One more mass killer, one more drug-addled mind

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

It's the drugs, stupid. In hundreds of square miles of supposed analysis of the Norway mass murder, almost nobody has noticed that the smirking Anders Breivik was taking large quantities of mind-altering chemicals.

In this case, the substances are an anabolic steroid called stanozolol, combined with an amphetamine-like drug called ephedrine, plus caffeine to make the mixture really fizz.

I found these facts in Breivik’s vast, drivelling manifesto simply because I was looking for them. The authorities and most of the media are more interested in his non-existent belief in fundamentalist Christianity.

I doubt if the drugs would ever have been known about if Breivik hadn’t himself revealed this. I suspect that mind-bending drugs of some kind feature in almost all of the epidemic rampage killings that Western society is now suffering.

Anabolic steroids were also used heavily by David Bieber, who killed one policeman and tried to kill two more in Leeds in 2003, and by Raoul Moat, who last summer shot three people in Northumberland, killing one and blinding another.

Steroids are strongly associated with mood changes, uncontrollable anger and many other problems. In my view, this link remains formally unproven only because no great effort has yet been made to prove it. A serious worldwide inquiry should be launched into the correlation between steroid use and violent incidents.

Likewise with so-called ‘antidepressants’, whose medical value has recently been seriously questioned in two devastating articles in The New York Review Of Books by the distinguished American doctor Marcia Angell. Her words ought to be reproduced and circulated to all doctors.

I pointed out some time ago how many shooting incidents involved people who had been taking these suspect pills. Patrick Purdy, culprit of the 1989 Cleveland school shooting, and Jeff Weise, culprit of the 2005 Red Lake High School shootings, had been taking ‘antidepressants’. So had Michael McDermott, culprit of the 2000 Wakefield massacre in Massachusetts. So had Kip Kinkel, responsible for a 1998 murder spree in Oregon. So had John Hinckley, who tried to murder President Ronald Reagan in 1981. They were also found in the cabin of the ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski, of whom more later.

Then there are the dangerous illegal drugs that are increasingly common since the State stopped bothering to prosecute users. Jared Loughner, who smiled so beatifically (like the equally unhinged Breivik) after murdering six people in Arizona, had been a heavy smoker of cannabis for much of his youth. The use of this allegedly ‘soft’ drug is increasingly correlated with mental disturbance, often severe.

All these poisons have their defenders, who will, I know, respond to the facts above with a typhoon of rage and spittle. This is because they all have their selfish or commercial reasons for preventing a proper inquiry into their effects – which is all I am calling for here. Shame on them. They are disgusting.

The rest of us must consider more wisely. The human brain is a delicate and mysterious organ, of which we know amazingly little.

But we do know this. Several drugs, especially the testosterone that is in steroids, the SSRIs such as Fluoxetine that are in ‘antidepressants’ and the tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which is the main ingredient of cannabis, have potent effects on brain chemistry.

Anyone can have unusual or unconventional ideas. Unkind conservative Americans used to play a game of guessing whether various alarmist statements about the environment had been written by the Unabomber – who lived in a forest hut and murdered people by sending them letter bombs – or by Vice President Al Gore, who lived in the Washington National Observatory with a Secret Service guard. It usually turned out that the wilder ones had been penned by Mr Gore.

And I have no doubt that the eloquence of writers can move people to action. William Butler Yeats feared that his patriotic poems might have set some Irishmen on the path to Easter Rising violence in 1916. But it is rational action. Nobody but a madman – and steroids have in my view made Anders Breivik mad – could believe that mercilessly slaughtering the flower of Norway would advance any cause.


Why are we served trash instead of films like this?

The injustice of film distribution grows worse and worse.

My home town is lucky enough to have an old-fashioned art-house cinema where last week I saw the excellent historical courtroom drama The Conspirator, directed by Robert Redford and starring James McAvoy.

It deals with the panic – similar to that after September 11, 2001 – which followed the murder of President Abraham Lincoln, and the struggle to preserve sanity and the rule of law against hysteria.

Why is it that it has hardly been shown, while smutty trash like Bridesmaids infests every multiplex?


Treating addicts as criminals might just have saved Amy

It's the drugs, stupid (part two). The death of the singer Amy Winehouse is a great grief to those who loved her. May they be comforted, and may she rest  in peace.

And I hesitate to quarrel over her grave, except that one or two silly or ill-informed people have chosen to use her death as a pretext to push that favourite establishment cause, the decriminalisation of drugs.

One, Sam Leith, asked crossly, ‘Who sold her those drugs? I hope we find out,’ then added, ‘You can favour legalising drugs and still think it is irresponsible to pass them to someone in such depths of addiction.’ No, Sam, actually, you cannot, unless you are quite thick. How can it be evil and wrong to sell drugs if it is not also evil and wrong to buy them and use them?

And as long as drug possession isn’t prosecuted, dealers will find it easy to sell. A real fear of prison might save many vulnerable  young people from the miseries of drugs. It is just possible that, had the CPS decided to prosecute Miss Winehouse for an undoubted drug offence in 2008, she might still be with us.

Then there’s that genius of political wisdom, Mr Russell Brand. He says: ‘We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care. We need to look at the way our Government funds rehabilitation. It is cheaper to rehabilitate an addict than to send them to prison, so criminalisation doesn’t even make economic sense.’

What criminalisation? Where has he been? Illegal drug users in this country are not criminalised. They are let off, and in many cases then provided with free drugs by the taxpayer, drugs from which they often die.

Mr Brand should also study the fate of singer Pete Doherty, a man who has actually been found in possession of heroin in a criminal court and still let off by a simpering, indulgent Judge. Criminalised, indeed.

Mr Brand already has the policy he wants, and it has resulted in ever-widening drug abuse, with its accompanying misery for the families of those involved.


Libya: The lunacy’s still going strong

The more our teenage governments throw their weight about abroad, the more our world standing and reputation diminish. Anthony Blair reduced us to a third-rate power by taking us into the Iraq swamp because he lacked the nerve to defy George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Now the equally juvenile David Cameron, supported by the increasingly tragic and pathetic figure of William Hague, is making this country look even more foolish and powerless in Libya.

Mr Hague’s recognition of the rabble ‘government’ of Benghazi (whose military commander soon afterwards lost his life in fishy circumstances) broke every principle of grown-up foreign policy. He did this silly thing to draw attention away from the admission the day before that Colonel Gaddafi may be allowed to stay in Libya.

This was the real development, the dropping by our Government of one of its principal stated objectives.


*********
Policemen with tattoos on show? Why not? It might draw attention to just how badly this institution has declined since the Sixties revolution. After all, we learned only two years ago that more than 1,000 serving officers have criminal convictions.

Resting My Case

This is my last substantive reply to Tim Wilkinson, and to other supporters of cannabis decriminalisation.

I’ve failed to communicate two of my fears – one my fear of the destruction of the link between effort and reward, and the other my fear that the general legalisation of mind-altering drugs produces passive and easily manipulated citizens. I think that failure is impossible to rectify - because you either care about such things or you do not. Cannabis users, and drug legalisers in general, don’t.

If you do not, then you reach for the pill, or the bottle or the spliff or the syringe, or you abandon any attempt to save people from the personal disasters for them and their friends and families and colleagues which these things bring about.

If you do, you try to change the world for the better within your power. I  believe myself to be descended from some of the Puritans who were Cromwell’s Ironsides, and I’m proud of that. When I listen to the excuses made for the culture of self-stupefaction, I can feel the scorn of those sober old Psalm-singers in my blood, and I’m with them. They looked the world full in the face, fought against what they thought was wrong, and also knew what they fought for and loved what they knew.

