A Different, Kinder, Better World? My response to Alex Massie
I have only just seen a blog by Alex Massie on the ‘Spectator’ site, in which I am personally criticised. You may find it here
I’d hate Mr Massie or anyone else to think that I had no response to it. So here it is. Mr Massie describes my case – that there is no ‘war on drugs in this country’ - as ‘ridiculous’. He seems to think that this is self-evident, as he introduces the following quotation from an article I wrote for the Spectator a year ago (you can read it here http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8666301/high-society-3/)
with the word ‘seriously’, as if inviting his readers to laugh at the obvious incontestable absurdity of my case. I shall come to that.
This is the extract from my article: ‘How is it that, in a country where drugs are supposedly illegal — where ‘evil dealers’ are endlessly denounced — that drugs are so common and that little or nothing happens to those who are caught in possession of them? How did the ‘cannabis warning’, a gesture without force or penalty, unsanctioned by Parliament, become the preferred response of the police to the crime of possession? How can Pete Doherty drop illegal drugs on the floor of a courthouse, be caught by a security guard and yet walk free from the building, if we are — as we are so often told — running a regime of stern prohibition?
‘The answer is that the official version of events is simply false. Since a momentous Cabinet meeting in February 1970, there has been no ‘war on drugs’ in this country, only the official pretence of one. I beg my fellow commentators, columnists and pundits: please do not take seriously any claims that our drug problems stem from zealous enforcement of cruel laws, or you might find me camping outside your front door in a woolly hat, denouncing you and proclaiming your sins on a bedsheet.’
The last line, I should explain, is a reference to an event described at the start of the article, where I recount the details of a rather funny one-man protest against me, involving a person in a woolly hat with a slogan-decked sheet, on a wet Sunday morning in Southampton.
The rest is self-explanatory and is well-known to regular readers here – the 1969 Wootton Report, with its calls for the law to differentiate between possession and sale (as it had not previously done) and the special classification of supposedly ‘soft’ cannabis, so as to give it an undeserved separate legal status from the other bogeyman drugs, enacted in 1971 with cross-party support; the 1973 instruction to magistrates to cease sending anyone to prison for possession of cannabis; the slow but relentless decriminalisation of cannabis in practice, to the point where a former head of the Scotland Yard Flying Squad could refer to it as a ‘decriminalised drug’ in the early 1990s; the further weakening of the laws following the Paddick Experiment in Brixton and the Runciman Report.
Nobody who knows about the issue really disputes this narrative. One of my principal sources was Steve Abrams, who masterminded the 1967 ‘Times Advertisement calling for decriminalisation, and later the SOMA campaign which led to the Wootton Report and what followed. Shortly before he died, Mr Abrams (a civilised man and an honourable opponent) read my book in proof and kindly let me know that he agreed with its facts and conclusions. He approved of the measures, while I didn’t, but he recognised the facts as correct. Likewise, Paul Addison ( a distinguished historian of the Left) points out in his TLS review of my book and of ‘Cannabis Nation’ by James H. Mills (OUP) that our accounts of events are more or less the same. Mills is far more sympathetic to cannabis than I am, I think I can say.
So what is the basis of Alex Massie’s assumed superiority? Fundamentally, it is a misunderstanding of what I say. Why an intelligent person (as Mr Massie is) should so wholly misunderstand such a simple case, I can only ask, and so can you.
My point is that our decriminalisation is covert and unacknowledged, because international treaties and political necessity currently make open decriminalisation or legislation difficult; also that it is directed mainly at the use and consumption of drugs, not at their importation, cultivation or sale. So far as I can discover, and figures on this are difficult to obtain, the weakening of the cannabis possession laws has been followed by a weakening of the possession laws as applied to Cocaine and Heroin, and also to a softening of sentencing for supply (and the introduction of ‘compounding’ as a way of letting off people importing small amounts of illegal drugs into this country).
Mr Massie reveals his own moral position in this interesting formula, ‘…our “drug problems” - to the extent they exist – are not the consequence of zealous law enforcement. They are, instead, the consequence of the human desire for escapism and the pleasures of losing oneself in a different, kinder, better world. And no laws – at least no proportional or humane laws – can eliminate that. Nor can they defeat that thirst. The appeal of intoxication will always be stronger’.
Well, that’s his opinion. Though I would riposte that nobody expects any law to be universally obeyed. But any law that exists is useless unless it is consistently and rigorously applied. Where laws exist and are not applied, one can safely presume that they exist for propaganda or other dishonest purposes.
