Some Replies to Contributors - MMR, monarchy and drugs

Some responses to comments. First, to Mr Falls, who writes : Having read Neil McKeganey's Controversies in Drug Policy and Practice and Theodore Dalrymple's Romancing Opiates,  I am baffled as to how Mr Hitchens feels they corroborate his semantic argument about addiction.’

 

To which I reply that it is the facts in their books, rather than any views expressed by the authors, which back up my point.

 

Mr Falls correctly says : ‘Dalrymple's book uses the term addiction and addict throughout he does not doubt the existence of addiction rather he states that withdrawal in his clinical experience is not as severe as many believe and that literature from De Quincey to Irvine Welsh has romanticised the severity. This has resulted in a conventional wisdom and a situation where literature rather than medical reality informs drug treatment. He also doubts the efficacy of substitute treatment and criticises it's expense. McKeganey also thinks addiction exists but criticises the biological reductionist view seeing social deprivation as a contributory factor. He is strongly critical of methadone and subutex substitution because of its cost and its ineffectiveness. He proposes residential abstinence based treatment rather than harm reduction which exacerbates the problem. So neither doubt the existence of addiction. Dalrymple's doubts the severity of withdrawal whilst both are critical of harm reduction.’

 

I go further than them perhaps because it is my job to do so. The clear conclusion of Dr Dalrymple’s account, for me,  is that the idea of ‘addiction’ as an insurmountable affliction, a medical condition which can only be alleviated by treatment and even then may persist or return, is false.

 

I don’t at all blame Dr Dalrymple for not actually saying directly that ‘addiction’ doesn’t exist, even though his description of ‘addicts’ shows that this is the case.  Like Professor McKeganey, his work brings (or brought ) him into daily contact with the modern ‘treatment’ establishment, for whom the idea of personal responsibility is actively horrifying, and the idea of ‘addiction’ therefore an article of faith.  They will have learned long ago that there is no practical point in engaging with these fanatics. I’ve never asked either man about this. My hostility to the ideas of ‘treatment’ and ‘addiction’ is not shared by any of my allies in the campaign to retain and strengthen our drug laws, and I just put up with that. They are practical people seeking to attain practical ends. I am a voice crying in the wilderness making a moral case. I expect my allies have done what I did in the past over many similar matters, and simply not allowed their minds to range beyond the borders of what was conventionally accepted. It is a perfectly normal thing to do. I’ve just given it up.

 

Anyone thinking of criticising the absurd concept of ‘addiction’ as widely accepted in our society,  only needs to watch the hurricane of abuse and screeching which I have received for stating this obvious truth. They would find, as I do, that  the advocates of ‘addiction’ will happily use it to mean one thing ( an insurmountable, overpowering physical affliction which is not the sufferer’s fault and from which he cannot escape unaided, if at all)  when they are demanding funds for its ‘treatment’ and as something quite different ( a far more nuanced condition which can be conquered by the sufferer under certain circumstances and may even be his own responsibility)  when they encounter informed critics.

 

The two are obviously wholly contradictory, and a universe which accepts the first as true cannot also accept the second as true. But the one that brings in the funds, and these days ensures the employment of substantial numbers of (wholly disinterested) persons  is the one that maintains it is a physical insurmountable condition, entirely absolving its victims from personal responsibility.

 

Once again I commend readers to my discussion of the matter with ‘Citizen Sane’  which can be found here http://bit.ly/GzI61T. He too greeted my position with scorn at the beginning, but was open-minded enough to concede it.  

 

My purpose is a moral one. I seek to point out when falsehoods are being told, and false ideas followed. This is not because I hope to influence current events  - though I often find that my ideas do actually become current, and even modish, years after I first encounter derision for expressing them – my advocacy of bicycling as a civilised modern method of transport for instance, drew me nothing but mockery from colleagues, as well as lectures about the (undoubted) dangers back in the 1970s. Now I can’t move in London for the legions of cyclists.

 

 

It is because I think someone just has to tell the truth about what is going on. The existence or non-existence of ‘addiction’ is a moral question, like so many others.  And my moral position rests on a profoundly unfashionable belief in personal responsibility for our own actions.

 

What is noticeable about so many of the defenders of ‘addiction’ is the way they simply cannot cope with any challenge to it. They act and speak as if it is self-evidently true. This is almost invariably the response of believers to challenges to their faith.  It is self -evidently true that water will wet us and fire will burn ( and in my view it is self-evidently that fear is a powerful motive, and that therefore effective and consistent punishment of actions influences the doing of them). But the existence of ‘addiction’ is not in that category. It only survives because it is conventional wisdom, which is almost invariably wrong, and almost invariably accepted by almost everybody.

 

‘Baz’ like many others, misses the point of the MMR judgement.

 

The injection into a human bloodstream of a vaccine is an invasive, irreversible physical assault on the human body of an innocent person. The person compelled to undergo this assault is not  guilty of any offence deserving punishment  - which I would accept, though ‘Baz’ probably wouldn’t, might under some circumstances justify a lawfully-imposed physical penalty .

