Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 301

Cannabis - A Warning to the Curious

I thought I would post, in one omnibus account, all the recent accounts by cannabis users (and in one case by the wife of a cannabis user) of their experiences with this dishonestly-marketed drug, which is neither safe nor ‘soft’.
The combined impact of them seems to me to be rather powerful.  I repeat that in all cases I have verified the bona fides of the person involved, though for obvious reasons,  each prefers to stay anonymous.

1.Cannabis - A (former) User Writes

The writer of the words that I reproduce below recently e-mailed them to me.  I have since spoken to him ( he is 33, by the way) and have his permission to reproduce what he says here. I offer them without further comment, except to say that he is fairly sure that his memory and some other faculties have suffered permanently as a result of his now-abandoned use of cannabis. He is, in what he says, too kind to me, but the general message is so valuable that I felt it best to reproduce it as written.  :
‘I would like to offer a great deal of thanks for continuing to highlight the dangers of cannabis use. As someone who smoked the drug regularly for a period of time in my early twenties, I know, from first-hand experience, the debilitating effect it can have on the user's mind. I have no doubt that for a number of people, however small a percentage, cannabis can trigger serious mental health problems.
‘Before ever having taken the drug, I was a happy, smiling, extroverted young person with lots of friends and a positive outlook on life.  Once I started to smoke the awful stuff, that all changed - and it changed very rapidly. 
Paranoia, depression, panic attacks - This is how my life ended up. Most disturbingly was the way my mind began to lose touch with reality. I began to suffer from delusional ideas and would hear voices in my head.  Some of the things I imagined to be real, seem completely absurd to me now. For example, I used to think that songs I listened to were coded messages.  I used to think that God was trying to communicate with me via car licence plates. I believed I could speak telepathically with people and had the ability to read their thoughts and implant my thoughts inside their mind.
‘Eventually I ended up losing my job, I almost destroyed my relationship with my family and I was almost driven to suicide. With the help and support of a close relative, whom I cherish dearly, I eventually stopped.  And when I stopped, the voices stopped, the paranoia stopped, the feelings of despair and sadness all stopped and my mind returned to how it was before I ever took the ghastly stuff.
‘I have been married for the past five years and have a beautiful daughter who has just started school.  I am in full time employment and also do voluntary work using my talents as an artist.  Had I still been smoking cannabis, I would have none of these things, but rather I would have ended up in prison, in some sort of mental health unit or worse than that as I am sure you can imagine.’
Note to webcrawlers: "Peter Hitchens reproduces a letter from a former cannabis user, highlighting the fact that this drug is anything but safe, and far from soft"

 2.How do you Define Mental Illness? Another (former) cannabis user writes

Peter Hitchens says: "Imagine what would have happened if fashionable opinion, professors,  rock stars, politicians and media figures had all lined up to defend tobacco against the growing evidence that cigarettes kill, as they now defend cannabis. My guess is that a lot more people would now be dead or ill, who are now alive and well".
Peter Hitchens says :"Yet again, some annoying wiseacre (ignoring what I have many times said on this very subject) brays that the figures on 'Psychosis' or 'Schizophrenia' haven't risen dramatically despite the undoubted increasing use of cannabis."
Peter Hitchens retorts: "As I have many times explained, mental illness is not exactly or objectively defined.  I try not to use the terms 'psychosis' and 'schizophrenia' because I am not sure what they mean or how they can be precisely defined. What's more, our government, which is trying hard to avoid the huge costs of proper mental health care, has a great interest in minimising it. Further, databases used to track such things tend to rely on general practitioners. But the sort of people whose lives are destroyed by drugs tend not to register with GPs."
Peter Hitchens asks:"Do the mental illness figures record the unknown number of young men who were doing well at school until they began smoking dope and fell to the bottom of the class? Is that 'mental illness'? I'd say yes, and I'd say the same about many other 'minor' tragedies which overtake the foolish dupes of propaganda and advertising who take this drug in the belief it is harmless."
And Peter Hitchens adds: "The recent survey on IQ and cannabis is clearly suggestive of a connectiion between cannabis use in the teens, and loss of IQ. It cannot possibly be advanced as evidence that use of the drug by older people is 'safe' - only that no comparably clear evidence of its dangers has yet been produced." I was shocked that a scientist should have been quoted as saying that it was 'safe' for any age . It was an unscientific statement.
I reproduce here another testimony from a former user of cannabis, which I think is relevant to the mental health question :
'After reading the article on your blog today, I feel more confident about sharing my experiences. I can relate entirely to the story told by the former cannabis user. I am only 21, but already feel that it has had a negative impact on me - something which suggests to me that harm can be caused by the drug even with moderate to little use. I went to university in 2009, and a number of my friends who I made there would often smoke it. In the course of around 8 months, I used it a number of times. By the time second year arrived, I suffered from extreme anxiety in almost any social situation, including lecture theatres, concerts and parties, and was filled with dread whenever I thought about the future. In the end I used beta-blockers for a year to control the anxiety, despite my doctor's suggestion that I use antidepressants (that's an issue for another time). Thankfully I realised early that there could be a relationship between the drug and my mental wellbeing, and as such have not smoked it since the summer of 2010. The year that followed was undoubtedly the worst of my life, due to the extreme anxiety and unhappiness which I was experiencing
 
'I regained the confidence which I had lost. However, I still feel that part of my life (albeit small) was wasted due to using the drug. There were other complicated issues in my life which could also have contributed to the anxiety, but I can trace my first panic attack back to using cannabis. I strongly believe that things could have been different had I not used it.
 
'Something which has become apparent to me as my experience with the drug changed is the way in which arguments are made to suit ones own ends.. During my first year I could easily have been described as a conventional liberal, as I strongly believed there was a war on drugs and that cannabis would not inflict any mental damage - it was all correlation, not causation. However as my mental wellbeing began to suffer I started to reconsider my views. As I began to discuss this with friends who did use cannabis, I was met with opprobrium for even suggesting that it could cause mental damage or that there was in fact no attempt to control drug use.
 
'This means I share your belief that advocates of legalisation are "selfish." My experience has taught me that much. Many have not yet suffered the negative consequences of the drug, and even of those who have do not think that there is a relationship between usage and mental health. Additionally, having been a student for the past three years I can easily say I have never met anyone, student or otherwise, who seriously worries that they will be penalized for using cannabis. The situation in which they can smoke it without any remonstrance from the police or society already exists, they just haven't realised it yet because it is still technically "illegal." Your writing on the subject has provided an armoury of well reasoned arguments and facts to combat conventional wisdom on this subject. I can imagine you must find it fairly dispiriting to put up with simplistic attacks from the drug lobby for arguing your beliefs, but there is no doubt a large number of people who share your sentiments - they just aren't as noisy as the advocates of legalization.'
 
'I have found your writings on the subject helpful, given the tide I feel I am swimming against, particularly at university where use of the drug is so common and it is rarer to refuse to smoke it than use it. I have realised earlier than some the damage it can do, and as such my opinions on it have changed entirely. I look forward to your book on the subject.'
NB: I have spoken directly to the author of this letter, and verified his bona fides.

3.Cannabis - A User's Wife Writes

 The more I write about the dangers of cannabis, the more people write to me to describe their own experiences. The following, rather harrowing account was sent to me today. I am very moved by the person’s generosity in sharing this deeply upsetting experience with a wider audience, in the hope that it may help others avoid the distress that she is undergoing. I don’t, by the way, agree with her comparison with alcohol, but it is her opinion and it would be wrong of me to cut it out. ‘My husband was sectioned 3 weeks ago - a kind intelligent man , who I don’t recognise. He was a heavy smoker of cannabis and claimed it relaxed him and made him more open to new ideas. However,  the last few weeks he became more and more paranoid and confused, some days holding it together well and other days going to pieces -for example :Turning all the electrics off; convinced someone had stolen all the words off his CDs; microphones were all over the house.
 ‘The problem is he wasn't a danger to himself or anyone else but he was and is vulnerable. For example, he was walking around sniffing people trying to take their temperatures to see if they were lying (about what I don’t know).
‘I think it was terrifying for him, and more so for us to try and take care of him. Finally we got in touch with a crisis team to come and help him but by then he was very delusional. The team called a social worker who arranged for him to be sectioned. I’m sure you know what this involves .
‘On that day the house was stormed by 16 policemen as my husband had tried to jump out of a second floor window. He is in his third week in hospital and at present not responding to medication. He is very aggressive at times and then so confused, like a little boy trying to do joined up writing or long division, if you know what I mean .
‘I have never smoked and had no feelings really one way or another about it , but this has been a massive learning curve for me - meeting families whose relatives are sectioned for the same reasons as my husband ; the sadness and guilt you feel when you see a loved one in this state ....it's horrible. He gave all his clothes , washbag , books cigarettes etc away to other patients or put them in the bin as he thinks they are contaminated. ‘And me? ‘Well I guess I will do my best to see this through and try to understand what has happened. I go every day to see him and mostly he is sedated, and when not is very abusive all of which Is very upsetting . In conclusion I think cannabis is like alcohol ......some people can just have that glass or 2 of wine or that joint and some people can’t.
 ‘He was moved from a section 2 today to a section 3 which could mean up to 6 months in Hospital .....I hope not for his and my sake. I didn't go to see him today as the nurse suggested having a little time to myself, eat some proper food ,have a nice bath, go to the hairdresser etc, things I haven’ t done for nearly a month.
‘It's not only the people who get ill from alcohol or cannabis, but the families and friends around them that suffer too’ .
Note: I have spoken to the writer, and verified her bona fides. She says that she now believes her husband, who had been smoking cannabis for about ten years, had been showing symptoms for some time, of sudden mood swings, turning the radio volume up high , experiencing a heightened sense of smell, worrying about what people in the street or the shops were saying (he wrongly thought they were talking about him). But at the time she put them down to the normal stress of life.

