An Interesting Article About the Sixties Generation

In my much-maligned (mostly by people who refuse actually to read it) book ‘The War We Never Fought’, I argued that there is now a constituency in this country for drug decriminalisation. It is a constituency of the influential, of the 60s generation come to power and influence.

 

I thought this was self-evidently true, and was very struck by the tragic case of Brian Dodgeon, the University lecturer whose store of illegal drugs was found by teenagers holding an unsupervised  party in his house, one of whom died after taking ‘ecstasy’ tablets she found there.

 

Mr Dodgeon is obviously full of remorse. He was badly injured some months ago after jumping off a Motorway bridge, and he tearfully apologised , in the Coroner’s Court, to the parents of the girl who died, Isobel Jones-Reilly.

 

The Coroner spoke to him sharply for leaving the teenagers unsupervised. Well, I don’t have a full transcript of what the Coroner said, and in separate  proceedings Mr Dodgeon has been given a suspended prison sentence after admitting drug possession. But it still seems to me that the issue is not really one of supervision, but about whether University lecturers in their sixties should keep and use illegal drugs in their homes. My view is that it is utterly morally wrong. But I know that the law is a good deal less interested than it pretends to be, and I tend to think that this weakens the moral barriers to such behaviour.

 

I suspect that this behaviour is fairly normal among people of Mr Dodgeon’s sort - vaguely leftish big city employees of vaguely leftish publicly-financed cultural and educational bodies. And I think that sympathy for such things, even among those who no longer use drugs themselves,  runs wider still. That’s what I said in my book, to explain the near-silent, but enormous political power of the decriminalisation lobby.

 

Now, in an article by Carol Sarler in Saturday’s ‘Times’ (3rd August 2013, which is behind a pay-wall and which I therefore cannot reproduce in full or link to) I have found a very interesting statement of the attitude of the Sixties generation (now, confusingly, in their sixties) towards drugs and the law.

 

Ms Sarler, whom I know slightly, and who I should say writes quite often for broadly conservative newspapers and magazines,  was discussing the political shift in Uruguay, which appears to be moving towards open decriminalisation of cannabis. Drug legalisers get terribly excited about such things, as they have about a similar development in Portugal whose outcome is much disputed. Yet they apparently cannot (or perhaps will not) see what is in front of their noses –namely the much more extensive decriminalisation of drugs, covertly permitted in this - much bigger and closer -  country.  They still co-operate with the politicians in the pretence that the British drug laws are sternly enforced.

 

Is this conscious? It certainly helps keep drugs more or less legal, and allows the police and courts to continue to fail to punish their possession effectively. Had the chattering classes been pointing out for the past 40 years that the laws are largely unenforced, and reading the Wootton and Runciman reports more carefully, they would long ago have realised that ‘prohibition’ did not exist. So whatever bad consequences we now have flow from ready availability of drugs, rather than from heavy-handed prevention.

 

But they don’t point this out. In fact the introduction of the ‘Cannabis Warning’ as the main police response to detected cannabis possession (their response to *suspected* possession appears to be to hope it will go away) passed virtually without coverage or discussion. This silence about a huge change in the law is not surprising, as this amendment to the Act was made by the police themselves, without Parliamentary authorisation, let alone the submission of the policy to the voters in any party manifesto.

So I tend to assume that most of those who pontificate on the matter simply aren’t interested in the facts, and continue to live in a 1960s world of stern drugs squads and young men and women doing hard-labour in broad-arrow-splattered convict suits for possessing small quantities of dope. It wasn’t really true in the 1960s. It certainly isn’t now (see my book). But they want to believe it, so they do.  

 

Ms Sarler wrote in the Journal of Record ‘…what matters is less the unfortunate consequences of taking the drug than the unfortunate consequences of outlawing it.’

 

She says that there was tough enforcement when cannabis use rocketed in the 1970s, even for allowing your premises to be used for its consumption. This is more or less true of the very early 1970s, but by 1973 it was over. The law on using premises was overturned in a decisive court case, and I think cancelled in the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act as well. Then the 1971 Act, replacing the previous Dangerous Drugs Act, and coming into effect during 1972, separated cannabis from the other common drugs and began a long process of reducing penalties for its possession, bit by bit. Lord Hailsham (then Lord Chancellor) told magistrates quite specifically, in October 1973, to stop sending people to jail for simple possession of cannabis.

 

Anyway, Ms Sarler’s point is larger than this. She writes of ‘those of us who perfected the art of rolling a joint’ while for some reason holding a Leonard Cohen album, then points out that many of these joint-rollers came from among students (then a much more privileged group than now) and, very soon, they were climbing career ladders.

 

She writes : ‘By the early 1980s conservative estimates had three million of us, largely young professionals, ushering in our nascent dinner-party years by passing the Joint around the route once taken by the port.

 

‘That is three million people born mainly to families that for centuries had prided themselves on their propriety — and here we were, our collective bum on the naughty step. No longer were we instinctively on the side of the police; we called them "pigs" and "fuzz" and the local copper to whom my father would routinely tip his hat was faced, one short generation later, by my sullen antipathy.’

 

She associates this with a ‘counter-culture of defiance’ , and argues that this ‘counter-culture’ was made stronger by the shared illegality of drug taking in this sector of society.

 

I couldn’t say. I had been a puritan Leninist at University, despising ( as I do now) drug takers for their zonked passivity and lack of self-discipline. And by the time she describes I was beginning the long process of growing up.

 

But not all my contemporaries were.  Ms Sarler writes ‘Because no matter how virulent the selective amnesia of many of the powerful might be when media inquisition turns to past drug use, the fact is that the people with whom I sat at those early dinner parties are now in positions of influence. And time and again they prove that the enduring effect of those years has nothing to do with ancient spliffs and everything to do with the severing of a historically presumed connection between the professional classes and forces of law, order and authority.’

 

I’m not wholly convinced by this myself. I think the spliffs were an essential, almost sacred rite of admission to the new cult of selfishness and personal autonomy  that rules our country (‘Nobody tells me what I can and cannot put into my body!’ Etc etc etc). I think the taking of this drug is central to the rejection of the Protestant ethic which is now almost total in our society.

 

In her most startling sentence (I do urge you to find your way to the article) , she seems to me to give a clue to the whole basis of the new orthodoxy. She says ‘…speaking strictly for myself, I still unrepentantly adhere only to laws that happen to suit my purpose.’

 

I think this is an astonishing thing to say, if you live in a civilization based on the rule of law. But I do not think it is that uncommon for educated, influential people to think this. And I am grieved to know it.