Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth

I know by heart the first two verses of Arthur Hugh Clough���s ���Say not the struggle naught availeth���, the warning that ���if hopes were dupes, fears may be liars���, and that apparent defeat may conceal real victory.  I used to say them softly to myself quite a lot, when it seemed as if the various battles I have fought for the last 15 years were lost.

 

I don���t bother these days, since the total failure of my main project, namely the destruction of the Conservative Party. Hopes were dupes. Fears weren���t liars. It really is that bad.  Through the most dishonest manifesto in modern history, and the use of huge piles of hedge-fund money in immensely clever and brilliantly-targeted direct marketing schemes, the Tory Party achieved what I had thought and hoped would be impossible, its first national parliamentary majority for 18 years.

 

Even so, I sense that some of my micro-battles, tiny guerrilla struggles and coastal raids behind enemy lines, are not as doomed as the main project. I think the obvious truth and force of the grammar school argument has genuinely penetrated the public mind, and even the elite mind, and the terrible error of 1965 may at least partly be undone before I die.

 

So perhaps I had better learn the second half of the poem, which runs:

 

���For while the tired waves, vainly breaking

     Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back through creeks and inlets making,

     Comes, silent, flooding in, the main.

 

���And not by eastern windows only,

     When daylight comes, comes in the light,

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

     But westward, look, the land is bright.���

 

 

Now two of my other campaigns, on ���antidepressants��� and marijuana, are also beginning to get a hearing, through the white noise of conventional wisdom.

 

Today���s blatant announcement by a ���Police and Crime Commissioner��� that he wants his local police force to ignore Parliament and refuse to enforce the law against cannabis cultivation, (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3169435/Police-s-latest-potty-idea-no-longer-prosecute-smoke-grow-cannabis-small-scale-reduce-costs.html )

has alerted many people to a fact I���ve known for years and which I tried to make better-known through my book ���The War We Never Fought���. I failed because the book was destroyed by a canny mixture of abuse and silence, and the people at whom it was aimed don���t know I���ve written it , what it says or even that it exists.

 

Our laws against cannabis are vestigial and wilfully unenforced. They are maintained on the books only to fool  conservative-minded voters and gullible politicians (and journalists) into thinking that there is still a serious effort to combat drugs which have, in effect long been decriminalised.

 

There are several reasons for this, one being the continued existence of international treaties which oblige us to maintain these laws on the books, but don���t tell us how we should enforce them.

 

But the main one is that much of our elite is already corrupted by drug-abuse, its own and that of its children. And the next one is that powerful forces, which are working night and day for total legalisation, open commercial sale and heavy taxation, need to maintain the pretence that the current laws are oppressive.

 

This falsehood, widely believed, enables them to recruit to their cause gullible simpletons who can be made to think that the law against cannabis is an affront to the liberty of the individual. These dim dupes can then imagine that they are fighting for a noble cause as they act as unconscious advocates for one of the most cynical billionaire lobbies in the world, one that hopes to make still more billions out of human misery, and is on the moral level of Big Tobacco.

 

Crucially, it also enables them to claim that the many problems caused in our society by drugs are the result of a non-existent ���prohibition���, when the truth is the almost exact opposite.  The widespread and tragic abuse of drugs in our society is the *consequence* of 40 years of unofficial decriminalisation. It will be far worse if we are fool enough to take the next step ��� to full legalisation .

 

This plan is falsely described as ���regulation��� by its slippery advocates, falsely because this so-called ���regulation��� will actually be deregulation by comparison with the current state of affairs, unleashing a hideous free-for-all in the dangerous drug market.   

 

Anyway, apart from the Durham incident, we also have more evidence of my suggestion that there is a correlation between drugtaking and the violence in our midst which we often seek to explain purely as terrorism, when in fact its perpetrators have been driven out of their minds by legal or illegal drugs.

 

I have studied these cases so often that I now know that it will usually be just a matter of time between the report of the outrage and a (much less prominent) story about the perpetrator���s drug problem.

 

A few evenings ago, reports came in of a supposed terrorist atrocity in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Apart from the unlikelihood of the So-called Islamic State targeting military facilities in such a place, I immediately thought that there were features of this (especially the lone killer) which made it likely that it was an act of madness. Very quickly it emerged that the killer, Mohammod Abdulazeez, had previously been pulled in by police for driving under the influence,  while stinking of marijuana and with a crust of white powder round his nostrils.