4.The Comment Warriors are Scared

Very soon after the experiences of a cannabis smoker's wife, harrowing and distressing, were posted here, the comments began to fly in, decrying it.
Why? What had I, or the author of the account, said? Neither she nor I made any specific claim. There was no need, actually. Any intelligent, dispassionate person can see the following logic.
A person, kind , hardworking and happy, uses a powerful mind-altering drug over a period of years.
He develops some strange symptoms. Then the events described by his wife take place. She happens to be the person closest to him, who knows him best (much as Henry Cockburn's parents knew him, and know him best).
 
She, reading of the experiences of others, makes a connection between the two events.
But that is all. Neither she nor I make any specific claim. Yet here come the 'Comment Warriors' in their usual swarms (people who in most cases never comment here on any other subject) to screech that there is no evidence of a connection between cannabis and a 'psychosis' I have not alleged ( and which is in any case a word I do not use because I have no idea what it means).
 
Evidence? Who said anything about evidence? What this is , is an indication, which any sensible person would take as a warning, and as a reason to know a good deal more *before* taking the existing controls off this already illegal drug.  Fundamentally, it's a reason to disbelieve the slick advertsising of this substance as 'soft' and 'safe'. I don't believe these Comment Warriors would accept anything as evidence that cannabis is dangerous. In this they are like the pathetic remainder of the tobacco lobby, who still argue that cigarettes don't cause cancer. Pleasure trumps thought.
My informant may be wrong about there being a connection between her husband's cannabis smoking and his current state (though I'll be surprised if I don't get other similar testimonies as a result, and though I have now had so many 'anecdotal' communications of this kind, several in private, along astonishingly similar lines that only the most obdurate dogmatist could pretend there was nothing at all to worry about).
 
But what these rapid and vituperative commenters hate (Are they organised? Was Luther a Protestant? Do mice have tails?)  is the widespread display and broadcast of truthful accounts which cast doubt on their selfish complacency.
 
They know in their hearts that their pleasure is damaging and dangerous, to themselves and to others. Many of them, I would guess, have had quarrels with families and with those close to them over their habit, in which relatives have pleaded with them to stop behaving as they do. They have ignored those pleas, and are guilty about it.
The more intelligent of them may also understand that their demands for a relaxed regime endanger young people who may, as a result, ruin their lives. The stupider ones probably don't see beyond the confines of their basements and attics.
But in both cases their anger is the genuine, deep, honest rage of the pleasure-seeker who sees his pleasure threatened.
Like all guilty people, they get angry when any outsider draws attention to the reasons for their guilt. Let them. Their anger is the anger of the toddler denied his chocolate. My anger is the anger of the disinterested person fighting to warn the innocent against an avoidable danger because it is his plain duty to do so, come wind, come weather. The two do not compare, in power or in purpose. Let them rage away. They don't scare me. They encourage me.

5. How many Anecdotes make an Anti-Dope Antidote? Another former cannabis user writes

Peter Hitchens writes : "Cannabis Comment Warriors, gird up your loins once more. Another former cannabis user has written to me to share his experience of this dangerous drug, misleadingly promoted as 'soft' and harmless.
"Perhaps after a while they will begin to see that these so-called 'anecdotes' have a common theme that might be worth investigating. Then again, perhaps the Comment Warriors will just get angry at having their complacency punctured by facts."
Here it is. Another 'anecdote'
A former cannabis user writes :' Since in your blog you have expressed gratitude to former cannabis users, or the kin of cannabis users who have reached out to share their experiences, I am moved to share my story with you.
'I smoked cannabis - the strong variety - intensely in my early teens. I started very early, even relative to my friends who were early users of drugs, and I consumed heavily. I remember being encouraged into smoking for a variety of factors: relaxed parents naive about the strength of new strains of the drug, a cool older sibling, hanging out with an alternative group of people, etc. I also clearly remember watching TV as a 13-year-old and seeing the downgrading of cannabis in the drug classifications on the news, and taking this as carte blanche.
'Almost every aspect of my life suffered. In terms of my emotional and social life, a lot changed - I went from popular, social, outgoing and highly confident, to isolated, introverted, emotionally fragile, self-doubting and paranoid. My intellectual faculties had also certainly been dulled - my wits, imagination and conversation had had the edge taken off them. With the scenery collapsing around me, I had the good sense to realise that it was cannabis that was a major cause of my difficulties and I rapidly curbed my consumption and within a few months kicked it completely.
'The final straw was the seriously unpleasant experience of getting arrested for possession - the first piece of negative conditioning from society I had received, and remain extremely grateful for, notwithstanding the lasting stain on my record.  It only happened because I deliberately smoked cannabis in a very public place.
'Almost a decade later, I strongly suspect that my emotional and intellectual life is still hampered to some degree, though, thankfully, tolerably so. Scarcely a day passes where I do not feel some regret/anger about this aspect of my young life.
'The 'comment warriors' you refer to would presumably allege that my story, and others like them, are anecdotal and at best show correlation not causation between cannabis consumption and mental issues. I personally have almost no doubt that cannabis was a major cause of my difficulties. Why do the comment warriors consider this irrelevant? Introspection would clearly be of no value if I was concerned with, say, the chemical composition of my stomach acids, or the structure of my DNA. But the subject of concern here is *my mental life*: why aren't *my*insights, thoughts and feelings highly relevant when the subject is *me*?
'Of course such feelings don't fully verify that cannabis was the cause of my troubles - my thoughts and feelings would need to be anchored by something external to me - but they are surely at least part of the story... The second reason, again presumably to be dismissed as 'unscientific', is what might be called the phenomenology of cannabis consumption, the what-it-is-like to be high: it is extremely powerful to the point of hallucinogenic when consumed in high enough doses. It would be very surprising if altering your mind to this degree and extent didn't have some serious consequences...
'Thank you for speaking out on this issue. It would be great if more people understood the risks involved, especially young people who are possibly too green to make a serious decision for themselves and are being exposed to wrong advice.'

 

Death and the Maiden

By ‘Maiden’ in this case, I mean the virgin commenters who come here and lecture me, without taking the trouble to check the index or read my books. I don’t mind diffident comments from people who haven’t done these things. I can’t expect everyone to do their homework. But I do mind assertive, lofty ones, and sniffy ones. If you want to be assertive, lofty or sniffy, please *check what I have written and said first*. Mr Stephenson, for instance, tells me a lot about the past operation of the Death Penalty in Britain, as if I didn’t know. Good for him, but he could have got much of this information out of the chapter on this subject (‘Cruel and Unusual’) in my book ‘A Brief History of Crime’. I think I have often recommended this chapter to those interested in my detailed position. The book can be obtained through any decent library. I am asked how I can support the ‘non-arming of the police, yet the the arming of the citizenry? ‘Surely’, the wonderfully named Mr Holmes, writes,’ it should be the other way round. Why does it make sense to give criminals guns, but not the cops?’. Well, I never said we should *give* guns to criminals. And in fact I support the lawful freedom of the law-abiding population to possess firearms, though it’s not a freedom I would want to exercise myself, or would urge anyone else to exercise, so it’s going a bit further to say I urge ‘the arming of the populace’. But here’s the point. Where gun ownership is illegal, criminals will be the only people who own them. Why? Because, they don’t mind about breaking the law, and because no society can be so sealed that guns do not circulate in it. I believe it is true that no gun crime has ever been committed by a first offender. As for the police, unless they are severely restrained, they will develop into an engine of oppression (the reason why Parliament repeatedly rejected suggestions of a British police force, until Peel developed his brilliant scheme of unarmed constables without special legal powers.(See also ‘A Brief History of Crime’ , a book anyone interested could read with profit) . A death penalty, which can be used against police killers and murderers in general, is actually essential for such a system of ordered liberty to operate Our liberties have diminished ever since hanging, and the principle of punishment in general, were abolished. The two are directly connected. ‘Oliver’ says that hanging will make criminals shoot all the witnesses. What is his evidence for this assertion? It certainly did not happen here when we had the penalty, whereas it did during the Wormwood Scrubs police murder (post abolition) discussed in my original article. On the contrary, the absence of a death penalty so that the sentence for armed robbery is not profoundly different from the sentence for murder *does* mean that it is a reasonable gamble for the robber to kill the witnesses. There is some suggestion that this is what has happened in the USA since the effective abolition of the penalty there ( see below) ‘Stranger murder’, that is, the murder of someone by a person wholly unknown to him, is the category that has increased. I don’t know what Mr Rawlings is trying to say, but he seems unfamiliar with my views on the bombing of Dresden ‘Rex’ says that ‘killings by (so called legally held) shotguns are becoming a regular occurrence now’ Are they? Where are the figures on this. I was under the impression that legally-held weapons are hardly ever used in the commission of crimes in Britain. This was certainly the case the last time I researched the issue, though this was some years ago. Alan Wylie wins this week’s award for most outstanding failure to check the index. He says (oh, joy) : ‘If capital punishment is a deterrent to criminals carrying guns, how come in the US the states that have capital punishment also have the highest rates of police being shot while on duty i.e. Texas, Florida, North Carolina, while the states that do not have capital punishment have lower rates of police murders, even though they are often the most populous states. Really Hitchens, you must instil some research and rigour into your right wing rantings.’ Really, Mr Wylie should instil some research into his standard-issue fashionable opinions. As I have explained many times here, the death penalty does not exist as a realistic prospect in the USA, and has not since the 1960s. The minority of murderers who are executed, even in death penalty states, die about ten years after their crimes. Most murderers will die of old age waiting for the exhaustion of an appeal process which has been used by liberal campaigners to obstruct the penalty. Many states which officially maintain the death penalty never in fact impose it at all. Therefore the statistic ‘the states that have capital punishment also have the highest rates of police being shot while on duty’ is of no use unless the user then analyses the frequency of the application of the penalty, relative to the number of murders committed. As I have said before, a much better correlation is that between climate and crime. The hotter the state, the more the crime. But if any state *really* reintroduced the death penalty, you might see a signgificant difference.

