A drug-ravaged criminal or Nick Clegg...Guess which one I trust

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

How on earth did I end up on friendly terms with Howard Marks, the drug-smuggler and pro-cannabis propagandist who died last week? Yet I did.
You might think we would loathe each other. He stood for almost everything I am against. But not quite. He was a fierce and instinctive defender of free speech, a rare and precious quality.

I learned this one long-ago evening in Blackpool, when a squawking rabble of ignorant, intolerant students succeeded in having me driven off the stage at a debate.
As a snivelling official of the National Union of Students switched off my microphone and ordered me from the room, Howard got up, put his arm around my shoulder and said quietly and firmly: ‘If he’s going, I’m going too.’ He walked by my side as we left through a knot of hissing, hostile zealots.

I vowed never to forget it, and I never have. He loathe
d my opinions, and I loathed his, but we both knew there was something higher and better than that – the freedom to argue without hate or rancour.

I debated against him four times. He was wholly frank about his aim – the legalisation of selfish pleasure and the profits to be made from it. He was a criminal – but had served prison time for it without complaining.
never did I hear him produce the sort of pious, oily rubbish you usually get from the advocates of the Big Dope lobby. He listened to my arguments. By the next time I met him, he would have read up the facts and prepared a thoughtful response. I cannot tell you how rare that is. Most Big Dope advocates never listen to a word their opponents say.

What a pleasing contrast he was to the pitiful Nick Clegg, who ceaselessly calls for drug law liberalisation with the ingratiating smarminess of a newly hatched curate. He was at it again on the BBC’s Newsnight last week.
The programme, which recently gave the ridiculous Russell Brand a free platform for his wet opinions on drugs, filmed Mr Clegg wandering around Colombia, mouthing pro-legalisation pieties.

The former Deputy Prime Minister clearly knows almost nothing about the subject. He’s never met a cliche or a fat, juicy slab of conventional wisdom that he doesn’t like.

He actually said that many people in this country are ‘forced to steal to fund their drug habit, because both drug dealing and drug use are illegal’. Forced to steal? By whom? No, they choose to do so because they are selfish and cruel and don’t care about wrecking other people’s lives. And beside the fact (seemingly unknown to the former Deputy PM) that the police are rapidly giving up enforcing the laws against drug possession, how does this follow?

If cannabis was legal in this country, the big producers wouldn’t give it away free. In fact it would be more expensive because it would be taxed. Which is why there’s so much crime in the UK surrounding smuggled but legal alcohol and tobacco. So why on earth would dishonest, greedy people stop stealing to pay for it, just because it was legal?

The absence of thought here is amazing, as is Mr Clegg’s complacent lack of interest in the growing correlation between cannabis use and mental illness, not to mention horrible, violent crime.

Howard Marks looked like what he was, the ravaged, ruined advocate of a very bad cause. Mr Clegg, with his nice suit and his sweet tones, is far more dangerous, and a lot harder to like.

Another foul-up vanishes into thin air

Have you noticed the way that news suddenly stops happening in various foreign parts? After months when it produced far more news than it could consume locally, Ukraine went dark and silent. But bad things kept on happening.

This always takes place in countries where the fashionable Left triumphs. South Africa, now a swelling disaster of disorder, mismanagement and corruption, is another example. The second act, where the liberal utopia goes wrong, just doesn’t get reported.

Well, last week the Ukrainian premier resigned, mainly because of his utter failure to tackle the real corruption (vicious and viral, affecting every corner of life) in which that country is neck-deep. Even The Economist, a naive cheerleader for the February 2014 EU-backed putsch in Kiev, admits: ‘Corruption is still rampant. Key reforms are incomplete… the oligarchs are still entrenched.’

Of course they are. The overthrow of the elected government, by a supposedly spontaneous foreign-backed mob, was always about pushing the EU eastwards. The rest was propaganda. I hope you didn’t fall for it.

***

Worrying? That’s what dads are for

There’s a single, very moving moment in the new film Midnight Special that makes the whole rather odd story worthwhile. The small boy at the centre of the plot, who is being sought by angry armed men, turns to his father and tells him to stop worrying about him.

