More Arguing Lessons for Slow Learners
I can���t predict the future, as I know to my cost. But it���s generally pretty easy to see how the pro-drug lobby, its shills and dupes, will react to anything I write on the subject.
So I can usually build in defence mechanisms against foreseeable lines they will take. Do these defences work? Well, possibly for others, but not, it would seem, against them. One thing about the drug lobby is that it *simply does not listen* to what its opponents say. I cannot count the number of debates I have had, on broadcast forums, on the web or in public meetings, where my pro-drug opponent simply pays no attention at all to anything I have said. Howard Marks has been a rare exception, which is why I exempt him from the exasperated contempt I feel for almost all these people.
He listens, learns and comes back with an improved case. Perhaps it���s his old-fashioned, pre-cultural revolution grammar school and Oxford scientific education kicking in. Howard was taught how to think. Most of my opponents, and almost all of their audiences, have been taught what to think.
The BBC, furious that I actually stood up to its beloved Professor Nutt, has pretty much excluded me from the airwaves on the subject of drugs, where in many cases its ���debates��� on the subject are disgracefully one-sided and simply exclude any voice which does not favour weaker laws. It gets round this by giving airtime to vacuous ministers, who pretend to be ���tough��� , and assure the public they have no plans to get rid of the existing laws while continuing to preside over a state which ensures that the ostensibly punitive laws against drug possession are not in fact enforced.
A fascinating sideline on this has been the recent legislation on ���legal highs���, which contains no penalties for *possession* at all, only for sale and distribution - an exact parallel to the *de facto* state of the laws on cannabis. The laws against simple possession are more or less unenforced, except in various circumstances where they are useful to the police as holding or alternative charges for people they can���t actually prove a case against in other matters. After all, the material possession of cannabis can be proven in court more readily than most offences, and anyone charged with it is going to have a hard time pleading not guilty if cannabis has been found on their person.
Anyway, a lot of Big Dope response to my 29th June article http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/06/yes-the-tunisian-killer-was-on-cannabis-too-so-what-.html
���was on the basis of correlation. I hadn���t shown it, they claimed. Where was my evidence? Well, in a sense this was just obtuse. I *had* shown that , in a number of prominent terror and mass-murder cases ( and in a number of ���ordinary��� criminal cases which I assembled in my old blog posting ���High and Violent���, to which I linked), the culprit had been found by the authorities to be a cannabis user. That���s correlation.
I had conceded, to be scrupulous, that in some cases I couldn���t show this was so. Nor could anyone else know that it wasn���t. There was just no information. I sometimes wonder whether to bother to *be* scrupulous, if my opponents are going to respond by saying that this is in some way evidence of the weakness of my case. I was pointing out that I knew the evidence wasn���t universally confirmatory, but that I still believe it to be strong enough to merit further investigation.
More than that, I also referred to other cases in which wholly different drugs (Steroids in the case of Raoul Moat and Anders Breivik, ���antidepressants��� in some others) seemed also to be correlated with violent acts. My argument has never been about cannabis alone. In fact my discovery of the cannabis-violence correlation came *after* my discovery of the correlation between ���antidepressants��� and violence, which is itself a step on from my original concern about the correlation between ���antidepressants��� and otherwise inexplicable suicide.
Now, here is the key passage in which I armoured my case against predictable criticism. I have emphasised the passage which seems to me to have been particularly important:
���There appears to be a correlation between the use of this drug and violent, irrational acts, a correlation so strong and so frequently observed in prominent events that it seems to me that we need a proper inquiry to see if it is significant. We know about the correlation because such horrors are much more intensively covered by the media and investigated by the authorities than other crimes. It is reasonable to contend that if other, less noteworthy crimes of violence were subjected to the same scrutiny, similar correlations might well emerge.���
Let me say that again. The correlation in this necessarily small number of cases is significant because it is only such high-profile cases which attract the sort of attention necessary to obtain the facts. I am a journalist, one person with many interests and nobody but me to do my research. I have limited (that is to say almost no) access to case files, police and court records. I am unaware of thousands of crimes that are prosecuted every year, and scores of deaths that are subject to inquests each year, because the media do not report them at all, or do so so scantily and in such obscure places that I could never keep track of them.
Only an inquiry, of the kind for which I call, could take us to the next stage of correlation. In many cases, as the police and the media are not interested and don't ask when the information is available, we may never know if drugs were involved in most past cases because nobody tried to find out. The inquiry would require police and courts to ascertain and record such facts in all violent crimes and in all suicides.
One other point. I���m also accused of saying that, because such killers were cannabis users, their Islamism (where present) is irrelevant. I don���t recall every having said this, because I don���t think it. Their choice of targets can be said without doubt to have been influenced by this on several occasions. But not, crucially, on all occasions.
The man who beheaded Jennifer Mills-Westley did not do so because he was an Islamist. He wasn't one. Nor did the man who opened fire in a crowded street in Tucson, Arizona. He wasn't one either. These actions, horribly similar to killings committed by men who *were* Islamists, took place with no religious or coherently political aim.
The question is not what politics or non-politics may have moved these people, but what made them able to do such dreadful things to their fellow-creatures (and in general to be so happy about it afterwards) . The inhibition against doing violent harm to fellow creatures is common to all of us, and very strong, or the streets would run with blood. It takes very powerful forces to overcome it, as military training experts well know. The thing they have in common, the Islamists and the non-Islamists, is cannabis, or some other potent mind-changing drug. Why is this simple point so hard to get across? Because the Big Dope Billionaire Lobby is incommoded by it and doesn't want to acknowledge it. The recognition of such a link, by a proper inquiry, would halt in its tracks their almost-complete campaign for legalisation. They know that. So they don���t argue. They obfuscate, in the hope you���ll be fooled. Don���t be.
And yet, still, I get nit-picking resistance, and claims that I have prejudged the matter. Can anyone be surprised that I get exasperated with the Big Dope Dupes?
By the way, the links below may be of interest to those who have taken part in the separate discussion on the drug laws of Tunisia. I think they tend to support my view that enforcement of these laws is episodic, probably not that consistent and just, perhaps, subject to corruption. :
Associated Press reports on Tunisia revamping drug laws (almost exactly a year ago) .
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-2670695/Tunisia-revamp-drug-laws-prisons-up.html
Global Post on same story, a week or so alter
Huffington Post reports here that 3,000 dinars is the ���price��� of a clear urine test, and that law is widely abused as a catch-all employed against people the police want to get anyway, rather than against drug consumption as such.
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