How many Anecdotes make an Anti-Dope Antidote? Another former cannabis user writes

Peter Hitchens writes : "Cannabis Comment Warriors, gird up your loins once more. Another former cannabis user has written to me to share his experience of this dangerous drug, misleadingly promoted as 'soft' and harmless.

"Perhaps after a while they will begin to see that these so-called 'anecdotes' have a common theme that might be worth investigating. Then again, perhaps the Comment Warriors will just get angry at having their complacency punctured by facts."

Here it is. Another 'anecdote'

A former cannabis user writes :' Since in your blog you have expressed gratitude to former cannabis users, or the kin of cannabis users who have reached out to share their experiences, I am moved to share my story with you.

'I smoked cannabis - the strong variety - intensely in my early teens. I started very early, even relative to my friends who were early users of drugs, and I consumed heavily. I remember being encouraged into smoking for a variety of factors: relaxed parents naive about the strength of new strains of the drug, a cool older sibling, hanging out with an alternative group of people, etc. I also clearly remember watching TV as a 13-year-old and seeing the downgrading of cannabis in the drug classifications on the news, and taking this as carte blanche.

'Almost every aspect of my life suffered. In terms of my emotional and social life, a lot changed - I went from popular, social, outgoing and highly confident, to isolated, introverted, emotionally fragile, self-doubting and paranoid. My intellectual faculties had also certainly been dulled - my wits, imagination and conversation had had the edge taken off them. With the scenery collapsing around me, I had the good sense to realise that it was cannabis that was a major cause of my difficulties and I rapidly curbed my consumption and within a few months kicked it completely.

'The final straw was the seriously unpleasant experience of getting arrested for possession - the first piece of negative conditioning from society I had received, and remain extremely grateful for, notwithstanding the lasting stain on my record.  It only happened because I deliberately smoked cannabis in a very public place.

'Almost a decade later, I strongly suspect that my emotional and intellectual life is still hampered to some degree, though, thankfully, tolerably so. Scarcely a day passes where I do not feel some regret/anger about this aspect of my young life.

'The 'comment warriors' you refer to would presumably allege that my story, and others like them, are anecdotal and at best show correlation not causation between cannabis consumption and mental issues. I personally have almost no doubt that cannabis was a major cause of my difficulties. Why do the comment warriors consider this irrelevant? Introspection would clearly be of no value if I was concerned with, say, the chemical composition of my stomach acids, or the structure of my DNA. But the subject of concern here is *my mental life*: why aren't *my*insights, thoughts and feelings highly relevant when the subject is *me*?

'Of course such feelings don't fully verify that cannabis was the cause of my troubles - my thoughts and feelings would need to be anchored by something external to me - but they are surely at least part of the story... The second reason, again presumably to be dismissed as 'unscientific', is what might be called the phenomenology of cannabis consumption, the what-it-is-like to be high: it is extremely powerful to the point of hallucinogenic when consumed in high enough doses. It would be very surprising if altering your mind to this degree and extent didn't have some serious consequences...

'Thank you for speaking out on this issue. It would be great if more people understood the risks involved, especially young people who are possibly too green to make a serious decision for themselves and are being exposed to wrong advice.'

**As before, I have spoken to the author of this account, and verified his bona fides.
 

Of course hanging won't end all murders - but it will make criminals afraid to carry guns

Parliament sentenced hundreds of innocent people to death when it arrogantly abolished hanging in 1965. Many of those innocent people have yet to meet their killers, but that meeting will inevitably come.

Hundreds more, also thanks to the smugness of our sheltered power elite, will instead be horribly, terrifyingly injured.

But – because our medical skills have grown while our common sense has shrunk – they will survive to live damaged, darkened lives.

On the long list of Parliament’s victims, both dead and wounded, are many police officers. Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes, may they rest in peace, are just the latest.

Nobody can really claim to be surprised by this. In August 1966, a few months after the death penalty was got rid of, three police officers were murdered close to Wormwood Scrubs Prison.[related]

Our once-peaceful country was so shocked that a memorial service was held in Westminster Abbey for the three – Geoffrey Fox, Stanley Wombwell and Christopher Head.

But the Prince of Liberal Smugness, the then Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, airily dismissed calls for a return of the gallows. ‘I will not change my policy in the shadow of recent events, however horrible,’ he said, in a statement of such bone-headed obstinacy that it ought to be carved on his tombstone.

If the murder of three policemen by an armed gang of crooks, months after hanging was abolished for that very offence, was not a reason to change a policy, then what would change his mind? The answer was that nothing would.

Like all such people, he knew he was right, and ‘civilised’ – and neither the facts nor common sense would change what he pleased to call his mind.
Now, after the Manchester killings, there has been an attempt to divert us into an argument about arming the police. Almost every account of these deaths, rather oddly, stressed that the two officers were unarmed.

Why? There’s no suggestion that Fiona Bone or Nicola Hughes would have been safer if they had been armed. Do we want to turn the police into executioners? In any case, the police of this country are armed, and have been for years.

Not all of them carry weapons, but the proud boast of this country in my childhood, that we were the only major nation whose police did not carry guns, long ago ceased to be true.

We weren’t asked about it. But then again, we weren’t asked about abolishing the death penalty. No political party ever put that policy in its manifesto. To this day it has not been properly discussed.

Few people understand that supporters of the gallows never pretended it would deter all murders. They believed it deterred criminals from carrying lethal weapons.

We have in fact had two experiments to see if this is so. The death penalty was suspended in this country for much of 1948, while Parliament debated (and rejected) its abolition. It was suspended again from August 1955 to March 1957, during a similar debate. After 1957 the penalty was much weaker, though it still protected police officers.

Colin Greenwood, a retired policeman, studied the statistics and found a marked leap in violent and armed offences during 1948, followed by a return to the previous level. There was another rise in 1956-57, followed by a slight fall. There was a third significant rise in the mid-Sixties, which has continued more or less ever since.

The carrying and use of guns and knives by criminals just grows and grows. Jay Whiston, whose dreadful death I mentioned last week, is one victim of this. The Manchester police officers are two more.

But these are the cases we all hear about. Far, far more common are dreadful events in which heroic doctors and nurses save the lives of people who would undoubtedly have died of comparable wounds 50 years ago.

Last week, in my beautiful, civilised home town, Oxford, two men were jailed for attacking Kirk Smith in his home, in a petty, moronic robbery – of £20 and two phones.

Abdul Adan, 21, was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years (in reality he will serve half that) for stabbing Mr Smith four times, after first smashing his nose. Mr Smith’s wounds were appalling. They ‘bared his intestines’, as the court report puts it. Adan’s accomplice, Michael Edwards, 25, got three-and-a-half years, which of course he will not serve in full.

Did these assailants care whether they killed him? Did they, in fact, fear the law at all? How many such crimes have been and will be committed in our supposedly civilised, liberal country this year? More than you think.

Are any of us safe in our homes, or on the streets, or on late-night buses and trains, from people such as this? Will anything be done to put it right?

You know the answer.

And people wonder why I despise politicians and all their works.

IS BEING HONEST REALLY SUCH A SHOCK?

I never thought much of Mitt Romney, but all these leaks have made me warm to him. Why is it a ‘gaffe’ to be honest?

Left-wing politicians do bribe millions of voters with welfare handouts, paid for from the taxes of Right-wing voters.

And the Arab leadership in Gaza and the West Bank have no interest in permanent peace with Israel.

We say we want truthful politicians, but when we get them, we fling up our hands in mock shock.

SEEING SENSE ON A POINTLESS WAR

It is good to see that conventional wisdom is now coming round to the view that our military presence in Afghanistan is a pointless and bloody waste of time.

Parliament is actually debating it.

Why, in a few months, everyone will want to leave, and most of them will believe that they have thought so all along. Well, they didn’t.

When I began my long campaign for withdrawal, in November 2001, the Afghan war was a ‘good war’. In 2006, when Comrade Doctor Lord John Reid committed us more deeply, saying, absurdly, ‘We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years’ time without firing one shot’, the intervention was still popular.

Peter Mandelson said that you have to go on saying something long after you are sick of saying it before anyone will take any notice. This is true.

But so many have died in the meantime. Why are we so slow to see the truth?