His father replies: ‘I will always worry about you. I like worrying about you. That’s the deal.’ In a world where fathers are increasingly being written out of the script of life, it’s a rare mention of an important thing.

***

Electronics shops are selling huge numbers of dashboard cameras to guard drivers against false accusations, something that happened years ago on Russia’s lawless roads.

Meanwhile, carers who steal from old people are being caught thanks to tiny surveillance devices hidden in smoke alarms. When are we not under surveillance? How many cameras will it take to entirely replace our shrivelled consciences and the dead Christian religion that once sustained them?

****

Well, so much for Jeremy Corbyn, who I have defended here for not being an Establishment mouthpiece. Tony Benn, who taught Mr Corbyn all he knew, was a patriot thrilled by England’s long struggle for liberty. He knew that the European Union meant the end of a thousand years of English history. He loathed its unaccountable power.
By taking away our freedom to make our own laws, the EU knocks the stuffing out of any serious political movement of Left or Right.
Mr Corbyn, by ignoring this lesson, turns out to be just another bureaucrat after all. He’d have done better to go down fighting. Having crushed him on this, his enemies now know that they can first bend him to their will, and then destroy him.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

 

An Exchange with Mr 'Paul P'

Below I reproduce part of an exchange between me and Mr 'P' which appears in full, on the comment thread 'Cannabis and mental illness - the Guardian speaks!'.

 

The missing bit is some embarrassing stuff by Mr P equating THC with lettuce and sugar, and some silly stuff from Mr P bizarrely claiming that because we have discovered cannabis is dangerous, we can now declare that certain levels of cannabis usage are safe. But, as the exchange below shows, there is no such precision available, nor is there likely to be. And the unpredictability of the effects of cannabis on the human mind make it as impossible to regulate as Russian Roulette, a sport which sensible people eschew, rather than seeking to 'regulate' it on the grounds that this will make it safe and elss available to children. Ha ha. Mr 'P', of course,  is free to reply at length. No doubt he will. 

 

Mr P: Mr Hitchens doesn't half spin his points of view. The following are two pertinent quotes from the Guardian article....

 

******PH: Spin? I've simply invited readers to look at what the Guardian says.***

Mr P (quoting)

 

"What has convinced some researchers that the risks of heavy cannabis use now warrant public health campaigns to warn people of potential harm?"

And....

"While the vast majority of people who smoke cannabis will not develop psychotic disorders, those who do can have their lives ruined."

Thus the harm can come from heavy use of cannabis while the vast majority of people, most of whom we presume are light users, will not suffer harm. This is so obviously intuitive that it makes scientific inquiry essentially redundant.

***PH notes : oh, right. Scientific enquiry is now redundant, eh? I would hardly expect the Guardian to emphasise the darker side of the question. I linked to it so people could read it, knowing what they would find, and confident in their ability to see that this particular newspaper's coverage, in my view long-delayed, might also be a bit optimistic.

What is 'heavy' use? Why, it's what somebody else does, just as an 'alcoholic' is someone who drinks more than his doctor.

The problem here, and the Robin Murray quotation -...

“It’s not sensible to wait for absolute proof that cannabis is a component cause of psychosis,” said Sir Robin Murray, professor of psychiatric research at King’s College London. “There’s already ample evidence to warrant public education around the risks of heavy use of cannabis, particularly the high-potency varieties. For many reasons, we should have public warnings.”

....make the point I've been making for years. That is that insistence on absolute, calibrated definition of the risks of cannabis simply delays action while victims accumulate and suffer.

I would love there to be such a clear linkage. I have long sought for such a clear linkage. Regular readers here know of the value I place upon objective and testable knowledge. But in the present state of medical and scientific knowledge, it is not available and is unlikely to be available in the foreseeable future.

As I have many times explained, the misty frontiers of mental illness are hard to define. I myself try not even to use the word 'psychosis' (though I will quote psychiatrists who use it) or any other of the words supposedly defining forms of mental illness.

