 1968 which deluged Chew Stoke.’

 

Oh, ha ha. No suggestion was made that any such body could prevent all flooding. The point (I think greatly supported by many well-informed contributions) was that such bodies were far better at managing the landscape, and its many watercourses,  than what has replaced them.

 

Happy New Year? Not if I'm being bombarded by fatuous fireworks

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Last Tuesday night,  long after I had gone  to bed, total strangers burst into my house yelling ‘Happy New Year!’, and shook me from a deep sleep.

Actually, they didn’t. But they might as well have done. Instead, total  strangers near where I live thought it fun to let off fireworks which sounded, in turn, like landmines and an anti-aircraft barrage.

Sleep was impossible from 11.30 till 12.30.

If you want to celebrate the New Year, that’s fine by me, though I can’t for the life of me work out why.

But I really don’t see why you feel the need to make me celebrate it too, or why the sensible law banning fireworks after 11pm doesn’t apply on December 31. I don’t mark Christmas or Easter by letting off half a ton of explosives in my garden at midnight (and it would be rightly illegal if I did).

I couldn’t care less that the calendar has changed. All it means to me is the need to buy a new season ticket, plus some disagreeable memories of Moscow during the Soviet Union’s dogged attempt to stamp out Christmas, and make everyone celebrate the meaningless change of the calendar instead.

Until Ted Heath, of accursed memory, came along, it wasn’t even a Bank Holiday in  England.

And until the Blair creature appeared, with his daft Millennium, fireworks were only for Guy Fawkes.

Before then it was a quiet night. If you lived in a sea port (I grew up in Portsmouth), there might be the strange and melancholy sound of all the ships’ foghorns sounding at the turn of the year. Perhaps there would be a few church bells. But you could sleep through that.

Yet somehow this empty  feast day grows in compulsory importance each year (just as the soul is sucked out of Good Friday, once the most solemn day in the calendar).

Shops close, silence falls – in honour of what? And pretty soon the miserable privatised train companies will stop running trains too.

I don’t want it. I couldn’t care less about it. You can have it  if you want to, but stop forcing it on me.

Attack of The Zombie Feminists

I now have absolutely no opinions about rape. There’s no point. If I did, the Ultra-Feminist Flat-Earthers would make up lies about what I had said, twisting my words into the opposite of what I meant.

But you don’t need to say anything on the subject to get a visit from the Thought Police.

A rather clever poster, produced by Calderdale Council in sensible Yorkshire, parodied a zombie movie advertisement by showing a hopelessly drunk young woman and pointing out the undeniable truth that ‘when you drink too much you lose control and put yourself at risk’. Sex wasn’t even mentioned. Yet the searching  red eye of the Flat-Earth Feminist Surveillance Network locked on to the campaign and instantly began squawking about .  .  . rape.

They should turn themselves in for incorrect thinking. Why did they think it was about rape? Could it be that they  secretly think that drunk women are more at risk of rape than sober women?

They should attack themselves for even allowing such  a heretical thought to cross their minds.

I rather enjoyed singer P. J. Harvey’s edition of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. It wasn’t that much more Left-wing than it normally is, and I agreed with its strong support for liberty, its dislike of war and its condemnation of torture.

It was far more honest and blatant than usual about its bias – which of course makes that bias much easier to resist.

The BBC’s real partiality is effective because most people don’t notice it – the careful selection of subjects and guests to exclude some views and help others, the prominence given to favoured causes, tone of voice in interviews, who gets selected for soft treatment, and who for the third degree, and who gets the last word.

How about P. J. Hitchens as guest editor next Christmas? I could show them how genuinely fair broadcasting can be done, even by a biased person, though I’m not sure they want to know.

Swamped by a flood of incompetence
Is the weather so much worse than  it used to be? Or are we just getting worse at coping with it? In the days before privatised trains, didn’t they  cut the trees back next to railway lines? Did state-run electricity boards take  as long as privatised ones to fix fallen power lines?

When rivers were patrolled and kept in order by fine old bodies such as  the lamented Thames Conservancy, weren’t they better managed than  by the grandiose quango called the Environment Agency?

The Agency’s great at issuing statements, but does it do much dredging  of ditches and streams?

And, as the last generation of  grammar-school educated engineers and boffins retires, are their comprehensive-trained successors as skilled and competent as their forerunners? This seems to me to be a better explanation of the mess we’re  in than ‘climate change’.

Binge-drinking is Thatcher's fault

Why has everyone forgotten that it was Lady Thatcher and the Tories who created binge-drinking modern Britain? New Labour simply finished a task that the Unconservative Party began in the 1980s.

Until then we had very sensible licensing laws, the result of a century  of temperance campaigns, enacted in 1915 on the pretext that munitions workers were too drunk to do their jobs properly. It was almost the only good thing to come out of the First World War.

The licensing laws had prevented much misery, and much disorder.

But someone – I wonder who – started to lobby for change. It began with an ‘experiment’ in Scotland, where more and more pubs were allowed to open  for 12 hours a day. Amazing statistics appeared, which supposedly showed that a miracle had taken place, and this change had no bad effects.

Of course, this was spin. Read the newspapers of the time carefully, and you will see that breaches of the peace increased, and extended hours were causing ‘great distress’ to nearby residents. But the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, rammed his liberalisation through anyway.

Even the great Keith Waterhouse, a man who liked to drink and whose instincts were for looser laws, warned in August 1987: ‘I fear there is little reason to believe that yobbism will not, in  some quarters, do for the relaxed drinking laws what it has already done for Association Football.’

He, and many other wise voices, were overridden. And so it began. And the first signs of what was to come were observed in Douglas Hurd’s own Witney constituency (now David Cameron’s seat) on Christmas Eve 1988. A local probation officer reported ‘more fights and trouble on Christmas Eve than I can remember ever before’. All the major parties are to blame for this, and many other wilful mistakes that have made life here nastier than it needs to be. Why do you keep voting for them?

To comment, please scroll down

A Few Short Points

A number of small points. My thanks to contributors who have expressed opinions on the Jacubs controversy. I am glad if I have stimulated some previously silent readers into speaking.  The comments are important, and can quite easily be dominated (in the absence of the intelligent and thoughtful) by various bores and show-offs. Please speak out in future, rather than leaving the forum to those who come here to write, but not to read.

 

I have nothing further to say about ‘addiction’, especially to ‘Olav’, who seems to have missed the point entirely.  My reasons are simple:

I consider my simple point made, that *all* the advocates of this fiction, either explicitly or implicitly,  rely on the claim that the ‘addict’ is ‘compelled’ or ‘forced’ or in some other absolute way left with no choice about continuing with his habit. If this were not so , then the policies which are based upon ‘addiction’ would not make sense. Why excuse a criminal from punishment, and treat him as a victim, if he had a choice over his actions? The voting public would not for a moment tolerate this sort of thing if they did not believe that ‘addiction’ equalled compulsion.

 

Among smaller audiences, where the voters are not listening, and the 'addiction' faction are confronted with knowledgeable, logical critics who point out that the claims of ‘compulsion’ are not tenable, its subtler advocates are prepared to concede that it is not in fact a compulsion at all. In which case, of course, the whole grandiose and indulgent structure of ‘treatment’, methadone and the rest, employing thousands, filling the pockets of drug manufacturers and various pseudo-scientiifc practitioners,  is unjustified. But as long as the admission is not made in a major forum, or widely understood by the voters, the ‘addiction’ industry continues as before.

 

But if such a suggestion *is* made on a major public forum (such as ‘Newsnight’) they will furiously shout it down and seek to smear the person who dares to make it. The use of the expression ‘disease’ to describe something which is obviously not one,  and the pretence that brain-scans and ‘withdrawal symptoms’ prove anything about ‘compulsion’ ,  when they plainly don’t, are just side effects of this fundamental contradiction. In most modern arguments you can fool the mob by assuming that most journalists are conformist and incurious, and by asserting that ‘science’ is on your side, most especially when it is not, as it is not in this case.