The point of laws is to reduce the crimes that they prohibit by credible deterrence, not to make those crimes completely vanish. Their purpose is not to scoop multitudes into the net of punishment, but to scare multitudes away from the illegal act.
And, in the case of life-ruining drugs, to provide a counter to the peer-pressure and celebrity advertising which beguile many immature people into risking their mental health, and so risking the ruin of their own lives and the lives of those who love them. Picture, if you will, the plight of the 70-year-old parent of an incurably mentally-ill 25-year-old, incapable of supporting himself or of any proper social contact, and only able to live from day to day thanks to the ingestion of powerful antipsychotics. I heard of just such a case on Saturday. All involved believe the tragedy was caused by cannabis. I believe such things are increasingly common in our Cannabis Nation. Victimless crime, you say? Ask that parent.
Burglary, one might argue, is the consequence of the human desire to own what we have not earned. No doubt the burglar imagines the world in which he takes freely the property of others as ‘different, kinder and better’ than the one in which he has to work and save to buy these things for himself. That’s his opinion.(Who but a moral fundamentalist can say he’s wrong?) Likewise, no laws can eliminate it, least of all our feeble ones. But would Mr Massie want those laws entirely dismantled, or further weakened, even so?
Mr Massie then states: ‘In England and Wales last year there were no fewer than 58,672 convictions on drug charges. In addition to that some 73, 973 “cannabis warnings” were issued.’
Yet he does not distinguish between the two. Perhaps he doesn’t understand the distinction (though if he had read my book he would). The ‘cannabis warning’ is not a conviction or anything like one; it is a decision by a police officer to fail to enforce the law, endorsed by the association of Chief Police Officers of England and Wales as their preferred response to detection of crime of cannabis possession. It carries no penalty nor any criminal record. And its very existence as preferred response makes police intervention in this activity a waste of time. As anyone who attends such events as the Glastonbury Festival or the Notting Hill Carnival (or a recent pro-cannabis demonstration in the centre of London) well knows, the actual police response to this offence is to try not to notice it at all. The ’warning’ is only activated when the officer is more or less compelled to take notice.
It’s also true that the cannabis laws have a vestigial purpose in police work, allowing police and courts to arrest, charge, prosecute and fine people whom they are pursuing for other offences which they cannot so easily prove against them. As most thieves, vandals and other troublemakers (no doubt in pursuit of a different, kinder and better world) are in fact almost invariably in possession of cannabis, this often serves to put them in the bag. But it is not evidence of a war against drugs, just evidence of the wider powerlessness of authority.
In commenting on the 58,672 convictions on drug charges, one would need a closer analysis to be sure, but I would suspect, from my study of those figures I have been able to obtain (and the various ministries are not very helpful with this) , and my observations of events in the courts from various local newspapers, , that the great majority of these were convictions for possession with intent to supply, or supply, or for repeat offences, or taken into consideration after conviction for other offences, or charges laid against arrested persons who, having been picked up for other offences, were then found to be in possession of illegal drugs which the police could therefore not ignore. Once again, this is not evidence of an active police pursuit of drug takers, for possession.
This should be taken into account in examining the figure which Mr Massie then adduces : ‘And, in England and Wales last year, some 9,562 people were imprisoned having been convicted of one kind of drug offence or another.’
Note, first of all, the contrast between the 58,672 convictions (in a year! In a country peppered with illegal cannabis farms!) and the 9,562 people in prison, many of whom presumably have been there for more than a year. Note the one kind of drug offence or another’, and the ‘having been convicted of’. Interesting that he does not say they are in prison *for* drug offences, a rather more specific statement. Why not? How many of these people were simultaneously convicted of other offences, drug use and trafficking not being unknown among the violent and dishonest? How many were imprisoned for drug offences *alone*? How many were first offenders of any kind? How many were imprisoned for simple cannabis possession on a first offence? It’s just possible that smoke and mirrors are being employed here. Contrast these figures with the facts revealed in an ITV documentary this week
which suggested that there are half a million cannabis farms in this country, many of them ignored by the law because sentencing guidelines spare culprits form prison of they are caught with fewer than ten plants (though nine plants can yield an income , tax-free of course, of £40,000 a year) .
I always like to note, when discussing the subject of cannabis farms, or principal growth industry, the blurted remark on this topic of the terrifying Manchester gun murderer Kiaran Stapleton. You may recall that Stapleton killed the Indian student Anuj Bidve, without the slightest reason or pretext, by walking up to him and shooting him in the head. Anyway, Stapleton said that ‘we got cannabis farms all over and more guns than the police’ (reported by the Manchester Evening News in July 2012). Knowing this, I wonder how Stapleton became the sort of person he is. Farmers, I muse, sometimes consume their own products.