Sarah Catt goes to jail for eight years (four, really) for aborting a big baby, in the final week of pregnancy.

But it’s perfectly legal to abort a small baby, to call it a ‘foetus’ instead of a human being, and to sneer that it is ‘just a blob of jelly’.

You try working out the logic of this. It’s not nice.

Background Noise

Nobody can accuse me of sensation-seeking or crude circulation boosting for what follows. It is a detailed response to Mr Wooderson’s recent replies to me. My responses are interleaved with Mr Wooderson’s words, and marked *** Mr Wooderson begins :’ Mr. Hitchens writes, 'it is not the ‘breadth and depth’ of the symptoms of dyslexia which cause me to doubt its existence.' This appears to contradict what Mr. Hitchens has said in his previous writings on this subject. For example, in the December 2009 article 'Science and Society', he writes, 'Their verdict that ‘dyslexia’ can’t be distinguished from other reading difficulties gives the game away. It can’t be distinguished because it has no objective, scientific definition. And that is because it doesn’t exist', the implication being, apparently, that because it has no 'objective, scientific definition' dyslexia doesn't exist.

'He goes on to say in his article of January 2010 'Language, Truth and Logic': 'even those who believe in this piffle have to acknowledge that it has no clear definition. How can that possibly accord with the standards of experimental, peer-reviewed and predictive science, which these people claim to be applying?' Which again seems to suggest that the lack of a scientific definition is evidence that dyslexia doesn't exist. And he continues by distinguishing this argument from his 'central point, about the Committee's view that 'dyslexia' can't be distinguished from other reading difficulties.' Of course, if Mr. Hitchens insists that this isn't what he believes, then I'm happy to accept that, but there still seems to me to be a certain tension between these views.

 ***Let me deal with this strange diversion first. Mr Wooderson seems to think he has discovered some sort of philosopher’s stone here. Working backwards (and a long way backwards, in the dark, as it seems to me) from the fact that I dispute the existence of ‘dyslexia’ , he seeks to establish that on the same logic I must doubt the very existence of mental illness. I don’t. the problem is entirely distinct. The claims of the supporters of ‘dyslexia’ are not about the existence of a fact, and the different names one might apply to it. The undisputed fact is that many children cannot read very well or even at all. That fact is accepted by both sides.

The claims of the ‘dyslexia’ lobby are that this is the result of a complaint to be found in the individuals who cannot read. By using this term, they attempt to alter the nature of the problem from the consequence of bad teaching to a physical failing ion the child who has been taught. This is not about nomenclature or definition. It is a fundamental disagreement about the nature and cause of the phenomenon. Therefore, to say that ‘dyslexia’ does not exist is not to say that the children involved can read. They can’t. It is to say that the explanation for this lies elsewhere. It is not the consequence of a medical complaint. It is the consequence of bad teaching . Any child, including those who are alleged to suffer from ‘dyslexia’ can be taught to read if the right methods are used ( see here ) for examples of this.

 

There is also a story of an experiment involving the same teacher, Eva Retkin, recorded in the Sunday Times of 22nd October 2000 (‘Learning to read is as easy as ABC’, by Alison Brace) , in which an allegedly ‘dyslexic’ boy is successfully taught to read in days, but it is behind a Pay Wall and I cannot link to it or reproduce it in full.

There is, so far as I know, no comparable argument over the fact that mental illness exists. Nor does the use of the term ‘mentally ill’ posit an explanation of mental illness that flies in the face of common sense and experience (unlike the use of the term ‘dyslexia, which does) . Nor is there a readily available and demonstrable alternative explanation for Henry Cockburn’s decisions (for example) to swim dangerous rivers and roam the countryside naked in winter. Nor can mental illness be readily cured by simple, time-tested methods, as ‘dyslexia’ can be. Mr Wooderson might ( I suspect he hasn’t) read ‘Henry’s Demons’ to see a detailed description of the things which mentally ill people do, and say, and think, which distinguish them from those who are not ill. Or he might read my contributor’s description of her husband’s unhappy struggle with unreason. Perhaps ( I hope not, but it comes to many of us) he will find that an old friend or colleague has become mentally ill. Or he might receive letters ( as I sometimes do) from people who are clearly not in their right minds. I assure him, there is no other explanation.

There is something materially wrong with them. Nobody maintains that the people who are thought to be mentally ill, who behave as Henry Cockburn did, are in fact suffering from nothing at all. Even R.D.Laing, I think never went quite that far. They are not as they should be. They are ill. Their behaviour has, if only we could discover it, a physical seat in their bodies. It is within them. It does not cease to exist if we do not observe them, or if they are placed in different circumstances. My argument, and it seems to me to be incontrovertible, is that the accepted *categorisation* of mental illness is dubious, not that mental illness does not exist (as ‘dyslexia’ does not exist), and can be satisfactorily and demonstrably explained as something else entirely ( as ‘dyslexia’ can) . Terms such as ‘schizophrenia’, ‘psychosis’ and ‘paranoia’, used by Psychiatrists, are subjective, vaguely defined and subject to changes of meaning. I would add that some states – such as the condition of many cannabis smokers, who fail at schoolwork, suffer memory loss, lose the ability to argue reasonably and undergo a decline in intelligence – are forms of mental illness which are not defined by psychiatry, or treated by the NHS.

 

That is to say, they are rooted in physical changes in the persons involved, which have followed and may reasonably be presumed to have been caused by their use of a powerful mind-altering drug, because the correlation is so common and because the use of a powerful mind-altering drug is in any case the most likely explanation of a major change in the performance of the minds of the people who have been using the said drug. Neither of these points has anything in common with my contention that the inability of modern British children to learn to read is caused by bad teaching (as it obviously is, as it is specific to our time) , not by an alleged ‘disorder’ whose only universal symptom is … an inability to learn to read, and which is, amazingly, ‘cured’ by intensive reading teaching. Mr Wooderson is trying, and failing, to be clever.

 

It is an indication of his fundamental lack of seriousness about the subject, a lack which I find increasingly irksome and disappointing, and I regard it as a waste of his mind, and a waste of my time. For this section of the argument he gets an ‘F’ at Gove level. Mr Wooderson (quoting me, referring to Professor Sir Robin Murray) continues : 'If he [Professor Murray] finds the categories of ‘psychosis’ and ‘schizophrenia’ useful to describe them, who am I to object? He chooses to use such terms as ‘psychosis’ and ‘schizophrenia’. I would question the boundaries and definitions of these complaints. But I would not question his medical opinion that the people involved are in some way ill.' Surely, though, if psychosis and schizophrenia are as vague and ill-defined as Mr. Hitchens claims, Murray's precise figures concerning the risk associated with cannabis use ought not to be trusted, based as they are on the assumption that schizophrenia can be objectively measured. If so, Murray's testimony is little better than anecdote, except insofar as he encounters more mentally ill people than most (but then, given the nature of his job, he's unlikely to encounter many healthy cannabis users).

***I don’t recall referring to any precise figures. I’m not sure any such figures are involved in this argument. I bring Professor Murray into the argument because, as a Psychiatrist, he can be reasonably trusted to know if someone is mentally ill. His observations on the possible causes of this among his patients, to whom he has talked at length and who he has experienced and encountered over many years, are themselves valuable as indications of a connection between cannabis and mental illness, quite independently of any specific claims about how these illnesses might be categorised or named. This sort of thing is called not seeing the wood for the trees. Once again it is profoundly unserious, avoiding the real issue with a sort F. Mr Wooderson continues, once again, quoting me. 'I have repeatedly answered the point about the lack of increase in the ‘rate of schizophrenia.' Yes, and the point of my line of argument thus far has been to show that Mr. Hitchens' usual response to this (that the diagnosis of schizophrenia is vague and has changed over time)...’ Mr Wooderson is not paying attention. I say a good deal more than this. I say that cannabis users who become mentally unwell are less likely to be registered with GPs than non-users, that the problems which they develop may involve forms of mental illness , but not be categorised as ‘Schizophrenia’, and I say that the diagnosis of Schizophrenia has not just ‘changed over time’ but that it was specifically *narrowed* by the APA, so that fewer people in general were included in the definition. I thought as much. He has been coming here to write and not to read. His laziness has found him out. F Grade again.

 

Mr Wooderson goes on :’…presents him [me]with a dilemma: if psychiatry is an inexact science, and schizophrenia an ill-defined condition, then he can't rely on studies purporting to show an increased risk of schizophrenia from cannabis use as evidence that cannabis is harmful, because they're unscientific by his reasoning.’ If, on the other hand, schizophrenia is well enough defined to be the subject of scientific study, the inconvenient fact that the rate of schizophrenia hasn't increased can't easily be dismissed as a quirk of diagnostics. ***Gosh, Mr Wooderson really thinks he has something here. No he hasn’t. Let me say it again. If I don’t accept the term ‘schizophrenia’, it does not mean that I don’t believe the people involved are *ill*. It just means I don’t think their illness can be objectively defined, as a cancer or emphysema could be. Mr Wooderson, again opening by quoting me : 'Oh, really, And how can they be explained?’ There are a number of theories, most of which are discussed in the scientific literature: self-medication by schizophrenics,

***The first is worthless. The very use of the term ‘self-medication’ is a declaration of bias. Nobody can ‘medicate’ by taking a street drug in unregulated, unmeasured doses, , any more than you can ‘medicate’ by drinking a bottle of gin. No reputable scientists could advance such a claim. It would also have to be tested by the simple device of establishing whether the cannabis or the illness had come first. If the former, then what were they ‘self-medicating ‘ for , before they became ill. This is just stuff.

