My Second Reply to Professor Stevens

This is the second part of my response to a blog published by Professor Alex Stevens, of the University of Kent at Canterbury, and available here.

http://www.talkingdrugs.org/alex-stevens/evidence-versus-morality-debating-drugs-with-peter-hitchens

 

In my first response I dealt with some simple factual points, and about what I regard as unconscious misrepresentations of my case by Professor Stevens. I stress that I think he himself is the main person deceived by these distortions.

 

This is why he does not actually address my factual case – that the British state has informally abandoned attempts to interdict demand for cannabis -  with any great verve or originality.  Howard Marks is a much better spokesman for the drug liberalisation cause, not least because he’s clear and open about what he wants, and because he listens to what I say.

 

I noted in my previous post how the Professor had simply missed my point on an important issue. I shall need to do so again, in a separate case,  below. The fact that an intelligent person does this is always interesting and educative.

 

Now I turn to the curious dichotomy he seeks to establish – between evidence and morality.  The implication is that, as my case is moral at heart - which it is – I have allowed my moral beliefs to influence my handling of facts. Have I? If so, where and when?  Amazingly in an academic, he criticises my evidence as being ‘selective’. The Professor must know that all evidence is by its nature selective to an extent,  since it is beyond the physical capacity of human beings – even full-time academic researchers with secretaries and, perhaps, the help of graduate students -  to assemble *all* the evidence on any given subject.

 

Selectivity is only wrong if it deliberately leaves out facts which contradict the writer’s case, or deliberately exaggerates or misrepresents those which support it. If he can point to any instances of this, will he please do so? If not, can he please stop saying this?

My book, I should say here, does not purport to be an academic study.  It is much better-written and much more to the point than most such things.  It is clearly and proudly polemical. But it is also correct. It tells (with evidence and supporting quotation in some quantity)  the much-neglected truth about the enforcement of laws against the possession of some drugs in England and Wales since 1971. This truth is unwelcome to those who like to claim that this country groans under the weight of a cruel prohibition regime, as they ceaselessly do. Why they claim this is for them to say. I can only point out that the claim , perhaps coincidentally, serves the interests mainly of those who seek to weaken our drug possession laws still further, and whose ultimate objective is presumably that we should have no such laws at all. Whether those who serve those interests know what they are doing, only they can say.

 

Now, here’s an instance of the Professor, who is so concerned about ‘evidence’, getting things wrong because he hears what he wants to hear. We suffer here from the absence ( so far as I know ) of any recording of the Canterbury debate. If anyone has one, can I please listen to it?  But let’s take this passage :

 

‘Hitchens may be right that there is no biological diagnostic test for drug dependence. But his main argument against cannabis is that it produces schizophrenia. Both schizophrenia and drug dependence are diagnosed on the basis of the behaviour and the self-reported experiences of the patient. Neither of them can be detected by blood test or biopsy (although some neuroscientists claim that both conditions are visible in brain scans). If you’re going to say that addicts choose to use drugs, you might as well say that schizophrenics choose to have delusions. But that would not support an argument on the tragic effects of cannabis.’

 

Now, I first got involved in this discussion some years ago. It has been a long, steep learning process. Journalists ( and perhaps Professors) suffer from the old problem of conventional wisdom. They think they know all kinds of things until they study them. Then they find out that they don't know about them at all. Luckily, 40 years of journalism have taught me to examine everything with a scepticism that most people find annoying and pessimistic, but which I regard as essential.

 

 And I freely admit that, when I began to discuss it, I assumed (as most people do) that classifications such as ‘Schizophrenia’ had an objective meaning.  Actually, it was my interest in two separate controversies, over ‘ADHD’ and ‘Dyslexia’ that led me to the discovery that this wasn’t necessarily so, and to my introduction to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association and its strange history. I then learned even more about the vagueness of (ancient and modern) psychiatric medical diagnoses by looking into the controversy surrounding ‘Clinical Depression’ and the prescription of SSRI tablets.

