Draconian Prohibition Strikes Again

What did I tell you? On Saturday in London, an event took place which, even ten years ago, would have caused some problems for the police and the government. As only one national newspaper reported :’THOUSANDS of youngsters openly smoked cannabis in a central London park this weekend. As they lounged on the grass amid a fog of marijuana smoke, it resembled a scene from the Woodstock music festival. Up to 2,000 gathered in Hyde Park on Saturday to campaign for the legalisation of cannabis.  Groups of teenagers smoked what appeared to be cannabis joints as parents with young children played nearby. A handful of police officers made no obvious attempt to arrest anyone for drug offences.  Yesterday Scotland Yard said no arrests had been made in Hyde Park for possession of cannabis.’

 

The date, if written in the American style (4/20) has some mystical association for dope smokers which I once tracked down but then forgot, as it was so boring and trivial.  But the point is that, in the very centre of the capital, in an area which the police do actually patrol ( and where officers were, without doubt,  actually present), a criminal offence (Possession of a Class ‘B’ illegal drug, as classified under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971) appears to have been committed by a substantial number of people, in conditions of total publicity, not to mention near-total predictability, since it was announced and publicised, well in advance,  on Facebook, which the Police have learned to use and often take very seriously. And what do we find? After initial reports that there had been no arrests at all, it later transpired that there had in fact been a small number.

 

According to the BBC website, 14 ‘cannabis warnings’ were issued (these have no legal force and are not centrally recorded, nor were they ever enacted by Parliament, just invented by the police themselves as a way of doing nothing while appearing to do something) . Two (that’s two) people were arrested for cannabis possession and one for robbery.

 

The organisers claimed, perhaps exaggeratedly, that more than 10,000 people had attended (the contrasting Police figure was ‘far more than 200’, The DM report put it at 2,000). In any case the ‘London Cannabis Club’ ( a body previously unknown to me, but perhaps soon to open premises on St James’s or Pall Mall, with leather arm chairs and obsequious servants) reported ‘no problems or arrests, the police left us alone’.

 

A police spokesperson said extra officers had been put in place, saying that it was difficult to tell who was there to mark the event and who was just enjoying the sunshine.  He added: ‘Regardless of their reason for being in the park, anyone seen by officers openly smoking cannabis in Hyde Park or elsewhere in Westminster would be dealt with in the same way, either by means of a cannabis warning or an arrest.’

 

I think we get the picture, especially if we read the above words with the same care with which they were, presumably,  chosen.  

 

Now, this is not in any way news to me, or a surprise to me, or a surprise to any of my readers who have paid the faintest attention to what I have been saying for some years now. What happened is exactly what I would have expected to happen, as I so often say that the police have given up even bothering to make any serious effort to enforce the law against cannabis possession.  Why should they? The courts and the Crown Prosecution Service have no interest in pursuing such cases. Why waste time arresting people who will probably not be prosecuted, and , if they are, will not be meaningfully punished? Just don't embarrass the government by making it plain that the weakness comes from them. The politicians must be allowed to pretend that they are still 'tough'.

 

But it surely must be a surprise to  to all the other commentators and think tankers,   and many journalists, and of course basement-dwelling ‘comment warriors’ from the cannabis community (even now homing in on this article as part of their effort to stamp out the last flickering flames of dissent),  who perpetually inform me that there is a ‘war on drugs’, that it is comparable to ‘Prohibition’  and that it has failed.

 

And yet here’s the paradox. The story appeared in the Daily Mail, sister of my own Mail on Sunday,  both among the very few newspapers that have continued to be realistic about the cannabis matter, and which have not fallen in with the absurd position that ‘The War on Drugs Has failed – so therefore let us call it off’.

 

To such newspapers, the event is not a shock, and barely qualifies as news – which is by its nature surprising and out of step with the general perception of how things are as well as how they ought to be. But for all those newspapers and media which insist that we have a Draconian, Eliot Ness-style. Prohibitionary  ‘war on drugs’, surely such an event was a major shock, worthy of prominent treatment.  But they didn’t mention it.

 

Where were the mass arrests by zealous police, the weeping, innocent young people marched off to jail, flung brusquely into paddy wagons by inflexible law enforcers,  their bright futures thoughtlessly, wastefully ruined by cruel, ‘Draconian’ prosecution and inescapable criminal records?

 

As George Orwell used to say, the only proper response to such beliefs is the old English expression of disbelief ‘And then you wake up’.

 

 

Because, just as in the USA ( where the THC weed is all but legal in many states, under the ludicrous pretence that it is a medicine), no such thing happened, or could have happened. In which case, how do these great organs of news and information justify their claim that there is such a war?

 

They don’t. They are silent about it. And they get away with it.