Weary as I am of the drugs issue, because of the frustrated fury it engenders in me to see intelligent people arguing for the wanton destruction of themselves, of other people's children and ultimately of civilisation, I feel compelled to continue discussing it because it routinely attracts more correspondence than almost any other subject. At the time of writing, my Tuesday posting on drugs has attracted 51 comments, compared with 17 on civil partnerships and 12 on Russia.
It is both a very small subject and a very large one. It is small in that, to anyone with a moral sense, the act of deliberately destroying and disrupting your perception of the material world is self-evidently wrong; so is deliberately damaging your own body. Even for those who lack the moral foundation to deduce these points from the known and understood truths of life, and who witlessly maintain that each man is an island entire of himself, it is clearly spiteful and ungrateful to your parents to pay them back for many years of love and nurture by doing such dangerous self-mutilating things to yourself. I suspect that only the deliberately childless are unaware of the nature and extent of the wrongdoing involved here.
It is also small in that it is likewise obvious to the feeblest mind that wicked deeds are less common when they are rigorously detected and harshly punished than when they are slyly encouraged, officially excused and unpunished. I note that the druggie advocates continue to pretend that there is a 'war on drugs' despite the evidence in Kathy Gyngell's posting (which I quoted at length) that drug possession of itself is no longer pursued or punished by our criminal justice system. But since they can get away with this sort of dishonest rubbish so easily, why bother actually taking it on board?
It is a large subject, in that those who are unable (because unwilling) to grasp the propositions above are the victims of an enormous revolution against reason and morality, under way now since the French Revolution, in which selfishness and immorality are dignified with such terms as 'libertarian' or 'freethinker', and advocates of the destruction of civilisation pose, without any sense of embarrassment, as its friends. This is the real battle for the soul of mankind, now coming to its conclusion as the forces of the unrestrained market align themselves with the forces of immorality and the forces of authoritarian despotism, in the most appalling alliance since the Hitler-Stalin pact.
So let me set out the limited terms on which we might debate this to a conclusion, for once.
The ground I choose is the suggestion that those who wish to see the laws against the possession of illegal drugs enforced are hypocritical, because of their allegedly relaxed attitude to the legal poisons, alcohol and tobacco.
First, and devastating to this argument is the fact that I have no such relaxed attitude, though my critics pretend that I have for the sake of their argument. They should stop doing so. To ensure that they do, and to help their understanding, I summarise my position here:
I think the law should be used to control the use of alcohol and of tobacco. In the case of smoking, this is very easy for me. I do not smoke. I do not like others smoking nearby, especially when I am eating or in an enclosed space. I think smoking by anyone of my generation or those younger than me is close to an insane act, given what we have now known for many years about its likely effects on the human body. I have been impressed by the effectiveness of smoking bans in offices and other public places, bans which I once opposed and now support, and think that such action has helped many people give up their habit, even though I think the 'science' on 'second-hand smoke' is highly suspect. I have begun to think it possible that smoking might be eradicated by legal force in a couple of generations.
I do not think alcohol can be so easily dealt with. This is partly because it is far deeper in our culture than tobacco, which we managed quite happily without until 500 years ago. It is partly because large numbers of people are quite capable of drinking alcohol for pleasure alone, without becoming drunk, violent, incapable or incoherent, and many drink it in small entirely non-intoxicating quantities, especially in the case of wine, because they like the taste. It would be very difficult, in fact impossible, to frame legislation that left these people free to drink while preventing those who drank to get drunk. (There's no such distinction among dope-smokers, all of whom smoke to become stupefied, and the same of course goes for cocaine and heroin users.) I think strict licensing laws and targeted taxation, as existed in this country until very recently, are the most effective method of controlling alcohol consumption in Britain. Even so, I have said before, and here repeat, that I would give up the small amount of alcohol I drink, tomorrow and forever, if I believed that by doing so I would aid the battle against drunkenness.
I don't think this would happen, though I remain open to argument and persuasion. As we are tirelessly informed by the pro-dope campaigners, who do occasionally deal in facts on the rare occasions when it suits them to do so, attempts to ban alcohol abruptly by law in countries where drinking is established have repeatedly failed. Any visitor to alcohol-free Islamic Iran is quickly offered illicit booze, and I know personally of people who have successfully availed themselves of this offer, and got away with it. I believe that Iranian law outlaws possession, as well as manufacturing, transport and sale.