‘a common disposition to both schizophrenia and drug use (which is plausible given the strong positive correlation between schizophrenia and conventional smoking),’

 

*** How can ‘schizophrenia’ , or rather ‘mental illness’ be a disposition? This is a category error. Mental illness is involuntary, not a habit or a lifestyle choice. ‘ or that cannabis use triggers the onset of the disease earlier in those who are predisposed to it.’ *** Now he’s talking. Like the fact that smoking tobacco and drinking spirits triggers the onset of gullet cancer in those (like my family) who are especially vulnerable, thanks to heredity, to that disease. Except that people who are ‘predisposed’ (sounds as if there’s a choice here. There isn’t, so let’s say ‘especially vulnerable’) to ‘schizophrenia’ (let’s call it ‘mental illness’ ) don’t and can’t know they are vulnerable to it. Why, that’s almost causative, isn’t it? It’s of no interest to the ill person that, unknown to him, he was vulnerable to the illness, if, when he smokes cannabis, that vulnerability is revealed. As far as he is concerned, he was well. He smoked cannabis. He became irreversibly ill. Had he not done so, he might still be well. Mr Wooderson continues : ‘ Studies also risk conflating the transient psychotic symptoms of cannabis use with full-blown schizophrenia (indeed, in some of the anecdotes mentioned here, the psychotic effects have apparently worn off shortly after the person stopped using the drug).

 

 ***Well, as I don’t insist on ‘schizophrenia’ only on a general recognition of a link between cannabis and mental illness, that doesn’t trouble me. And I am glad he uses the word ‘apparently’. How does one measure these things. How do we know there will be no recurrence. People who use chemicals to mess with their brains famously suffer flashbacks and other experiences many years after they used them. There’s every reason to assume, for safety’s sake, that a brain, once damaged, remains damaged. Mr Wooderson quotes me as speculating thus on the reasons for his (Mr Wooderson’s ) adherence to this wretched cause 'except perhaps because he is some sort of show-off.' I've no idea why Mr. Hitchens would suggest that.’ ***Oh, but I have. This weblog has an audience. Not a huge one, but one bigger, perhaps, than Mr Wooderson can find elsewhere. And there is something in his tone which suggests to me that he enjoys his role as resident drug defender, and would rather be upbraided than ignored, or relegated to background noise, a fate he is doing little here to avoid. Mr Wooderson :’ And no, I don't see why the absence of any ulterior motive for my views 'makes [my] moral position even worse'.

 

***Can’t he though? I can. Because at least a self-interested person has a rational basis for the promotion of this evil, (he benefits, though at the expense of grave danger to others). If no self-interest is involved, it seems to me that the only explanations left are vanity (see above) stupidity or deliberate evil. Greedy self-interest isn’t very attractive, true, but it’s less repellent than those three. Mr Wooderson answers my query 'what does he (Mr W) mean by suggesting that Professor Murray has an ‘agenda’?' I mean nothing more sinister than that Murray, like many scientists, may have become somewhat attached to his theory, and that, having invested so much effort into promoting it, he would find it embarrassing if it proved to be false. Tim Wilkinson in his debate with Mr. Hitchens pointed out what he saw as flaws in Murray's methodology, which might suggest an attempt to bend the facts to fit a certain conclusion. I'm not scientifically qualified to say whether Mr. Wilkinson was right, but his criticisms seem fairly compelling to me as a layman.’

 

***I suggest he takes this up with Professor Murray, who will doubtless be impressed by Mr Wooderson’s critique. That, however, is not usually what people are intending when they suggest that a person has an ‘agenda’. I hear the sound of rowing back, in this reply.

Mr Wooderson says “Mr. Hitchens continues: 'How can a serious campaign for the licensing of a medicine have anything to do with one for the legalisation of a pleasure?' He gives his answer. ‘The two causes will remain inseparable so long as the government believes (probably rightly) that allowing medicinal marijuana would undermine its half-hearted attempts to prevent recreational cannabis use.’

 

*** I don’t follow this logic. Nor is it the case. As it happens, the British government permits the limited prescription of two drugs based upon the ingredients of cannabis, Nabilone and Sativex. Nabilone, famously, doesn’t provide a high and hasn’t proved very popular or efficacious. Sativex is another, long story which I don’t propose to address here. But both are proof that a limited licensing of a drug for a specific purpose is compatible with the formal (and , if were ever implemented, practical) maintenance of a criminal law against street cannabis. Surely, the more the medical campaigners separate themselves from the dopeheads, the more respectable they will be and the more specific and limited their objectives will be – and thus the easier it would be for the government to grant the required licences. I don’t think Mr Wooderson has thought about this answer at all. Mr Wooderson repeats my question: 'Is permanent damage to the intelligence serious enough? I should have thought so. Is a general deterioration in mental wellbeing, almost impossible to measure, varying from person to person, a strong enough case against? I should have thought so.' And he replies :’Well, I would have thought almost certainly not, and that this is in any case a matter for individuals to decide themselves. Certainly one would need more than this rather cursory assessment to justify imprisoning people.’

***This is an irritating remark of great arrogance and stupidity, which tempts me to abandon the whole discussion, it revolts me so. It is the statement of a child, of someone who has never felt any responsibility for another human creature, or worried about them. God send that no child of Mr Wooderson ever turns to him and says that it s a ‘matter for individuals’ whether he risks his sanity and his future happiness for fun, and also risks making himself dependent on family or state until he dies. Can he imagine what it is to have a child or a spouse in a mental hospital? Plainly not. It is in this grotesque, light-minded frivolity over potential tragedy that the difference really lies between me and this person.

 

***He also makes the incessant, dim claim (answered dozens of times here, and never acknowledged or dealt with by the drug lobby, which is why his lazy repetition of it makes me so angry) that the purpose of penalties is to be imposed, rather than to deter people from doing the thing which attracts the penalty. The purpose of penalties is to deter. If a person, knowing that an act is punishable by prison, does that act, *he puts himself in prison through his own wilful act*. The MP who made the law, the policeman who arrests him, the lawyer who prosecutes him, the judge who sentences him, the jailer who locks him up, all grieve at his decision. But he has obliged them to enforce the law, and they must do so. Mr Wooderson quotes me : 'when Richard Doll and his colleagues made their initial studies which *appeared* to show a link between cigarettes and lung cancer, they all immediately gave up smoking.' He replies : ‘But the burden of proof required to justify prohibiting a substance through the law is, I think, somewhat greater than that required to make a personal decision to stop using that substance (and what level of risk is unacceptable will at any rate differ from person to person).’

 

***Maybe so. But the substance under discussion is *already* prohibited by law, though I can easily forgive Mr Wooderson for forgetting that rather significant fact. What if his cause succeeds, and it is legalised, and on commercial sale, and making lots of money for big companies with large lobbying capacity, and in the following years it becomes clear that it is indeed a grave danger to mental health? How hard will it then be to get it back into the box of illegality? Efforts to prohibit alcohol are often derided, but their main problem was always that it had been legal and widespread before, and so very hard to make illegal. Well? See a parallel? Mr Wooderson is arguing that, through complacency now, we will make reconsideration incredibly hard if our complacency turns out to have been unjustified.

 

Doll and his colleagues would doubtless have supported strong legal measures against cigarettes once they knew what they knew. But they had to fight a very long battle to get them. During that time, many lives were ruined or ended. Ah, but Mr Wooderson reckons that was just a matter of individual choice, so tough if those who died were anybody else’s fathers, mothers, brothers, sons, sisters or daughters. Why do you weep at the graveside? He/she was only exercising his/her freedom. That’s much more important than your loss. Mr Wooderson quotes me : 'People are unaware of their own deterioration, not just in this matter but in all others. It would be the carefully recorded observation of teachers, close family and work colleagues (preferably themselves drug-free) which would be valuable in this case.' He responds ‘I would imagine it's difficult to be unaware of the symptoms of schizophrenia or serious mental illness.’ ***Alas, mentally ill people often do not know they are ill, and will sometimes treat as enemies those who try to tell them that they are, though that is not the point. ‘ As for subtler effects, such as a decline in intelligence, then perhaps others are better placed to judge this,’

 

***Perhaps they are. A good use of ‘perhaps’. Of course they bleeping well are. Mr Wooderson continues loftily : ‘but I find the idea that the law has any business in making sure that people don't squander their talents by smoking pot absurd and, frankly, reprehensible.’ ***Reprehensible! Gosh, and I am accused of pomposity. Why ‘absurd’? When does he think a person is old enough to make such judgements? This stuff is now so widespread and unrestrained by law or morals that it is sold in quantity in secondary schools.

Mr Wooderson : ‘Adults should be free to make their own choices and their own mistakes.’ *** Well, it’s not just adults, as he must surely realise now. But that’s covered in the question to him above. So the father of a family , responsible for the mortgage and the food bill and the electricity and the gas and the water and the council tax should be ‘free’ to turn himself into a shuffling welfare recipient, unemployable and a useless parent? This ‘mistake’ is not reversible. Yet it is powerfully advertised ( and what is the rock music industry but an advertisement for drugs) as harmless. How can we counter this falsehood, except with an urgent deterrent law? How?