The DSM has no fancy word to describe many of the things associated with cannabis use, not necessarily 'heavy' in the opinion of the users. These include : Deterioration of schoolwork, academic and professional failure or mediocrity in persons who might have been expected to succeed, declining IQ, inability to cope with criticism, fantasies about persecution, verbal incoherence, repetitiveness in conversation, a generally lower level of life than the user might  have expected to attain. If such things were named, recorded and measured, I think we would find a very strong correlation between them and cannabis use. Where they may lead over time is unknowable. Many of them result in needless personal tragedy in the form of wasted lives and grief-struck, baffled parents. Of course, it can get much, much worse.

 

Another dreadful crime, the stamping to death of a tiny child, turns out to have been perpetrated by a *heavy* cannabis user , though I wonder if the killer would have so described herself. At least we hear less of the silly claim it is a 'peaceful' drug. Perhaps in time we'll move on to the increasingly obvious conclusion about what kind of drug it really is.

 

I also note, on the same theme, that the alleged perpetrator of another recent violent crime has also been charged with cannabis production. 

Cannabis and Mental Illness- The Guardian Speaks!

I long ago got used to the fact that what I say now, everyone will be saying within 20 years. But on the cannabis risk, things may be moving a bit faster.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/15/cannabis-scientists-call-for-action-amid-mental-health-concerns

 

Maybe they could take another look at my book on the subject, which they reviewed so abusively so recently. 

On the Death of Howard Marks - My Regrets at the Passing of a Gentleman

I learned with regret this morning that Howard Marks, several times my tough debating opponent, never my foe, on one unforgettable occasion my honourable ally against fools and censors, has died of inoperable cancer at the age of 70.

 

This seems a good moment to re-publish the posting I placed here in January 2015, after I learned of his illness. My condolences go to his family and friends.

 

'I was very sorry to hear that Howard Marks, the famous cannabis smuggler and advocate of cannabis decriminalisation, has inoperable cancer.  I disagree with everything he argues for, and have debated against him on four occasions. But I regard him as a civilized opponent, a gentleman and a principled defender of free speech.

In fact I am often thinking of him when I experience the other thing – an opponent who lacks generosity, who misrepresents me, who confuses disagreement with personal dislike and lets one become the other, who isn’t actually paying attention to what I say, and who probably wishes in secret that I could be shut up by force.

 

Howard is the opposite of all these things. I’ll describe the strongest instance of his generosity in a moment. He’s never been other than friendly despite our disagreement. A few years ago, when I bested him on a point on a debate, I was struck by the way he had carefully researched that very point the next time we met. Because we each listened to the other, we both made each other think and came back with a cogent answer to it.  

He is also possessed of the picturesque ruin of a once-beautiful voice. And I often wonder what he might have made of himself had he not chosen the sad path of drugs. He has a considerable mind, and the country would have benefited greatly had that mind been used for another purpose. He is of course a grammar school product, from the lost days when the sons of Merchant Navy captains from Bridgend could get into Balliol College, Oxford.

 

But this is how we met. Long ago, so long I can’t recall the date. I agreed to discuss the drugs issue with him at a fringe meeting of the National Union of Students conference, one winter's night in Blackpool. This took place in one of the side rooms of the vast, ornate Winter Gardens there. A lot of people had come to hear Howard. Soon after we had begun, someone in the audience (or perhaps not) spread a false story that I had said from the platform that I was a ‘racist’. The person involved later withdrew and apologised for this slur.

 

I had no idea that this storm was quietly growing as I spoke. Since it wasn't true, I couldn't have known the story was circulating. There was a certain amount of muttering from a part of the audience, but that’s not unusual at such meetings.

Then  ( and I have to say the meeting was going rather well, with plenty of repartee, humour and audience engagement) a senior official of the National Union of Students marched up on to the platform and told me that I must immediately cease speaking and leave. When I asked why (totally amazed by this behaviour) he told me that I ought to know, and that I must know why. I said I had no idea, and protested quite loudly. The microphones were then turned off. Some sort of protest group had meanwhile assembled and were shouting. I can speak without a microphone, and proceeded to do so. The NUS official then said ‘In that case, I must ask you to leave the platform’.

 

At this point, Howard declared ‘Well, if he’s going, I’m going too’. What’s more, he put his arm firmly round my shoulder as we walked through the shouting protest group.

