Stephen Fry Unintentionally Backs my Argument on Drug Law Enforcement

Now I have to thank Stephen Fry for helping me to make my case for the proper enforcement of our laws against drugs.

 

Mr Fry’s latest book of memoirs has just been published. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s a rather sad and attention-seeking volume, full of name-dropping, and a great reassurance to anyone who thinks he or she has been missing something important by never belonging to the Groucho Club, or never spending an evening with the Young British Artists, or the cultural elite in general. It isn’t exactly a Kingdom of the Mind out there.

 

The book also suffers from the Will Self problem – a belief that long words are better and cleverer than short ones, and curly sentences better than straight ones. Take for instance the words on page 96  ‘that first intranasal introduction of cocaine into my system’. This is surely better rendered as ‘the first time I snorted cocaine’?

 

Fry, who calls explicitly for drug legalization (and taxation) on p.133 of his book (he doesn’t specify which drugs) , says he was (but is no longer) a heavy user of the Class ‘A’ drug cocaine (possession of which can, supposedly, be punished by a seven year prison term and/or an unlimited fine) and publishes a list (see below) of the places where he used to take it.

 

There’s a sort of apology for this. ‘I take this opportunity to apologise unreservedly, to the owners, managers or representatives of the noble and ignoble premises and to the hundreds of private homes, offices, car dashboards, tables, mantelpieces and available polished services that could so easily have been added to this list of shame.

'You may wish to have me struck off, banned, black balled or in any other way punished for past crimes; surely now is the time to reach for the phone, the police or the club secretary.'

But it somehow doesn’t sound that apologetic to me.

 

Now, did Mr Fry really believe that any such law existed or operated, when he behaved as he now says he did from 1986 to 2001? For in the book he says he took cocaine in many London clubs, Buckingham Palace, the Palace of Westminster, the BBC TV centre and the offices of several newspapers (not this one).

 

On one occasion he was actually in police custody (thanks to being caught on his motorbike when he had been drinking)  with some cocaine, but the police didn’t find it. He was worried chiefly (p.125) that he had enough of the drug to be charged with intent to supply it. “It was generally understood in the druggy world that one or two grams would be taken to be ‘personal use’ but that much more might be construed by a bolshy or ill-disposed policeman to be ‘intent to supply’. The first might result in confiscation or a warning. ; the second would certainly, if the judge was in accord, lead to a prison sentence". Mr Fry by his own account had three grams (roughly one ninth of an ounce) in his possession.

 

I am struck that he was so minutely aware of this difference, between possessing two and three grams, a difference of about one twenty-eighth part of an ounce.  Who had told him this? How had they known? How was it ‘generally understood’? And this was not yesterday, but some years ago.

 

And yet I am constantly told of the savage and draconian drug laws which cruelly criminalize the one-time user. These are the laws which Mr Fry presumably wishes to have repealed. Yet he *knows* they are not applied. This is what I keep saying, what my book was about, the one everyone said was rubbish. Britain has in fact engaged in a vast unofficial decriminalization of drugs, well-known to metropolitan drug takers while hoping that suburban provincial voters won’t notice.

 

This is bad enough in itself. But the way in which the metropolitan drug liberalizers then pretend that these dead-letter laws are in fact fiercely enforced, so as to weaken them still further, really, really gets my goat. And my habit of pointing out the truth really, really gets their goat.

 

Mr Fry also writes interestingly on the subject of ‘addiction’. On page 72 he seems to come close to at least grasping  my view: he describes with reasonable fairness those who ‘repudiate the premise that addiction is a disease’ and who consider that drug taking is a matter of ‘weakness, lack of grit, absence of will-power and feeble self-justifying excuses’.

 

“They (people like me) hear, most especially, figures in the public eye talking of ‘pressure’ and ‘stress’ and they want to puke up. Here are rich overpaid, over-praised,  over-pampered, overindulged ‘celebrities’ who scrabble and snuffle and snort like rootling truffle pigs at the first bump of naughty powder and then….after years of careless abuse…”  … “they bleat ‘But I’ve got a disease! I’m an addictive personality! Help!’”

 

But then , on page 73, he cites more approvingly the view that “addiction is indeed a condition, often inherited or congenital, and that the only way to defeat it even if it is not a ‘real ‘ disease is *to treat it as if it is*.”(Mr Fry's emphasis)

 

Given the colossal failure of this approach, followed by a huge increase in drug abuse, and given the total absence of any evidence that ‘addiction’ has any objective existence or is a disease, this is a wobbly platform on which to stand. But Mr Fry does not seem (I have not read the whole book) to go beyond asserting it.  

 

So I think we can assume that this is his view. He does at one stage (p.125) use the expression 'my, poor, stupid addicted mind'. And yet I don’t think (again I must point out I haven't read the whole book) that he actually describes himself as an ‘addict’ - and he also says   'I didn't take coke because I was depressed or under pressure. I didn't take it because I was unhappy (at least I don't think so). I took it because I really, really liked it.'

 

Well, quite.  I applaud his honesty.