 

Mr Wooderson : ‘To deny this is unabashed paternalism.’ ***Well, and who cares? If it’s ‘paternalism’ to save someone from a life on antipsychotics, call me an unabashed paternalist. Mr Wooderson :’One doesn't even have the excuse in this case that this wasted potential affects others in some way, because presumably the relatives of the cannabis user have no more idea than anyone else whether he'd have become a brain surgeon had he never used the drug.

***I rather think they do. Using ‘brain surgeon’ as a general description standing for ‘talented person using those talents fully for the benefit of society and as a fulfilled human being’ , the families of persons whose brains have been wrecked by drugs have a pretty good idea of what might have been and of what has been lost. Mr Wooderson, alas, lacks the imagination or maturity to grasp the nature or extent of this loss. he thinks it a price worth paying, because he doesn't expect to be paying it himself. That is why he is so smug.

Mr Wooderson :’ What we can establish from the anecdotes of those who claim to have used the drug for years without suffering any harm is that in many cases it doesn't lead to serious mental illness.’

 

***So what? People have smoked Capstan Full Strength all their lives and never got lung cancer. And …?

 

Mr Wooderson :’ We can't establish, for the reasons given, in cases where serious mental illness followed cannabis use that there is any causal connection between the two.’

 

***No, but we can make an intelligent guess that the use of a powerful psychotropic drug might conceivably alter brain function, and we can decide that until we are certain, the existing law needs to be maintained. He quotes me 'I regard it as callow and close to personally insulting (to them[the Cockburns]) to dismiss their experience, which they have rather bravely shared with outsiders, as ‘obfuscation’. And then claims ' I never dismissed it as obfuscation. I can perfectly understand why someone in Patrick Cockburn's position would come to the conclusion that cannabis was responsible. What I said was that Mr. Hitchens appears to dismiss the issue of correlation and causation – the possibility that Henry may have developed the disease anyway, and that his cannabis use was just a symptom – as obfuscation.’

 

***I don’t dismiss it. I constantly address it. I accept that correlation is not necessarily causation. But I point out that correlation is also not necessarily *not* causation. Personally I think it obtuse to the point of evil to smirk ceaselessly that there’s no proof in this case. How unlikely is it that the use of a potent psychotropic would affect the mental health of the person involved? How many ‘anecdotes’ do these people need to see that there is something serious going on? It is wilful blindness, and I personally find it very hard to forgive, and I hope that those involved will in the end meet justice and see what it looks like. It was quite clear that he was using obfuscation in the fashion that I described. If he now backs away from it, well and good.

 

Mr Wooderson ‘ In any case, it would be easier to keep dangerous substances out of the hands of teenagers if they weren't sold exclusively by unscrupulous street dealers.’

***Oh, not again. This is wilful ignorance, and wilful refusal to think. So teenagers can’t buy alcohol or cigarettes, can they? He quotes me : 'nor does it generally have this effect, or the jails would be full (as they are not) of drunk drivers and non-seat-belt wearers, and the civil courts crowded (as they are not) with martyred pub landlords who allowed smoking in their bars.' I doubt whether many people have much of a desire to drive without a seatbelt (is it even an imprisonable offence?) 

*** I'm not sure. But if anyone thought the issue worthy of martyrdom, he could end up in rison by refusing to pay the fines imposed.                                                                                                                                                                                       Oddly enough,I don't think anyone has.. Mr Wooderson again 'The other two examples are simply not comparable. Both are carried out in public, making the laws against them relatively easy to enforce'

 

***This is mere wriggling. Millions of people ceased to drink and drive when the breathalyser made enforcement possible. How many of them would have been caught? Very few. The risk was enough. And has Mr Wooderson never heard of informers? If the cannabis laws ever get properly enforced again, he will. Mr Wooderson claims ‘Drink driving has also, I'd suggest, in recent years become far more socially unacceptable than it used to be, regardless of the law. ***No, because of the educative power of the law, and the uncompromising propaganda campaigns mounted to back it up. Instead of making such tenuous comparisons, we should look at the experience of other countries that have pursued the war on drugs more zealously than we have, and see whether there's any striking connection between draconian drug laws and the level of drug use. (I would suggest that there isn't).

 

 ***This is an evasion, made by someone who knows he is in a corner and wants to change the subject. We have the experience of our own country, and its particular circumstances, to go by. I am quite happy to have a separate argument about the USA, (which he, being by his own account of himself a credulous propaganda victim, apparently believes is some kind of paragon of draconian drug prohibition, rather than the place where ‘medical marijuana’ is effectively legal in a majority of states) . Mr Wooderson concludes: I hope Mr. Hitchens will now at least acknowledge that I've responded to his arguments seriously and fairly.'

***His hopes are vain. I have concluded from this exchange that Mr Wooderson is shallower and less interesting than he at first seemed. I shall not waste any more time upon him.

Could I Push the Hangman's Lever? What about Finland? And other questions

A few brief and necessarily hurried responses. Scandinavian countries are often advanced, by left-wingers, as models of how to do things, etc. I have myself noted Norway’s successful existence outside the EU, for different reasons (Norway, like us, has oil and gas. Unlike us, it made wise use of them).

But these countries are really city states. They do not suffer many of the problems which blight us.  I believe Finland’s current population is 5.4 million. Its cities are spacious and its countryside sparsely populated ( I have visited it once, briefly). It is generally prosperous and stable, and has been since the end of the  Second World War left it as a neutral state. Its main internal problems used to be, as far as I know, connected with lingering hostility towards Swedes, seen as colonial oppressors.

What it does not have is the thing that curses this country – a powerful class system, probably originating in the Norman conquest, reinforced by a brutal 19th century industrialisation and now made worse by a 21st century de-industrialisation.

Britain’s class problems, often death to talent and hope if you are born on the wrong side of the divide, are the curse of our state education system. That is why enlightened socialists such as R.H.Tawney were very keen on the grammar school system which – first with scholarships and later through local authority free places – opened up good education to the children of the poor.

Of course, they did not totally succeed. There weren’t enough grammar schools in many areas, and the primary schools which fed them were often inadequate. Many, many things could have been done to widen the road upwards. But they did a lot of good, and now that road is completely closed.

There is also the powerful secondary point that not all bright children are *academically* bright, or want an intensive academic education of the kind grammar schools provide.  Many would benefit much more from a predominantly technical education, though this should also be coupled with the teaching of culture, history and language so as to permit the maximum enjoyment of life. I believe it is the case in several continental countries that the plumber or the electrician who comes to fix your pipes or wiring will be quite able to discuss literature and classical music, because his teachers never assumed that working with your hands meant that you could let your brain atrophy.

Each country has different problems. Ours were better solved by an admission that class barriers exist and need to be broken by schools. The comprehensive system fixed the class borders where they were, and let them there. It also (as I explained in the article) lowered the standards of all our schools, because its inventors could never admit openly that it was a huge experiment in social engineering. Nor could they, nor can they,  admit that it has failed.

I shall leave the discussion of cannabis for a bit, except to note how interesting it si that first-person accounts of the sad fates of cannabis users provoke so much rage and fury among the dope community. If they are so sure there’s no connection, why would they worry so? They are angry because deep down they fear that I am right.

 I intend to spend some time over the weekend grading Mr Wooderson’s more recent postings on the subject. 

I am once again accused of nostalgia, by someone who obviously doesn’t actually read what I write. I once again deny it. The past is gone. It is the future that concerns me, and the fact that we insist on choosing the wrong future. Nor were the 1950s any kind of paradise.

Luckett Bell asks if those who favour the death penalty should be prepared to carry it out. Not necessarily. We pay soldiers, sailors and airmen to deter (by being prepared and trained to kill) or actually to kill our external enemies. I don’t see why I should pay a hangman to deter (by being prepared to and trained to kill)  or kill our internal enemies . I think the parallel is exact. Some US states have elaborate systems under which the prison officer who throws the switch for an execution is one of several and does not know if he is the one responsible. I have no special objection to this, if it comforts those involved (like the supposed blank bullet in one of the rifles given to a firing squad) . But a hangman (whose action is essentially the physical exercise of the will of justice) is a skilled person, and has to be personally involved, and I can’t see how this could be anonymised. As I think hanging the most effective and humane method of execution, this makes such a device impossible. I’m sure Albert Pierrepoint was affected by his actions, but if I am right he did a great deal of good, by keeping this country much less violent than it was after he was retired. I do know, by the way, that he later came to view capital punishment as vengeance, and to oppose it. While this is quite understandable (many soldiers become pacifists for similar reasons),  I think he was wrong. On the other hand, this story hardly suggests that he was corrupted or turned into an unfeeling monster, by his duties. I certainly wouldn't volunteer for the job. I would find it very difficult. But I find many responsibilities hard to face, and that doesn't mean that, if it came to it, I wouldn't face them.

Oh,  ‘Legal Highs’. Some people seem to think there is some sort of clincher here.  I can’t see why. Apart from the fact that, to all intents and purposes cannabis is now a ‘legal high’, since the laws against it aren’t enforced,   it is much like the conversion of alcohol (since the 1980s) from something generally drunk in moderation in company, into a mind-obliterating drug consumed by hundreds of thousands of people with the sole purpose of getting drunk. Self-stupefaction is morally wrong. Our society has abandoned that belief, in law, morals and custom, and the abandonment of the alcohol licensing laws, accompanied the hollowing out of the drug laws, have created a society of debauchery and licence in which self-stupefaction is regarded as normal and desirable.  Just look at the pitiful, tragic ‘ Freshers’ Weeks’ at our ‘universities’ where the young, liberated from the restraints of home, are inducted en masse into drunkenness, sexual licence and drugs.