 

I was then asked to sit in a side-room, where, to my even greater astonishment, I was approached by a  police officer who offered to escort me to the railway station for my own safety. Never having been run out of town before, and being (as an ex-Trotskyist) very unscared of Trotyskyist mini-mobs, I urged him not to worry.  I would leave under my own power, and spend the night in Blackpool as planned, thanks all the same.

 

Very cleverly, the officer pointed out  (accurately) that the Winter Gardens are full of glass. The place is terribly breakable. If I left without an escort, he said, who knows what might happen to the ornate glass panels and lamps we saw all round us. And of course, if they were damaged, he, the police officer, would be held responsible for having failed to keep the peace. Surely I didn’t want that.

 

So, seething in fury, but outmanoeuvred, I agreed to be escorted to a back entrance like a fugitive, though not to the station. Nothing of any kind happened to me. I didn’t see Howard again for some time, but I was deeply impressed by his instinctive revulsion at the way I was treated, and his readiness to stand literally shoulder to shoulder if it had come to trouble. Every time I've met him since has also been a pleasure, though we'll never agree. Not many people are like this, and more should be.'

That Sussex Debate - the Full Version

A member of the audience has kindly sent me a link to the complete recording of the Sussex University Debate on marijuana legalisation. 

 

Here it is

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V89gLhFAc1M

A Youtube recording of my speech on Drugs at Sussex, 7th April 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pkKmqT7edc

What 'War on Drugs'? What 'Prohibition?' Will the BBC take any notice of its own research?

Take a look at these figures gathered by the BBC, on an extraordinarily rapid fall in cannabis possession arrests in England and Wales.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35954754

My main question is ‘will the BBC now reflect this fact in its coverage of the issue, which currently consists of giving unchallenged platforms to liberalisers, ignoring me, my evidence and my book completely, and accepting their bogus argument that the existing state of affairs is the result of failed prohibition, and that a ruthless and cruel law is ‘criminalising’ harmless victimless drug users.

I enjoyed the hilarious bit (which appears in all such accounts) about police being ‘freed up’ (why are they never just freed’ or ‘freed down’)  for ‘more important work’. What is this more important work? Patrolling Twitter? Staging notional arrests of dead Bishops? Can we have research? As my book found, it certainly hasn’t been followed by any especially increased efforts to pursue the so-called ‘hard’ drugs, not that there’s anything soft about marijuana, as my regular readers well know.

What’s actually happened is that by the introduction of the ‘Cannabis Warning’ by the then Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), since replaced by the National Police Chiefs’ Council, the police declared that this was a law they were no longer prepared to enforce.

This extraordinary example of a law made without reference to Parliament should attract more interest. It is hard to track the exact origin of the ’Warning’; but it appears to have become national police policy in the early years of this century, following the Brixton ‘experiment’ along the same lines, and the widely misunderstood 1997-2000 Runciman Report, which pointed out that countries had considerable freedom in enforcing laws which they were bound by treaty to have on the books. This was the successor of even more widely misunderstood 1968-9 Wootton report, which the government of the day appeared to reject but in fact accepted and which began the long, gradual decriminalisation of marijuana in England and Wales.

And after a short period in which the ‘Warning’ was actually issued, they now aren’t even bothering with that,  most of the time. You can hardly blame them. It is a waste of their time, even if the time saved is spent twiddling their thumbs or discussing overtime. The ‘Warning’ , not sanctioned by Parliament, is not centrally recorded and  has absolutely no consequences for those to whom it is given. It is literally pointless. Simpler to do nothing at all.

This is absolutely no surprise to me, or to the select body of enlightened, properly informed persons who have courageously obtained and read my near-samizdat book ‘The War We Never Fought’ , despite the mixture of ignorant abuse, baseless derision, personal fury and silence with which its publication was marked.

Even today, after years of pointing out that cannabis in this country has been, de facto, decriminalised, I am pestered by Big Dope’s comment warriors claiming that there is a ‘war on drugs’ which has failed or that there is ‘Prohibition’ of cannabis in force. Or I hear people going on and on about the alleged ‘success’ of a far smaller, far more recent experiments in  overt drug legalisation in the Netherlands or Portugal.

When will it sink in that England has been engaging in a far longer, far bigger experiment for decades?

Probably never.