 

Intimidating dissent with mass abuse also helps.  As to why individual scientists and doctors decide to serve this fiction, their motives must be examined just as much as the motives of those without such qualifications.  I point out here once more, that (as in my positions on ‘ADHD’, ‘Dyslexia’, ‘antidepressants’ and drug legalisation) I have absolutely no personal material interest. I simply tell the truth. So why do I constantly risk the sort of abuse and vilification which I receive for pointing out the logical and factual fallacies on which these things are based? I could easily continue in my chosen trade if I never mentioned any of them again.

 

A contributor  asks for ‘incontrovertible evidence that I have tried to "hijack this site’s audience, when they could never have achieved that audience by their own efforts" or "trying to piggyback on my audience ".’

 

If this contributor thinks that this stricture applies to him, then I bow to his judgement. He should know his intentions better than I. As it happened, I didn’t have this particular person in mind when I wrote those words.

 

I note that the same contributor, who is always claiming to be some kind of guardian of the truth, and amusingly equates himself with a strict teacher of the old school, recently asserted that I ‘won’t brook any dissent from his (my) opinions’.  This claim is so outright, obviously, visibly untrue that I have not acted upon it. But he would still be wise to correct his own contributions in future, as sharply as his old Latin teacher once corrected his.

 

Somebody says I should have provided links to the articles I appended at the bottom of my previous posting, rather than the articles themselves. I am not sure that such links exist, as they mostly date from quite long ago. And many people never actually follow links, and the material in these articles had a direct bearing on the accusations made against me. The texts come from the Associated Newspapers Library. In any case, nobody is compelled to read anything I post here. Complaints about length, and lots of words, are just silly. If you don't want to read it, don't.

 

 

Mr Jacubs

Mr Jacubs needs to understand this simple point. I couldn''t care less about his opinions, and the fact that he rarely seems to read what I say properly before attacking it. He can say and think what he likes on any matter, within the laws of England. But I will not have accusations made against me here which I have good reason to believe to be false. By 'false', I mean accusations which are untrue, and for which the accuser can, when challenged, produce no evidence.

This is not an arbitrary decree. The person involved is given ample opportunity and time to put it right.

He has four available options.

1.Show that, by specifically saying that one murder committed by Muslims (a murder which I in no way condone or excuse, but on the contrary clearly abhor) is best explained by the killers' known and undoubted criminal cannabis habit (which I condemn, and which does not in my view lessen the killers' criminal responsibility ) , I am 'excusing' any murder, or excusing Islamic fanaticism, or supporting it, or endorsing it, or offering any sympathy of any kind to Islamic fanaticism of any kind.  Or doing anything other than saying that the Woolwich murder is more convincingly explained by the killers' drugged state than by any other factor.  

2.Admit that he cannot do so, apologise for his accusation and withdraw it unreservedly.

3.Do neither, and be asked to leave here until he apologises and withdraws, which is as long as he likes, not as long as I like.

4. Do neither, and cease to post here any more (which is in effect an admission that he cannot back his claim with facts, but without the courtesy required for an apology or withdrawal).

Even in the case of 4, he will still be allowed back the moment he apologises and withdraws, or the moment he substantiates his claim.

Anyone who thinks Mr Jacubs should stay,  should address his pleas to Mr Jacubs, not to me.The decision is for Mr Jacubs.  He can easily stay if he wants to. He must just either substantiate his claim, or admit it is baseless and apologise and withdraw. 

 

The Addiction Faction Shifts its Ground on the Addiction Fiction

I will say this only once more. There is now a great body of writing in the archives of this weblog about the fiction of ‘addiction’, and , after I have written this article, I shall refer future inquirers to that archive, and try not to add to it any more.

 

Why?

 

The ‘addiction’ debate here is now as exhausted as the one about God . And I should point out here for about the ten millionth time that I make no claim to *know* that  God exists, only to *believe* that He does . I also ceaselessly say that this must remain a matter of choice without proof.  So the galumphing attempts to equate my religious beliefs with those of the ‘addiction’ zealots don’t just miss with both barrels. They backfire.

 

Think. They suggest that my religious decision to *believe*, without proof but because of my individual moral preference, is identical to the ‘addiction’ zealots’  claim to *know* without proof  that ‘addiction’ is a ‘disease’, without any objective proof.  This is not just a category error, though it is one. It also supports my contention that believers in ‘addiction’ do so because it suits their moral beliefs and desires.

Alas for them, there is absolutely *no* evidence that their internally contradictory ramshackle invention actually exists, whereas there is a huge amount of evidence for the existence of God.

 

Now to my reply to the latest shoal of comments.

 

Before we begin, let us accept that I have shown beyond doubt that the supposed scientific and medical evidence for ‘addiction’ does not in fact show that the individuals involved are compelled to take the various poisons which they do take. The most we can say is that, after they have adopted these stupid bad habits, in defiance of good sense and often in defiance of law, they find it harder to give them up than they would have done if they had never started.

 

I am now told by ‘Olav from Oslo’ that :’ This condition makes it more *difficult* to stop taking drugs, but not *impossible*. Both sides of the argument seems to agree on this.

 

'Your opponents define this condition as "addiction", while you don't. Instead, you cleverly operate with another definition of addiction: The *inability* to stop.

 

'Since individuals evidently can override the aforementioned condition with will power, you therefore conclude that addiction doesn't exist at all.

 

'But this position is built upon a straw man definition, which I doubt you can find in any dictionary of psychology.

 

'There is also a disagreement within the psychological community whether or not addiction is a disease.

 

'It is therefore possible to believe in addiction and at the same time deny that it should be labelled as a disease.

 

'I take the latter position and I don't think anything else separates us on the question other than diverging definitions.

 

'Denying addiction altogether was a huge tactical mistake on your behalf. You should have denied it being a disease and presented your moral argument without doing that.’

 

It’s nice of him to call me ‘clever’. But (as we shall see below) it is quite clear that the vast ‘addiction’ lobby does indeed maintain that ‘addiction’ is a ‘disease’, and responds furiously to any suggestion that it isn’t. Diseases are not voluntary. The use of this term clearly implies compulsion. There's no other point in using it.  If there is a 'straw man' he belongs to the addiction faction, not to me. Those who doubt this are invited to review my televised conversation with Matthew Perry, and then search for my name on Twitter. Mr Perry was clear that he believed ’addiction’ to be a ‘disease’, and the swarms of people who abused me for challenging the idea made no distinction of the kind ‘Olav’ now seeks to make.

 

And then there is ‘Timbo’, who lectures me thus :’ This increase in desire for the substance taken is what is widely understood by most of us as 'addiction'. It is not a disease, nor is it impossible to break the habit using willpower, but playing semantics with the word like you do does you no favours. It lets your opponents ignore all the good, important points you make when arguing this subject and allows them to focus their attack on this one area, which results in unsympathetic viewers and readers dismissing you as a crank, and they learn nothing.’

 

I do wish such people would actually read what I write and follow the links which I provide. It is not I who plays semantics. My position is simple and does not alter. But they vary the meaning of the word to suit them. I know that, and often say so.

 

They harden ‘addiction’ into absolute compulsion while they demand sympathy or funding or eviscerated laws, but swiftly soften ‘addiction’ into a conditional choice when someone knowledgeable challenges them. Then they feebly pretend that they never said it was a compulsion.

 

But the two meanings are not just paler and darker shades of the same thing. They are active and practically important direct contradictions of each other. Only powerful fashion and conformism protect this ludicrous contradiction from being more widely recognised. It has always been thus. Bad ideas always survive in this way.

 

The pretence that they never suggest it is an absolute compulsion is demonstrably false. They are always doing it, sometimes explicitly, always implicitly.

 

The discussion I had with ‘Citizen Sane’ is based wholly upon the way in which ‘addiction’ is represented as an absolute, a compulsion, and irresistible force; and upon the way in which the ‘addiction’ zealots then alter its meaning when it can e clearly shown that ‘addiction’ is not in fact absolute, a compulsion or irresistible. I’m referred to various dictionaries, as if they offered a legal definition of the word. The word must be judged by the way in which it is used in common speech, but its advocates.