This is ultimately a moral question, and a question of morals being reinforced by law. If we still had morals, and still used the law to reinforce them, there would be a lot less demand for self-stupefaction. There would also be a lot more discontent with the squalid, incompetent , corrupt nature of our society and civilisation. But, in a permanent haze of legal and illegal ‘highs’, we passively accept our third world lot, which will end in the miserable enslavement of our descendants, the fate which always waits for civilisations which commit suicide.  

 

 

 

 

 

The Comment Warriors are Scared

Very soon after the experiences of a cannabis smoker's wife, harrowing and distressing, were posted here, the comments began to fly in, decrying it.

Why? What had I, or the author of the account, said? Neither she nor I made any specific claim. There was no need, actually. Any intelligent, dispassionate person can see the following logic.

A person, kind , hardworking and happy, uses a powerful mind-altering drug over a period of years.

He develops some strange symptoms. Then the events described by his wife take place. She happesn to be the person closest to him, who knows him best (much as Henry Cockburn's parents knew him best).

 

She, reading of the experiences of others, makes a connection between the two events.

But that is all. Neither she nor I make any specific claim. Yet here come the 'Comment Warriors' in their usual swarms (people who in most cases never comment here on any other subject) to screech that there is no evidence of a connection between cannabis and a 'psychosis' I have not alleged ( and which is in any case a word I do not use because I have no idea what it means).

 

Evidence? Who said anything about evidence? What this is , is an indication, which any sensible person would take as a warning, and as a reason to know a good deal more *before* taking the existing controls off this already illegal drug.  Fundamentally, it's a reason to disbelieve the slick advertsising ofthis substance as 'soft' and 'safe'. I don't believe these Comment Warriors would accept anything as evidence that cannabis is dangerous. In this they are like the pathetic remainder of the tobacco lobby, who still argue that cigarettes don't cause cancer. Pleasure trumps thought.

My informant may be wrong about there being a connection between her husband's cannabis smoking and his current state (though I'll be surprised if I don't get other similar testimonies as a result, and though I have now had so many 'anecdotal' communications of this kind, several in private, along astonishingly similar lines that only the most obdurate dogmatist could pretend there was nothing at all to worry about).

 

But what these rapid and vituperative commenters hate ( Are they organised? Was Luther a Protestant? Do mice have tails?)  is the widespread display and broadcast of truthful accounts which cast doubt on their selfish complacency.

 

They know in their hearts that their pleasure is damaging and dangerous, to themselves and to others. Many of them, I would guess, have had quarrels with families and with those close to them over their habit, in which relatives have pleaded with them to stop behaving as they do. They have ignored those pleas, and are guilty about it.

The more intelligent of them may also understand that their demands for a relaxed regime endanger young people who may, as a result, ruin their lives. The stupider ones probably don't see beyond the confines of their basements and attics. 

But in both cases their anger is the genuine, deep, honest rage of the pleasure-seeker who sees his pleasure threatened.

Like all guilty people, they get angry when any outsider draws attention to the reasons for their guilt. Let them. Their anger is the anger of the toddler denied his chocolate. My anger is the anger of the disinterested person fighting to warn the innocent against an avoidable danger because it is his plain duty to do so, come wind, come weather. The two do not compare, in power or in purpose. Let them rage away. They don't scare me. The encourage me.

 

 

From 'O' Level to No Level

 

Here’s what they will never say about British school examinations. All their problems arise from the abolition of most state grammar schools in in the 1960s and 1970s.

Since then, comprehensive state schools have been social engineering machines aimed at creating a more equal society, and incidentally in creating more easily manipulated voters. The first has been a bit of a flop, because it always is, and because our relatively free society allows rich and clever parents to rescue their children from the egalitarian fanatics. But the second has been quite effective.

One of the reasons for this is that examinations give schools purpose and backbone. There’s something to work for. There’s competition. There’s a time limit . Schools without exams are a bit like tennis without a net. In the end the natural inertia of the human race will stop anything much from happening in schools where there’s no aim to work for.

So the nature and rigour of those exams – and the way people are selected to take them, and the subjects into which they are divided -  are far more crucial than any national curriculum (generally fictional anyway, as so much of it is optional) or government targets.
The devaluation of all examinations, so that the annual results would not show up just how disastrous the comprehensive experiment has been, is just one aspect of the mountain of lies constructed to deceive the public about the real purpose and nature of modern education.

One rather funny unintended consequence of this is that it has made the independent schools, the remaining grammar schools, and the church schools all look much better than they really are. In fact it has saved many mediocre and failing private schools from the doom that would have overtaken them if the grammar schools had survived (private secondary education is almost unknown in Germany, where there are still grammar schools). This is because, if you lower exam standards to make the comprehensives look acceptable, you  make selective schools look absolutely wonderful, especially if you make the top grades accessible to mediocre pupils. So, harm done all round. Only a small minority of independent and selective schools have sought to maintain real standards, by using the  ore rigorous International GCSE instead of the GCSE, and the International Baccalaureate (or the new Cambridge pre-U) instead of ‘A’ levels.

Exams, by the way, are not the same as the wretched tests which take up so much time in state schools these days. They are solid investigations into how much pupils have learned about a given subject, not rigged and drilled attempts to prove that children who cannot really read, write or count can in fact do so.

Before the abolition of the grammar schools, and of their close relatives the Direct Grant schools (independent schools which took in large numbers of state pupils who had passed the eleven plus – a sensible system which you might think met  politicians’ repeated demands for the private sector to help the state sector – so why did they abolish them?) , we had two secondary exams at this level.

One was the GCE ‘O’ level, generally taken by pupils at independent, grammar and Direct Grant schools. The other was the CSE, usually taken by pupils at Secondary Moderns. This distinction wasn’t universal. A minority of Secondary Moderns took ‘O’ levels ( and A levels) and even sent pupils on to university. Like Grammar schools, Secondary Moderns varied, from area to area, in quality and intake. Some areas, such as Wales, had far more Grammar Schools than other parts of the country.  Surrey, by contrast, had comparatively few grammar schools. Some had better provisions for girls, though in general they had a poor deal when it came to winning grammar school places. Technical schools, promised in the 1944 Education Act, were seldom built, though they were and are badly needed.  There were, in short, many reforms that could have been made to the system, which would have improved it greatly, and probably would have cost much less than the comprehensive revolution inaugurated by Anthony Crosland in 1965(and continued by Margaret Thatcher after 1970, though she, unlike Crosland,  was unhappy about it) . See the chapter ‘The Fall of the Meritocracy’ in my widely-unread and almost universally unreviewed book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ for the definitive account of this extraordinary episode.

The CSE had 5 grades of pass. Grade One at CSE was considered by schools and employers to be the equivalent of an ‘O’ level pass.

Before 1975, ‘O’ levels were graded differently by rival boards. Some boards graded from A to H, with F, G and H being failure grades for which no certificate was awarded. Others (including the Oxford and Cambridge Board, used by my independent school in Cambridge) graded from 1 to 9, with 7, 8 and 9 being failure grades for which no certificate was awarded.  Those certificates which were issued did not , as I remember (for I have never in all my life been asked to produce any of my exam certificates) , mention the grade, which was on a flimsy bit of paper sent out by post . Pay attention here, for these details are important.

By the early 1970s, with the grammars vanishing, standards began to fall. As this was before the age of ‘league tables’, the evidence of this comes in brief intense flashes of light, which some people will no doubt dismiss as ‘anecdotal’. Well, let them.

I have in front of me a cutting from the Daily Telegraph of 11th November 1974, which quotes the late Sir Rhodes Boyson, and Professor Brian Cox ( opponents of ‘progressive education’ as it was then called, before it ran into very serious trouble in the late 1970s). They cited surveys by the education authorities of Manchester and Sheffield.

These showed that since Manchester’s comprehensive reorganisation in 1967, the proportion of Manchester schoolchildren going in for ‘O’ level had been falling sharply. By contrast, in that city’s Roman Catholic grammar and secondary modern schools, not yet reorganised, the proportion had risen. Sheffield’s experience was similar. In a report in October 1975 the Telegraph noted  a ‘gradual decline in the percentage of comprehensive school pupils succeeding in GCE examinations’. Pupils at the about-to-be-abolished Direct Grant schools, meanwhile, showed ‘a constant increase in GCE success rates’.

One state school which I will not name abandoned ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels altogether after a collapse in discipline and standards.

But by then, as the late Lynda Lee-Potter wrote in the Daily Mail of 10th September 1975, the O level grading system had been mysteriously altered. There were now 5 grades:  A, B and C were the equivalents of the old 1 to 6 or A to E. But a certificate was also awarded to those who received  grades D and E. These were roughly the equivalent of the old failing grades  (not exactly, of course. D was the equivalent of the old F and the old 7, whereas E was the equivalent of the upper half of the old 8 and the old G).

Miss Lee-Potter complained, in an article I may come back to at another time because of its prophetic force,  :  “The government have now abolished the words ‘pass  ‘ and ‘fail’ because they think it’s wrong to tell children they have failed.’