 

‘Baz’ may think that there is ‘no logical reason’ to refuse the MMR, but ‘Baz’ needs to understand that in a free society others may have different views, and this should be left to them. His opinion is not an objective fact, and certainly cannot be the basis for ordering physical assaults on innocent person.

 

‘Damiana’ writes ; ‘Odd that adults inflicting an injection on a child is a no-no, yet adults inflicting religion on a child (in order to be a Girl Guide) is not. The difference, of course, is perpetuating health as opposed to perpetuating a religious tradition that not all humans share in the first place. ‘

 

This seems to me to be a wholly false comparison, which only a mind furiously prejudiced against religion could make. The raising of a child in a religious faith involves no invasive physical assault, and in any case takes place in the family,  a fortress of freedom against absolute state power, whose independence any free person should support.  The child brought up in a  faith is free to reject that faith when it attains the age of reason, and indeed is better equipped to reject it than a person who does not even know what it is, and so can have no real opinion of it. If, as ‘Damiana’ presumably believes, religious faith is self-evidently  transparent drivel, then the child will be *more* likely to reject it if he or she encounters it in its full force, than if he or she is merely mildly aware of it as something other people do.

 

The arguments (many times rehearsed here) about the MMR make it clear that there are very different views about a) the effectiveness of vaccines in reducing the dangers of measles b) the certainty we can have over the safety of such vaccines in all cases. The other simple point is that it is wholly irreversible, and cannot be undone if its effects turn out to be damaging, or if future knowledge shows that it is harmful. There is also the issue of the social contract bargain suggested by the immunisers, in which we have some sort of duty to risk our children for the sake of the Blessed NHS and the (alleged) Higher Good. As I say, in a People’s Republic such ideas are law. But in a free society, they are not.   I am merely pointing out that the MMR zealots are not, in fact, lovers of freedom, but rather sympathisers with the other thing. I understand that they don’t like this being pointed out, but in that case they should either decide that they like the strong state and dislike liberty, and be honest about it, or change their views.

 

 

A Mr ‘Edmund Blackadder’ asks :’ On the question of the Royal Train, does Mr Hitchens not think that at a time when food banks are on the increase, it does look like a case of 'let them eat cake, when the well heeled and well subsidised royals are now getting a ruddy refurbished train to themselves?’

 

No, Mr Hitchens doesn’t. The idea that that  monarchy is a huge public charge is laughable. I am interested and perplexed by the growth of food banks, but their existence suggests to me that there are detailed failures in the benefits system, which need to be fixed, not that it lacks money in general. Nobody should go without food if their families or they have no way of providing for themselves. The train, as others have pointed out, is not especially luxurious,  and many Presidents are far more costly and luxury-lapped than our monarchy.

 

The bizarre idea that republics are in some way *automatically* more free and fair than monarchies persists against all the evidence. It is quite possible to be a monarchy and to be free, in fact in most of the Anglosphere, and in Scandinavia, constitutional monarchy has been a most successful way of ensuring liberty under the law, and of affirming the sovereignty of free peoples under laws chosen by themselves. Many Republics seek to emulate many of its characteristics (Ireland, I think, being one of them). The USA is an 18th-century monarchy in which the monarch, instead of inheriting,  is picked by billionaire donors every four years.  France is, likewise an elective monarchy. Germany is an interesting experiment which has yet to run its course, but s currently running into trouble because its deliberately indecisive, consensual constitution cannot cope with several major issues, from nuclear power to the Euro. Switzerland is the only Republic I can think of with as much popular sovereignty as the British monarchy provides. And then we have all those other Republics which are or were neither free nor fair – the Republic of South Africa, under the apartheid regime, the German Democratic Republic, the Chilean Republic under Pinochet, etc etc etc. It’s all about thinking, instead of repeating what you’ve heard on the TV or picked up at PSHE, as usual.

 

I agree that a fully nationalised police force is precisely what we don’t want, and is probably being planned. That's why we need to call for more local police forces, as we used to have before Roy Jenkins closed them down.  

 

Mr Falconer posts : ‘Many of the states within the USA have in place the most draconian penalties for all forms of drug use, where a second offence of possession of cannabis results in a prison sentence, only avoided in the first place by strict judicial. supervision regimes. The result has been that the so-called "land of the free", the USA, with only five percent of the world's population, has over twenty-five percent of its prisoners, currently numbering over two million.’

 

I need much more detail here. An impression is given by this arrangement of words, but is it the right one?  I do know that the drug laws in much of the USA are at least as lax as our own *in practice* (see the case of Jared Loughner, known to the authorities as a long-term cannabis user, never prosecuted for the offence, let alone imprisoned)  , though the route of ‘medical marijuana’ has been the main way in which this has been achieved. But perhaps he could list a) these states, and b) explain what he means by ‘only avoided in the first place by strict judicial supervision’ . What is avoided? What does this ‘supervision’   actually involve?  and c) can he please explain how he jumps from these statements to the figure of two million prisoners. How many of these prisoners have actually been incarcerated (rather than, say, given suspended sentences never served)  for *simple possession of cannabis, with no intent to sell,  on a first or second offence, and for nothing else*? Breakdown by state would aid comparison with the figures on drug use, or at least arrests,  which we would then need to seek.