The US Volstead Act, under which Alcohol Prohibition was introduced there, significantly did not ban possession, as any serious prohibitive law should. Had it done so, I think it would have proved even more unenforceable than it turned out to be, since many middle class wine drinkers, members of the professions, respectable Italian and German family men, etc, would have been prosecuted for doing something they had been brought up to regard as normal.
I would challenge any of my drug-apologist critics to make an equivalent statement, that they would give up their cannabis, heroin, cocaine or other poisons tomorrow, if they thought it would help save anyone from the many disasters associated with these substances. I can guarantee that none of them actually thinks this, since none of them believes it. Their whole case is to argue for the general legalisation of illegal substances which they enjoy using, so as to remove the very small risk that they may be prosecuted and punished, and presumably lower the price as well. But how can we trust their statements, since I believe many of them brazenly lie about their own use of illegal drugs, so as to conceal their self-interested motivation in this argument?
Further, I would say that many if not most of these drug apologists are themselves users of alcohol and tobacco, probably excessive ones, and have no genuine disapproval of them. And I would repeat the simple point they never deal with, that making something legal and accepted illegal is wholly different from properly enforcing an existing law on something which has long been illegal, which most people don't use, and which is not part of our culture. To take a point half way between alcohol and cannabis, the case of tobacco, I can foresee a point, many years from now, when it might be productive to outlaw the sale and possession of tobacco. To do so now would be to destroy the progress we have made in discouraging its use. Tobacco and alcohol use are both far more widespread and accepted than cannabis has ever been.
I would insert here the account of the story of Patrick Cockburn and his son Henry, which I reproduce here. Patrick Cockburn himself (who I think I could fairly say is a man of the Left) wrote it. I understand from many conversations with parents of children of this age that similar stories are by no means uncommon even among the stable, educated, enlightened middle class:
"On February 10, 2002, I called my wife Jan by satellite phone from Kabul, where I'd been writing about the fall of the Taliban. Her voice sounded more anxious than I'd ever heard before and I felt a sense of dread.
She said our 20-year-old son Henry, a student at art college in Brighton, was in a mental hospital. He'd tried to swim Newhaven estuary fully clothed the previous evening and had been found by fishermen as he left the near-freezing water.
They feared he had hypothermia and took him to A&E.
The doctors, suspecting that he might have been trying to commit suicide, called the police, who ran Henry's name through their computer. They found they had arrested him for a few hours ten days earlier.
Passers-by had seen Henry, barefoot and dishevelled, climbing the dangerously high wall of a railway viaduct and reported him as a potential suicide.
He denied to the police that he was trying to kill himself, claiming he'd climbed the viaduct only to get a better view of Brighton.
Taking into account this earlier incident, the police decided Henry was a danger to himself and should be sent to a mental hospital. The NHS one was full, so he was sent to The Priory in nearby Hove as 'overflow'.
I told Jan I would come home. I couldn't get a flight from Kabul, so I decided to drive to Islamabad in Pakistan and get a plane from there.
My driver Mohammed gulped at the thought of going through the Kabul Gorge to the Pakistan border, because the Taliban were attacking travellers.
I told him my eldest son was very ill and he agreed we would have to go. I managed to get the first plane from Islamabad to Heathrow, and arrived in Brighton the next day.
Henry was pleased to see me. He was in a neat room on the third floor of the clinic. A nurse checked on him every 20 minutes.
He was baffled and subdued by what had happened. He downplayed the idea that he had intended to commit suicide, and said he had felt the urge to walk barefoot back to his old home in Canterbury, 70 miles away. Newhaven estuary had simply been an obstacle to be crossed.
He felt being held in The Priory was a form of persecution or at best a misunderstanding: the police and doctors were over-reacting to his eccentric lifestyle.
Henry has always had great intelligence, wit and charm. From an early age, he showed an intense interest in other people and made friends easily.
He later told me he felt 'shy and inhibited' as a teenager at King's School in Canterbury, but I do not think this was true.
He was artistic and had won at least one valuable prize for his painting. He had no difficulty in getting the A-levels to enter Brighton art college at the end of 2001.
