Massie Attack
When I first saw Alex Massie’s latest posting, I quickly forgot about it. It did not once cause me so much as to scratch my chin in doubt, or to seek new figures, or to re-examine my arguments. It was just a bog-standard reiteration of the drug liberalisers’ creed, larded with some mild personal abuse. Then I was amazed to find that various people were praising it as some sort of masterful, crushing response.
Two of these are individuals who have made public *personal* attacks on me in the past, but who (while willing to wound me when among friends who will applaud this) have always avoided any sort of actual direct debate with me on the disagreements between us. In one case, the person involved (who picked a fight with me, wholly unprovoked, for no reason on our first meeting) has ignored repeated invitations to make his case on my blog. I have no idea who the others are, but I am used to the fact that the drug liberalisation lobby resent the continued existence of any voice which opposes them, and besiege such voices with abuse and denigration. The person publicly and intemperately attacked me at an Orwell Prize event, and the nature of that attack (and my temperate response to it) can be found on YouTube by those with reasonable detective powers. When they have seen it, they may begin to understand his interest here.
Then there is the fact that Mr Massie bears an honoured name, and his articles appear on the website of a respected magazine which has long been a very important part of British conservative journalism, and to which I sometimes contribute. So I sit here in a Sydney Hotel, composing a reply. I do not expect this reply to have any impact upon Mr Massie. That would be to flatter him. I write it for the many people in the world, especially the young, who are perplexed and distressed by the social and cultural pressures placed on them, to take drugs; and who are puzzled by the blatant official lying about the state’s true attitude towards technically illegal drugs.
This may seem ungenerous to Mr Massie. And there has to be a basic generosity in debate, as I often state , a willingness to accept that you may in fact have something to learn from your opponent, a willingness to accept that he or she is fully human and has motives which he or she at least believes to be good. If you really think your opponent is a deluded idiot, then of course you have no need to challenge his arguments.
But this is so lacking in his approach that I, desiring to be forgiving, find it very hard to do so until he has shown some sign that he recognises this sort of thing is wrong and that (as John Henry Newman put it in a long-ago debate with Charles Kingsley) it breaches the laws of war and can be described as ‘Poisoning the Wells’.
What do I mean? Take this passage : ‘ I rather regret suggesting Mr Hitchens is a nitwit. That was unnecessary. I do think his argument – impeccably sincere as it may be – runs towards nincompoopery but since we all hold beliefs other people consider idiotic we might do well, at least occasionally, to recall the usefulness of treating the man and the ball as separate concerns.’
In this he abuses me while pretending not to. I know nothing about Mr Massie at all. The patronising attribution of ‘sincerity’(which being translated means ‘poor deluded old booby’), the ‘I don’t want to say he’s a nitwit and a nincompoop and an idiot, but of course he is’, is typical of the faintly grubby technique known as ‘willing to wound, but fearing to strike.’ This is what you get for saying that your opponent is ‘undoubtedly intelligent’, as I did.
I know nothing of Mr Massie and I suspect he knows very little of me. I suspect that (as do many of my critics) he thinks he knows more than he does, and has seldom felt the need to find out if his prejudices match the facts. I would imagine that, in the world he inhabits, dismissing people such as me is guaranteed to produce a warm snigger of collusion and shared disapproval.
Yet he seems to take it personally when I set out the truth about the British state’s attitude to ostensibly illegal drugs, which he purports to believe is one of stern and draconian prohibition. I am said to have said that the ‘war on drugs' is a ‘figment of *his* imagination’. Oh, not just his. Nothing personal, Mr Massie. You are wrong, but the emphasis in this statement is on the word ‘wrong’, not on the word ‘you’. It isn’t all about you, or about me. Actually, it’s about a grave peril, complacently encouraged by fashionable opinion, to a number of young men and women, who as I write this may be taking terrible risks with their futures, and the futures of those who love them. And Mr Massie might consider that his articles may be used by such people as reassurance that that they are not in fact running any danger at all. In this, I do plainly criticise an *action* performed by Mr Massie. But I don’t attack him as a human being.
Then we move on the terms of debate, as set by Mr Massie. He says :
‘The essence of his argument is that, look matey, there is no such thing as a War on Drugs. The evidence for this assertion – and I am afraid it is merely an assertion unbuttressed by the facts it sorely needs – is that the War on Drugs is not prosecuted nearly as vigorously as Peter Hitchens thinks it should be.’
This is extraordinary. I did not set out all my evidence in a brief blog posting (though of course I gave a taste of it there). My evidence is set out in some detail in a book. ‘The War We Never Fought’,(Bloomsbury, 2012) to which he should resort if he wishes to know my full argument. That is why people write books – because they seek to state a case in full. Has Mr Massie read my book? I do not think so.
For if he had, he simply could not assert much of what follows.
He takes this passage(by me)
‘[O]ur 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).’
And promptly completely misunderstands it, thus:
‘But how weak are these laws? In recent years we have seen Cannabis reclassified as a Class B drug, Khat classified as a Class C substance, raw magic mushrooms categorised as a Class A substance, Ketamine given a Class C status and Methamphetamine upgraded to a Class A product. In addition other, more exotic or less well-known substances such as Methotexamine have been added to the long list of prohibited drugs.
Since, as best I can tell, no drug of any sort or kind has fallen off the list of prohibited substances and, actually, several more have been added to the catalogue it is perverse to argue that this represents a climate of de facto decriminalisation.’
Oh dear.