 

Look at what Mr Perry said (for which he was applauded by those who excoriated me). He insisted that ‘addiction’ is a ‘disease’ (because fashionable medical opinion says so, though he was unable to identify or enumerate its objective symptoms).He then made various blustering claims about it being ‘an allergy of the body’ and ‘genetic’, before remarking that he was ‘in control of the first drink’ (which he surely wouldn’t be if he were suffering from an involuntary disease which compelled him to drink, any more than a sufferer from a real disease could hold off the first symptoms of that disease by willpower) .

 

 

Now look at the gospel according to Russell Brand (my other vocal opponent on this subject), writing about ‘addiction’ a few months ago in the Spectator magazine:

 

“…the mentality and behaviour of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless (my emphasis) over their addiction and, unless they have structured help, they have no hope.”

 

The people who keep telling me that I am mistaken in saying that ‘addiction’ is believed by its advocates to be a compulsion, an irresistible force, need to address their complaints not to me but to Mr Brand, a hero of the ‘addiction’ faction.

 

The words ‘completely powerless’ are (like many of the words used by Ellie in the article to which I replied), absolute.  A sample of her use of absolute words is here:.

 

An example : ‘a huge number of those who are *dependent* on alcohol, cigarettes or tablets (often, first prescribed to control another illness) are ordinary Britons who don’t *know* they *can’t*stop until they try.’

 

This is only half the point. The other is in the practical application of the concept, which is the most reliable tests of the true meaning of such a word. The treatment of habitual users of illegal drugs in many ‘advanced’ countries is clearly based on the belief that ’addiction’ removes their criminal culpability, and is a disease. Why else are such people spared the penalties of the law and directed instead to so-called ‘treatment’ (a process, often involving the provision by the taxpayer to criminals of mind-altering drugs,  which has no parallel in any other area of medicine).

 

The whole idea that drug abuse is a medical rather than a criminal problem was advanced by both my opponents in the Perry discussion. It is now common ground (despite the fact that it is the most arrant and unscientific  tripe) in most of the legal and political establishment. It would be untenable if it were not for the concept of ‘addiction’ as a compulsion,  so strong that it removes criminal responsibility.

 

The proponents of ‘addiction’ cannot defend t by claiming it has one meaning when they lobby for legal changes, ‘compassion’ for deliberate criminals, and then that it has anther meaning when this idea of absolute compulsion is shown ( as it easily can be) to be utterly false. If it’s not a disease, and doesn’t compel, then habitual users of illegal drugs should go to prison, not hospital.

 

Stop trying to have it both ways.

Cut-Glass Accents, my one meeting with Nigella Lawson, and a Warning to Mr Jacubs

Once again we suffer from the problem of people seeing what they wish to see, rather than what is there. Take, for instance, the contribution from 'Alex, Newcastle' . He accuses me of having ’gone soft on drugs’ and of  ‘flying a white flag’ and asks:

 

‘Have you changed your mind? Do you now resign yourself to the liberal (libertarian?) hegemony that began in the late 1960s that, you claim, does not regard drug taking as a moral issue? Or is it that you and the Mail on Sunday recognise that the issue of drug taking, at least when unaccompanied by other crime, is essentially a private affair and best left to self-regulation rather than the criminal law, no matter how morally abhorrent you or some of your readers might find it?’

 

Certainly not. I have many times made it clear that I view myself as an obituarist for my country, not a campaigner or a political activist. After the utter failure of my attempt to influence politics at the last election  (when millions of conservative patriots voted for the Conservative Party that hates and despises them, so saving that ghastly organisation from what would otherwise have been certain doom), I have abandoned any serious hope of making any difference. It goes deeper than that. Over many years of presenting conservative and patriotic arguments in public places, I have found that it is becoming harder and harder to do so, not easier. The overwhelming bias of our culture, media and schools towards the ideas and beliefs of the left has produced three generations to whom my beliefs are now actually shocking.

 

So I have decided that telling the truth must be its own reward.  As I have often stated here, what we do here matters somewhere else, often in ways we cannot see at the time. This applies to evil deeds and to good ones.

 

It is perfectly obvious that I am not arguing against the pursuit of Miss Lawson because I think that what she did was right, or should be applauded or condoned. I think her actions, as described by her in the witness box, to be revolting and immoral. I wish that we had an effective criminal law to encourage people such as her, and much of her generation in the London elite, to behave differently.  Had we prosecuted such behaviour properly in the 1960s we might now have a lot less of it. But there is no point in pretending that 50 years of legal and moral retreat have had no effect, or that they can be simply reversed. To admit that is not in any way to concede that laws against these drugs are wrong. I have not shifted from my view that such laws are right, and should be enforced. I despise the self-styled ‘libertarian’ view that is now so common among self-indulgent post-Christian libertines who like to dress up their immorality as a struggle for freedom.

 

My book ‘The War We Never Fought’ was descriptive, not prescriptive. But even to describe this state of affairs truthfully is to risk the rage of the London elite mob. And I duly encountered that rage ( see here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/10/the-reviewer-reviewed-a-response-to-jonathan-ree.html and here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/10/the-usual-abuse-number-one-in-a-series.html

 

This is not ( as one Mr ‘Tom Law’ states) being ‘panned by many critics’. It is being attacked (and you may form your own judgement on the quality and justice of the attacks) by *two* critics. That’s not ‘many’.

 

What I also encountered was effective censorship. I am not a wholly obscure person. Drugs are not an arcane or obscure subject. Bloomsbury, my publishers, are a major power in publishing. Yet my book was not even mentioned on any BBC programme that discusses books, nor in almost all major Daily and Sunday newspapers, nor in most of the major magazines of opinion.

 

The case of Ms Lawson gave me an opportunity to seek further publicity for it, by restating its argument.

 

Some contributors, most absurdly of all, seem to suggest that I might have some personal reason to go soft on Miss Lawson. This is absurd, given my article last week scorning her complaint about her treatment in the witness box. I’ll say it again, if you decide to give evidence against someone, evidence which may ruin their life and put them in prison, don’t be surprised if their lawyer gives you a hard time in the witness box. Our wholly admirable system, of presumed innocence and adversarial trial, depends on such things. The silly campaign to go soft on witnesses ends up by increasing the power of the state to lock people up when it likes. If prosecution evidence can no longer be ruthlessly challenged, anyone can be railroaded into prison.

 

I don’t know Miss Lawson. I have had some small dealings with her brother Dominic, a distinguished journalist, and even smaller contact with her father Lord Lawson of Blaby, whom I have interviewed for a TV programme and met round a dinner table  (I think it was the evening before the Brighton bomb) when he was a Cabinet minister, long ago.

 

I think I may have met her, briefly, before she was famous, at a party given for her first husband, John Diamond, when he was already very ill with the cancer that killed him. If I did, it was no more than a handshake and a 'hello'. I already knew from her 'Observer' columns that we weren't likely to agree about anything. Mr Diamond was friendly and helpful to me after a BBC programme (with which he was involved) traduced me back in the mid 1990s. He behaved in a very fair-minded way to put the matter right and, in later meetings, was always civil and pleasant - which most people with his left-wing opinions wouldn’t have been. I went to the party ( I hate parties) purely as a gesture to John Diamond, who died soon afterwards, and I stayed about 20 minutes before slipping away. These are not the sort of people I know.  

 

Telling stories against yourself is always interesting. I mentioned my encounter with the lady who complained about my voice, when it was useless and pointless to do so, at the end of a 90-minute journey, because it had genuinely upset me. My own view is that , having kept quiet about it all that time, she would have been better to stay silent. The only purpose served by telling me off at that stage was to make me feel bad. Why would you do that?

I often ask people to stop using their mobile phones in quiet carriages (This wasn’t one. The wretched railbus on which we were travelling, into which Worst Late Western had decanted the passengers from another much larger train, has no quite carriages) . I don't stew for hours until I get cross, but politely ask them to cease. Quite a few choose to make a fight out of it, using some hilarious excuses,including 'the train's not moving' ( I am not making this up)  but that's their look-out.

