Think it possible that ye may be mistaken

The first slice of my response to Tim Wilkinson's challenge, on the subject of drugs and the law, on his blog 'Surely Some Mistake', follows.   I have been grazing on the southern slopes of his enormous article, and do not claim to have dealt with it all yet.  

I will be selecting several key passages (well, key passages in my view) from Mr Wilkinson's challenge, and will reply to them piece by piece. My replies are marked thus**.

I think this technique makes the argument easier to follow.

Mr Wilkinson opens: "My starting point is that we should presume that behaviours should be legal, and then ask - are there good reasons to make this behaviour a criminal offence? "

**Mine is slightly different. I don't think, as Mr Wilkinson implies, that we are naturally lawful creatures. I start from a willing acknowledgement that there will have to be laws.

I presume that any civilised society will require laws, because – while a society ruled entirely by conscience is a theoretical ideal – in practice we know that we cannot rely on conscience alone. On the contrary, by doing so we put the just and the conscientious at the mercy of the disobedient. 

And in any case Utopia can only ever be approached (though never reached) across an ocean of blood. We should steer clear of attempts at perfection and accept that government is often a matter of choosing between one set of disadvantages and another.

Some consequences follow from this, consequences which are unappealing to many. There are those who wish to do what they want and think they should be the judges of whether it is right. In many cases these are people who believe that, because their freedom to take an action has done them no harm (or so they think), then it should be licensed for all. There are those who dislike inflicting any kind of hurt on others and abdicate responsibility for the penal enforcement of laws. Laws, to be laws at all, must apply to all, not just to some.

Laws must also ultimately be enforced with punishments for those who break them, punishments which by their nature cannot be pleasant.

And many actions which are or appear to be harmless for one individual, particularly a wealthy and strong one – are disastrous if adopted by the poor and weak. No-fault divorce is one example of this. I believe the taking of some drugs is another. I here make a point that will recur throughout this discussion. The response to each problem will be different. I would not, for instance, make divorce a criminal offence. But I would reinstate the pre-1972 criminal law for cannabis, which meant that its possession was treated as seriously as trafficking, and that a first-offender could (and sometimes did) go to prison.

Mr Wilkinson continues: 'My answer is no. Ordinary cannabis users derive great enjoyment and – yes – pleasure from their indulgence in the weed. Many report taking it in modest quantities and find that it aids relaxation, enhances their appreciation of food, music, art and sex, and even stimulates creativity.'

**And I reply 'So what?'  I believe there are people who enjoy mistreating animals.  For all I know they say it enhances their appreciation of art, food , music and sex, and stimulates creativity – though I haven't a clue how one would measure any of these things anyway.  I couldn't care less.  Their pleasure in this activity is of no interest or consequence in any discussion of what the law should say about cruelty to animals.

And no, I am not comparing cannabis smoking to cruelty to animals, merely demonstrating that the point is irrelevant. 

Mr Wilkinson proceeds: 'To deny these benefits by more effective prohibition would involve far more oppressive measures,'

**I am a little lost here. Something seems to have gone missing. Far more oppressive than what? And in any case the purpose of strengthening and enforcing an (existing if weakened law) is not to deny anyone any pleasure. That is propaganda. Pleasure may be denied, but that is not the purpose of the law. As we shall see.
As for 'oppressive', I do not think this word can be used for a law which punishes the measurable possession of an illegal substance with stipulated penalties. If it is right for the substance to be illegal (the core of the argument) then it is right for the law to punish its possession. We are not talking about freedom of speech or thought here.

Mr Wilkinson continues: 'for the sake of preventing abusive overindulgence and the risk of cancer which accompanies smoking (though not as far as I know ingestion or inhalation of vapour). Those risks could be adequately mitigated, or in the case of the cancer risk, properly and – one might hope - honestly  publicised, under legalisation and regulation.'

**I am not sure what is meant here by 'abusive overindulgence'.  As for the risk of cancer, while it undoubtedly exists,  it is not my principal concern.

Mr Wilkinson continues: 'Overblown claims about the dangers are rightly seen as ridiculous by those who know anything about it.'

**This is the most problematic statement in his argument so far.
It is perhaps the most important point on which both sides must work with the same material. I want to know precisely which claims he views as 'overblown', and whether he accepts that cannabis has – or might in future be found to have -  any dangers for those who use it. And if so, what he believes those dangers are.

He continues: 'which makes officialdom look foolish and means that even accurate information is likely to be disregarded.'