The interests which wish to suppress this truth are so powerful that it is almost pointless to challenge them.  They are on the verge of a huge success, the abolition of the international treaties which prevent the open sale, marketing, advertising and taxation of marijuana, without which it cannot reach its full profit potential. Having thought they had won, they are now highly perplexed by the growing correlation between cannabis and mental illness which suggests that their 50-year PR campaign , in which it is portrayed as a soft drug, is false and mistaken.

They exist among the political, chattering and media classes, most of whom have used marijuana in their adult lives, many of whom still do, and many of whom permit their children to do so.

These are the outliers who patrol the frontiers of debate, unleashing spite and misrepresentation, gross unfairness in broadcast discussions and what amounts to censorship, on anyone who challenges the official narrative that cannabis is a) harmless and b) its users are cruelly and needlessly persecuted.

These are strengthened by a selfist, hedonist culture, which regards self-stupefaction as a morally defensible response to the modern world , and in some cases desires a Brave New World type of society in which discontent is dissolved in narcotic sweetness.

Behind them stand that huge, but quieter forces of the Billionaire Big Dope Lobby, one half of which wants profit and the other half of which sees legal marijuana as a huge new source of tax revenue.

Every time you see or hear a spokesman or a dupe of Big Dope, ask yourselves which of these profiles he or she fits.

We aren't fighting a 'war' - they're just a bunch of doped-up losers

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Here we go again, politicians and media hand in hand, doing the work of the terrorists. They are called terrorists because their aim is to scare us into doing their will. Those who help them scare us, by exaggerating their power and importance, are giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It is stupid, and they should stop.

Supposed ‘experts’ speak in grave tones about ‘security’, an area about which you can say anything at all because nobody ever confirms or denies anything. The ‘security services’, costly and ineffectual as they are, are pleased to be given an importance they have not earned.

And they will be along in a minute demanding more powers to snoop into the lives of the innocent while continuing to fail to spot the guilty. Like anyone who is allowed to claim expenses while not being required to give details of how he spends the money, these people live by boasting and exaggeration, plus a bit of angry pomposity if anyone questions their real worth.

I especially dislike all this lofty stuff about how bad the Belgians are at tracking terrorists. Are we so much better? How will all this look if – and in truth we have no realistic way of predicting or preventing it – it is London next?

The French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, says ludicrously that this is a ‘war’ and others bloviate and splutter along the same lines, instantly winning themselves starring roles on the 24-hour news feeds.

What nonsense. How the sordid criminals of the Brussels suburbs, who are common murderers of low morals and low intelligence, must grin like dogs and rejoice to be paid such a fat compliment.

Let Monsieur Valls visit a real war zone and see what modern munitions can do to a big city, such as Baghdad, where the shockwaves from bombs falling a mile away made the hospitals tremble so violently that women gave birth prematurely.

Let him see the enormous craters, the concrete buildings with their floors collapsed like a pile of pancakes, the general chaos. Let him observe how normal life ends, schools close, money loses its value, the shops empty as supplies dry up and the economy ceases to function.

If we were at war, life as we know it would come to a stop, and we would be set back decades, living in ruins without electricity.

That is war. They know all about it in Iraq, Syria, Libya and the other places we have ‘liberated’ recently. What we face is crime – stupid, vicious, cruel, but crime, actions which don’t deserve to be dignified or pumped up beyond their real significance.

When we have eventually found all there is to be known about the culprits, I predict that they will turn out to be very like the drug-addled petty crooks and lowlifes who killed Lee Rigby, who attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo and who murdered more defenceless people in Paris last November.

Read this report from the BBC’s Secunder Kermani, which brilliantly describes the reality, quite different from our fictional picture of Wahhabi puritans directed from a bunker in Arabia: ‘One friend of the [Abdeslam] brothers who used to hang out there told me he would regularly see Brahim Abdeslam “watching IS videos, with a joint in one hand, and a beer in another”. He said Brahim would spout off radical statements but that no one took him seriously.

‘Another friend showed me a video from a Brussels nightclub of the two Abdeslam brothers on a night out with girls, drinking and dancing – this was February 2015, just months before they started to plan the attacks in Paris.