 

Now it turns out that he was a ���deeply troubled young man who struggled with mental illness and drug abuse at the same time��� and who had also been ���medicated��� by doctors in his school years then ���turned to drugs and alcohol���, then lost a job for failing a drug test. His diaries, written shortly before his crime,  are described by those who have read them as ���gibberish��� .

 

In this he is similar to almost all of the drifters and drug-abusers who have been involved in two recent murders of soldiers in Canada, the Lee Rigby outrage, The Charlie Hebdo murders and the linked killings in and around Paris, the Tucson, Arizona attack in which Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 13 others were badly wounded, and six people died . Not to mention the entirely non-political killings of Palmira Silva by Nicholas Salvador, and of Jennifer Mills-Westley by Deyan Deyanov (both these, horribly, involved the beheading of the victim, an act commonly associated with Islamist fanatics).

 

Then there was the utterly irrational and purposeless (but dreadfully violent) killing of Alan Greaves, a Church organist, by two known cannabis users in Sheffield. The thread which runs through these incidents and which, I suspect, runs through many more less-reported ones, is that the killers were drug-abusers and that they behaved in a wholly unhinged and irrational fashion.  

 

My first interest in this was stimulated by what still seems to me to an extraordinary correlation between the use of legal ���antidepressant��� medication and rampage killings.  Many of these killings are scantily reported in the British press, because the numbers of dead and wounded are ��� comparatively ��� small. So I sometimes contact local journalists in the USA to ask for details. I found that, in some cases, there was genuinely no trace at all of the use of ���antidepressants���, but there were suggestions of marijuana use. Over some years of examining such cases,  I came to the conclusion that this is still a correlation which badly needs investigating, a correlation between mind-altering drugs, legal and illegal, and irrational acts of severe violence. Such an investigation would need a lot of money and a lot of power, especially to demand the opening of sealed medical records which are a surprisingly common feature in such cases. I believe this is also still a problem in finding out exactly what ���medication��� the German wings pilot who deliberately crashed his plane , Andreas Lubitz, may have been taking. I have to ask who benefits from this secrecy.

 

I���d add at this point that the linked problem of ���antidepressants���, drugs whose efficacy seems to me to be unproven and whose side-effects are beyond doubt, also seems at last to be getting some attention . Though again, people seem unable to see what is in front of their noses.

 

I watched the start of a BBC News Channel programme on Monday. I think the first three individuals who spoke said how ���antidepressants��� had a) done them no good and b) been very hard to relinquish. Rather than pursuing this, the presenter then went off into a general discussion about how mental illness was still not treated as the same as physical illness, which is undoubtedly true and also not wholly irrational, given the absence of objective diagnoses in this field.  

 

This followed a powerful article in the ���The Times Magazine��� last Saturday, which is behind a paywall, but which I urge you to read. In it, Luke Montagu, the future Earl of Sandwich, recounts his experiences with ���antidepressants��� .

Here���s a small sample:

 

���For the past 20 years, Montagu had been taking antidepressants - first Prozac, still new back then, now one of the most commonly prescribed drugs of all time, subsequently other common antidepressants such as Seroxat.

���Yet when he was first prescribed these drugs at 19, Montagu was not depressed and had never been diagnosed with depression. He was a student at New York University, and had recently undergone a general anaesthetic for a sinus operation that left him with headaches and feeling, as he puts it, "not myself".

���Without carrying out any tests, a British GP announced that he had a "chemical imbalance of the limbic system" and prescribed Prozac. Montagu, "impressionable and in awe of doctors", swallowed them unquestioningly.���

 

You���ll have to read the whole thing to find out all the dreadful things which followed.

 

But the bit which rang the strongest bell with me was this  ���One of the worst things the family has had to endure has been the scepticism of others. Antidepressants and sleeping pills are everywhere - one in three British women will take antidepressants in her lifetime and one in ten men. People don't like to hear that something supposed to make them feel better might actually be harmful.���

 

Once people have themselves been prescribed these things (last year there were 57 million ���antidepressant��� prescriptions in England) they become advocates of them. They want to believe they are being helped. So they refuse even to consider that they might  possibly have been prescribed a useless or even harmful drug.

 

Like so much of modern life, the whole thing reminds me of that great and terrible film ���Invasion of the Bodysnatchers���. People cease to be who they were, and those who notice and complain are vilified and isolated.

 

And yet, and yet, if such an article can appear in such a place, perhaps a painful inch has in fact been gained.