**I'm all in favour of avoiding overblown claims. As he rightly says, they are likely to be laughed at. One recalls the 'Heroin Screws You Up' advertisement. He will not find me making claims about people dying from drug abuse (though some do) because I don't regard it as the main danger, and I too think it unwise to overstate my case with incredible claims.

And I do in any case have a parallel case against the legalisation of stupefying substances, which would stand if they were physically harmless.

Let me sum this up: First, morally – the pleasure and joy and exaltation provided artificially by drugs, and naturally by the human body are rewards for effort and courage. You may believe this is a created fact or the consequence of evolutionary biology, but the arrangement is beneficial to humankind because it limits this reward to those who have earned it. If you haven't delivered the Gettysburg address, or won the Second World War, or designed St Paul's Cathedral, or written Beethoven's Violin Concerto, you shouldn't be able to feel as if you had.  If you can, then people will stop doing these things.  I might add Allan Bloom's point in 'The Closing of the American Mind', to some extent backed up by Tim Lott in 'The Scent of Dried Roses', that those who have achieved exaltation through drugs in early life are left afterwards with an emptiness, a flatness, an absence of the superlative, which stays with them all their lives. I have a strong suspicion that the human body has only a limited capacity to deliver the sensation of joy, and that the use of drugs eventually exhausts it, with sad consequences for the individual.

Obviously the religious person would see something straightforwardly wrong in messing around with the gifts of God in this way. But the Atheist (I'll have an interesting example of this later) also might consider that there are good rational and material justifications for restraining unwise and impulsive young people from consuming chemicals which might  - unexpectedly and irreversibly - drain all the colour out of their later lives.

Next there is the argument from human liberty and responsibility. Aldous Huxley's imaginary drug Soma was a key part of the soft but devastating repressive apparatus of his Brave New World. In one scene a riot is actually put down by police spraying Soma on an angry crowd of Deltas. I think there is a powerful point in this. Rulers may well be glad to have a population which is numbed by artificial pleasure, and can take a holiday from reality( and responsibility, and legitimate discontent)  by ingesting a happiness drug.  Creating contentment where there should be discontent,  dulling eyes that should be clear, closing ears that ought to be hearing the sound of dissent , drowning protests in giggles and manufacturing chemical happiness where there ought to be criticism and reform are all – surely -  things which those honestly interested in freedom should dislike.

Mr Wilkinson goes on:  'Legal regulated cannabis would be of known strength and free from such very harmful adulterants as wax, petrol, even plastic, which can be found in poor-quality illegal hashish.'

**The same can be said of tobacco, alcohol and motor cars, three legal scourges which we already have among us. If the substance, or the commodity is fundamentally damaging anyway, listing its contents on the packet, surrounding it with safety regulations  or keeping it free from impurities will not get rid of the fundamental  damage it does. It will only make it more 'acceptable' while allowing the wrong to continue.  Indeed, the campaign to make motor cars safer has indeed made them safer for those inside them, but it has done little or nothing for the safety of pedestrians and cyclists, and road casualties have fallen mainly because so many children no longer dare bicycle to school (or their parents daren't let them) and because of a rigid apartheid which keeps pedestrians from getting in the way of cars, shoving them into tunnels or forcing them to wait long minutes while humorously-entitled 'pedestrian-controlled traffic lights' wait to change in their favour.

So no, 'regulation' of something fundamentally bad doesn't get rid of its fundamental badness. Sometimes we may have to accept it as a compromise while we try to remove a poison from our culture, or at least greatly restrict it. But that is a defeat, and there is no need to acknowledge defeat with cannabis. It is nothing like so deep in our culture as cars, alcohol or tobacco. Not yet, anyway. 'Regulation' would help to make it so.

Mr Wilkinson says: 'The current system already exposes users to criminal sanctions and means they must become involved at the margins of the criminal world to get hold of it, with the concomitant aversion to police and contempt for the law."

**This is not really true. There are no serious criminal sanctions for possession of cannabis, and most 'dealers' are not Colombian gangsters or Sam Giancana-lookalikes in fedoras, but a mate at school or in the pub.

Also what is this word 'must'? 

They don't have to get hold of it. They want to. They know it is illegal. But alas, they also know the law isn't enforced.  That is the reason for their contempt for the law, that it is contemptible. It pretends to exist, but doesn't.  As for 'aversion to the police', hard to feel much aversion for people you never see.