‘The network that the Abdeslam brothers had around them – based as much on personal loyalty, disenchantment and petty crime as radical ideology – would be key in helping Salah [the other brother] escape after the Paris attacks.’

This is not war. It is the action of deranged nobodies, trying to give their dead-end lives meaning with a grandiose cause.

If you want to know where to find them, just follow the smell of marijuana, the supposedly harmless drug which rots the reasoning powers of its users and which, when combined with radical Islam, explodes into red ruin.

The Big Dope Lobby and its many suckers and dupes constantly attack me for pointing out the dangers of the drug they want to legalise. They claim I blame everything on it. But what can I do?

This week I ask your pardon for referring to this drug twice in one column. For it is not just associated with Islamic terror. It is also linked with the most callous and cruel non-political crime.

The dreadful death of PC David Phillips was caused by Clayton Williams, a youth who smokes the drug so much that his Facebook picture showed him with a cannabis joint in his mouth.

Williams had been smoking this supposedly ‘soft’ drug on the evening he mowed down PC Phillips, the father of a young family – a horror Williams’s doped mind still seems unable to understand.

When will the twin lies, that there is a ‘war on drugs’ and that taking cannabis is a harmless, peaceable recreation, be exposed for the dangerous falsehoods they are?

Though I dislike most of his views, I have always been rather impressed by Barack Obama, a thoughtful and interesting man. He has also been dead right about Cuba, realising that the best way to finish the Castro nightmare is to end the US blockade and make it clear that island’s misery is the fault of its communist despots. He should do something similar in North Korea. A picture of him standing alongside Kim Jong Un might cancel out the embarrassing memory of his plainly unwanted surprise grapple with tango dancer Mora Godoy in Buenos Aires (right).

 

Once again you will have woken this morning to find that the clocks have been shoved forward by an hour. For me, and for many other early risers, this means weeks of something rather like jet-lag. But what’s it for? Why do we do it? Nobody actually knows. We just do it because we have done it for years. There’s no solid objective evidence that it does any good at all.

Wait a few weeks and the evenings will get lighter all by themselves. Yet we’re told absurdly that it provides more light. It doesn’t.

A Cherokee elder, baffled by the paleface habit of messing around with clocks, once asked: ‘What sort of person thinks that by cutting a foot off one end of a blanket, and then sewing it on to the other end, he gets a longer blanket?’

You won’t be surprised to learn that I am more interested by the gloomy bit of Easter – the betrayal by the secret police spy, the show trial, the cowardice of the government in the face of the mob, executing the innocent and releasing the murderer – than in the happy part. The really great myths, so-called, are not about something which once happened. They are about something that goes on happening all the time, and is happening now.

An Exchange on Correlation and the Possible Dangers of Some Drugs,Legal and Illegal

What follows is a posting from 'Theo', a  reader of my Sunday column, and my responses interleaved and marked ***.

I felt it deserved a posting of its own. 'Theo' is of course welcome to reply at length. 

 

Theo: The use of Anti depressants by one of the columbine shooters? CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION... a psychologically disturbed individual with suicidal and homicidal thoughts was taking anti depressants, wow, what a revelation!

***PH writes: Indeed, correlation is not causation. But it is also the case that correlation is not necessarily *not* causation. On the contrary, it is the foundation of epidemiology. This is why I call for an inquiry, to see if the correlation is meaningful (as some are) or meaningless) as some are). I cannot see why any open-minded person could possibly be against such an inquiry.

Theo: As for 'a psychologically disturbed individual with suicidal and homicidal thoughts was taking anti depressants, wow, what a revelation!', this remark is neither as clever nor as conclusive as he seems to think. Unhappy people, of whom there are many, often have nothing physically or measurably wrong with them and are not objectively distinguishable from happy people, by any scientific test (with the possible exception of an absence of physical exercise from their lives, see below) .

PH: It is possible - and despite being jeered at for saying this when I first did so I now find considerable research support for the suggestion ( eg http://bit.ly/1P7Vt4n )- that the widespread absence of serious physical exercise common in advanced western societies may explain a great deal of the otherwise inexplicable unhappiness known as ' clinical depression'. There may be other explanations. I do not know.