 

I would instantly have shut up had she asked me to do so at any stage. I wasn’t aware that I was speaking particularly loudly, and  was sitting round a small table with two other people who were willingly conversing with me. I suspect that she mainly disagreed violently with what I was saying, and slowly worked herself into a fury, great enough to overcome her diffidence.

 

Thank you to the contributors who paid me kind compliments. The problem with one’s own voice is that one hears it normally through the bones of one’s head. And it sound quite different from the way it sounds to others. Because I broadcast from time to time, and often review those broadcasts to improve my technique, I hear myself as others hear me (and see myself as others see me). This is seldom enjoyable if you’re as vain as I am. My real voice, as I’ve explained here in the past, is cut-glass lower-upper-middle-class Royal Navy, as brilliantly portrayed in that fine film ‘In Which We Serve’. I think one of the reasons why I so much enjoy re-runs of films from this era is that they evoke memories of how my parents actually spoke during my prehistoric childhood. They’d already ceased to do so by the time I reached my teens, and it is only because of my discovery of a long-lost tape recording that I know for certain that they had changed the way they spoke. Mind you, both my father, who grew up speaking broad Hampshire, and my mother (whose childhood was spent being passed from relative to relative) would almost certainly have consciously altered their voices in their late teens and early twenties, to fit in with the world into which the Navy and the War had introduced them. I can still do the other thing, if I choose, but most people under 30 find it so shocking that I don’t.  

 

But those of us who were brought up to speak like that discovered, in the early 1960s, that it was not wise to do so, and so we semi-consciously deepened our tones and moderated our vowels, to avoid the danger of mockery or perhaps lynching. The result can be a bit treacly. My late brother actually became more cut-glass later in life, after he had moved to Washington DC. I suspect this was because Americans are terrible snobs, and imagine that we all still speak like Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard.

 

Now to Mr Jacubs, whose gradual retreat from his original allegation against me makes Napoleon’s dogged retreat from Moscow look like a hundred-yard sprint.

 

But it still won’t do. Mr Jacubs must understand that he is in grave danger of being asked to leave this site for good. It is only because this is the season of goodwill, and because I suspect that he has a shaky grip on the meanings of some of the words he uses, that I haven’t already acted.

 

He says:  ‘Firstly let me say that I do apologise to Peter for accusing him of “defending” almost every horrible Islamist crime. I should have used the word “excusing”. I also do not in any way suggest that Peter is excusing their crimes per se.’

 

Well, this is both wrong and incoherent. Mr Jacubs cannot simultaneously say that I am ‘excusing’ ‘almost every horrible Islamist crime’ (a thing I quite simply have not done in any way, shape or form, ever, and an accusation for which Mr Jacubs despite his repetitions of it, and my requests for substantiation, has never once dignified with a syllable of evidence), and that Mr Jacubs is not in any way suggesting that I am ‘excusing their crimes per se’. This is just contradictory having-it-both-ways drivel, as well as falsehood.

 

I have not ‘excused’ anything or anybody.  I regard the drug-taking of Adebowale and Adebolajo not as an excuse but as a dangerous crime in its own right.  That’s one of the many reasons for the need to use the criminal law against people who possess such drugs. The fact that you deliberately make yourself violently unhinged does not, in English law, get you out of paying for the crimes you commit in this state. I have excused nothing and nobody.

 

I have just said that the authorities and the media are imposing a false pattern of ‘Islamist militancy’ on a crime that is much more coherently explained by drug-induced mental illness, and which would be much more preventable if we accepted that explanation.

 

It’s interesting that none of my critics in this matter has challenged my evidence (How can they? It’s incontrovertible) . They have just resorted to the electronic equivalent of trying to shout me down, false accusations and personal abuse.

The Addiction Fiction - My Response to Dr Ellie Cannon

Dr Ellie Cannon wrote a critical response to my argument with Matthew Perry in the Mail on Sunday of 29th December 2013 . You can read it here.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2530376/Yes-willpower-way-beat-DOESNT-mean-addiction-fiction-Peter-Hitchens-Doctors-response-Mail-columnists-TV-showdown-Friends-star-drugs.html

 

 

Well, it makes a pleasant change to be challenged on this subject by someone who does not instantly dismiss me as an ignorant idiot who has a bigoted closed mind. And I’m grateful for that.

 

But did the ‘whole thing descend into name-calling’? Not on my side.  Nor did I say the whole debate was pointless. Had I thought it pointless, I wouldn’t have taken part. I don’t believe I called Mr Perry any names, or ever departed from an entirely logical and fact-based approach, or lost my temper.  It’s an interesting reflection that the Twitter Mob clearly prefer Mr Perry’s combination of incoherent pseudoscience and personal abuse, thinking it a superior form of argument to facts, logic and dogged persistence. There’s not much hope for our civilisation if this is a general view.

 

Given that I was rather ill that night, thanks to the numerous side-effects of a disgusting and (literally) nauseating disclosing chemical I had taken as preliminary to a CT Scan due the following day, I rather pat myself on the back for that restraint. I described Mr Perry as smug and lofty at the end of the discussion (and complained about his lack of seriousness)  because this seemed to me to be a factually accurate description of his attitude and behaviour. It still does. I only invoked Tinkerbell later because Mr Perry had introduced Peter Pan and Father Christmas into the matter. I would have invoked Tinkerbell that same night if I hadn’t felt so terrible.

 

I don’t ‘claim’ that addiction is offered as an excuse for a failure of free will. I state that it does not exist. If anybody disagrees, they only have to do what Mr Perry couldn’t do, and produce a testable proof of its existence.  I argue that its popularity as an idea is the result of our general rejection of the idea that humans have free will and are responsible for their own actions. I challenge those who say that ‘addiction’ does exist to do the usual thing required of people making factual claims. That is:

 

*Define* the thing you say exists. *Describe* it. Show how we can detect its presence in an *objective, measurable and testable* way. The burden in such disputes is always on the advocate, not on the doubter.  

 

This polite request meets either with silence, a painful grinding of gears as the subject is changed, or (more often) a stream of personal abuse. There’s also the danger of being enveloped in a thick fog of pseudoscience and psychobabble, which will leave most people lost.

 

I further state that if people want to give up the substances and habits to which they claim to be ‘addicted’, they can do so if they really wish to do so. I don’t say ( as has been alleged ) that this is ‘easy’.  I say that it is possible.  I can’t see how we can be said to be free or even properly alive if this isn’t so.

 

I repeat: as in all debates about science, the burden of proof is on the person who asserts the existence of a thing. Those who doubt its existence are a great help to the true scientist, who finds their scepticism helpful in refining his proof. But that’s always assuming he has a proof in the first place. Non-scientists, who accept claims on trust , or because of fashion, conventional wisdom or wishful thinking, are usually infuriated by scepticism. QED.

 

Where does one find the proof of the existence of ‘addiction’? Actually, there’s a question that comes before that. Where does one find a consistent definition of ‘addiction’ which remains valid at *all* stages of the argument about its existence, and which might even be testable?

Before we can prove its existence, we have to decide what it is. Otherwise we will get involved in a  tricky bit of ‘bait and switch’ , much like those games of ‘Find the Lady’ into which unwise victims are inveigled by strangers on trains. A discussion of this problem in depth(in adversarial debate) may be found here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/12/can-we-be-friends-i-doubt-it-but-mr-perry-please-read-this-on-addiction/comments/page/3/ .

 

But the problem can be simply stated. If addiction is, as its advocates assert , a ‘compulsion’ , a force over which its victims are ‘powerless’ (as Russell Brand has said) , then how is it that so many ‘addicts’ do in fact give up the things to which they were formerly addicted?

 

 

I don’t, by the way, use the expression ‘pull yourself together’. That is a silly caricature. It’s very difficult to give up pleasing or self-indulgent habits even when they are obviously harming us. I have several such habits and weaknesses, and struggle with them. But I never pretend that they are anyone else’s responsibility, nor do I blame them on some external force. When I fail, I fail. If I sought excuses for them, I wouldn’t even try, and I would certainly never succeed.

