An Exchange with a Sympathiser of Billionaire Big Dope

The following exchange, with a Mr Falconer, appears in the comment thread beneath 'More notes on marijuana legalisation...'

 

I thought it deserved a wider audience. Mr Falconer is of course free to reply at length, the word limit will be waived for him. My responses are bracketed with asterisks. 

 

Mr Hitchens

I happen to know a great deal about drugs and drug policy, having followed the debate for nigh on three decades. (***PH remarks: 'Jolly good!"***) I also know your arguments backwards (**PH asks : Does he really? It seems from much of the below that he has paid little attention to them so far, backwards or forwards****), and they are disingenuous at very least.

**PH remarks: I think this means that he disagrees with me. Well and good, many people do. But, as a fact, the information that he disagrees with me is, by itself,  unpersuasive.***

Firstly, your accusation of "Big Money" buying up the California referendum is absurd to say the least. Do you seriously expect that any major political campaign can be funded for nothing, and frankly why should it, when its opponents have access to plenty of cash, whose putting up the money for the prohibitionist SAM organisation I wonder.

***PH responds. I am well aware of the costly nature of American campaigning.  I note that Bernie Sanders, a contender for the  Democratic Party's Presidential nomination, has funded his campaign entirely without billionaire backing, amassing the necessary cash through many small individual contributions. One also has to differentiate between donations to a cause which would open major commercial possibilities, and to one which would block them.****

Secondly, you keep on saying, oh why should anyone bother wanting legalisation, it's as good as legal now, there is no prohibition. Mr Hitchens, you know well enough that a thing is either legal or it is not. Cannabis is illegal, therefore the entire market is gifted to organised crime.

***PH: On the contrary, the British and US governments have (in my view deliberately)  achieved a position where the substance is officially illegal(to satisfy international treaties) but in practice legal, so it can indeed be both at the same time.

***PH further notes: The product itself is damaging to those who buy it, whatever its legal status. I really don't see why it would be better for it to be in the hands of cynical businessmen than in the hands of organised crime. The cynical and greedy supply (for profit)  of a dangerous poison to consumers who will be damaged by it is wicked whether legal or illegal. The principal difference between legality and illegality is the number of victims, which will be far greater if the  drug is legalised. 

Also, he mistakes or misrepresents my point. My point is a) that the claim of harsh prohibition, a principal argument of the legalisers, is based on a falsehood; that the step from decriminalisation to legalisation would not greatly alter the ability of those who want to buy and use marijuana to do so. It would therefore have only one major effect - on the sellers and suppliers : it would allow the open sale and advertising of the drug, the taxation of it by the state, and the involvement of major investors and banks in financing its production, promotion and distribution.*

 

 I wonder if you are aware that cannabis, or marijuana,as the Americans call it, is the main commodity for the cartels.

***PH: I am aware of it.***

 They earn more money from cannabis than any other banned substance, and legalisation hits them very hard. The fact that the state chooses not to enforce its laws against possession of cannabis does not amount to a legal market, and that is what people are campaigning for,

***PH: Quite so***

 as they are tired of people like you demonising what is in fact a mainstream recreational intoxicant with dangers no worse than alcohol.

 

*** PH asks: What objective, testable calculus has he used to reach this conclusion? Has he even taken into account the fact that marijuana, not being legal, is used far less in our society than alcohol?***

***PH further comments: He means, they are frustrated by the continuing insistence by people such as me that marijuana is not a safe drug, which is not 'demonising',  but a statement of plain fact given the growing correlation between cannabis use and mental illness (Swedish Army Study, Dunedin Study, many works by Professor Sir Robin Murray etc). It use is at the least restrained by it not being advertised, promoted or on commercial sale via shops or the Internet.

 

It is also observable (in the case of tobacco)  that governments, which receive large tax revenues from an unhealthy or dangerous product,  are reluctant and slow to do too much to suppress or discourage use of that product.  Were it to be legalised, it is highly likely that its use would increase. Its bad consequences would then increase as well (driving while under the influence of marijuana  is already a growing problem and public danger in the UK, and I have many times highlighted here the instances of violent criminals being under the influence of marijuana at the time of their crimes).

 

So it is at least arguable that its widespread use would be at least as disastrous as the widespread use of alcohol -which nobody would now make legal, if it were illegal, in the knowledge of its effects which we now possess. But as we also know, products which have been legal and in mass use for any significant period cannot realistically be made illegal again. Legalisation is an irreversible step, and it would be an act of extraordinary rashness to legalise marijuana just as we begin to discover its dangers.**

 

 

Your pointing up of the few cases of damage done by cannabis....

 

 

***PH comments: This, too , is a misunderstanding. I repeat, for the umpteenth time, that the cases about which I write are chosen because they are from a small sub-set of high-profile crimes where in-depth reporting has uncovered the use of cannabis. In this sub-set, the correlation between marijuana use and violence is close to 100%. We simply do not know how pervasive its use is among less-prominent criminals, because nobody has even asked. It would be unwise to be too sure about the far greater number of  uninvestigated crimes. This is why I call for an inquiry into this very thing. Once again,  to move towards legalisation *before* such an inquiry has reported is highly irresponsible.***

 

 .... are insignificant when compared to the overall numbers of people using the drug.