By the way, I’ll note here that when the GCSE was eventually introduced, as the logical consequence of all this fudging and devaluation, its grades ran from A* (originally A) down to G. F and G were equal to the old CSE grade 4 and 5, and to the top half of the ‘U’ (or ungraded) grade of the post 1975 ‘O’ level.

You need to be good at your letters and numbers to keep up with this, don’t you? But if you look you will see a trend, and it’s downwards all the way. It has to be. Anything else would make it obvious that comprehensive schools are about egalitarian politics (the central project of it, and the new , ironbound Clause Four of  New Labour, so fiercely held to that the Tories dare not challenge it) not about good education. And when the public finally realise that, they might just object.

A report in December 1975 said that marks had slumped in GCE exams, but quoted teachers who blamed the raising of the school leaving age and the increasing turnover of teachers. Perhaps these contributed, but given the education industry’s keen support of all-in schools, you can see why they might have sought to avoid mentioning the more obvious explanation – comprehensive schooling.

Funnily enough, it would soon be harder to tell. Experiments in a combined O level and CSE (what would become the GCSE 12 years later) were reported as being already under way, on the initiative of the Schools Council, a Quango of the time,  as early in June 1974. This idea had been floated as early as 1972. It would carry on floating – Shirley Williams wanted to introduce the GCSE in her time as Labour Education Secretary, in the late 1970s. Funny that it was evebntuall introduced by the prototype Thatcherite, Sir Keith Joseph, poor anguished sir keith, I suspect, had little idea what he was doing. But his party has for many years been a false friend to state education. Its senior figures either pay fees, or (liek New Labour nobility) live in comfy areas, or (these days, also like Labour toffs) have learned how to wangle their bairns into smart, untypical schools. They aren't interested in a politically difficult true reform.

Now , after leaks that ‘O’ levels were to come back (which this writer disbelieved from the start) , which were then watered down to a more rigorous GCSE, we have the double dog’s breakfast of the Gove Level, or Chewbacca, or whatever it’s to be called. Actually it's the Gove-Clegg level, launched with Michael Gove more or less shackled to Nick Clegg, a flesh-and-blood assurance to the Education establishment that there will in fact be no true return to rigour. It may not happen at all, since the plan has been delayed till so late in the Parliament that Labour can begin to influence it too.

If it doesn’t come off it’ll be no great loss. It would have had to carry on the sustained cover-up of comprehensive failure, just as all the gimmicks, from Blunkett to Gove, have sought to avoid confronting the awful truth which is – without selection, you can’t have good secondary schools. 

Maybe one day they’ll admit it.

 

 

 

 

The Rhetoric May Change. Nothing Else Will

 

The cruel killing of two police officers has ignited a row so phoney that I hesitate to join in. Nothing of any interest or use will happen as a result of these two sad and irreparable deaths.

As the astute old liberal Kenneth Clarke has rightly said of the government’s crime policy in general ‘The rhetoric may change but the substance will stay the same’. This is as true of penal and police policy in general as it is of the present government, though I see the new Injustice Secretary has already given an interview in which he pretends to be ‘tough’, and nobody has laughed (except me).

 And let us here pause for a moment to consider the waves of grief and loss, spreading out over years and decades, caused by the violent ending of these two women’s lives.

Forget all the soppy talk about the deceased person only being in the next room. Even for religious believers, who retain the hope of eternal life,  death is still a slammed door, an end, a silence and an impenetrable barrier.  What use it if the person is ‘in the next room’ if no effort of will or love can find the door to that room, let alone unlock it?

So many people have been robbed of hopes. So many people’s lives now lack a purpose they used to have. So many good things which would have happened will now never happen.

And the reason? We do not know and cannot speculate upon who committed this crime. That, I am glad to say, is still a matter for an impartial court of justice with the presumption of innocence.

But we can say with near certainty that the culprit, whoever it might be, had this single characteristic , the common feature of all criminals  - arrogant selfishness.

Such a characteristic, unchecked either by moral force or the fear of punishment, is, if let loose in a society, as dangerous as a nuclear bomb. We are only just beginning to see the consequences of the amoral, punishment-free experimental society we so blithely allowed to be imposed on us 50 years ago.

The long afterglow of Christian moral law, and of Victorian and Edwardian law enforcement, is finally fading into twilight. Those who retained the habits of older British people, of deference to law they had made themselves, and whose principles they had been brought up to understand and respect, are dying fast. Our ordered peace existed in their hearts. When they are gone, it will be gone too.

Then there will be darkness. And I do not know what force in our society will be able to take us out of the dark age that is coming.

‘Bring back hanging!’ . The logic of this is in my view unanswerable. That is why those who advance it logically are not met with reason but with fury and scorn. But how can a post-Christian society accept a punishment based largely on the idea that even murderers have souls, and of course on the deeper idea, that human life is so uniquely valuable that the deliberate taking of it for evil ends is a crime of special horror? It will not happen now (though when this country finally sinks into the enlightened paradise for which the left have worked so hard for so long, I expect it will eventually return. It is in left-wing countries, such as Communist China and Communist Vietnam,  that the death penalty is most commonly used, but without any of the safeguards that would make it acceptable).

‘Arm the police!’ Well, we already have an armed police. This has been done, and will continue to be done, without legislation.  I see armed police officers every day. And I note that the uniforms of most forces are now designed to look semi-military, and give the impression that the person is armed even when he or she is not. Add a gun-holster to the ensemble already dangling from the average uniformed officer’s waistband, and it wouldn’t be a shock. The near unanimity with which media outlets described the two murdered officers as ‘unarmed’ made me wonder if there had been a briefing of some kind in which this fact was stressed. From what I have seen, there is little evidence that they would have been much safer if they had been armed. Nor would they have been. Handguns are largely useless weapons at the best of times,  except to threaten people with, and even heavily-armed soldiers often die in surprise attacks. 

If we do get a  fully-armed force, they will of course increasingly find themselves imposing an informal, unjust, ill-regulated death penalty, against which all the powers of Amnesty International and Mr Clive Stafford Smith will not prevail, because it will not ever be admitted that it is in fact a death penalty. But it is an entirely useless one, since it has no moral purpose or consistency.

By the way, I often point out that the deterrent effect of the death penalty does not simply affect murder.  It restrains criminal violence and the use of weapons in general. I’ve also pointed out that modern medical techniques save many lives which would have been lost in the 1950s and 1960s, so making ‘then and now ‘ comparisons of homicide figures rather misleading.

This morning I read an example of such a case in my own local newspaper, the Oxford Mail. This sort of thing is now counted too trivial to get into the national papers, though I think it once would have done.  You may read it here
Note that the victim nearly died and was left with his intestines exposed and a punctured lung.

 

Cannabis - A User's Wife Writes

The more I write about the dangers of cannabis, the more people write to me to describe their own experiences. The following, rather harrowing account was sent to me today. I am very moved by the person’s generosity in sharing this deeply upsetting experience with a wider audience, in the hope that it may help others avoid the distress that she is undergoing. I don’t, by the way, agree with her comparison with alcohol, but it is her opinion and it would be wrong of me to cut it out. ‘My husband was sectioned 3 weeks ago - a kind intelligent man , who I don’t recognise. He was a heavy smoker of cannabis and claimed it relaxed him and made him more open to new idea. However the last few weeks he became more and more paranoid and confused, some days holding it together well and other days going to pieces -for example :Turning all the electrics off; convinced someone had stolen all the words off his CDs; microphones were all over the house.

 ‘The problem is he wasn't a danger to himself or anyone else but he was and is vulnerable. For example, he was walking around sniffing people trying to take their temperatures to see if they were lying (about what I don’t know).

‘I think it was terrifying for him, and more so for us to try and take care of him. Finally we got in touch with a crisis team to come and help him but by then he was very delusional. The team called a social worker who arranged for him to be sectioned. I’m sure you know what this involves .

‘On that day the house was stormed by 16 policemen as my husband had tried to jump out of a second floor window. He is in his third week in hospital and at present not responding to medication. He is very aggressive at times and then so confused, like a little boy trying to do joined up writing or long division, if you know what I mean .

‘I have never smoked and had no feelings really one way or another about it , but this has been a massive learning curve for me - meeting families whose relatives are sectioned for the same reasons as my husband ; the sadness and guilt you feel when you see a loved one in this state ....it's horrible. He gave all his clothes , washbag , books cigarettes etc away to other patients or put them in the bin as he thinks they are contaminated. ‘And me? ‘Well I guess I will do my best to see this through and try to understand what has happened. I go every day to see him and mostly he is sedated, and when not is very abusive all of which Is very upsetting . In conclusion I think cannabis is like alcohol ......some people can just have that glass or 2 of wine or that joint and some people can’t.

 ‘He was moved from a section 2 today to a section 3 which could mean up to 6 months in Hospital .....I hope not for his and my sake. I didn't go to see him today as the nurse suggested having a little time to myself, eat some proper food ,have a nice bath, go to the hairdresser etc, things I haven’ t done for nearly a month.

‘It's not only the people who get ill from alcohol or cannabis, but the families and friends around them that suffer too’ .

Note: I have spoken to the writer, and verified her bona fides. She says that she now believes her husband, who had been smoking cannabis for about ten years, had been showing symptoms for some time, of sudden mood swings, turning the radio volume up high , experiencing a heightened sense of smell, worrying about what people in the street or the shops were saying (he wrongly thought they were talking about him). But at the time she put them down to the normal stress of life.