An Evening with Howard Marks

I can’t possibly give a full account of my encounter with Howard Marks in Oxford on Thursday evening, as you can't atke notes on a debate when you're taking part in it, but I thought readers might appreciate a few notes on the event.

First, I should explain how it is we came to be debating. Mr Marks and I first met on a windy evening in Blackpool more than ten years ago, when we were both speaking at a National Union of Students event, on drug laws, in the vast and rather lovely Winter Gardens.

It was quite a big meeting and we were having quite a lot of fun arguing when some commissar from the NUS marched on to the stage,  switched off my microphone and told me I had to leave. When I asked why he told me that I surely already knew. I said I had no idea. I then foghorned my protest to the hall, not needing the microphones, and rose rather angrily to go.

Howard (as I have ever since called him) behaved magnificently. He scooped up his notes, took me by the arm in a very friendly way and said ‘Well,  if he’s going, I’m going too!’

We were besieged, as we went, by a very small crowd of angry, heavily-pierced people, who shrilled various incomprehensible but plainly critical remarks at me. (It turned out later that they had been fed, and willingly believed, a rumour that I had said I was a racist and proud of it, a false claim which later led me to threaten a lawsuit against the individual responsible for spreading it,  the only time I have done this. The person very swiftly retracted and apologised).

 I was then intercepted by a (very cunning) police officer, who led me into a side room. He offered me an escort to the railway station. I was, it seemed, actually being run out of town.

Oh come on, ‘ I said ‘Don’t be silly. They’re only Trots. I used to be one. They're all mouth and no trousers.  I’m not afraid of them. I’m quite happy to walk out there and brave whatever they want to say to me.’

‘Ah’ replied the subtle officer. 'I quite see. But you may have noticed – who couldn’t - that there’s rather a lot of glass in this building, some of it quite old and valuable? ’

I admitted that this is so. The Winter Gardens are a majestic Edwardian palace of glass and wood, the glory of Blackpool, if you like. I’m rather fond of them.

‘Well, sir, you see, if there were serious damage to that glass, I’d be held responsible for failing to keep the peace, which wouldn’t be very nice, would it? You’d be doing me a great favour if you let me slip you out by a back way I know, and on to the railway station’.

When it was put like that, I’d have been a heel if I’d refused. So  just said ‘ Oh, all right then. But no need to go to the station. I’m sure I’ll be safe in Blackpool till the morning’. And so I did.

But I never forgot Howard’s chivalry, and his instinctive rally to the side of liberty, even the liberty of an opponent he didn’t know, and had no reason to like.  If ever I seek a definition of magnanimity, I recall that evening.

A little while later we found ourselves debating again, this time in Durham.  Once again, we enjoyed the encounter, without conceding anything to each other in the argument. There was a vote, and to my surprise I won it, as Howard is a hero in the student world . Something similar happened in Exeter.

So it occurred to me to seek a rematch (I think the vote last night was more or less even, to the extent these things matter. My view is that a debate without a vote is like tennis without a net) .

Howard’s argument rested heavily on the fact that the old League of Nations had been panicked into banning cannabis by the more-or-less hysterical urgings ( as he described them) of an Egyptian delegate, plus the more usual points about the bad effects of illegality on users and on the purity etc of the drug, and the point that many eminent scientists and others had used cannabis without ill-effect.  Regular readers here will be familiar with Malcolm Muggeridge’s rather more measured description, in ‘Chronicles of Wasted Time’(and quoted in two of my books, 'Abolition of Liberty' and 'The War We Never Fought'),  of the baleful effect of widespread cannabis smoking on the Egyptian people in the 1920s. There was clearly something bad going on.

My case will be familiar to regular readers here and I won’t rehearse it. I suspect Howard is broadly right that the dangers of hashish, as it then was, were in some ways misrepresented to the League. That is because in those days we knew so little about this drug, which was then almost unknown in the western world, and in fact we knew very little about any drug. Like the exaggerations of ‘Reefer Madness’ so often mocked by the pro-dope campaign, such arguments now look foolish.

But they contained, for all their crudity, an essential truth – that  the ingredients of cannabis which we have now isolated and studied, are powerful psychotropics which can have unpredictable and long-delayed effects. Just how bad those are, and what action they justify, are the real issues for our time.

Each of us teased the other a bit, but without malice.

We then had an all-too-short period of questions, again quite like the sort of subjects which come up here. I think, at the end, many there felt that they could easily have gone on for longer. But bookshop staff have homes to go to, and we couldn’t stay there all night. We meet again on Monday 29th October, in Bristol, but I’m told that’s sold out.

Perhaps we might do it again. I’ve no doubt our discussions serve the cause of truth, and the cause of free speech. And they demonstrate that opponents in this matter can behave towards each other with humour and personal generosity (unlike reviewers in ‘The Observer’) . I’m also meeting Peter Reynolds of CLEAR at Exeter University on the evening of Thursday 29th November, and Tim Wilkinson ( see www.surelysomemistake.blogspot.com) in London on 14th November.