This country would not be what it is,  if it fell into the hands of people who lay down, shrugged and giggled, rather than people who rose up and fought. I cannot make people care about this who don’t, especially those who have already altered their brains by taking such drugs. But I hope there are enough of the old sort to see that changing your perception rather than reforming reality is the road to slavery.

How sad that the only thing about modern Britain that makes the cannabis lobby  angry is the continued existence a few individuals like me, who wish to deny them their dope.

Now,  a brief summary of two earlier posts, to avoid misunderstanding. My central point is that the study, classification and diagnosis of mental illness is in its infancy, and in many cases far from objective. It is therefore unreasonable to expect there to be (as there is in the case of cigarettes and lung cancer) a clear and easily quantified connection. To say ‘this isn’t important because it isn’t precise’ is to avoid the undoubted knowledge that mind-altering drugs are a risk to mental health.

There is without doubt some correlation between the use of cannabis and permanent, irreversible mental disturbance. No drug being tested for marketing or prescription would be licensed with such a suspicion hanging over it. Cannabis, for whatever historic reasons, remains illegal and we therefore have (as we never did over tobacco or alcohol, points made ad nauseam) the chance to prevent it from becoming commercially available.

Nothing of lasting value or importance would be lost if Cannabis disappeared from our society.  Cannabis users know this , as they also know that they are privately concerned by some of its effects on them, but they prefer not to admit this to opponents such as me.

Even if you accept ( as I do not) the various claims made for its medical benefits, such benefits could certainly not be provided by the drug as it is currently used by most of its users, as a smoked and inhaled vapour in unmeasurable doses. Nor do the ‘medical’ claims made for it, questionable as they are, overcome the grave dangers it appears to have.

I believe Thalidomide was quite effective in its main role as a suppressor of morning sickness among pregnant women. But who cares? Its other effect,  resulting in children missing limbs or otherwise harmed, simply cancels this out. The danger of severe and irreversible mental illness may not be precisely comparable to the effects of Thalidomide. But it does not seem to me to be that much less important, especially having seen these effects at first hand.

The truth is that cannabis is predominantly and almost invariably used as a pleasure drug, not as medicine. Its supporters are being disingenuous when they pretend otherwise, because they know that the equation between their desire for pleasure, and the danger to users which they seek to minimise, is not very creditable to them.

On the question of the law, serious persons know perfectly well that the law functions as a deterrent form of street- theatre, in which examples are made to turn the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just.

Most cannabis users don’t find it such a marvellous experience that they’d be prepared to risk six months at hard labour for a second offence of possession (my suggested minimum penalty, the first offence being dealt with by a genuine ‘caution’, whose condition would be that the cautioned person never subsequently committed the same offence).  Permitting premises to be used for its use would also be treated in the same way. This ( as with the smoking ban) has the effect of turning every householder or owner of commercial premises into an ally of the law.

After a brief flurry of convictions and imprisonment, during which the actual unyielding severity of the new law would be demonstrated, use would fall with amazing rapidity.  My opponents know this. They know they would be too scared to carry on possessing under those circumstances. That is why they get so cross with me. Because my plan would work, and deprive them of their pleasure.

I have no doubt that, among dope-smokers as in the rest of society, there would be quite enough informers willing to earn money or favours from the police to ensure that all users had a lively fear of being caught and prosecuted.

It’s just a question of will, a thing our governing class has lacked for many years. 

By the way, I’m not, as Mr Wilkinson characterises me,  an ‘opponent of nannying, interfering government action.’

He must have mistaken me for someone else. I’m not a ‘libertarian’, whatever that is. I’m a conservative.  I’m just an opponent of the *wrong sort* of nannying, interfering, government action.

And my comparison of the drivel talked now about cannabis and talked in the past about cigarettes is just that, a drivel comparison to demonstrate how intelligent people will talk rubbish and defy the blazing truth in defence of a selfish personal interest. It is not a suggestion that cannabis is fatal (though it seems to me that a permanently mentally ill person is in many important ways dead to those who love him or her). Nor is it a contribution to the argument about cannabis and cancer.

As I said, I have no large hopes of converting the cannabis zealots who have been hate-bombing this site for weeks now. They have their greasy pleasure to defend, and, having destroyed almost all opposition to their desires, they seek to silence me too.

I just think that the whirligig of time brings in its revenges, that things may not always be as they are now, and that conventional wisdom must be opposed when it is dangerous, so that real wisdom survives to recover when the folly is past. As Barbara Wootton once said  in a very different context ‘Again and again I have had the satisfaction of seeing the laughable idealism of one generation evolve into the accepted commonplace of the next.’ 

This is such an era. I wish, oh how I wish, I were as much of a threat to cannabis users as they imagine me to be.

For ‘Tobacco’ read ‘Cannabis’

This forms the second part of my riposte to Tim Wilkinson on ‘Surely Some Mistake’

I have spent an interesting few days in the archives of Associated Newspapers, finding among the crumbling cuttings which were once this morning’s urgent news the raw information about how long it took for this country to take serious measures to curb smoking.

One of the main reasons for this was that many people enjoyed smoking and refused to believe it was bad for them, and were in themselves a powerful pressure group on elected governments.

But also there were powerful interests abroad, which hoped to stave off restrictions.


The history of this dispute really goes back to the 1930s, when scientists in Hitler’s Germany posited a link between cigarettes and lung cancer. Because of the time and place of their discovery, it was ignored and forgotten. It was not until Richard Doll and his colleagues, worried by the sharp increase in lung cancer in post-war Britain, began looking for an epidemiological explanation, that the truth began to emerge.

(The reasons for this increase were simple. Smoking had become enormously popular during the rationed, stress-filled years of war, and had been taken up by many who had never done so before, especially women. People also smoked more than before. The Daily Mail of  13th August 1941 recorded a huge wartime increase in cigarette consumption. It said heavy bombing from September 1940 had contributed to a 50% increase in demand.)

Here, in the necessarily random order in which I found them in bulging, ancient envelopes, are some moments in the long controversy which followed and which is still in being (as I found when I spoke in favour of a smoking ban at a ‘libertarian’ gathering a few weeks ago).

The Tobacco Manufacturers’ Standing Committee (7th March 1962) reacting to the release of ‘Smoking and Health’ by the Royal College of Physicians, said: 'There is a growing body of evidence that smoking has pharmacological and psychological effect that are of real value to smokers.'

'The main unspoken lesson of the report is the need for far more intensive research.'

‘Only a minority of even heavy smokers get lung cancer or chronic bronchitis.

‘There is increasing evidence that air pollution has a strong effect on the incidence of lung cancer, varying between given areas, and more research is needed here.

‘It has not been possible to identify the substances in tobacco smoke that might be injurious to health’

(Reported in ‘Daily Express of 8th March)

On 1st May 1962,  the Guardian reported the words of  Mr C.W. Mason, chairman of Gallaher (makers of ‘Senior Service’) :’Excess in most habits is harmful but the great majority of smokers exercise moderation in this habit from which they derive pleasure and comfort without injury to their health.’

Ted Leather, Tory MP for North Somerset, on 26th March 1962, called the Royal College of Physicians’ report warning of the dangers of smoking ‘unscientific tosh’ and dismissed Lord Hailsham’s speech endorsing the report and calling for action as‘hysterical nonsense.’

He added:’ I have every intention  of enjoying my smoking until the day I die, as my grandfather did – and he lived to 95’ (actually he died aged 85).