But as soon as a person begins taking the chemicals known as 'antidepressants' he or she alters his or her brain and body , quite possibly irreversibly.

While crowd madness is frighteningly common, severe irrationality (especially associated with violence or suicide) is actually quite rare in individuals and is often associated with some sort of external trauma, whether induced by violence or drugs. Until quite recently, most suicides were readily explicable by the inescapable desperation of the suicide's position, and, in a horrible way, rational. Now, it is often the case that devastated relatives tell coroners (I read a lot of these cases in local newspaper reports) that they had no idea the suicide was so unhappy, and cannot explain the action. Almost invariably, I find that the subjects of these puzzling cases are said (often in passing with no further interest shown by the coroner) to have been 'depressed' or 'undergoing treatment for depression', which I would judge usually means that they were taking some sort of 'antidepressant' medication. I was almost absolutely sure when I heard of the Lubitz case that it would emerge that he had been taking such pills, or possibly was a cannabis user. As I always do, I held my tongue while I waited for the details. There would just have been a lot of ignorant howling if I had speculated without data, and the lack of information would have made it impossible to resolve it at the time. Being proved right later wouldn't have made up for this.

As I almost always find, my speculation was eventually found to be correct. As I almost always find, nobody drew any conclusions from this.

It is also the case that quite a lot of such chemically-associated suicides are no longer recorded as such, and are registered under such vague categorisations as 'narrative verdicts', thus making the statistics unreliable.

It is also now pretty much accepted ( see Nordic Cochrane Centre reports January 2016) that 'antidepressants' make suicide more likely among the young. I have never seen any good reason for supposing that this might not apply to those who are not young, and the research which established this link did not in fact rule out the possibility that it might apply to others as well.***

Theo: It's very similar to you always pointing out how a lot of terrorists and killers happen to have smoked lots of marijuana, well yeah lots of disturbed people happen to fall in to substance abuse and consume drugs and alcohol.

****PH writes: Yes, it is similar, and essentially the same point. And the same argument applies. People who take serious mind-altering chemicals whether on prescription or illegally via criminal dealers are exposing their physical brains to possible physical and chemical alterations and effects ( quite possibly permanent effects) which go way beyond the effects of personal distress or unhappiness, and might well, as a result, undertake behaviours well outside the normal range of human actions. ***

How easy do you think it would be to find dozens of pacifist philanthropists and heroes who smoke lots of cannabis? I'm guessing pretty easy, one could easily identify such people and say, 'look they're smoking lots of cannabis and doing all these good things, so cannabis must make you do good things. The pilot who crashed the plane most likely did so because he was suffering from severe depression and psychological issues, hence why he was taking the anti depressants. Psychologically disturbed and sick people often take drugs, either through prescription or by self medication, or both.

***I find this argument evasive and also designed to avoid further investigation. My position is that there is a matter here that plainly needs to be investigated properly. Once again, I have not suggested that *every* person who takes such drugs becomes a violent killer or kills himself. Not every cancer sufferer dies. But if in some extreme cases there is a link between such drugs and such actions, it would tend to suggest that the drugs themselves might not be as 'soft' or 'safe' as their promoters and defenders suggest. We should therefore, at a minimum, be more careful about allowing people to use them than we are****