By ‘weakening of laws’, I do not simply mean the dilution of statute penalties for drug possession, though this has been in progress for 40 years, as detailed in my book.
I mainly mean the increasing unwillingness of police to arrest and charge, or of courts to apply anything but the lowest level of penalty for possession for cannabis in particular. It is incontrovertible that this has taken place, and my book describes in detail how this has happened.
My point is therefore that the law continues to exist in paper, but is not enforced in fact. Is this a very difficult concept to grasp? I think not. Would it be hard to disprove, if my claim were false? I do not think so. The existence (and widespread use) of the ‘Cannabis Warning’, for instance, is a living, operational proof of my point.
There is, of course a, point at which this process moves beyond statistics. It is well known and undisputed that the police, encumbered by the Codes of Practice of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, increasingly dread having to make arrests because of the tangle of bureaucracy which then ensues. It is also undisputed that the Crown Prosecution Service, which long ago supplanted the police in deciding whether cases should go to court, decides not to prosecute huge numbers of cases which the police, even in this era, think worthy of an arrest.
Once an offence (and shoplifting is another example of this) is almost guaranteed to be met with a shrug by the Crown Prosecution Service and the Courts, the police will try not to pursue it unless they are absolutely forced to, by the blatancy of the individual offence, or the repeated nature of it. Cannabis possession is now such an offence. The police can and do simply ignore it ( and have been observed doing so by journalists) at pro-cannabis demonstrations in central London, at such events as the Notting Hill carnival and at the major rock festivals. Who seriously denies this? Does Mr Massie? Worse, I have repeatedly been told by haggard parents (in prosperous southern towns and less comfortable northern ones) of drugs being on open sale at their children’s state schools, and of the police’s unwillingness to take action to stop this. The remarkable thing is that, despite trying so hard to ignore it, the authorities are still occasionally forced to act or (as I point out) sometimes use the existence of the law to arrest people who they are in fact pursuing for other less easily proven, offences. But that does not change the general position. Cannabis is a de facto decriminalised drug. The strength of the laws on the statute book has no meaning if those laws are not enforced. As I say, this is not a hard concept to grasp.
Mr Massie, and his supporters, do not fail to grasp it because there is anything wrong with their minds, or because they are ‘nincompoops’ or ‘nitwits’. They fail to grasp it for the reason which has, down all the ages, been the strongest force of deception known to man. *They do not want to know*.
For instance the sleight-of-hand in the following passage (the mistaking of paper penalties for actual ones), is an almost exact repeat of a similar claim made in a famous pamphlet by Peter Lilley MP, which I rebut in detail in my book. Nobody who had read my book (or who was paying attention at all) could simply repeat this dud argument and non-response as if it were some kind of decisive blow:
‘Moreover the maximum penalties for both possession and supply of drugs remain severe. Seven years for possessing Class A substances (life for supplying them), five for Class B (14 years for supply) and two years imprisonment for possessing Class C drugs (14 years for supplying them). Doubtless Peter Hitchens would complain that maximum sentences are not imposed with sufficient frequency. And, of course, convicts are often released from jail before they have served their full sentence. Nevertheless, these tariffs are hardly evidence of undue leniency even if, as Hitchens might claim, the full force of the law is invoked too rarely.’
I don’t ‘claim’ this. I state it as a demonstrable fact. Does Mr Massie dispute it? Let us see his figures on the legions of people flung into dungeons for cannabis possession by ruthless authority, if he has any.
Nor is it a question of rarity. The facts show that extreme leniency is standard.
My precise point, and I repeat it here for anyone still in doubt, is that paper penalties are maintained, to abide by international treaties and to reassure conservative voters, but that these mean nothing when they are not enforced. By the way, the person who initially alerted me to this was the late Steve Abrams, the most skilful and dogged campaigner for the weakening of cannabis laws in this country, progenitor of the famous ‘Times’ advertisement of 1967, signed by the Beatles, which called for cannabis decriminalisation. It is Mr Abrams’s thesis which (with grateful acknowledgement) I have made more widely known in my book. Mr Abrams’s purpose was different from mine. He was annoyed at the way in which some drug liberalisers seemed to have forgotten or minimised his role in making cannabis a decriminalised drug in this country, and refused to recognise the extent of his success. Shortly before he died, I sent Mr Abrams my manuscript and was pleased to learn that he broadly agreed with my analysis. Not all drug liberalisers close their minds to the facts. Some undoubtedly do.
The rest of his posting is consists of the usual exaggerations of my arguments, those exaggerations then being correctly dismissed as such, and this being presented as a refutation of my case. I believe there’s a technical term for this sort of thing.
Then there’s lots of unresponsive stuff which does not in fact address my simple point, that the possession and use of drugs in this country has been effectively decriminalised and that the state, pursues an illogical and futile sham war, whose only purpose is to fulfil inescapable treaty obligations and to soothe the remaining moral conservatives in the electorate that something is being done when in fact it isn’t. Meanwhile, young men and women are starting on courses of action from which they might be deterred, courses of action which will ruin their lives and the lives of those who love them.
And the rudest thing I can say about Mr Massie and his friends is that their words and actions are making these tragedies more likely. I do hope that they will one day understand this, and seek, in the time remaining to them, to make amends for this terrible, selfish mistake.
Mr Massie was responding to my response to him, here, which is still a pretty definitive statement of the point, and which I doubt most of my critics have read with any care
This was a response to an unprovoked assault on me which Mr Massie posted here
Mr Massie’s latest attack upon me is here
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