Some Responses to Alex Stevens

Various drug decriminalisers have been retweeting a rather feeble set of ripostes to me by a Kent University academic called Alex Stevens, while carefully ignoring the replies I made to them at the time. Below are his Twitter messages and my replies to them (a computer problem over which I have no control means that you will have to go to his original tweets on his timeline yesterday morning (29th July) @alexstevenskent,  for the links he supplied, but this is not difficult, and I don���t challenge any of his facts, just the use he makes of them).

 

I met Stevens long ago, I guess it must be seven or eight years ago, at a debate at the University of Kent in Canterbury. At that time I still believed that those who campaigned for the relaxation of the drug laws were rational beings open to persuasion. I know now that this is not so, and that Big Dope is a huge, screaming juggernaut of selfishness and greed whose attitude towards opponents is that they must be shouted down and crushed lest they prevent the triumph of their lobby. My first real intimation of this problem was the debate against Stevens, in which it was quite plain to me, when it came to rebuttals, that he had not listened to a word I had said and ��� more importantly ��� did not think it necessary to do so. His case remained, absurdly, that there was a 'war on drugs' which had failed and that the law was engaging in serious repression of marijuana use. 

I must say  I had thought even the worst of the liberalisers had abandoned this now, just as most of them have been compelled to accept that there is a strong and worrying correlation between marijuana and mental illness ( a truth they jeered it only seven or eight years ago). It seems not. 

 

Stevens: Data from @MoJGovUk shows that there have been over 218,000 criminal convictions for cannabis possession in England and Wales since 2008. Over 3,800 cases where cannabis possession was the most serious offence led to a custodial sentence.

 

PH: Terrific, That means an average of 21,800 a year, in a country where the offence of possession is committed tens of thousands of times a week.

I commend to you 'Cannabis Nation' by James H.Mills, OUP 2013, esp pp 156-157: Notes that by 1979 (!) there was only one first offender... awarded an immediate custodial sentence...for a single offence of possession of cannabis'. Everybody but you knows perfectly well that marijuana possession has been de facto decriminalised for years. That's why London stinks of marijuana, and people smoke it in Hyde Park in front of the police, and nothing happens to them.

Possession is listed as 'the most serious offence' because of the very high theoretical maximum sentence of five years plus unlimited fine. But it will not usually have been the reason for the custodial sentence, as you well know. The interesting thing is why an apparently intelligent person such as you should continue to believe and peddle the comically untrue idea that use of marijuana is severely repressed.

 

Stevens: The UK does not use the harshest punishments in the world for cannabis possession. But, given the lack of evidence of benefit, these convictions and sentences are disproportionate and unjust. And they fall most heavily on black people

 

PH: I'm with you here. We should arrest many, many more rich white people for drug possession. I'm an equal opportunity prohibitionist.

 

 

Stevens: Mr Hitchens likes to point at some countries ��� like S Korea and Japan ��� that have harsher punishment. But ��� again ��� this is not how correlations are demonstrated in the social sciences. You need to look at a wider sample of cases, not just the convenient ones you select.

 

 

PH: No, of course, the existence of any actual examples which contradict legalisation propaganda must obviously be ignored. So sorry for mentioning them.

 

 

Stevens: And when we look across time in Europe, we do not find that changes in the punishment of cannabis users are associated with changes in cannabis use.

 

PH: A simple rather dim confusion of which an academic should be ashamed. It is not the theoretical penalties which make a difference, but the practical enforcement of them. Heavy theoretical penalties, unenforced as here, have no impact.

 

Stevens: And Mr Hitchens, as shown by

@Dave_Brew has a very limited understanding of Japan, where the law is less strictly enforced than he imagines

 

PH: What have I said which is contradicted by this article, such as it is? Give referenced direct quotes. Show where they conflict. [subsequent note. I have only said, repeatedly and simply, that Japan and South Korea continue to prosecute for possession, and have lower levels of consumption. I believe these facts are connected. That is all]

 

 

Stevens: And when we look at the most recent decriminalisations of cannabis in the USA, we do not see increases in use

 

PH: When have I said that they would? Decriminalisation of the drug generally follows a long period of lax non-enforcement, such as we have here. An immediate major jump would not be likely.

 

Stevens went on to slither out of a request by me that he should support my call for a proper judge-led inquiry into the apparent correlation between marijuana use and criminal violence.Why would anyone not support such an inquiry?  He also tweeted a blatant misrepresentation of the point I had made about the effects of decriminalisation on levels of use. I hope I shall have no further need or cause to deal with him. It is never a pleasant or uplifting experience.