The EU is our own Hotel California: We can check out, but we'll never leave

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I’m sorry to break this to you but it looks as if we’ll have to endure not one but two EU referendum campaigns.
The second one, by the way, will definitely end in a vote to stay in.
The ‘exit’ campaign was last week cunningly taken over by Tories who don’t want to leave the Superstate and will use a vote to leave (if it happens) as the basis for yet another round of negotiations with Brussels.
Boris Johnson and Michael Howard are ancient liberal Europhiles, who have learned how to seduce the Tory Party with speeches that sound Right-wing but aren’t really. It is painful to see this cynical seduction technique at work, and watch the old ladies fall for it.
Neither is what he seems. Lord Howard led a Left-liberal putsch against the genuine EU opponent Iain Duncan Smith in 2003. Mr Johnson is an act, not a politician. He is a keen Europhile, and to conceal it from his fans he will do so many U-turns between now and referendum day that they will look like a series of S-bends.
Both men’s weird declarations of support for Brexit were cunningly hedged.
And the London Mayor was careful to state: ‘I will be advocating vote “leave”... because I want a better deal for the people of this country to save them money and to take back control.’
Read this carefully (as you always should) and you will realise there’s no clear declaration that he wants our national independence back. But there is a desire for a ‘deal’. Likewise his supposed reversal last Saturday wasn’t really as clear as it looked. Be assured. If there is a majority to leave there will be a second poll and a search for a new deal.
What sort of deal? Lord Howard was more specific. In an article which was lazily reported as a ‘blow for David Cameron’, he explicitly said that he saw a vote to leave as a way of restarting negotiations on how to stay in: ‘There is only one thing that just might shake Europe’s leaders out of their complacency: the shock of a vote by the British people to leave.’
He added: ‘We would be sorely missed. If the UK voted to leave, there would be a significant chance that they would ask us to think again. When Ireland and Denmark voted to reject EU proposals, the EU offered them more concessions and, second time round, got the result they wanted.’
Lord Howard went on to explain how happy he would be for Britain to be a semi-detached part of a two-tier EU – something very much on the cards as the EU moves into its next phase of integration, two or three years hence. ‘We – and others – could say to the integrationists, “We don’t want to stop you doing what you want to do as long as you don’t make us do what we don’t want to do.” ’
You read it first here. The EU is like the Hotel California. You can check out. But you can never leave.
This referendum, which was never supposed to happen at all, is a sham for which I refuse to fall.

What sort of hero condemns women to death?

The BBC’s new thriller The Night Manager must be one of the strangest things ever broadcast. Its apparent hero, played by Tom Hiddleston, is portrayed as a tower of moral purity. Yet the first thing he does is to betray a living, breathing woman (who trusted him with her life because of his honest British appearance) in pursuit of an abstract ideal. Apparently, he hates arms traders so much, this is the sort of thing he does.
Predictably, the woman, played by Aure Atika, is barbarously murdered (in the book, I’m sorry to say, her dog is murdered too, a detail the BBC spared us). The arms dealer, equally predictably, gets away with it.
This skewed moral system in which people claim to be virtuous by having severe, righteous views about foreign countries, seems horribly common among our cultural elite. Is this why our foreign policy keeps getting its head stuck up its own fundament?
Again and again, in pursuit of some supposedly noble goal, we plunge entire countries into lakes of fire and blood, and then stand about looking puzzled and claiming it wasn’t our fault.
Inscribed in stone, above the doors of all government buildings, should be William Blake’s bitterly true maxim: ‘He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars: general good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.’

Country dwellers are often mystified by the appearance of strange little dumps of used fertiliser pellets, which appear now all over  the place by night. I can explain. These are left by the owners of urban cannabis farms (Britain’s most successful and profitable agricultural sector) who dare not use their own bins for fear that even the British police – among the most relaxed in the world on the dope question – might notice and take action against them.

Education that doesn't add up

The reports flood in, as they do almost weekly. The standards of mathematics teaching have plunged disastrously. The professions are dominated by private school products, two years ahead of their state school contemporaries.
Yet nobody ever reaches the obvious conclusion – that we should return to selection by ability in the state system and reopen the great private schools to the taxpayer-funded Direct Grant system which lifted so many poor children to success.
Why are our elite so prejudiced against this obvious remedy? Even on their own terms, their position makes no sense.

Every week I hear more alarming things about our prisons, especially the almost universal availability of mindbending drugs, whose users often become violent. These are now flown into cells, through broken windows, by drones. The authorities seem powerless to stop this.
No surprise there. As we make no effort to stop drugtaking outside prison, it is hardly surprising prisons themselves are even more lawless. Alongside these cases are alarming numbers of mentally ill people, cast out into the non-existent ‘community’ by the wicked decision to close most mental hospitals.
Older, experienced staff are quietly disappearing and turnover among new staff is unsurprisingly high. Huge jails are often left overnight in the charge of tiny numbers of officers.
I predict a major catastrophe soon. And it will be the direct result of decades of liberal penal policy, which uses prison only as a last resort and so ensures that a large number of inmates are hardened criminals, incapable of reform, before they ever get there.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down