 

Similarly, I have come to question the universal acceptance of the concept of ‘addiction’ as an insurmountable physical affliction rather than as what it is - a grandiose description of a failure of will, intended to relieve the so-called ‘addict’ of personal responsibility for that failure. And I have learned that, like all heresy, this is shocking to most people. This is a society which largely rejects personal responsibility and is unpleasantly surprised when anyone suggest that it might in fact still exist.

 

Since that point, I have simply ceased to use the term ‘Schizophrenia’ , except in the course of explaining that it is a shape-shifter and a moveable feast, along with almost all mental illnesses. I have certainly long ceased to suggest direct causal links between cannabis and any mental illness, including ‘Schizophrenia’. I have stuck to what we have, which is a very worrying and very strong correlation between cannabis and mental illness. I tend to speak at length about the case of Henry Cockburn to make this point.  I also take the view that we are at the same stage we were at with cigarettes 60 years ago, in that the correlation is severe and striking but the direct evidence of causation is lacking.  (By the way, we’re told it’s all anecdotal. Here’s a recent such anecdote

 

http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/10732162.Motorway_plunge_victim_was_high_on_cannabis/?ref=rss

 

…which is of course as anecdotal as all get out, especially the rather terrible detail about how the poor child was identified.  But there are a lot of these anecdotes in our local papers, and at some point anecdotes might begin to add up to evidence, if anyone selective enough were to try to connect them).  

 

 I have used the term ‘mental illness’. If Professor Stevens had read my book with any care, or even listened to what I said that night,  I think he would know this.

 

Yet Professor Stevens seems to have heard me specifically linking cannabis to Schizophrenia in Canterbury that night. Well, it’s possible he heard me correctly, and I don’t like to directly contradict anyone on facts, as it’s potentially rude.   But in the light of the above, how likely is it that I did so? I am well aware of the inconsistency he tries to pin on me. If ‘Addiction’ isn’t objectively measurable, how can ‘Schizophrenia be?   

 

That, by the way, is as far as the contradiction goes.  ‘Addiction’ and ‘Schizophrenia’ share very few characteristics apart from the difficulty of objectively establishing their presence in the human frame.

I would normally doubt the logical and intellectual powers of anyone who said ‘If you’re going to say that addicts choose to use drugs, you might as well say that schizophrenics choose to have delusions.’.

 

But, as this is a Professor speaking, I owe it to him to take this comparison seriously. On ‘Addiction’ I do urge him to read Theodore Dalrymple’s witty and informed work ‘Romancing Opiates –Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy’ . Dr Dalrymple was for many years a prison psychiatrist and encountered ‘addicts ‘ in large numbers ( a brief taste of his experience can be read here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-476208/Heroin-addiction-isnt-illness--stop-spending-millions-treating-it.html by the open-minded few (note in particular his dismissal of ‘withdrawal symptoms’, and the ease with which his patients stopped using the drug when it suited them to do so). I also repeat my link to this discussion I had with another person who initially believed my dismissal of ‘addiction’ was outrageous http://bit.ly/GzI61T

 

But the point here is that nobody is forced to take the drugs which are generally supposed to be ‘addictive’. Nobody ‘catches’ ‘addiction’. Habitual use of heroin or crack cocaine has to be deliberately, doggedly pursued, by repeated ingestion or absorption (often involving wilful and actively painful and unpleasant self-harm).

 

Now, one of the things about severe mental illness, such as that which falls within the accepted current diagnosis  of  ‘Schizophrenia’, is that its victims are generally struck down without warning by symptoms they did nothing to bring about.  Its causes are, I think, largely unknown in most cases. Heredity, grievous emotional stress and physical injury have all been blamed. To compare the undesired onset of such a terrible affliction with the deliberate ingestion of an illegal drug known by all to be dangerous is a logical absurdity which would be comical if it weren’t also rather nasty. And this from a Professor!

