No Misrepresentation without Retaliation

Did I ever assert that cannabis was more injurious than alcohol?

What follows is for those who enjoy anatomising quarrels, which I know is a minority pleasure. Even so, on this dark St Stephen’s Day afternoon, it has given me some satisfaction to dissect a recent Twitter argument on the question above. It is important, even if it’s not exciting. And it helps me to organise my thoughts.

 

Everyone’s heard of the American colonists’ snappy slogan  ‘No Taxation without Representation’, though its apparent corollary,  ‘No Representation without Taxation’,  is nothing like as popular. (I can’t think why not).

 

I have my own slogan here. It goes ‘No Misrepresentation without Retaliation’.  I try to follow this rule quite strictly because, if you don’t prominently correct misrepresentations of your views on the Internet,  you will find that these misrepresentations become accepted as true.  That’s why, for instance, I took up so much space on David Frum’s recent attack on me.

 

 

On December 20th a  person I shan’t now name because for some reason (probably my own limited web skills)  I can no longer find all his original Tweets,  wrote to me on Twitter saying that‘…the harms of alcohol greatly exceed those of cannabis’. This summary suffers because of Twitter’s apparently random attitude towards the order of things, so that conversations seem to appear upside down, or even mixed up with each other, rather than as a timed record of the exchange. I'm sorry for this, and beg readers' forgiveness in advance for any resulting confusion.

 

 

I replied to him: ‘Of course they do. [Alcohol is] legal and cannot now be banned. If cannabis were legal, it would do as much if not more harm.’

 

My critic (who I believe to be a doctor and scientist, judging by his self-description on Twitter) responded :’My comment is unrelated to the legal status or prevalence of use of either drug, but rather their effects on human health.’

 

I then retorted :’Ah, so lifelong mental illness is not as bad as the various effects of alcohol? Daft.’

 

He objected to my use of the word ‘daft’ which was intended to describe the postulated idea rather than the person advancing it, but  then I don’t suppose it’s specially enjoyable to be told that your belief is daft, nor (if I am honest) did I intend him to enjoy it.

 

The odd thing is that this person seems to be nearly as sceptical as I am about the use of some legal drugs, though his interest is mainly in the opioids, which he sensibly regards as very risk for their users. I share this concern, but also have grave worries about ‘antidepressants’ and the amphetamines and amphetamine mimics which are prescribed to children (and increasingly adults) supposedly suffering from the fantasy complaint ‘ADHD’.

 

So he ought to be an ally. But mysteriously he has adopted the bizarre belief that alcohol’s harms are greater than those of some illegal drugs, notably cannabis. This belief is generally advanced by those who seek to relax the laws against cannabis rather than by people who seek (as I do) to tighten the restrictions on alcohol. Indeed, I can see no other purpose or use for it.  So I tend to greet the argument , and those who make it, with some contempt and hostility.  The more intelligent and educated they are, the more I think it irresponsible of them to endorse the illegal drug abuser’s most ancient (and feeble) self-serving excuse.

 

After all, it’s very poor logic to say that the existence of one legal poison is in any way an argument for the legalisation of anther poison. I honestly don’t know how a scientifically-trained person could accept it.

 

But then again, people will accept what they want to accept, even if scientifically-trained. This is why I’m always so unimpressed when a scientist or doctor is produced in support of some cause or another. Unless it’s in his own precise field of knowledge, his view is no better than anyone else’s. Even if it *is* in his own precise field of knowledge, a layman is entitled to challenge it on simple questions of fact and logic.

 

None of this would matter at all except that on the 23rd, the same person wrote, sort of out of the blue though perhaps jolted into action by my simultaneous twitter skirmish with David Frum,  ‘How about your baseless assertion that cannabis is more injurious than alcohol?’

 

I replied asking when and where I had said this. I supposed it was possible that, long ago, in my salad days when I was green in judgement,  I might have made such a claim. If I did I here retract it, for the reasons set out below.

 

But I was pretty sure I hadn’t done so for many years,  if at all, and if confronted with any such quotation I would there and then have regretted my mistake and retracted the words. Leaving aside any other question, I have good reason to avoid doing anything to promote alcohol, or minimise its dangers. I have seen what it can do.

 

Since I wrote my book 'The War We Never Fought' and learned (as a result) much more about this debate, I have been keenly conscious that the available objective facts on drugs and their effects are very limited. That’s why (for instance) I no longer have any opinion on whether cannabis should be classed ‘B’ or ‘C’ in the schedules of the Misuse of Drugs Act. I used to, but I was wrong to do so and wish I hadn't made this mistake.