 

Ellie says ‘But a huge number of those who are dependent on alcohol, cigarettes or tablets (often, first prescribed to control another illness) are ordinary Britons who don’t know they can’t stop until they try.’

 

She is assuming  (she does this quite a lot) she has won the argument when she hasn't. By using the word 'dependent' she assumes that its truth has been proven. What does Ellie mean ' don't know they can't stop?' How do they *know* they *can't*. This is terribly prescriptive. 'Dependent',  'know' and 'can't' are absolute words, like 'compulsion' and 'powerless'. But the truth is that these absolute words cannot accurately be used here, because people *do* stop. Wouldn't it be better to say that they find it very difficult to stop, when they first try? And that the drugs are habit-forming, rather than that they are 'dependent' on them?

 

And could part of that difficulty experienced by these patients arise precisely because a huge consensus of media, doctors and ‘experts’ of all kinds have told them they *can’t* stop? Why, these days, I can’t even buy over-the-counter painkillers (which I have been taking occasionally without problems for years)  without being earnestly warned that I might become ‘addicted’ to them.  Twaddle.  I hate them, and have hated them for years, but take them occasionally when the alternative is a splitting headache. This absurd belief in 'addiction' hovering over all of us can be much more damaging than that. A dying relative, in terrible pain, had to struggle to get sufficient morphine because of a ludicrous belief among doctors at the time that she might become ‘addicted’ to it. A less likely ‘addict’ never walked the earth, as the person involved was a tough-minded, self-disciplined and courageous nurse of the old Nightingale school, who had accompanied the Allied armies across northern Europe in 1944 and 1945, seeing horrors and stemming the pain and fear of others. But she still suffered from great pain at the end.  She died before she could prove them wrong,  God bless her.

 

I am interested to know in what way ‘psychological support’ is ‘proven’ to work in dealing with people who have damaging habits. My understanding, from friends, colleagues and acquaintances who have given up those very powerful habits, smoking and drinking, is that the only significant factor in their success was their own genuine desire to stop. I cannot see why deluding people with claims that they are not personally responsible for lifting the glass, or lighting the cigarette, and that doing so is a compulsion and a disease which is not their fault, will ever help them to that point.

 

Also, what precisely is ‘psychology’?  It sounds scientific, but it is not based upon hard, objective, testable science at all. It benefits from the lay-person’s confusion of it with psychiatry, and is often wrongly believed to be a medical science. Even psychiatry is  a soft and inexact body of knowledge, constantly altering, with many competing theories,  and now in severe decline,  but is more or less respectable because it is practised by people with proper objective medical qualifications.  Those qualifications play little part in psychiatric practice, though – crucially – they allow practitioners to prescribe drugs, a fact much exploited by the pharmaceutical industry in its campaign to persuade us to take expensive pills to ‘treat’ various supposed mental illnesses. Pills have supplanted older therapies, since the Pharmaceutical giants became so generous with their conferences in nice resorts, free scuba-diving holidays and other rewards to doctors who recommended their pills.

 

So psychology, despite its grandiose Greek name, is at two removes from hard science and is about as ‘scientific’ as social work or sociology. Its claims are not gospel.  

Then there’s this. When I asked for an ‘objective diagnosis’ of addiction I was not (as Ellie seems to think) necessarily seeking a blood test or chemical test of any kind. There are plenty of ways of diagnosing real physical diseases without such tests (though tests are often useful to confirm the presence of a suspected disease in cases of doubt).

 

A consistent list of observable, recordable*physical* symptoms would do, symptoms which could not, in that form, be present in a healthy person, and which were distinct signs of that disease and that disease *only* , and which could be independently identified and confirmed by more than one qualified practitioner, and further confirmed by a specialist in that area of medicine. The crucial word is not ‘chemical’ (which I didn’t use) , but ‘objective’ (which I did).

 

I think Ellie Cannon would accept that Parkinson’s for instance, can be pretty reliably identified through a number of distinct *physical* symptoms. If you don’t have them, you haven’t got Parkinson’s.

 

Also, Parkinson’s like most diseases, is not a matter of choice. But the alleged ‘addict’ has chosen his or her ‘addiction’, and pursued it with some diligence and determination. Nobody sets out to get Parkinson’s or embarks on a series of behaviours that are known to lead to Parkinson’s . I realise as I say this that there are some ‘lifestyle’ diseases, lung cancer being the most obvious, which people can pursue and often obtain  in this way. But large numbers of people give up their dangerous habits (often at the cost of great effort)  rather than continue. Willpower and responsibility once again come into the question, or none would give up.

 

 

The fact that someone voluntarily goes in search of criminal dealers, voluntarily breaks the known law by buying from them, pokes heroin into his arm or eyeball, or voluntarily drinks too much whisky , after a long,  slow and deliberate process during which he or she has ignored a thousand warnings and pleas from his family to stop, and in the case of heroin has repeatedly broken the criminal law, is simply not in the same category as the rather compulsory, and much feared, signs of the presence of Parkinson’s.

 

If Parkinson’s sufferers could stop experiencing the things that their bodies do against their will and desire, they would. They really can’t. To confuse the two things is not just a category error, but a bit rude (I put it mildly)  to sufferers from real, compulsory diseases. Nobody goes in pursuit of Parkinson’s.

 

So, that deals with that non-parallel.

 

Next we come to brain imaging. Now, brain imaging is very interesting, but it can be a trifle overstated.  Brain imaging can show physical and chemical events in the brain. It can link them with external stimuli. And this is a good deal more than we used to be able to do. But it has absolutely nothing to say about such concepts as free will. To talk as if it does is like looking at Google Earth pictures of a city you have never been to, and trying to deduce from them what the people in that city are thinking and saying.(More on this below).

 

No doubt the frequent use of pleasure-inducing chemicals habituates the brain and other organs to those chemicals, and creates conditioned reflexes of many kinds. It undoubtedly increases the *desire* of the person for these things. But increased desire is not the same as compulsion.  It merely makes it harder to stop.  

 

And if ‘addiction’, so called, is not compulsion (and we have already established that  it isn’t) then it lacks the crucial characteristic of a disease, the characteristic that makes us sympathise with the sick and has created the great professions of medicine and nursing, and which sustains the NHS with willingly-given taxes - that a disease is something you get whether you want it or not. The thing we call ‘addiction’ has to be energetically and knowingly  sought over a long period, in defiance of morality and social disapproval, and often of law, and there is no evidence at all that the ‘sufferer’ cannot throw it off if he wants to. On the contrary, there are tens of thousands, possibly millions of cases in which people have given up heroin, alcohol and cigarettes.

 

 

I am sorry to say that sentences such as ‘Evolutionary neuroscience suggests that this compound is intrinsic to our ability to learn’ are not in fact statements of scientific truth. The word ‘suggests’ is imprecise,  uncertain and vague . The phrase ‘intrinsic to our ability to learn’ is likewise unclear. It has to be because the claim it makes is unclear and so very hard to test. Alas, the use of such words can beguile the layperson into thinking something truly authoritative is being said.

 

The same goes for the formulation ‘neuroscience’, which first appeared in the dictionary in the 1960s.  Let us first be clear about what it is not. There is a hard science of the brain and nervous system known as neurology (also a medical discipline and specialism). But like old-fashioned analytical and Freudian psychiatry, neurology has taken a bit of a  back seat in recent years . This is perhaps because it is incredibly modest about how little it knows and how little it can do to heal or cure injuries to and diseases of the brain. It is also rather sceptical about prescribing pills for them, as it recognises that the actual operation of ‘antidepressants’, and ‘antipsychotics’ is mysterious at best .

 

 

Neuroscience is an ‘interdisciplinary’ science. It combines in one body chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, physics and psychology. Most of these are real hard sciences. But several are not. And the presence in such a cocktail of any soft sciences softens the whole lot.  It is also often linked with pharmacology, a development which I think is connected by the large (and in my view exaggerated) claims of pharmaceutical companies to have developed biochemical treatments for several ailments of the soul.  Can they really?  Perhaps not.  A discussion of their claims to treat depression can be found in two powerful articles by the distinguished American doctor, Marcia Angell , here  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/epidemic-mental-illness-why/

And here

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/illusions-of-psychiatry/

(These articles are themselves reviews of books on this subject by well-qualified authors. Nobody interested in the current state of psychiatric medicine should be in ignorance of them).

