On being Insulted by Experts (and non-experts), and my evening with Russell Brand

Well, not an evening, exactly, but a few joyous minutes, connected by some sort of electronic miracle of the kind that has become all too easy in the modern world. The occasion can be found in full at about 40 minutes into this YouTube link

I appear again at around one hour 48 minutes and also briefly at one hour and 54 minutes. And I'm not planning to rehearse arguments on drug legalisation which have been held many times here and can be found in detail in many indexed items, and the comment threads that follow them.

The occasion was a very strange encounter, presented as a debate but in fact not really one, more a sort of combative colloquy, streamed live by Google and Intelligence Squared (who do organise successful debates in conventional style) from a large hole in the ground near King's Cross Station in London, underneath the offices of the 'The Guardian'.

I have no idea how the actual audience came to be selected, though I am used to the fact that metropolitan opinion is generally identical with the received wisdom of the BBC and the left-wing media - I might add that many supposedly conservative newspapers have, during the long slow surrender to drugs of the past 40 years, swallowed the propaganda of the liberalisers.  I am sure that there were far too many people taking part, and I suppose that quite a lot of the audience (especially the overwhelmingly pro-drug online audience, and why is that?) thought that I could usefully have been left out of the cast.

Like Theodore Dalrymple, another sceptic about 'addiction', I was even inconvenient to my own side. Thanks to the widespread acceptance of psychobabble, and the strange ascendancy of the pseudo-scientific chimera known as 'Neuropsychopharmacology' many arguments which would once have been open are now more or less closed, and those who do not agree with the orthodoxy are pushed to the margins.

That is what Tuesday evening's event also demonstrated. My main contributions to the event were as follows. First I blamed drug-takers for their own actions, and also blamed them, and their hedonistic selfishness, for the disasters which have befallen the narco-states, disasters about which that very good man Ed Vulliamy is rightly incensed, though I don't share his solutions.

Second, I stated that drug-taking was itself morally wrong. This is absolutely true for the reasons that I stated, and for other reasons too , which I hadn't time to set out but which are dealt with in my book 'The War We Never Fought' (manuscript now delivered to the publishers).

These are perfectly arguable propositions and I think I made the case for them clearly and rationally. The response I received was not rational. It was a form of rage, mingled with incredulity. They thought everyone like me was dead already. How dare I still be alive? (For an unfettered expression of this hatred see many of the barely coherent comments on the YouTube original, seething with rage and loathing). The alleged comedian in the hat (he was wearing a hat indoors, and nobody else was,  how was it abusive to mention his hat, obviously a consciously chosen personal trademark? Perhaps he didn't like me calling him an 'alleged' comedian, but I have to say I have yet to see any proof of the contention that he is one) responded to my point about selfish rich kids with a tirade of personal abuse and the standard all-purpose false accusation of racial prejudice that is the universal sign of a person who has no good argument, and knows he has no good argument.  As his voice rose to a whine similar to the sound of an ill-tuned hand-dryer, he railed at me for daring to work for a newspaper he didn't agree with (and which caught him out in a piece of behaviour which doesn't exactly redound to his credit). It is amusing to be accused of bigotry by someone who fulfils its characteristics himself.

Mr Brand was one of three people that evening who chose to abuse me personally and crudely.  Another was Julian Assange, a person I have never previously met and for whom I feel, in general terms, some sympathy. If he wants to call me lavatory-wall names, that's his privilege. But once again he offered no serious counter to my point.  And, like Mr Brand, he received the general support of the audience for behaving in this way. The third was the extraordinarily over-rated lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, who – on every occasion when I have debated  him – has shown himself to be rather poor at reasoned debate. This may be excusable, if tiresome, in an amateur, but in one of Her Majesty's counsel, a trained lawyer and part-time judge, it is pretty dispiriting. There are some opponents with whom it is a pleasure and a challenge to argue. He is not one of them. I might also add that in the Green Room beforehand he had approached me (without encouragement) in an ostentatiously  friendly fashion, to which (having encountered him before) I responded with cool civility. I might also add that I received an e-mail from one of the pro-liberalisation speakers saying how much he regretted the rudeness of his side towards me, for which I am grateful.

The point is far greater than a simple matter of manners. The point is that this sort of treatment is the presage of suppression and censorship. Now they are merely shocked that I still dare to say these things, which they had hoped to make unsayable before now. The long collapse of the remaining conservative elements in the Tory party (now almost complete) means that the spectrum of permissible opinion, in public debate, is narrowing sharply, and I do not know how much longer I shall be allowed to express my opinions on major public platforms. The Brave New World grows closer, and the world a little darker, each day.