There were, perhaps incidentally, then many Imperial Tobacco workers in his North Somerset constituency)

Hailsham had said the government could not be influenced by fears of lost revenue and called the official attitude of tobacco industry: ’one of agnosticism bolstered up by scientific doubt’

On 22nd  March 1962 Lord Sinclair of Cleeve (President of Imperial Tobacco) said in the House of Lords: ‘Manufacturers have never said that heavy cigarette smoking  can in no circumstances cause the disease [lung cancer]. But they do claim that to say smoking causes lung cancer is  not *proven*.’

Several Peers followed Lord Sinclair in calling attention to the alleged  ‘danger of air pollution’.

They  cited as evidence the lower lung cancer death rate in the  Irish Republic,’ where the air was much cleaner.

In response, Lord Cohen of Birkenhead attacked an article by Chapman Pincher ( a non-smoker and still with us) that the dangers had been exaggerated because TB had hidden cancer, that doctors were better at diagnosing cancer, that ex-smokers got fat and died of that, and criticised a pro-tobacco leader in the Daily Express called ‘Free to Smoke’ (22 Mar 1962 )

On 11th March 1962, the Tobacco Manufacturers’ Standing Committee said there was a  ‘growing body of evidence that smoking has pharmacological and psychological effects that are of real value to smokers. .

‘A ‘number of articles’ had shown that it was ‘ an aid to concentration, that it reduced tension 'particularly in emotionally stressful situations'; and that hyper-tension occurred less frequently in smokers than in non-smokers’.

A laboratory was to be built in Harrogate for an extensive programme of research’.

Chapman Pincher on 17th March 1962, argued for smokers’ freedom in a Daily Express article entitled ‘Why Pick on Smoking?’. This argued that ‘cigarette risks are being exaggerated’ criticised  doctors’ ’woe-woe’ warnings and said the lung cancer increase was more apparent than real.

This was a renewal of a controversy that had in fact begun some years before.

On 17th February 1954 Iain Macleod, Minister of Health,  made what I think was the earliest government statement warning about smoking On 25th June that year Richard Doll warned of an ‘association;’ between smoking and cancer of the lung.

On the 18th May 1956, the Daily Mail recounted how Professor Bradford Hill and Dr Richard Doll had recorded Lung cancer death increases . they rose from 5331 men and 1237 women in 1944 to 14,820 men and 2,451 women in 1955.

They  continued: ‘Does the statistical evidence provide a proof that cigarette smoking directly causes cancer of the lung?

No. It permits one only to deduce the most probable and reasonable interpretation. We ourselves believe that the accumulated evidence today is such as to denote a cause and effect relationship.’

But the idea was still resisted. On 31st October 1957, the Glasgow Herald reported that a suggestion  by a doctor that smoking killed George VI  had been ‘ridiculed’ by the King’s friends. *(It is now of course conventional wisdom that this was so).

On the 26th August 1957 an unnamed Tobacco Workers’ Union official said: ‘It is wrong to condemn cigarettes as a cause of cancer when so little is known about the problem.

There is also this sort of desperation:  On 1st March 1959 we read of Dr C.N.Smyth, of University College Medical School, who has discovered a ‘safe’ method of smoking. His solution? Prick two holes in the cigarette with a pin .

‘It is no crank theory', he intones.

By 30th January 1963 a team of British doctors is said to have started an ‘all-out investigation’ into links between smoking and heart disease.

But there is still resistance, on the grounds of ‘liberty’. On 16th April 1963, a speaker at the  conference of the Co-Op party  advocated that smoking should be treated like sexually transmitted diseases (the expression he used was ‘VD’, but this seems to have dropped out of use lately). .

Mr Bill Gilman, from Essex, retorted ‘You are getting to the state where you are trying to interfere with the liberty of the individual’.

On the 7th November 1967 Tory MP Edward Taylor accused Kenneth Robinson, Health Minister of ‘acting on a hunch’ by ending cigarette cut-price coupon schemes.

On 24th October 1968, Sir George Godber, Chief medical officer of the Health Department, omplained of ‘incessant propaganda in support of cigarettes’.

On 7th Jan 1971, almost in modern times, a  report by Health Education Council emphasised dangers again.

Meanwhile  a report from the ’Tobacco research Council’ (25th June 1971) claims that  cigarettes can help with stress. It declares: ‘Smokers are more self-reliant and extrovert than non-smokers’ The TRC is of course financed by the cigarette industry

By the same date,  manufacturers were reported as being ready to put warnings in packets and stop cinema advertising aimed at the young – if the government ignored a demand – from the Royal College of Physicians -  for a total ban on advertising. 

As late as 28th Nov 1971 the  Observer reported that the Swedish Institute  of Public Health had suggested that some people may be able to smoke with little risk to their health

It’s all there. Just substitute ‘cannabis’ for ‘cigarettes’.  Caution on the part of those doing research which would eventually turn out to be devastatingly right. The advocates of doing nothing chanting that correlation isn’t causation, cigarettes are good for you, our freedom is threatened, it’s really caused by air pollution, you can do this safely. Doesn’t sound quite so appealing to the cannabis lobby, though, in the mouths of Tory MPs and the Daily Express and Imperial Tobacco.

More to follow.

My Latest Response to Tim Wilkinson

I think the time has come to be a bit briefer. Both of us have set out lengthy arguments in several parts. But principles, and basic truths, can be lost in too much detail. I don’t actually expect this to change any minds. This argument is not about cannabis, but about a profound moral disagreement.

I grasped some time ago that this was a contest between those who care principally about themselves, and those who believe they have responsibilities to others, and thus between the present age and the one that has gone (and which may return).

Most of the responses I receive will be abusive and non-responsive.  I just wish to place this reply on record.

Much of what Tim says about the risks of cannabis has little to do with my point. I don’t believe in addiction, a concept which assumes that people have no power to control themselves. They have such a power. But they often choose not to use it because they are enjoying themselves.

If people are ‘enslaved’ by a drug it is because they have enslaved themselves. I do very much believe that the law can protect people against such self-abasement, by scaring them away from it when they are too young and/or ill-informed to understand the dangers they run. 

A calm and smiling sea is more dangerous than a rough and wild one, for beneath that sunny calm can run fatal currents and irresistible rip-tides. Fear is often a saviour.

Now to the medical argument. Mr Wilkinson seeks to concentrate this upon what he would like to be a hard core of known fact.

I don’t think this is possible and do not rely upon it. It is doubt that I rely on.

Alas, the whole area of mental illness, its cause, its operation, its nature and its treatment,  is itself very vague. The recent revolution in its treatment, from Psychoanalysis and Therapy to the indiscriminately-wielded chemical cosh of Neuropsychopharmacology, is so colossal that it is hard to see that the two have anything to do with each other.

Yet, like the discredited practice of pre-frontal lobotomy and the dubious one of electroconvulsive therapy, they are all linked by the urgent desire to find a treatment that will address this frightening form of human tragedy. Sadly,  the skills available rise very little above that of the frustrated layman thumping the TV set when it goes on the blink.

The desire to cure, tragically,  has always been a good deal stronger than the scientific knowledge needed to satisy that desire. It is precisely because of the weak scientific base of mental treatment that it is able to veer so wildly from one response to another.

Physical medicine of course advances and changes, but not in such a revolutionary fashion.

One thing I have learned in this debate, over many years (and I include in that the parallel debate I have been conducting with readers over mythical complaints such as ‘ADHD’ and ‘Dyslexia’, and over the highly suspect drugs misleadingly called ‘antidepressants’ ) is that neurology as a diagnostic tool is in its infancy, and that neurology is the only exact and objective science that can be applied here. And yet that it very seldom is applied because of its severe limitations – and thus that the  boundaries of mental illness are ill-defined and subjective. What is more, many people who have been ‘diagnosed’ with mental illness or various 'disorders' only actually become definitively, measurably *physically* changed when they take the medicines that are prescribed.