 

The gap between much of this activity and real hard science is being widely debated in the current controversy over the American Psychiatric Association’s latest Diagnostic and Statistical manual – DSM 5 , which treats a large number of human conditions as medical problems, conditions which used not to be so treated.  A good lay description of these difficulties can be found in the book ‘Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good’ by James Davies (Icon Books, 2013).

 

So I would beg readers to be careful with several passages in Ellie’s argument, which seem to me to be contentious, or not to be backed by hard science.

 

Animal studies cast little (in fact no)  light on human will. As Ellie says ‘Whether or not these animals have willpower, no one knows’. You can say that again. And it is hard to see how anyone ever will know.

 

Then we reach what seems to me to be the crucial passage. I’m now going to examine it for hard science. My criticisms are inserted in Ellie’s text, marked ***

 

Ellie : ‘But the research does suggest something physical happens in the brains of those who are addicted.’

*** This statement begs the question. It presupposes the existence of ‘addiction’ without defining it or proving its existence. It would be more accurate to say that something physical happens in the brains of those who abuse substances. Well, yes, and so what? Nobody disputes that people’s brains are changed by experiences, by injuries and by drugs. But be careful what you deduce from this. Learning the streetmap of London to qualify as a licensed taxi-driver also physically alters the brains of those involved. This does not show that the taxi-driver became a taxi-driver *because* his or her brain changed shape. We know that these changes followed the learning process. It shows that acquiring and storing this concentrated body of knowledge altered his or her brain.

 

 

Many human behaviours have *effects* on the brain. Taking drugs which act physically or chemically on brain tissue will axiomatically change the brain. Taking the legal ‘medications’ often given to such people by doctors will likewise change the brain even more. You would expect drug abusers or heavy drinkers to have abnormalities of the brain.  You would expect consumers of prescription psychiatric medications to have abnormalities of the brain. Again, so what? This shows a correlation between certain influences on the brain, and physical changes within the brain. And within very tight limits we can assume a simple, crude, cause and effect. Certain external experiences have physical effects on the brain. Beyond that we can say nothing for certain.

 

Ellie continues ‘ In human studies, scans have shown that areas in the brains of addicts ‘light up’ when they are exposed to the object of their desire.’

***Quite so. But we really have to be very modest in what we deduce from this. We know which part of the brain is involved. We know the nerve pathways which are travelled. But I think it difficult to say more, given our very limited knowledge of the brain and its operation.

 

Ellie : ’Numerous studies have shown a rise in the brain chemical dopamine which occurs in response to addictive vices, whether gambling or drugs.’

***Once again, this an event which happens *after* the action which Ellie is seeking to explain. We must not mistake description of a correlation, after an event, for an explanation of how and why the event took place. Interesting use of the word ‘vices’ though.

 

Ellie: ‘Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a naturally occurring chemical produced by the brain that sends messages between nerve cells and signals pleasure.’

***I’ll assume for the sake of argument that  that this  statement  ‘Dopamine…signals pleasure’ can be objectively shown. By the way, if that is so, its increased presence in the brains of gamblers and drug abusers presumably shows that they enjoy these activities (or ‘vices’), and get pleasure from them. Which is my explanation of why they keep doing it and don’t want to stop.

 

 

Ellie : ‘Evolutionary neuroscience suggests…’

*** Two red lights should flash here in the mind of the careful reader: This subject and verb are both contentious. ‘Neuroscience’ as discussed above, contains subjective elements. ‘Suggest’ is a conditional and cautious statement, well short of ‘says’. In terms of scientific solidity, this is soft currency, not hard currency.

 

 

Ellie’… that this compound is intrinsic to our ability to learn’

***Vaguer and vaguer. What does ’intrinsic to our ability to learn’ actually mean? And, I might add, what does it have to do with the claim that ‘addiction’ exists?

Ellie ‘– it acts like a ‘save button’

***I am sorry, but I do not think this can be called a scientific or medical statement at all.

 

Ellie ‘…and helps us remember to do things by giving us a good feeling when we do them.’

***I am also not sure how solid this claim is. We also remember to do things by getting a bad feeling when we forget to do them.  Nor am I sure what it has to do with claims that ‘addicts’ are ‘compelled’ to take the things they take.

 

Ellie then says :’Famously, the psychologist Pavlov showed that even the anticipation of pleasure can elicit a physical response: his dog salivated at the sight of food, and by Pavlov ringing a bell as he served it, eventually, his dog salivated as soon as he heard the bell, without food being present.’

 

***Yes, and conditioned reflexes are without doubt powerful. But (as stated above) we do not even know if dogs have will. And involuntary drooling at the sound of a bell, in a dog, is hardly the same as supposedly involuntary drinking, smoking or poking of needles through the skin,  in a  human.  It is a reaction, not an action. Such reflexes do not override human will in matters of action, and provide no evidence that brain changes resulting from a voluntary habit can, ever have,  or ever could achieve such a result.

 

So the next statement that

 

‘Addiction is simply this reward process gone awry. Studies show that once people are addicted to a drug, the dopamine in their system spikes even with the expectation of ‘the hit’, and if it doesn’t come, the dopamine levels drop sharply. This feels bad.’

 

…is once again a great howling question-begger , in that it assumes the matter under discussion is resolved, in the course of trying to prove that it is This is against the rules of logical argument .  ‘Simply’ indeed! Remove the first sentence, with its contentious and unproven claim, and the only coherent and uncontentious matter is as follows : ‘Studies show that once people are addicted to a drug, the dopamine in their system spikes even with the expectation of ‘the hit’, and if it doesn’t come, the dopamine levels drop sharply. This feels bad.’

 

Once again, yes and so what? Disappointment in the pursuit of pleasure is not compulsion to seek that pleasure. On the other hand, this would seem to be a clear scientific statement of my repeated claim that drug takers take drugs because they enjoy it, which I am always excoriated for saying.

 

I’ll leave it at that for the moment. I deal with a small but important extra point below, because I will need to return to it when I know more about it.

 

 

 
I’ve been unable to obtain full details of the alleged Mayo Clinic Gambling Compulsion study.  Because of the infuriating unavailability of medical journal articles in newspaper library systems, details of this are scant.  

But perhaps others can help me. What did these patients (presumably sober puritans with no previous urge to gamble) do when they were given these dopamine agonists?

Did they break out of the clinic and fly unguided to Atlantic City or Las Vegas, there to throw away their fortunes in slots or at the roulette table?  Did they (when the drugs ceased) immediately abandon this gambling? Were they able to recall, describe or explain their behaviour while under the influence of the drugs? The unanswered questions are endless, especially since gambling is not (like, say, eating, drinking and a few other things) a natural human activity, but a culturally-conditioned recreation only available in advanced societies with concepts of money, ownership and mathematics. What would they have done in a society where gambling wasn’t possible?

 

The drugs involved seem to be very powerful. Those who take them do so in the hope of escaping the symptoms of very unpleasant conditions, so once again the matter is not one of fully voluntary choice.  Perhaps they are comparable in effect to the physical brain traumas which cause people to start speaking Welsh, when they did not previously know the language, or to talk in foreign accents, or undergo other mysterious personality changes?

 

If so, then I don’t think they can really be compared to the process of voluntarily embarking on a bad habit, known to be habit-forming, expensive and dangerous to health( and possibly criminal) and then persisting with it until it is quite hard to give up, and then blaming an external force for your own stupid selfishness.

Another Attempt at Reasoning with Mr Jacubs and the Neo-Cons

What a strange struggle this is, the dope lobby on the one hand, and the neo-cons on the other, driven by their differing dogmas to ignore a hugely significant fact.  And then Mr Jacubs, who is neither of these things,  with his weird accusations against me, suggesting that I am some sort of apologist for Islamist terror.  Can he really think this? I see he has now altered his baseless charge from claiming that I defend ‘every’ horrible crime, varying this to ‘almost every’. I have never, ever  defended any such crime. I can't allow the charge to stand as it is. Mr Jacubs needs either to produce evidence for his claim, or unreservedly apologise for and withdraw this charge, and preferably soon.