Mr Massie urges me ‘Try telling them [the people in prison having been convicted of one kind of drug offence or another] – and their families – that the War on Drugs is a myth.’
OK . I say to them ‘The War on Drugs is a Myth’. There. Easy.
Mr Massie continues: ‘ To put this number in context there are, almost exactly, as many people imprisoned for drug offences as there are for robbery (5,276), sexual offences (3,459) and criminal damage (1,085) combined.’
Well, yes, and?
Mr Massie partly answers his own question ‘Of course, drug taking and even drug supplying is rather more widespread than these other crimes.’ (I’ll say it is)
‘Even so, there are more convictions on drug offences each year than on crimes of violence against the person (39,176 last year) or burglary (24,547). Of course there are more drug-users in Britain than there are burglars (this is a good thing, by the way) but the idea no-one is convicted, far less imprisoned, because of our drug laws is utterly fanciful. You can only believe this if you have an aversion to the facts.’
It’s so easy to dismiss arguments other people haven’t made. Nobody , least of all me, said that *no-one* is convicted or imprisoned. The important thing is who is imprisoned, and who is not. And the distinction ( as my book explains) is driven by the political need to pretend that we have laws against drugs, when in fact we have none against their possession and use. We insist on an unhinged difference - between the treatment of drug abusers (who voluntarily seek out these evil dealers) as victims, and of drug traffickers as the sum of all evil. If the substance isn’t evil, why is it evil to trade in it? And where is its evil manifested? Why, in its ingestion. So surely the ingestion is as evil as its transport and sale, and should be punished equally (as it was, in law, before 1971)? But it isn’t.
I must finally deal with the following demonstrations of Mr Massie’s fashionable inability to understand or properly examine the question.
He says : ‘Just because British laws and policing are not as monstrously unjust and stupid as those pertaining in the United States does not mean there is no War on Drugs here. But it is just as futile as the War waged on the other side of the Atlantic.’
Is he really unaware of the virtual decriminalisation of cannabis in large parts of the USA (not least the worrying experiment now under way in Colorado) largely conducted under the flag of ‘medical marijuana’? Readers here will know of the statement by Keith Stroup in 1979 (detailed references available from me or from the Emory University library at Atlanta, Georgia, in case anyone attempts, as they will, to deny this) in the ‘Emory Wheel’ magazine, that legalisation campaigners such as Mr Stroup planned to use the medical marijuana argument as a red herring to get the drug a good name.
Even before this came into effect ( and medical marijuana laws of varying laxness now embrace 20 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia) , the case of Jared Loughner illustrates how liberal US enforcement of Marijuana laws already is. Loughner, some will remember , was the culprit in the mass-shooting in Tucson, Arizona in which Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was terribly injured and six people, including a nine-year-old girl, were killed. US Army recruiting records (they rejected him), the accounts of acquaintances and police records show he was for many years a regular smoker of this supposedly harmless drug (could this possibly have anything to do with his wholly irrational action and his bizarre demeanour after it?). The important detail here is that, when Loughner was caught by police with illegal drug paraphernalia in a car stinking of cannabis smoke, he was let off. Pity. If there had been a ‘war on drugs’, we might have been saved form much. Nor is his the only case of a marijuana user involved in a mass shooting.
Mr Massie then comes up with his final chunk of conventional wisdom: ‘Nor, in any case, is the cost of the War on Drugs confined to this country. It is a war that has helped claim thousands of lives overseas, especially in countries such as Mexico and Colombia. Prohibition is not the only cause of the horrific drug-spawned violence in those countries but it is a serious contributing factor.’
Is it? Why?
Surely the principal factor is that the Pounds, Dollars and Euros of selfish rich kids in the cities of the First World finance a huge and lucrative industry in the Third World in which criminals have inevitably intervened ( as they intervene in this country in the legal alcohol and tobacco industries)? But why is it there at all for them to intervene in?
Until the people of the western nations embarked on their demoralised rush for chemical pleasure, there was no such problem. If stupid, selfish, complacent, self-indulgent chasers after ‘escapism and the pleasures of losing oneself in a different, kinder, better world’ did not feed this monster, it would die. *They*, smug and self-righteous as they so often are, sneering about ‘victimless crimes’ and how ‘I have a right to put what I like in my own body and do what I like with my own body’, *they* are the Mr Big who stands behind the drug trade. How funny that people who drink FairTrade coffee and boycott stores that buy from sweatshops happily give their cash to the most sordid, exploitative industry of all, casually to risk the happiness of those who love them – and then have the nerve to blame the law for the evil they do.
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