 

 

***PH responds:  See above, but until the correlation between violent crime as a whole and cannabis use is established, he cannot actually yet say that with any confidence. There is a lot of violent crime in our society which has been growing since cannabis was decriminalised. In any case, as he well knows, the violent crime issue merely *highlights* the basic problem - the damage the drug apparently does to the mental health of its users.This can take many forms, some homicidally violent, others merely tragic and miserable.***

 

  It is equivalent to someone pointing to skid row alcoholics and demanding alcohol be banned; a call which would rightly be seen as ridiculous.

 

***PH: Not really. Most alcohol abuse does not lead to skid row, but just to unhappy and often desperate families in ruined homes, unseen by outsiders, ending in physical ill-health, unemployment, poverty and early death. That does not mean that it is illegitimate to point to the dreadful violence done by some users, as a reason for restricting its sale. And anyone with any knowledge of its effects would probably wish that alcohol had never *been* legal in the first place. The problem, for the third time is that it has been legal and in mass use for many centuries. Attempts to rescind this permission have failed wherever they have been tried.

We do not (with alcohol) possess the great piece of good fortune we have in the case of marijuana. Marijuana has never been both legal and in mass use. We can still prevent it ever reaching the same levels of use that alcohol has attained, as long as people such as Mr Falconer are ignored****

 

 

I am very sorry for those who suffer ill-effects from using cannabis, but the truth is that if the market were legal, it would [a] be easier for people to get help as it would no longer be a furtive illicit vice which must be denied by the user

 

***PH: This is twaddle. As we have demonstrated here repeatedly, the marijuana user has precisely nothing to fear from the law.  I am not sure what 'help' he suggests they might seek, but the best help would never to take it at all.****

 

 ...and also [b] the quality of the cannabis used would be far higher than in the illegal market of today, where high THC skunk is the product most often used: the cannabis equivalent of the bathtub gin of the 1920's.

 

***PH: Once again twaddle. Legal alcohol is sold in increasingly high strengths, because it is what consumers want. The same would be true of legal marijuana. A poison is a poison is a poison. 'Quality' does not make it less so.****

 

You also probably know but fail to mention, in the majority of cases of cannabis psychosis it is a temporary condition which resolves when the person suffering it ceases using cannabis, rather than a lifetime mental derangement as you claim.

 

***PH notes: I would be interested to know of his evidence for this. My concern is in any case not 'cannabis psychosis', a term whose meaning seems to me to be vague and hard to define, but the long-term effects of the drug on the human brain, a complaint which so far has no name, but (as I explain in my book 'The War We Never Fought') mental illness is notoriously hard to define or diagnose in any objective, testable way.  Yet it undoubtedly exists, in the form of irrational and often self-destructive behaviour in the sufferer, normally following some sort of physical or chemical damage to brain tissue. This is seldom if ever reparable. ****

You also state in regard to crime figures that the reduction in crime is due solely to reclassification of offences, which comes pretty close to the truly bottom of the barrel prohibitionist argument that "why don't we just legalise murder and theft and then we won't have any crime problem at all", conveniently ignoring the prescient fact that cannabis use, unlike theft and murder is a victimless 'crime',

 

 

***PH notes: My arguments about crime figures can be examined exhaustively elsewhere E.g.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/11/the-fiddling-of-crime-figures-vindication-of-my-warnings.html .

As for the 'victimless crime' claim, on the contrary (as I have many times said here ( and as he would know if , as he claims above, he 'knows my arguments backwards') the principal victims of the marijuana abuser are his family.**

 

...unlike theft and murder which have very real victims who demand and should receive justice. Cannabis is only became a crime because right-wing, authoritarian racist bigots legislated prohibition statutes to make it so, a pattern that has been repeated ever since, especially by Richard Nixon, whose adviser John Ehrlichman later admitted the War on Drugs was fabricated in order to allow a police attack on the counter-culture and the civil rights movements.

***PH notes: this is just assertion and rhetoric. The laws against marijuana originate (via the League of Nations) in the terrible problems experienced in Egypt following widespread use of the drug, and first resisted by 'Russell Pasha'. This is described in my book, 'The War We Never Fought' .I believe Mr Erhrlichman has a bit of a grudge against his former employer, and I can easily understand why that might be. I am not sure we can take his testimony as gospel. ***

Finally, your claim that cannabis legalisation will inevitably be followed by marketing, advertising and internet sales. How is it then, that the government is able to regulate tobacco successfully, disallowing advertising and marketing etc of that substance,

***PH: It has taken governments more than half a century to impose anything remotely resembling control on tobacco, all of these restrictions fought inch by inch by Big Tobacco, during which time millions have died needlessly. To this day, these measures still fail to prevent millions of people from smoking, and from taking up smoking. Big Tobacco was driven backwards partly because people like Mr Falconer by and large viewed it with contempt, and government felt more confident in taking it on. But Billionaire Big Dope, by contrast  has the sympathy and support of such people, and will therefore be far better able to resist attempts to control it. Also all modern western governments are desperate for tax revenue, and will not want to diminish it*

 

....but somehow will not be able to do the same with cannabis, which of course it will be able to do, as you well know.

***PH: No, they won't, no 'somehow' about it. See above.****

I quite expect that in keeping with your usual pattern, you will not allow this reply to your claims to appear on your blog, as you seem to have a tendency to want the last word.

*** PH his claim is proved untrue by its appearance here. He should withdraw it.****

 

No matter, the facts remain the facts, and on drug policy I repeat, you are quite simply wrong.

 

***PH adds: In his opinion, which is not, as he seems to think, a fact . Rather far from it, in fact***.