 

By the way, running a man down in the street with a car (the actual means used to kill Lee Rigby, and a very secular 21st-century method it was )  is not an ‘Islamic method of execution’. So, does the fact that these two used this method detract from Mr Jacubs’s insistence that this was an act caused by Islamism? If it does not, his argument that Islamism was the motive, because  the subsequent obscene butchery of Mr Rigby was an ‘Islamic method’ also falls.

 

Let me restate and elaborate my simple point. The most powerful influence in the lives of Adebowale and Adebolajo appears to me to be their long-term use (which is indisputable) of a dangerous mind-altering drug.  In both cases, their adoption of the cannabis habit coincided with other events which drew them away from normal, law-abiding and productive lives, and towards the amoral and chaotic fringe world in which they lived, and from which they emerged to kill and butcher Lee Rigby.

 

That drug, cannabis , is an important influence on the lives of many young criminals in this country. Any careful reading of crime reports will find that numbers of extremely violent and irrational acts are committed by young men (it is almost always young men) who have been using cannabis. It is easy to see why dope users and ‘comment warriors’ do not want this known or discussed. But why do the neo-cons attack me in this way? And why does Mr Jacubs do so?

 

Trying to attribute this *action* to Islamist fanaticism is a mistake and a dead end. There are several reasons for this. None of them is a desire on my part to defend or excuse such fanaticism.

 

I have written nothing, ever, to suggest that I seek to defend or excuse such things.

 

Those who claim that I have done so are guilty of straightforward manufactured untruth. Worse, in some cases, they seem airily unaware of what a serious thing it is to make such an accusation. And when, rather than reacting with justified anger, I seek to correct them, they persist with this falsehood and are quite unresponsive to my arguments and repeat the false charge. This is a breach of good manners, and in my view a breach of the rules of this site. 

 

Now, why is explaining the Woolwich murder as the operation of Islamist fanaticism futile and mistaken? I stress here that it is plain, and common ground between me and my critics, that the men’s choice of victim and their later attempts at self-justification obviously have some origins in this belief.  

 

It is their actual ability and willingness to kill and mutilate a fellow-creature that I seek to explain through their drug abuse.

 

There are several reasons for rejecting the one and preferring the other.The first is that it is neo-conservatives, always noisily to the fore in condemning Islamism, whose open-border migration policies have actually ensured that Islam is a strong and growing social, religious and political force in this country. It is absurd for them to complain about an entirely predictable consequence of the free movement of people across the world which they have pursued vigorously in practice, especially since they have no concrete ideas for dealing with the problem (see below).

 

Another reason is that that many people hold fanatical Islamist views and never act upon them. If Islamist fanaticism by itself led to murder, the death of Lee Rigby would not, I think, be the isolated incident that it is. Another is that there is no satisfactory way of defining an Islamist fanatic, or of telling him from an ordinarily pious Muslim,  and no way of telling (through surveillance or examination of opinions or contacts) why one such fanatic will  never do anything more than say wild things, whereas another will take the path of crime.

 

The frenzy about Islamist fanaticism,  if taken seriously, would require the existence of a powerful thought police apparatus of bureaucrats and freelance spies,  directed at Muslims in this country, itself an abomination. And even then it would probably fail to achieve  its objective . By contrast, a serious attempt to discourage the use of cannabis among the young, pursued vigorously and within the laws of a free society, and directed equally at everyone regardless of his religious opinions, would greatly reduce the danger of such dreadful events.

 

The possession of cannabis is itself a crime, clearly defined by Act of Parliament, of the sort that can be prosecuted by the use of material evidence in a proper court of law (unlike thought-crime). It would be a perfectly legitimate reason for the authorities of a free country to arrest and prosecute potentially dangerous persons.  English law rightly deals with actions, not with opinions or thoughts. Had Adebowale and Adebolajo been prosecuted and properly punished, years ago,  for their cannabis possession at the start of their descent into crime and personal chaos,  I doubt that we would ever have heard of them again.

 

 

 

Let me repeat that the absurd thing about the anti-Islam neo-conservatives is that they are invariably supporters of unrestricted migration, the means by which Islam has quite peacefully established itself as a permanent, growing major social, religious and political force in our country. If Sharia law comes to Britain, as Mr Jacubs fears, it will not be because of violent actions such as the Woolwich outrage, which I think we can safely assume were condemned and disowned by most British Muslims.  It will be as the result of the entirely peaceful establishment of a sizeable Muslim population in this country.

 

 

Some years ago, in the higher levels of American conservatism, a battle was fought between those who wanted to restrict immigration into the US on cultural grounds ( Peter Brimelow’s book ‘Alien Nation’ was the text of those who favoured controlled borders) and thsoe who believed in open borders and the free movement of peoples.  A parallel battle was fought among British conservatives, who have now been almost entirely supplanted by economically and social liberal neo-conservatives, though here it was much more about sexual matters than about migration.  The other crucial difference was that the immigration which has now transformed the USA was predominantly Hispanic, and hardly Muslim at all (which is why neo-conservatism has yet to acknowledge this contradiction) . Whereas migration into Britain and now into the EU has for many years included a large number of Muslims.

 

Helped by the newspapers, TV stations and magazines of Mr Rupert Murdoch, the pro-immigration, open borders, greenish and sexually liberationist neo-conservatives triumphed , and would later become the nucleus of the pro-war, liberal interventionist bloc which included everyone from Charles Moore and Anthony Blair to Nick Cohen, and which attracted many ex-Trotskyists in the USA and here. The (in my view nonsensical and vacuous) term, ‘Islamo-Fascism’, was immensely helpful to this group, in making warmongering feel nice and left-wing.  For a lot of the more Leftist members of this alliance, the *religious* nature of Islamic terrorism was a vital part of their dogma. It provided abridge and some camouflage. The neo-conservatives, many of them religious, could accept these atheist and even Marxist allies - provided they directed most of their atheism at Islam, and most of their Marxism at so-called Islamo-fascism (or in calling Saddam Hussein a ‘fascist’, as they did,  an essentially meaningless term of abuse which allowed them to feel good about joining the Blair march to war). 

 

This absolute concentration on religion to the exclusion of all other things  is one of the reasons why so little is said, known or discussed about the *political* and *diplomatic*  background to the September 11th attack,  so interestingly explored in that fine book ‘The Eleventh Day’  by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan. This is a book which everyone should read because of what it so very nearly says about the real origins of the atrocity, but cannot quite say, not least because of the blatant suppression of important evidence by parts of the US government. You will have to read the book to see what I mean.

 

I’m not myself sure that we know if (for instance) the September 11th hijackers, or the June 7th bombers, or the killers of Ken Bigley,  had any history of drug use, so it’s useless to speculate on the matter in their cases.  It seems to me to be far from impossible that such people abused drugs, but as we don’t *know*, we can’t say they did. We also can't say they didn't.

 

The thing about the Woolwich killers is that we do know - though I do understand that those who relied only on TV and radio reports might not have known the details which newspaper readers had before them. The fact that Mr Jacubs has seen so many articles and news items attributing the crime to Islamist fanaticism and not even considering the role of drugs is not evidence for his position. It is evidence of the lazy conformity, and lack of curiosity,  of much of the British media.

 

And if you’d never even previously heard about the two men’s very considerable and long-term drug abuse, and its role in changing their lives (which the poor people who rely on TV for their news hadn't heard) , you might find it a bit of a jump to be told that cannabis could have been a decisive factor in their behaviour. Well, that’s why people come here, I hope -to see a different and less conformist analysis. And not to run away squealing, or become pointlessly enraged,  when they meet an unfamiliar idea.

 

I don’t in any way deny the power of fanaticism to motivate men, though it is much greater in homogeneous societies in which a common aim is generally accepted , and in the midst of wars, when emotion is heightened and reason suppressed. On the other hand it is certainly the case that many  armies and navies have given their fighting men large quantities of alcohol just before combat, presumably in the belief that this will lower their inhibitions against killing, and perhaps make them less afraid of being killed or maimed.  But I don’t (for instance)  think Kamikaze pilots were drugged.