Taking drugs to alter the mind has one undoubted affect. They alter the physical, neurologically measurable state of the actual brain. This might suggest that a drug such as THC might have that property too.

Mental medicine, whether it be therapy or neuropsychopharmacology  uses the terminology of physical medicine,  but it does not really have the same characteristics.

Thus, while I make much use of (for example) Sir Robin Murray’s work, because it clearly raises severe doubts about the safety of cannabis, I qualify my agreement with him. He isn’t interested (as far as I know) in criminal sanctions for cannabis possession, though they seem to me to be the logical conclusion of what he is discovering.

And I am by no means sure that the complaint termed ‘schizophrenia’ is either well-defined enough to be medically and scientifically useful (see below) , or indeed to be described as the major risk from cannabis. Something exists. Something undoubtedly happens. People become ill, often in highly alarming and similar ways.

There is some sort of connection between it and cannabis.

But I am not sure it is shut off from many other mental disorders by a clear, sharp line, or that its prevalence and diagnosis are easily measured in a reliable and consistent way.

I think that both the study of mental illness, and the study of the effects and potential effects of THC, are in their infancy (not least because of the tiny areas of knowledge available to neurologists as yet) and I think that both sides can produce peer-reviewed scientific papers which support either alarm or complacency about cannabis. I’m accused of ‘cherry-picking’ those studies which support alarm. I am not sure what is wrong with that, unless I ignore studies which actually somehow prove cannabis is safe, which of course cannot be done.  I could make the same counter-accusation against my opponents, that they ‘cherry-pick’ those studies which support complacency. Of course they do. Who wouldn’t?  But it doesn’t make any difference if the accusation is true or false.

Why not?

The existence of *any* studies which suggest that a substance is harmful is itself of importance. The existence of counter-studies cannot possibly acquit cannabis of suspicion at this stage.

I’m simply not going to enter into this battle of peer-reviewed papers not because I cannot (of course I can) but because, in the end,  it is inconclusive.   But that inconclusiveness is – as I am sure Mr Wilkinson knows – one of my most powerful arguments.

Even my modest claim that there is something serious to worry about here, which we have not yet fully quantified, should be enough to give any responsible person pause. And Mr Wilkinson wishes to be responsible, a wish which ( I fear) wars in his breast with a wish to see cannabis acquitted of danger.

I am against complacency in any field of action, and my own personal experience leads me towards alarm. It is on the fact that there is doubt that I rest my case. If there were none, who would need us to debate?

Is repeated memory loss a mental illness? Is a damaging and irreversible decline in school performance (in many cases leading to a wasted life)  a mental illness? Is the general demoralisation of a person, from a self-supporting individual into a dependent one, a mental illness? Is an inability to consider or acknowledge the arguments of opponents a mental illness? If so, what is it called? And who is to decide? And who can say that these changes in human life, needless and avoidable, are minor?

In the course of an individual life, such a thing may cancel a happy, fulfilled future and turn it into a dingy and futile one. I write largely as a parent and as the friend of other parents – that great body of people who all understand something that non-parents do not – the aching, impossible responsibility for children which can never be shirked or avoided, and the burning desire to keep them safe from harm.



Yet I think most cannabis users, if honest, would acknowledge that such effects of this sort, often long-lasting , are common (not universal, nobody is arguing universality) among the users of this drug. Exceptions do not mean the danger is not there, merely that some escape it – just as some descend into locked-ward madness. This is the normal scale of human experience, extremes at either end, and a variegated middle.

I suspect that many users worry privately about whether the effects they feel on themselves, after the high has faded, may become permanent. I suspect many of them have seen friends or acquaintances go all or some of the way travelled by Henry Cockburn, and at least wondered if it has something to do with the drug.
They do not know. Neither do I.


That is why they get so angry with me for voicing their own unspoken and unwanted doubts. It is all right. I understand this anger very well and forgive those who vent it on me. In the days when I too thought and spake as a child, I did the same. But now I have put away childish things. By becoming a parent, I have moved out of the rear echelon and lazy base-camps of humanity, and towards the front line where , like it or not, only I stand between my children’s generation and the dangers that menace it. Once this was done for me. Now, having buried those who did it for me, and walked away from the graveside suddenly and bitterly alone, I must do it myself. It is called growing up.

But such anger, while understandable,  is illegitimate in debate, and I appreciate the fact that Mr Wilkinson(though not all his allies) have avoided it.


As for Schizophrenia itself, it is notable that its diagnosis was sharply redefined after a major disagreement among psychiatrists about what it is.  There is no objective test for it. Even now, there are two rival sets of criteria, one in the USA and one elsewhere.

But that is minor combined with the revolution in diagnosis which took place in the 1970s, coincidentally the time at which large-scale cannabis use became common in many advanced societies.  This introduction of a much narrower diagnosis may have something to do with the fact that the prevalence of cannabis has not been accompanied by a higher rate of schizophrenia diagnosis in this period ( a fact often advanced to suggest that cannabis has not affected schizophrenia levels).

Once again, we are not dealing with an exact science. Let my opponents desist from caricaturing my argument with such silly such phrases as ‘reefer madness’, and from exaggerating or over-defining the claims I make.

My claim is this:

*Cannabis is – demonstrably - potentially dangerous to the human mind*


No more. No less.

Now, isn’t it reasonable, as long as this proposition is tenable and unexploded, to treat it with caution? Mental illness, usually permanent and incurable, is not a thing to risk lightly. If any commercially-produced drug or foodstuff carried such a risk, wouldn’t the very people who now lobby for a cannabis free-for-all be in the forefront of the campaign against wicked big business’s greedy plan to poison us all for profit? And quite right too.

This inconsistency can only arise from a selfish desire to protect their own pleasure. Is this creditable? Is it, above all, an argument?

Now, I am told a lot that correlation is not causation, as if this were a great discovery of logic and philosophy.

But I have never said that correlation is causation.  I am quite willing to await the results which may be many years in coming, of the mighty studies now doubtless under way to see if and how cannabis causes mental illness (Oh, there are no such studies?  Why is that?).

My position, once again, is more modest. Epidemiology’s first success, the location of a poisoned well by the mapping of cholera outbreaks in a London slum, was not searching for causation . The mechanism of how filthy water spread cholera took, I imagine, some time to establish.

But if doctors had ignored the correlation, and had not immediately chained up the offending pump until they had  evidence of causation in peer-reviewed journals, , they would have been irresponsible in the extreme.

The same could be said of Richard Doll and his colleagues when it became clear to them that the huge post-war increase in lung cancer correlated not with tarmac fumes, nor yet traffic fumes (both of which were suggested and widely believed), but with cigarette smoking – which had grown inordinately during the stress of wartime.

It would be years before the causal relationship was established between cigarettes and lung cancer ( and heart disease, and emphysema) .

But the correlation justified government action and warnings to the public, and changes in the law. .

And here I shall have some bitter fun, because those measures were undoubtedly delayed by similar arguments to those now being deployed by the cannabis lobby.

That will be in my next post.

‘I am a Scientist! You Will Obey!’ Part Two

I like this headline so much that I’ve decided to use it again. It so beautifully sums up the Dalek-like barking of the pro-Nutt faction.  Not one of them, so far as I have noticed, has properly absorbed the significance of the uncontested fact that their  hero  

•    Described as a ‘criminal sanction’ the so-called ‘cannabis warnings’ which involve neither punishment nor a criminal record.
•    Wrote about  a phantasmal BBC statement saying that the Corporation will not use me again.