 

I would add that if Establishment persons such as him accepted (and I do not know if he does, for he tends not to respond to arguments about this,  but suspect he doesn’t) that there is a significant correlation between illness and cannabis use, then the position would alter slightly.

 

For if he accepted that this was a severe danger ( as I do) and he joined me in seeking to deter the young from taking this appalling risk with their lives and the lives of all who loved them, then in *some* cases we might be able to say that those who became mentally ill after using cannabis *had* chosen their hallucinations. As it is, because the establishment scornfully shrugs  off these warnings, which people such as me, Kathy Gyngell, Melanie Phillips and Mary Brett try to make when we can, the young could be forgiven for thinking that the danger was small and not worth worrying about, and the resulting tragedies could not be blamed on their wilful folly.  If politicians and the police and academics say dope is harmless, and that any law prohibiting it is cruel and wrong, why then, it must be so , mustn’t it?

 

They could, however, be blamed on the smug and obdurate complacency of establishment figures who refuse to act to protect the young from this danger.

 

And here we come to the moral issue. I am proud to be a Protestant Christian   I  think this country’s ordered liberty,  and its prosperity tempered with justice,  are founded upon self-discipline, the belief that the true rewards of virtue are not to be found in material goods or passing pleasures. The idea of deliberate self-stupefaction is therefore disgusting to me.  

 

But I recognise that these beliefs make a lot of people giggle, and I count that rather mild as ordeals go. My forebears had it a lot harder, and so, I suspect,  will my descendants.   

 

I also understand that many members of my generation , and even more in the generations that have come after, don’t share these views and can’t understand them. I’m sad about it, but I accept it. As professor Stevens says of me ‘But this is unlikely to be convincing to people who do not share his faith.’

 

So I appeal to them at a simpler, more utilitarian level. If they are thinkers or teachers, why defend a habit that dulls and deadens thought, and stifles curiosity? If they are reformers and radicals, why defend a habit that promotes stupefied apathy, and makes people love their own servitude? If they love their fellow men, why help promote a trade which corrupts and ruins poor countries? Why abandon the ignorant young to a danger which can capriciously ruin their lives? They would not stand by while an infant child played at the edge of a busy road. Allowing schoolchildren  and students to think that drugs are safe, and that we don’t care if they take them,  is as bad as such standing by (sometimes literally, as in the case of Ryan Perks, linked above).

 

Professor Stevens, challenged at Cheltenham over the undoubted ability of the law to deter some young people from drug taking (largely through fear of wrecking career prospects or being banned from the USA), said this curious thing: (his own description) ’ Another member of the audience wanted to know whether decriminalisation would make it harder for parents to put their children off drug use. I replied that our children face many dangers, with traffic accidents being the one I am most afraid of. But we do not need to ban crossing the road to help our children stay safe. We should not rely on misinformation and fear to help our children negotiate the dangers of modern life.’

 

There are several blazing shout-out-loud faults in this response. One is that tiny children are not influenced by the law, and are the direct responsibility of the adults in charge of them; another is that the immediate danger of being hit by a speeding vehicle is fairly obvious to anyone above the age of about three, whereas modern complacency about drugs, and their promotion by celebrities, misleads many young people into underestimating the dangers of drugs, particularly of cannabis, even said by the law to be ‘soft’;  three, that the dangers of drug taking often become apparent only when it is already too late, and that a deterrent, preventing the young from taking them at all, is therefore necessary to save them from mistakes they don’t otherwise know are mistakes. The other is that the questioner clearly believed , from her own experience, that fear of the law had been an important deterrent in cases personally known to her. Evidence? Not for the Professor, though of course he’s never selective. Just another ‘anecdote’.

 

 

  

 

If this discussion is not informed by morals, what point does it have anyway?  But what exactly do the liberalisers really, really want?

 

 

In seeking to answer this question, Professor Stevens writes ‘There is another basis for moral debate on drug policy. It does not rely on religion or self-interest, but on the respect which we owe to our fellow human beings in recognition of our common humanity.’