 

The point of these classifications is not to reflect a researched and objective difference between the dangers of Heroin, LSD, Cocaine and Cannabis. It is to separate cannabis from Heroin and Cocaine, in the public mind and in law, so giving the false idea that cannabis is somehow less dangerous than other illegal drugs. There should in fact be one class: ‘Illegal’, and there should be no distinction in law between possession and sale.

 

The dangers of these drugs are different.  All, in various ways, can lead to terrible tragedies, as can alcohol and tobacco. All can in their different ways shorten or wreck lives. Some can be directly blamed for the deaths of users. But there are also living deaths which, for the person involved and those who love him, seem to me to be as terrible as death, lifelong mental illness being one of them. Who can say that the worst extremes of cocaine or heroin abuse or LSD are more or less dangerous than the lifelong irreversible mental illness which is increasingly correlated with cannabis? What measure can objectively say which is worse? Some exercise of individual opinion or judgement must be involved.

 

Attempts to create such an apparently objective measure, some of which I have carefully examined, mix objective hard real science with soft subjective pseudo-sciences such as psychology and sociology. Such things are as strong as their weakest link. The hard scientific material in them is not reinforced by the soft pseudo-scientific wrapping. It is weakened by it.  The soft science is not strengthened by being packed next to hard science. It just damages the hard science.  

 

While such studies also quite rightly point out the appalling dangers of alcohol and tobacco, they do very often seem to have been conducted or promoted by or for people who have for one reason or another swallowed the ‘what about alcohol and tobacco, then?’ non-argument which I have so many times rebutted ( and in my view comprehensively refuted) on this blog.

 

So I would now say that any such statement as ‘alcohol *is* more dangerous than cannabis’ or that  ‘cannabis *is* more dangerous than alcohol’ could not reasonably be made by an informed person.  My statement to Mr X that if cannabis were legal it would do 'as much as if not more' harm than alcohol was clearly connected to the highly likely increase in the numbers of cannabis users which would follow legalisation. It was not a claim about the objective harm of cannabis as compared to the objective harm of alcohol.

 

Mr X clearly understood that,  as he said *his* comment was unrelated to the legal status or prevalence of either drug. I think it fair to say that I can logically infer from this that his view on the dangers of each drug did not depend on the number of people using it, and was an absolute statement about their comparable dangers, as drugs .  As such, it is a statement of the sort I don’t believe an informed person can make.

 

Anyway, when asked when I had said what he alleged I had said, Mr X  replied ‘You implied exactly that [that I believed cannabis was more injurious than alcohol] in the exchange to which I provided a link’  That exchange, you may recall,  was partly reproduced above. (For those who can’t be bothered to go all the way back, the key part of it ran: Mr X‘…the harms of alcohol greatly exceed those of cannabis’

 

Me: ‘Of course they do. [Alcohol is] legal and cannot now be banned. If cannabis were legal, it would do as much if not more harm.’

 

Mr X:’My comment is unrelated to the legal status or prevalence of use of either drug, but rather their effects on human health.’

 

I then retorted :’Ah, so lifelong mental illness is not as bad as the various effects of alcohol? Daft.’)

 

I responded to his claim that I had ‘implied exactly that’  by asking  ‘How does one ‘imply’ something “exactly”?’

 

It seemed to me that an implication, by definition, could not be exact, especially as ‘implications’ so-called so often turn out to be the subjective conclusions drawn by others from imaginative readings or hearings of the writings or sayings of people they don’t like.

 

I then said ‘In my long experience of silly critics, when they use the words “You implied” they mean “I have just made this up”.’ .Which in my long experience, is true.

 

At this point Mr Frum, the Sage of the Bush White House , intervened in our conversation. It would be too complicated to explain how or why. But he did.

 

I then asked Mr X ‘Aren’t you supposed to be a scientist? Devoted to precision and truth?’

 

It then became a bit rude, and has not advanced since. I recognise that this is not a complete account, and would in fact be glad if anyone comes across any additions which aid understanding.

 

But I stick absolutely to my original position, that the claim that I had asserted that cannabis was ‘more injurious than alcohol’ was not proved or even supported by the evidence Mr X adduced. And if he is indeed a scientist, devoted to accuracy and truth, he certainly shouldn’t go round patting himself on the back, as he appeared to be doing when we last communicated.