Both these dollops of balderdash were uttered by him quite voluntarily in public places. I’m sorry but in these matters he is actually, plainly and incontrovertibly wrong.  Despite his fan club’s efforts, there’s no excuse for either of them. Does the fact that he is a scientist, and a professor, mean that these significant errors don’t count?

Or do they rather make one worry about his rigour? I’d say myself that his description of our dispute on ‘Comment is Free’ is highly inadequate (I’m being polite), and that anyone who wanted a full account of it would be far better off reading what’s been written here.

Here’s another cause for joy. One of my critics is a Colin Walker, who three days ago posted the following:’ Prof Nutt may not be quite as good a journalist as you, though that is debatable, however you Peter are no scientist. The argument you’re having is a tabloid journalist and author on subjects of politics and religion against a professor with a PhD and years of research in the topic. I wonder who is going to have a better grasp of the facts in this one?’

I said I thought this was pretty unresponsive to what I’d written (which it obviously is).
Mr Walker now writes in again to complain about having the board-rubber thrown at him by teacher and while doing so makes some very important concessions, which some other contributors here might like to note as , though they are set about with various hostile and biting remarks, they pretty much accept my principal argument:

’ Peter, sorry 'Mr' Hitchens (or 'He who shall not be named' given a previous rant I've received from you), I hadn't realised that one of the comments you were referring to was mine when you accused people of not reading the article. I think it’s very clear I had read your article as I made reference to two points near the end of the article.’

I reply ‘Really? What were they? I am unable to see any trace of this in his original posting.’
Mr Walker continues ‘ I apologise for not giving a piece by piece critique.’

To which I reply : ‘No, no, Mr Walker, that is perfectly all right.’

He then explains,  enjoyably covering his retreat with bluster: ‘ I just had a few minutes to kill, wondered what reactionary drivel you were spouting lately and got mildly miffed enough with your points to make a comment. Some of the points you make in the article are valid and in some you are pedantically stretching a minor point e.g. 'criminal sanction'.’

I respond here:  ‘A *minor* point indeed? Does Mr Walker really think that there is no important difference between having a criminal record and not having one?  Or between suffering a material punishment and not suffering one?’

He continues ‘ My point was that Prof Nutt may very well not be as good a journalist as you, you are well placed to criticise him on it given your qualifications and experience.’
I respond ‘ Actually,  that is not what Mr Walker said at all. He said: “Prof Nutt may not be quite as good a journalist as you, though that is debatable.”. Still, perhaps Mr Walker ,too, is a scientist, and his accounts of recent events do not need to be subjected to the same rigorous scrutiny as do the accounts provided by us poor unscientists. I do however welcome Mr Walker’s important concession – actually the point of this whole argument – that I am well-placed to criticise Professor Nutt on matters where his expertise is not involved.

He adds: 'However you are no scientist and are not capable of criticising him on his scientific statements in a rational or a valid way. ‘

I reply ‘I completely agree. I yield to the professor on all matters of neuropsychopharmacology.  I have always made this clear. What’s more, I don’t criticse his purely scientific statements. I criticise him on his statements about morals, politics and sociology, and his attempts to mix hard science with inexact social commentary .’

He then adds: ‘Your grasp of the scientific method does on occasion appear to be OK and I don’t doubt you understand the principles involved well.’

This too is a welcome change of tune.

So I really don’t mind that Mr Walker then tosses these words over his shoulder as he departs: ’ It's just a shame you so often abandon it and resort to self righteous anecdotes and vitriol when it doesn't help your argument. ‘

Self-righteous anecdotes, eh? I must curb those.

On  a few other points. I was born in 1951 and can just remember (as I recount in my ‘The Rage Against God’) the outer echoes of the Suez affair. But manners, customs, fashions, manners of speech,  etc. remained very much the same for some years after 1956  – it wasn’t until 1963 or 1964 (see Philip Larkin) that the cultural revolution began to be visible, and then quite tentativel,  in established institutions.

So I’m working in part from memory, in part from conversations and correspondence with people who were older than me at this time, particularly veterans of newspaper offices in that era, and in part from such interesting and detailed fictional accounts of the age such as Margaret Drabble’s novel ‘the Millstone’ , and P.D. James’s ‘Shroud for a Nightingale’ which I cite in my ‘The Abolition of Britain’ . My basic point is that the drama completely fails to capture the spirit of the age, which is why I feel quite confident that its subsequent episodes will be as ghastly as the first.

I’m puzzled by the claim that period drama isn’t about the period in which it is set. Why, then, the elaborate attention to detail in terms of clothes, cars, smoking, old newspapers, music etc? If 1970s music were played, or a 1968 car appeared in the background, or a skirt-length from another era, there’d be sharp letters of complaint,. But when the most crucial thing of all - *what people were actually like*- is so wrong as to be laughable, nothing happens.

Poor old Shakespeare is going to be dragged in here. Personally I’m sick of seeing the histories set in the Third Reich and Richard III in Nazi uniform. But since his plays are crammed with a great deal of beautifully-expressed historical, personal, moral and political truth, they could be performed in boiler suits and you’d still get something out of it, even if ‘Julius Caesar’ were set in modern Kinshasa (and why not?).

Nowhere in the article do I say that 1956 was better than today. To criticise the present, and to point out that some features of the past were creditable, is not to yearn to recreate the dead past. It is to make suggestions for the future. I do grow weary of this stupid jibe.

I lived in the 1950s. I know what they were like, damp, smelling of stale tobacco, greyish- brown in colour, poorly-heated, stuffy, punctuated with horrible food  and insipid drink, almost wholly devoid of foreign travel save the very rich. Many of the evils of the 1960s in terms of crime and immorality incubated in the de-Christianised and demoralised culture left over from the war. I have never said they were a ‘Golden Age’ because I don’t believe it.

But there were good things too,  that we have lost, and it is false to deny it.

I thank Mr Demetriou for his suggestions but I am to some extent constrained by current events, I am simply unqualified to write about economics ( I am no longer sure who *is* qualified, but I am certainly not). Funny, isn’t it, that I get complaints that I won’t do that |( and even more complaints that I won’t discuss theology.  Another subject on which I readily admit my lack of knowledge and understanding) , whereas if I dare to write (quite knowledgeably if without scientific qualifications) about drugs, I am told snottily not to do so.  I should have thought my ready recognition of my own limitations might be a sign that I was careful to stick to what I know. 

But I have written an enormous amount about education. I have pretty much said all I wish to say, especially in the chapter ‘The Fall of the Meritocracy’ in ‘The Cameron Delusion’
Oh, and Tim Wilkinson, over at ‘Surely Some Mistake’ has completed his reply to me on the cannabis issue.  My thanks to him for taking so much time and trouble to make a proper, serious response. I hope he will forgive me if I now take some time to prepare my reply, which I hope will be in one part and as brief as I can make it.  I have many other commitments and don’t want to rush.

All the Hallmarks of What?

I think it’s in the story of ‘The Dancing Men’ that Sherlock Holmes finds a bullet hole in a window and a set of footprints outside it which the police have somehow failed to spot , and - when asked by Dr Watson how he saw them when nobody else did - replies ‘Because I was looking for them’.

So, here I am, looking at the misery, loss and grief of poor Norway, and wondering what could explain this quite astonishing and exceptional behaviour.  Want my answer? Hang on a second. First let’s see what the answer isn’t.