 

 

And I think it foolish to be dogmatic, where we have no knowledge,  about whether the other authors of Islamist atrocities were in any way drugged at the time of their actions, or permanently affected by long-term drug abuse. I don’t think anyone asked this question, in most cases, since most who have written on the subject already thought they knew the cause and the explanation.

 

The Arab and Muslim world is not by any means free of drugs, especially cannabis.  Nor, for that matter, is Afghanistan.  The Horn of Africa, especially Somalia, is famous for its production and consumption of the intoxicant khat.  I’d be surprised if the Somali pirates off the coast of that country are often unintoxicated. Cannabis is very widely available in the Maghreb and also in sub-Saharan Africa.    

I am not denying the power of fanaticism, religious or political, when I explain the actions of Adebowale and Adebolajo as the result of drug-induced unreason.

 

I don’t specify particular mental illnesses, believing the specific categories to be unhelpful and startlingly lacking in objective measurements, but my suspicion of *categories* does not, in fact or in logic, mean that I doubt that they were ill, in the sense of *abnormal*.

I mention this because so many of my critics try repeatedly to create this confusion, and claim there is a contradiction where there is none. I believe the teenage schoolboy who wrecks his studies by smoking dope is mentally ill, as is the cannabis smoker who suffers from feelings of persecution, ceases to be able to bear criticism,  suffers from poor memory and concentration, or many of the other features of users of this drug,  sadly well-known to their friends and families. There is no Latin or Greek name for this condition. Even so, it exists and seems to be strongly correlated with use of this drug.  

 

What I am doing is saying that , by looking through a dogmatic lens, we fail to see the decisive factor *in this case*. It is amazing what people think they see and what, in their certainty,  they fail to see. I always remember, during the hunt for the failed July 21st bombers in 2005, that one of the suspects was pictured running through a tunnel wearing a dark T-shirt on which the words ‘NEW YOU’ were clearly inscribed in large white letters . Yet when it was first shown, a commentator claimed that it bore the words ‘New York’, and (perhaps because this in some way suggested a link to September 11), commentators and some newspapers thereafter continued to say (despite the plain evidence to the contrary before their eyes) that it said ‘New York’. It didn't. It still doesn’t.  

 

As Sherlock Holmes used to chide Watson, ‘You see, but you do not observe’. You also see what you expect to see, and worse, you see what you have been told to expect to see. Try looking for yourself, with an open and curious mind.   

You can't prosecute Nigella - cocaine's been legalised

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column.

The police should leave Nigella Lawson alone. It would be ridiculous and stupid to pursue her over her admissions of illegal drug use.

I confess that this was not my first response. I was angry with the immediate reaction of the Metropolitan Police, when they said they would do nothing.

It looked to me as if they were either afraid of Miss Lawson’s TV celebrity power, or besotted by it.

Perhaps when she has become old and unfashionable (or even dead) they will dig up the file and pursue it. For the modern police seem much more interested in patrolling the past  than they do in patrolling the present day.

But then I paused and thought again. True, Miss Lawson has stated on oath that she took (and so must have possessed) cocaine and cannabis, both illegal actions under the Misuse of Drugs Act of 1971. 

But how could it possibly be right for the police or the CPS to take action against her, when so many thousands of others in similar positions will never face arrest?

It would be a pathetic token prosecution, damaging or even destroying one person, to sustain a silly pretence that what she did is really illegal.

It would not deter others, for hardly anyone is likely to find himself in the witness box, as she was, with no real choice but to say what she did.

And it is much more important that the police, the courts and the politicians who stand behind them finally admit the truth about their drugs policy.

It is a great big, stinking lie. They have legalised the use of cannabis and cocaine (and of heroin too). The supposed laws against drug possession are not enforced unless the police are absolutely compelled to do so by the persistence or stupidity of the offender.

This country is in the midst of the most radical experiment in decriminalisation in the advanced world, much more extensive and far-reaching than in Holland or Portugal.

It has been achieved piece by piece, in a slow salami-slicing process, over the past 40 years.

Yet leaders of all the major parties, when pressed, will adopt  stern expressions and say grimly that they will never legalise drug possession. Of course they won’t. It would breach our international treaty obligations. 

But why should they need to act openly, when they know perfectly well that the police won’t arrest drug users, the CPS won’t prosecute them and the courts won’t punish them?

The London elite knows this very well, but it is a sort of thought-crime to say so in modern Britain.

The upper deck, in the media, in politics, in the universities and in showbusiness, don’t want the world to know, because they enjoy their drugs so much. And they rightly suspect that if the ordinary, respectable people of Britain realised what was going on, they would demand action.

When I explained the system in my recent book The War We Never Fought,  it was ignored by almost every national newspaper, and pelted with ignorant abuse by the few that reviewed it.  

When I gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee, I was heard politely and then ignored. 

Of course, I would like to see  a proper drug law, properly enforced. I believe it would save many people from horrible fates (especially the families of young cannabis users, who are often burdened for life with the care of a mentally ill person). 

But prosecuting Nigella Lawson, and leaving tens of thousands of others alone, would achieve nothing except (as was once said on another rather  different occasion long ago) to break a butterfly upon a wheel.

****************************************************************************

Hilarious reports suggest that Britain is going to  catch up with Germany economically, despite having almost no manufacturing industry, comically bad schools and a collapsing infrastructure.

I can only assume that we will do this by overtaking the Germans in the production of fairy tales.

Theirs are called things like Hansel And Gretel. Ours are called ‘official statistics’, an amazing fantasy world in which crime is down, school standards are up, there is almost no inflation and George Osborne is an economic genius.

****************************************************************************

As Vince Cable strives to smash the Coalition, it’s time to review my past predictions and preview the year to come.

Vince is surprisingly right about David Cameron being like Enoch Powell. Both men used the immigration issue to reinflate sagging careers and reputations. Neither had any serious plan to do anything about it.

But the Prime Minister, unlike Mr Powell, could do something about it if he wanted to.

He could admit that as long as this country stays inside the EU, it cannot control its borders or its laws, and so its government has no power over migration at all.

And he could say that, for this and other good reasons, he would now call an immediate General Election on a policy of rapid withdrawal from the EU.

But for that to happen he would have to have courage and principle, and you might as well enter a snail in the Grand National as to expect such things of him.

Instead, the two Coalition parties will shortly pretend  to go to war with each other (as I predicted back in September 2011).

 I then said: ‘But the biggest fake of all will be the stage-managed split between  the two, which I predict will take place by the spring  of 2014...'

 I then thought the trigger might be a row about spending. Now I suspect it will be dire results for both Tory and Lib Dem parties in the European Parliament elections on May 22.

'... the Liberals will then noisily leave the Coalition but quietly agree to maintain a minority Tory Government on the basis of “confidence and supply”. 

'Mr Cameron will then find ministerial jobs for some of his friends. Mr Clegg may possibly go off to the European Commission –  a seat falls vacant in 2014.

‘If he does, I suspect Vince Cable will become leader, a change worth many votes  to his party. The Tories will try and fail to get a few “Right-wing” measures through Parliament.

‘And at the 2015 Election, voters will be asked to choose between Liberal Conservative, Liberal Democrat or Liberal Labour candidates, pretending to disagree with each other.

‘The Liberal Democrats will then form a coalition with whoever gets most seats. And your wishes, hopes and fears will continue to be ignored.’

Well, that last prediction is absolutely certain, whatever happens.

****************************************************************************

You may not believe this, but I don’t much like the sound of my own voice.

Having had quite a lot of chances to hear it, I can see why it might annoy people.

So I was humiliated, but unsurprised, when I was told off, at the end of a long and much delayed train journey, for talking too loudly to my travelling companions.

Even so, as I said to my accuser, couldn’t she have complained while I was actually annoying her, instead of waiting till it was too late?

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens's blog, click on Comments and scroll down