I acquire some Unlikely Allies in the fight against Big Dope

Here’s something for the Cannabis Comment Warriors to get bothered about. The poor things patrol the Internet searching for the tiniest expression of dissent against the idea that Big Dope is Good and Must take Over the World, and then descending on the offender with wave after wave of anger-enhanced word-bombs. And I haven’t given the chance to launch a raid here for some time. 

 

Once again a Pay Wall prevents me from reproducing in full, or linking to an interesting article on the subject of Dope. A recent one,  by the London ‘Times’ writer Robert Crampton, is in response to President Obama’s rather relaxed remarks about cannabis, or marijuana as they call it in the USA. I urge you to get hold of it because, although Mr Crampton has swallowed much of the silly conventional wisdom on this subject he has not swallowed all of it. And so he has had enough sense to notice that the ‘soft drug’ propaganda about cannabis is simply misleading.  He thinks it should be harder to get, not easier.

 

He says he has ‘dabbled in’ cannabis perhaps a dozen times, though the experience was less enjoyable the more he did it. (Would a prominent writer for a respectable national newspaper offer such a confession if there truly were a ‘war against drugs’ in this country?).  It made him ‘at best silly and sleepy, at worst paranoid, unstable, offensive’. Crucially, he concluded that it ‘seemed to me to be far more powerfully mood-altering than the received wisdom claimed’  Acquaintances who smoked it a lot were not just tedious and ‘a bit dozy’ but ‘many seemed to be seriously mentally impaired.’ 

 

I can however link to *this* blog by my old adversary, and Unashamed Member of ‘Blairites for Cameron’, John Rentoul of the ‘Independent.

 

Here he is

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/if-cannabis-is-legal-more-teenagers-will-smoke-it--and-that-cant-be-good-9044349.html

 

 

Again, it’s full of wearisome conventional wisdom, including the comical claim that cannabis use is diminishing (that must be the reason for all those busy hydroponic gear shops all over the country, and the pathetically ineffectual yet incessant police raids on a tiny minority of cannabis farms) But I’ll tell you what struck me most about this rather feeble call for inaction.

 

First of all, he spots that the Big Dope legalisers don’t actually have any answer to organised drug crime in Colombia, Mexico and Afghanistan (he ignores, as establishment people always do,  the real answer, which is that this wickedness is financed and kept going by the greed and selfishness of western drug abusers, and the best hope is that those users are deterred from purchase by properly enforced stringent laws. )

 

He writes : ‘Then there is the harm done by the control of the production and supply of drugs by criminals. Yes, it is a problem. But we are mainly talking about cocaine and heroin, if we mean organised crime and drugs, and a lot of the harm in those cases is suffered in Colombia and Afghanistan. I don’t have the answers to that; but then, neither do the advocates of legalising cannabis, who tend not to propose legalising “harder” drugs, yet.’

 

I just love that ‘yet’.  I also quite like the “harder”. Has Mr Rentoul cottoned on to the fact that cannabis may in fact be one of the hardest of all drugs, because of its correlation with irreversible mental illness, surely one of the most dreadful fates that can befall us? I do hope so. It’s about time that the ‘soft’ drug promotion of cannabis, one of the most successful PR frauds in human history, was exploded.

 

And then, in a  few throwaway words he concedes the whole point of the book I spent ages writing, that I have been excoriated and jeered at for writing, which few newspapers have bothered to acknowledge, let alone review, namely that the law against cannabis is a dead letter, and no war has been fought or is being fought against it: he says  ‘the most common legal position all over the world:[is] illegal but not stringently enforced for small amounts.’

That’s not what certain academics seem to think, with their claims of thousands of drug abusers languishing in prison and the implication that these are innocent citizens caught up in some sort of draconian prohibitionary round-up because they have been detected by inflexible police officers in possession of tiny amounts of drugs held for 'personal use'. (Twaddle, by the way).

He also says, very much like Mr Crampton : ‘But it is possible that, in some cases, it acts as a trigger for serious mental illness, especially for male teenagers.’

 

So there you are, see. It isn’t just reactionary, brutal old me. Other people including members of the liberal elite , recognise that the dangers of cannabis are severe, and that legalising it may not therefore be a good idea. And at least one such accepts my point that the laws against cannabis possession are not really enforced (though he doesn’t seem to understand the implications of this for the rest of his argument).