Part of me is sneering at the ‘experts’ who initially assumed that this was another Islamist attack. I’d be unsurprised to find that one such proclaimed that the event has ‘all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda’, a phrase which invariably causes me to conclude that the user has no idea of what he or she is talking about at all.

What are these ‘hallmarks’? That a terrorist murder has been committed, and that a Muslim has committed it. Well, if it’s that easy, then that means it isn’t helpful either. If ‘Al Qaeda’ can be detected with such extraordinarily broad clues, can it really be said to be a meaningful concept? (No, actually).

Then, when the undisputed culprit turned out to be a podgy-faced  blond Scandinavian body-builder and general loser, with some half-formed ideas about Islamism, off we go into the realms of a sinister ‘right-wing’ menace, not to mention neo-Nazis and Christian fundamentalists.  Well, you worry about that if you like. Dingy attics are full of mummy’s boys and fantasists hunched over keyboards whose impact on the outside world (apart from the bad smell they usually give off) is likely to be minimal.

Others proclaim that he is ‘mad’. An unhelpful idea in such cases. Plainly it is reasonable to assume that someone who has done such cruel things is not fully human. But it is also circular, and avoids the interesting question of why this is so. It has no practical application, either. Nobody said he was mad before he did his murders. Nor can I see what objective diagnosis would have concluded that he was, until it was too late. So thanks a lot.

Now, here comes Sherlock Holmes (who I’m sorry to say is not a professor, nor even a neuropsychopharmacologist, but can still tell a hawk from a  handsaw and so may still have something to say on this subject)  He’s looking for something.  And these days he has the wonderful facility of ‘Control F’, which finds the very few important words in vast 1,500 page manifestoes of drivel.

What is he looking for? No, not our mass killer’s views on ‘Cultural Marxism’ or Antonio Gramsci. Such views do not cause any normal human being to go out and murder nearly 100 fellow-creatures with pitiless calm. Rather the contrary, if  he has actually understood what this dispute is about.

He’s looking for suggestions that the killer might have been using legal or illegal mind-altering *drugs*.  

And because he is looking for them, he finds them.

The entry for July 3rd makes it plain that this unlovely creep was taking Anabolic Steroids and a stimulant (similar in effect to amphetamine) called Ephedrine, in his case mixed with caffeine. Follow these references up and you find a great deal about a substance he calls Winstrol, also known as Stanozolol, an anabolic steroid derived from testosterone and favoured by some body-builders as it doesn’t lead to weight-gain. 

Our mass murderer has settled on this as his steroid of choice after much experimentation with others.

I think it fair to say that the use of anabolic steroids is correlated ( I know correlation doesn’t count with the cannabis crew, but you can’t please everybody) with aggression and violence. In the weird language of Psychiatry,  in which I am unwilling to trade, it is correlated with ‘Hypomania’, which grandly describes a rather worrying state of mind for anyone to be in while carrying a gun and a lot of ammunition. Ephedrine, meanwhile, is said to be associated with delusions, paranoia, hostility, panic and agitation. It is similar to amphetamine and to the SNRI type of antidepressant. 

Once again, it strikes me that if you’re taking this stuff, especially along with testosterone, it’s not a good thing to be armed.

I can do no more than point out these facts. They seem to me to be highly significant, and to warrant serious research into the effects on the human mind of various types of drug which are too readily available in our civilisation. 

The BBC can't recreate 1956 - because it loves our selfish, grasping present too much

Why does the BBC find it so hard to understand the past? Last week saw the launch of a new drama set in 1956, The Hour, attended with great trumpet blasts of publicity. It was, from top to bottom and from side to side, the most feeble, laughable tripe.

Yet it could have been so good, and I switched it on in the genuine hope that it would be. If you don’t like watching public humiliation or cooking, there is little enough to see on the TV. This is especially so since University Challenge turned into a scowling science lesson, and most news and documentary programmes are aimed at backward eight-year-olds with the attention span of a bedbug.

Which is why The Hour could have been great. There was, from the mid-Fifties to the early Sixties, a mighty revolution in TV news and current affairs. The story of how it happened, combined with the events that it covered, Suez, Hungary, the end of the Empire in Africa, and later the Cultural Revolution, could be great drama.

No such luck. TV producers seem to think that if they deploy enough cigarettes, bright-red lipstick and nail polish, not to mention a few dozen pairs of vintage spectacles, they have recreated the era of Anthony Eden. If they can hire a few old cars and clunky Bakelite telephones, they imagine they have attained utter perfection.

What they don’t seem to understand is that the spirit of the age is what they need to capture, and that people in those times were quite unlike us.

They really did speak in those strangled accents, and in complete sentences. That is because they thought differently, had grown up with different experiences from those we know. Everyone over 25 could remember the war. Men really were courteous to women, and women – including educated women – genuinely expected to get married and have children and saw nothing wrong in that. The men wore blue or grey suits (often shabby) and knotted their ties tightly.

Most women – particularly in offices – were compelled to be fairly dowdy by the general shortage of money. Career advancement came very slowly, and so deference was common in offices. People knew if their colleagues were married. Oh, and stabbings in London were so rare that they merited a bit more than a paragraph in the paper.

But The Hour revolves around two central characters who seem to have been transported direct from 2011 into 1956. The pair, played by Ben Whishaw and Romola Garai, stamped and flounced through the slow-moving scenes as if they were superior to the times they lived in, cross that everyone wasn’t Left-wing and politically correct like them, sure that they were about to inherit the Earth.

Did the director have a bit of a problem with persuading them to get into character? While all the other actors had been subjected to more or less authentic 1956 makeovers, these two looked as if they’d just wandered in from the Groucho Club, or wherever 2011 groovers go.

The BBC cannot recreate 1956 because it loves the present day too much, and is afraid to admit that anything about the past might have been better.

It was drugs that put Charlie in jail

I must disagree with my colleague Liz Jones about the 16-month prison term given to Charlie Gilmour, who swung on the Cenotaph.

The sentence is, of course, nothing like as long as it looks. He will serve half of it at most. It was not passed to do Gilmour any good and I shouldn’t think it will. It was passed on behalf of the millions who thought his behaviour disgraceful and felt he should be punished.

Our courts don’t do this often enough, which is why more and more people seek private revenge. By the way, if he hadn’t taken an illegal drug, the whole thing probably wouldn’t have happened.

What a pity that the laws against that crime have been quietly abandoned, and that the rock music industry has done so much to pretend that illegal drugs are OK, or he and his family would have been saved from much woe.

+++ I AM almost unable to believe that the devastation of our Armed Forces is happening so fast, and with so little protest, under a nominally Conservative Prime Minister and Defence Secretary. The Royal Navy has virtually ceased to exist, and the Army is being forced to rely on part-timers for a significant part of its strength.

Usually this drawing of teeth and pulling of nails is what happens to conquered nations as they take a foreign yoke. Even Vichy France was allowed a bigger army than ours by Hitler. I think perhaps we are a conquered nation, but just not willing to admit it in public.

Real politics thrives on a diet of custard pies

I say let’s have more custard pies in politics.

What is wrong with all the people who have adopted gloomy long faces and intoned about the dignity of Parliament, breaches of security and so forth? And why do Westminster’s broadcasting rules prevent the cameras from showing such events (which is why you have seen only a back view of the Murdoch splat)?

A pie in the face is a good test of a public figure, as is a bit of heckling. I suspect a few well-placed, well-timed pies might have halted the advance of Anthony Blair, who would have had to get Alastair Campbell to wipe them off and change his clothes for him.

The real damage done to Rupert Murdoch was not the pie, but his magnificent wife’s embarrassingly maternal response, as if her little boy had been attacked in the playground and couldn’t look after himself.