 

All right. I’ll accept that as a reasonable common ground. So what does that involve?

Professor Stevens: ‘ As I have written elsewhere, this moral framework puts the protection of life, health and property above our desires to use drugs or for other people not to.’

 

Indeed. And that is precisely why I argued, ten feet away from him,  that a strongly-enforced law against possession would counteract the appalling peer-pressure on the young to take illegal drugs – a point to which I do not think he responded.

 

 

The Professor continues: ‘The deontological question of what is right in drug policy therefore intertwines with the actual effects of drug policy. Drug policies which actually kill people or otherwise reduce their abilities to act to their own ends are immoral.’

 

This is very odd. A policy which actually killed people might well be wrong sometimes, even often, though ‘Just War’ principles might occasionally justify some killing. But why is this reasonable statement joined together with a wholly different claim about laws which ‘otherwise reduce their abilities to act to their own ends’.  Can this conceivably be in the same category as killing people? Surely,  almost any law  ‘reduce[s]  [ou]r abilities to act to  [ou]r own ends’. Does the Professor actually think that it is *immoral* to prevent anyone from doing anything?  Shoplifting? Burglary? Armed robbery? Assault with a deadly weapon? Attempted murder? Where’s the line? If he’s going to argue that drug taking is victimless, he needs to answer my point (again made ten feet from him) that the relatives of the drug taker generally did not find this to be the case, any more than the taxpayers who had to pay to keep the poor, mentally-ill creature for the remainder of his burned-out life?

 

The Professor then asserts: ‘Harm reduction saves lives.’

Does it? On a narrow judgement of the claim, fatalities on methadone programmes ( a pillar of ‘harm reduction’ in practice) are increasing, according to Professor Neil McKeganey. http://www.eurad.net/en/news/drug_treatment_+_recovery/Scotlands+Methadone+Deaths.9UFRjWZf.ips

 As to the wider effect of ‘Harm Reduction’, which basically assumes that drug taking is unstoppable and abandons any attempt to discourage it, isn’t it just possible that such an official attitude (exemplified in the amoral government-backed website ‘Talk to Frank’) causes more people to take drugs, many of whom will become mentally ill and some of whom will die prematurely? I don’t say that the threat is principally one of premature death. I see mental illness, unclassified but catastrophic for the sufferer, as being a far greater threat. Even if ‘Harm reduction saves lives’, would that justify it,  if it also promoted the widespread existence of incurable mental illness?

 

The Professor then declares :’ Decriminalisation reduces limitations on freedom without increasing harms.’

 

I think that’s simply tendentious. Whose freedom?  How free is the parent in late middle age who must devote his or her remaining years to the care of a person who is the drug-destroyed shell of their son? Even J.S.Mill recognises that limits on the freedom of the drunkard are justified. How can the *freedom* of the drug taker be compared with the real freedoms, of speech, assembly and thought? It is much more comparable with the *freedom* of the drunken driver, with his tendency to harm himself and others,  which most of us agree should be curbed by law.

 

The Professor concludes :’Empirical evidence does not stand against morality. It helps us to become more fully moral in how we regulate the use and supply of psychoactive substances.’

 

I simply have no idea what this means. It calls to mind George Orwell’s comment on political writing of a certain kind that ‘A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details.’

 

How could empirical evidence stand against morality, even if it wanted to? You might as well say that a Blue Whale does not stand against Stilton Cheese. Evidence is evidence. Morality is morality. They are measured in different ways, and if either is what it claims to be, they do not act upon each other.   If he wants to be ‘more fully moral’  in ‘regulating’ the greasy substances he dignifies as ‘psychoactive substances’ , then he should at least show some serious interest in the general dangers of these substances to those who take them.

 

 

What are the morals of people like this,  anyway? I struggle to work out what moral code would impel a person whose whole life was based upon ordered liberty, the love of learning and the continued existence of a wealthy and stable civilisation, to scrabble away at the last scanty defences we have against a yelling, moronic inferno of self-indulgent chaos.