Resting My Case

This is my last substantive reply to Tim Wilkinson, and to other supporters of cannabis decriminalisation.

I've failed to communicate two of my fears – one my fear of the destruction of the link between effort and reward, and the other my fear that the general legalisation of mind-altering drugs produces passive and easily manipulated citizens. I think that failure is impossible to rectify - because you either care about such things or you do not. Cannabis users, and drug legalisers in general, don't.

If you do not, then you reach for the pill, or the bottle or the spliff or the syringe, or you abandon any attempt to save people from the personal disasters for them and their friends and families and colleagues which these things bring about.

If you do, you try to change the world for the better within your power. I  believe myself to be descended from some of the Puritans who were Cromwell's Ironsides, and I'm proud of that. When I listen to the excuses made for the culture of self-stupefaction, I can feel the scorn of those sober old Psalm-singers in my blood, and I'm with them. They looked the world full in the face, fought against what they thought was wrong, and also knew what they fought for and loved what they knew.

This country would not be what it is,  if it fell into the hands of people who lay down, shrugged and giggled, rather than people who rose up and fought. I cannot make people care about this who don't, especially those who have already altered their brains by taking such drugs. But I hope there are enough of the old sort to see that changing your perception rather than reforming reality is the road to slavery.

How sad that the only thing about modern Britain that makes the cannabis lobby  angry is the continued existence a few individuals like me, who wish to deny them their dope.

Now,  a brief summary of two earlier posts, to avoid misunderstanding. My central point is that the study, classification and diagnosis of mental illness is in its infancy, and in many cases far from objective. It is therefore unreasonable to expect there to be (as there is in the case of cigarettes and lung cancer) a clear and easily quantified connection. To say 'this isn't important because it isn't precise' is to avoid the undoubted knowledge that mind-altering drugs are a risk to mental health.

There is without doubt some correlation between the use of cannabis and permanent, irreversible mental disturbance. No drug being tested for marketing or prescription would be licensed with such a suspicion hanging over it. Cannabis, for whatever historic reasons, remains illegal and we therefore have (as we never did over tobacco or alcohol, points made ad nauseam) the chance to prevent it from becoming commercially available.

Nothing of lasting value or importance would be lost if Cannabis disappeared from our society.  Cannabis users know this , as they also know that they are privately concerned by some of its effects on them, but they prefer not to admit this to opponents such as me.

Even if you accept ( as I do not) the various claims made for its medical benefits, such benefits could certainly not be provided by the drug as it is currently used by most of its users, as a smoked and inhaled vapour in unmeasurable doses. Nor do the 'medical' claims made for it, questionable as they are, overcome the grave dangers it appears to have.

I believe Thalidomide was quite effective in its main role as a suppressor of morning sickness among pregnant women. But who cares? Its other effect,  resulting in children missing limbs or otherwise harmed, simply cancels this out. The danger of severe and irreversible mental illness may not be precisely comparable to the effects of Thalidomide. But it does not seem to me to be that much less important, especially having seen these effects at first hand.

The truth is that cannabis is predominantly and almost invariably used as a pleasure drug, not as medicine. Its supporters are being disingenuous when they pretend otherwise, because they know that the equation between their desire for pleasure, and the danger to users which they seek to minimise, is not very creditable to them.

On the question of the law, serious persons know perfectly well that the law functions as a deterrent form of street- theatre, in which examples are made to turn the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just.

Most cannabis users don't find it such a marvellous experience that they'd be prepared to risk six months at hard labour for a second offence of possession (my suggested minimum penalty, the first offence being dealt with by a genuine 'caution', whose condition would be that the cautioned person never subsequently committed the same offence).  Permitting premises to be used for its use would also be treated in the same way. This ( as with the smoking ban) has the effect of turning every householder or owner of commercial premises into an ally of the law.

After a brief flurry of convictions and imprisonment, during which the actual unyielding severity of the new law would be demonstrated, use would fall with amazing rapidity.  My opponents know this. They know they would be too scared to carry on possessing under those circumstances. That is why they get so cross with me. Because my plan would work, and deprive them of their pleasure.

I have no doubt that, among dope-smokers as in the rest of society, there would be quite enough informers willing to earn money or favours from the police to ensure that all users had a lively fear of being caught and prosecuted.

It's just a question of will, a thing our governing class has lacked for many years. 

By the way, I'm not, as Mr Wilkinson characterises me,  an 'opponent of nannying, interfering government action.'

He must have mistaken me for someone else. I'm not a 'libertarian', whatever that is. I'm a conservative.  I'm just an opponent of the *wrong sort* of nannying, interfering, government action.

And my comparison of the drivel talked now about cannabis and talked in the past about cigarettes is just that, a drivel comparison to demonstrate how intelligent people will talk rubbish and defy the blazing truth in defence of a selfish personal interest. It is not a suggestion that cannabis is fatal (though it seems to me that a permanently mentally ill person is in many important ways dead to those who love him or her). Nor is it a contribution to the argument about cannabis and cancer.

As I said, I have no large hopes of converting the cannabis zealots who have been hate-bombing this site for weeks now. They have their greasy pleasure to defend, and, having destroyed almost all opposition to their desires, they seek to silence me too.

I just think that the whirligig of time brings in its revenges, that things may not always be as they are now, and that conventional wisdom must be opposed when it is dangerous, so that real wisdom survives to recover when the folly is past. As Barbara Wootton once said  in a very different context 'Again and again I have had the satisfaction of seeing the laughable idealism of one generation evolve into the accepted commonplace of the next.' 

This is such an era. I wish, oh how I wish, I were as much of a threat to cannabis users as they imagine me to be.