Mr Murdoch will never be a real tycoon again.

Yes, I know I’m asking for a pie of my own by saying this. And I have a pretty good idea when and where I’m going to meet it. I’ll let you know how I get on.

+++ THE vast folly of the European single currency becomes more obvious with every day that passes. It may yet be the ruin of us all.

Now that Rupert Murdoch has apologised for phone-hacking, isn’t it time that all the politicians, journalists, notables and ‘impartial’ broadcasters who backed the euro took out their own advertisement in the papers to apologise?

They need to say sorry not just for being stupid, gullible and ill-informed, but for the derision and insults (‘Little Englander’, ‘Xenophobe’ etc) that they heaped on people such as me who rightly warned against it.

‘I am a Scientist! You Will Obey!’ Professor Nutt speaks again

Many readers will recall my various clashes with Professor David Nutt, the noted Neuropsychopharmacologist and former Chairman of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs. 

His opinions were eventually judged so bizarre and embarrassing, even by a Labour government that winked at the covert decriminalisation of supposedly illegal drugs, that he was removed from that committee.

I suspect they were worried that he was drawing attention to the establishment’s covert acceptance of drugs in our midst. I suspect that many more serious people on the drugs decriminalisation side view the Professor as an embarrassment. I wouldn’t blame them.

He has enjoyed the notoriety ever since, becoming a bit of a hero to many decriminalisers.  I’ve attacked him for it. And now, in an article on the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ site
he makes a direct attack on me. Actually, this isn’t the first time. Last December he gave an interview to The Guardian in which he assailed me for my alleged ’baseless alarmism’ about drugs.

I have responded to the Professor here in the past and here and here and also here.

Now I must do so again. It is important that Professor Nutt’s contributions to the drugs debate are judged on their merits, not protected from proper analysis by his scientist’s white coat.

Professor Nutt’s latest ‘Comment is Free’ article is as cavalier with facts as his claim on the radio that 160,000 people were subject to criminal sanctions for cannabis possession. The majority of them ( as I have shown) were not punished at all, merely given unrecorded warnings without legal force.

The problem with the Lancet report that began our quarrel  is that it is a curious hybrid of natural science and social science, known as ‘Multicriteria Decision Analysis’ . Measurable chemical or physical factors such as ‘intrinsic lethality’, and physical damage,  are assessed in the same document alongside such things as Family adversities, ‘Extent to which the use of a drug causes family adversities—eg, family breakdown, economic wellbeing, emotional wellbeing, future prospects of children, child neglect’.

Or 'International damage, Extent to which the use of a drug in the UK contributes to damage internationally—eg, deforestation, destabilisation of countries, international crime, new markets'; or 'Community - Extent to which the use of a drug creates decline in social cohesion and decline in the reputation of the community'; or 'Loss of relationships. Extent of loss of relationship with family and friends'. In effect, it claims to consider, in the same package and with the same objectivity, both stomach ulcers and deforestation, sociology and also psychology, chemistry and neurobiology. That is the point I strove to make. In the weighting of all these things against each other, some subjectivity must be involved. The claim that science has somehow established that one drug is more damagaing than any other is, to say the least, questionable *on scientific terms*.

I also pointed out that the report didn’t seem to take into account the difference made to alcohol’s impact by the fact that it is legally on sale, whereas most of the other drugs examined are at least technically illegal. Decca Aitkenhead (no political ally of mine) made the same point in her interview.

By omitting these facts Professor Nutt gives the impression that the clash was one between a cool, objective scientific mind and a raging tabloid hack. This is highly misleading.

Finally, but very significantly, Professor Nutt asserts ‘the BBC issued a statement saying that they would not use him [me] again.’

They issued no such statement. This is pure fiction.  His account of my subsequent encounter with the ‘Feedback’ programme is also misleading in several significant ways.  I didn’t protest about ‘censorship’. I complained about having been attacked at length on air on a supposedly impartial station, without being given any opportunity to defend myself. And I had to make very considerable efforts to secure the fair hearing that I eventually received.

I can only hope that Professor Nutt’s science is better than his journalism. But if he wishes to claim that his scientific standing gives him some special right to pronounce on this subject, it would seem to be incumbent on him to use the most basic scientific method in his own work –  factual accuracy.

Prohibited or Inhibited? Or just reluctant?

On and on it goes. Mr ‘Beaufrere’ claims to be ‘honestly’  unable to understand my position on alcohol.  Well, I am ‘honestly’ unable to help him further. Can anyone else explain it to him? I doubt it. His problem is not with the explanation, but with his determination, derived from received wisdom and so not susceptible to examination, to believe that the existence of legal alcohol is an absolute obstacle to laws against cannabis. Against such an obstacle, the intelligence of Einstein, the forensic power of Sherlock Holmes and the eloquence of Abraham Lincoln cannot prevail. Let alone me.

It is perfectly simple and has been stated here more times than I care to recall. If there were any words of fewer than one syllable which I could use for the purpose, I would do so. Nor do I think that Mr Badger’s query, accompanied as it was by one of those ghastly Internet winks, was seriously meant.

I usually find that when people claim to be unable to understand something, they are in fact unwilling to do so.

Oh. And ‘commit’ is a reflexive verb here. I don’t know why its reflexivity has been abolished elsewhere, but on this weblog the only thing one commits, without a reflexive pronoun, is a crime, or a solecism or a faux pas. I commit myself to maintaining this proposition.

I suppose it happened about the same time that ‘The 1800s’ an expression referring to the years from 1800 to 1810, began to be used to refer to the entire 19th century (etc.). Was this introduced because it became too difficult to explain to uneducated children how the centuries had been numbered before?

Likewise I stand by my view that active campaigning to weaken the law against cannabis, for your own benefit, means that you are happy to see the human destruction that you know will result.  The comparison he attempts to make (whereby I decline to support war on foreign countries because I don’t like their governments and am therefore said to be ‘happy’ about the regime of the Third Reich)   doesn’t work. The element of active campaigning for the ease of one’s own pleasure, at the expense of others,  is absent. So not a slur. A statement of fact. Cannabis legalisers are, axiomatically,  selfish and wicked.  I know some claim, incredibly, to support this campaign without any element of self-interest. If this is true( which, as I say, I very much doubt) then they are deluded and credulous. Take your choice.

Mr Slane asks how a Christian can be in favour of prisons. It’s not a matter of principle (though his alternative appears to be sale into slavery, which doesn’t strike me as specially Christian (***UNDERSTATEMENT WARNING***) ).

This is where we start from. Our system has arrived at prison as its principal weapon against wrongdoing (in fact prisons are a liberal idea, see my ‘Abolition of Liberty’). The Christian surely seeks to make that system conform as closely as possible to Christian principles. 

An eater of vegetables says (first quoting me): ’ "It is simply false to pretend that the Second World War was fought out of idealism. This falsehood is spread by people who want to start wars for idealistic reasons now."- Peter Hitchens.
- That's a silly thing to say.’

That is the view of this person. But it isn’t necessarily true because he or she says it is. Can he or she tell us why he or she thinks it is silly? It seems perfectly sensible to me, and true,  and I have explained why here in the past (see index). Briefly, is this person really unaware of the use of ‘appeasement’ and of Churchillian rhetoric, accompanied by the presence of a bust of Churchill on George W.Bush’s desk, the gift of our Washington Embassy,  in fomenting the Iraq war?

I don’t think those who disapproved of Charlie Gilmour’s abuse of the Cenotaph, and subsequent behaviour, would have been satisfied by a fine, which he (or his parents) would have had no difficulty in paying.

Mr Platt cannot find anything in the index about fox hunting because I haven’t (n as far as I can remember) written anything about it since this blog started, and probably long before that. I seldom do. I care very little about it. My general view has always been that slaughterhouse cruelty is far worse, if you want a cause. Likewise the living conditions of many pigs and chickens. These things can be ameliorated by buying meat more carefully;  and that the keepers of cats are responsible for far more hideous torture of small animals and birds than are foxhunters.

But as a suburban person I have no strong feelings about fox hunting, though I would welcome a method of stopping them relieving themselves in gardens and strewing mangled fast food cartons about the place. A hunt would probably be impracticable for this purpose. 

Mr Platt goes on to ask ‘If the owner of a B&B turns away a homosexual couple on religious grounds does Mr. Hitchens consider the owner to be immoral, or is the imposition of such a law incompatible with a free society?’

I don’t see the comparison. Nobody suggested that the B&B owners refused unmarried guests (heterosexual or homosexual) to pursue pleasure. They did it because they believed it was their moral duty.

A Monumental Error, and Other Themes

A number of readers chided me for what I said about the sentence given to Charlie Gilmour. I have responded privately to his father. But in general I stand by what I said. I don’t rejoice at the sentence (given my reservations about our prison system, it is hard for me to do this, ever), nor have I gloated over it. But I think those who say it was excessive are mistaken in many ways. The main point is that the general outrage against his actions had to be reflected by the justice system. All justice systems area form of street theatre, to discourage the bad and encourage the good. They pick on particular individuals to make examples of them. It is wise not to become one of those they pick on.

By the way, one reader seems to think that I claim to have been at the Garden House riots in Cambridge. I did not intend to give that impression. I was not. My demonstrations were elsewhere, and one of them, against the presence of Enoch Powell in Oxford Town Hall, is described in my book ‘the Cameron Delusion’. And I wrote, on the fortieth anniversary of the event, my recollections of the nasty ruckus in Grosvenor Square in March 1968, where one of my fellow demonstrators (no doubt peaceful) was a future head of Mi6.

I would say that on all my demonstrations however rough they got, my mind was not clouded by drugs or drink. In fact, a lot of Trotskyists were a pretty puritan lot (though there was a boozy minority). I think we would have regarded any sort of attack on the Cenotaph, or on a Royal car, as self-defeating and very bad propaganda.

One or two other points:

‘Bob H’ wrote: ‘it was somewhat of a politician's answer. I originally asked you why consuming cannabis was morally wrong or wicked and why consuming alcohol was morally ok. You replied that it was because alcohol is legal. You have failed to address at all the main point I made that the morality and legality of something are separate. According to your logic I could do the same thing in 2 different places and be wicked and selfish in one (where cannabis was illegal) and not in the other (where cannabis were legal) And I simply don't accept that because something always has been it always will be. Our lifestyle and culture has changed beyond recognition in the last 200 years. Who's to say that with similar tactics to the ones used to reduce smoking, alcohol use couldn't be driven to a fraction of what it is now? ‘

I don’t think this is true at all. ( He began in fact with this question, rather different form the one he now professes to have asked: Let's imagine we are both in a room. I am consuming cannabis. You are consuming alcohol. I know that almost certainly someone else has suffered horribly due to cannabis. You know that someone has suffered horribly due to alcohol. Why am I selfish and wicked but you are not?). My answers to Mr ‘H’ have not been at all evasive. I never said that consuming alcohol was morally OK ‘because it was legal’. I made an entirely different point.  Morality and legality are indeed different things.

But I cannot believe anything will ever happen to make it morally right to seek freedom to pursue a pleasure which, if legalised, will undoubtedly damage others. I think it wrong to sacrifice the health  of others for my own pleasure. Mr ‘H’ , as far as I can see, is ready to do this. That is immoral, in fact it is selfish and wicked, as I have said.

I repeat my answers to him here :

First
‘1. Alcohol is legal and cannabis is not. 2. I campaign consistently for *more* restrictions on the sale of alcohol, and would, if I thought it practicable, support its prohibition and give up its use. I don't think it practicable, hence my support instead for tight restrictions on its sale and heavy penalties for crimes committed under its influence. ( I do think effective laws prohibiting the possession of cannabis, and punishing those who allow it to be used on their premises, would be practicable and effective. So do the dope campaigners, which is why they are so alarmed that I call for this measure). 3. He doesn't say if he is in favour of relaxing the laws against cannabis. If he isn't, then his illegal action is a blow against those laws anyway, and the breach of laws in a free society is an immoral act in itself. If he does favour relaxation of those laws, he is happy to see the dangers of cannabis inflicted on other people for the sake of his own pleasure. His position is therefore more or less the opposite of mine. That is the main difference.

Second
’ I explained the grave differences between our positions whether or not cannabis was legal. He now says: 'But I want strong controls on cannabis as well, so again how are we different?' Because I want stronger controls on alcohol than there are now ( and stronger controls on cannabis than there are now, notably serious imprisonment for possession and the restoration of the absolute offence of permitting remises to be used for its consumption) Whereas, unless I misunderstand him, he wants weaker controls on cannabis than there are now. This seems to me to be a pretty fundamental difference. Alcohol has been in our culture for thousands of years, mass cigarette smoking for only about a century. The two are not really comparable.’

‘Carl’ asks: ‘’ Oh Peter, did you really have to use this as an opportunity to talk about the supposed slipping of standards in History? Of course the lad knew it was Cenotaph, he's pulling (y)our leg(s). ‘

I think it entirely apposite to mention this problem. I suspect that many people of his generation, including those with university degrees, have the vaguest idea of what and where the Cenotaph is, and of what it represents. Many older people have no idea of how utterly cut off this generation is from the past. It is time they realised.

‘Wesley Crosland’ states: ’Peter Hitchens and his conservative creed would have been happy to look away from the pornographic National Socialist regime’.

This as an interesting jibe, which qualifies as a slur. To say I would have been ‘happy’ is simply false. It is a grim fact of life that we have limited influence over human evil, and can only exercise it close to home, which means we are often aware of terrible wrongs about which we can do little or nothing. To recognise this sad fact is not to be ‘happy’ about it. Most informed people knew from the early 1920s onwards that the USSR was a hideous prison house and torture chamber in which whole categories of people were murdered, often by starvation. Yet we all lived alongside it till it collapsed through its own internal contradiction, and the ‘democratic’ powers spent four long years in close alliance with it and permitted it to spread its rule over even greater areas of the world. Were they, too ‘happy to look away from the pornographic Stalin regime’.

This sort of language has no pace in grown-up discussion.

In fact the whole world, including the USA and the USSR, were, if not happy, then willing to look away from the National Socialist regime from its inception in 1933 till they went to war with it, never less than six years after it came to power, and often rather more. The International Olympic Committee was happy to allow it to stage the Olympics in Berlin, though its repressive, lawless, murderous and racialist character was already quite clear by then. Hardly any of the countries of the civilised world would take in refugees from Germany in any numbers, especially Jewish refugees. The famous Kindertransporten of Jewish children from Central Europe were halted forever the day war broke out. The British government signed treaties (notably a Naval Treaty) with Germany during this period. The USSR was actually Germany’s ally.

Dislike of the Hitler government played no part in any major country’s decision to go to war with Germany, at any stage. And the worst atrocities of that government took place after the European war had begun and – quite possibly because of the fog of war allowed such crimes to be committed, which couldn’t have been committed in peace time.

It is simply false to pretend that the Second World War was fought out of idealism. This falsehood is spread by people who want to start wars for idealistic reasons now.