I had been proud of Henry's ability to get on well with my friends, mostly foreign correspondents, though they were much older than he was.
But I also worried that he was something of a Peter Pan, a boy whose magical charm made it difficult for him to grow up.
I sat on the bed in Henry's room in The Priory and he lay on the floor. Sometimes he beat out a rhythm on an upturned waste-paper bin and chanted snatches of rap, but mostly he was listless and remote. He had grudgingly told the doctors he had been seeing visions and hearing voices since that January.
'I tried to climb the bank by the railway station because I thought the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were on the other side,' Henry told me years later. 'It sounds dotty, but I felt there was another world beyond the tracks.
'Trees were talking to me like someone speaking in my head. Earlier, I had asked an old woman with a dog the way to a coffee shop. She giggled and pointed the wrong way, and I truly thought she was a witch.'
Jan and I soon became familiar with the distorted landscape of the strange world in which Henry was living. The visions and voices, though the most dramatic part, were infrequent.
He spoke vaguely of religious and mystical forces and became ascetic, adopting a vegan diet and not wearing shoes or underpants. He was wary of anything mechanical or electronic, such as watches, mobile phones and smoke alarms.
The consultant diagnosed Henry as being in the preliminary phase of schizophrenia. I knew almost nothing about the illness, except that it did not mean having a split personality.
I had spent months in hospitals in Cork and London when I had polio in an epidemic in 1956, but had never been inside a mental hospital. I knew schizophrenia was serious, but I hadn't realised how devastating it was. I read up about it with increasing dismay.
The average age for the onset of schizophrenia is 18 in men and 25 in women. There are 250,000 diagnosed cases in Britain, though the true number might be closer to half a million.
Symptoms do not necessarily include violence, though the suicide rate is high. The illness can be alleviated and controlled, but not cured, by drugs developed since the Fifties. Medication may work, but it is not clear why.
The causes of schizophrenia have long been the subject of prolonged, rancorous and inconclusive debate among scientists.
People develop the illness because they are genetically predisposed to do so. But it is not genes alone that are responsible.
Tests show that if one of a set of identical twins develops schizophrenia, the other has a 50 per cent chance of suffering as well. So events in the person's life may play a part.
The onset of the disease may be brought on by the loss of a job, academic failure, the breakdown of a love affair or the death.
Or it might, though this is unproven, be the result of taking mind-altering drugs such as cannabis or skunk.
I blame cannabis for what happened to Henry. He says he smoked a lot between the ages of 14 and 19, but I didn't notice at the time.
I would have been concerned, of course, if I'd known back then, but until recently I had no idea about the explosive impact cannabis can have on some people.
I don't think people realise 19 out of 20 people might take a small quantity of cannabis without ill effects, but for the 20th person who has a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia, the result is catastrophic.
I don't believe those who advocate less stringent laws on the sale and consumption of cannabis realise the devastating effect it can have.
I started talking to friends about mental illness only after Henry was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and I was astonished to discover how many had close relatives who were mentally ill.
It is as if ailments of the mind, and schizophrenia in particular, are feared more than any physical illness, aside from Aids.
The Priory doctors explained that 'a third of people diagnosed with schizophrenia recover completely, one-third have further attacks but show improvement, and one-third do not get better'.
In reality, the statistics are more complicated and less comforting. We did everything to help Henry. Along with Jan and his younger brother Alex, I visited him often.
I took a room in Brighton and walked around the town with Henry most days until he was released nine weeks later. He then came home to Canterbury.
The medication had done him good, but he saw taking the anti-psychotic drugs twice a day as an imposition and secretly began to spit them out.
My son, who had been so alert, original and inquiring, sank into gloomy passivity. At the end of the summer, he went back to art college, on the advice of a local consultant, but could not cope.
He returned to Canterbury, and by 2003 had been sectioned in the first of a succession of hospitals and halfway houses we were to get to know all too well over the next five years.
It is not that Henry became a wholly changed personality. Most of the time it was possible to have normal conversations, and he remained affectionate, witty and intelligent.
But he would sometimes disappear into the countryside, running through brushwood and streams until he was found, often naked, dirty and covered with scratches.
The grim aftermath of one of these disappearances comes across in Jan's diary entry for February 4, 2004, when we saw him in hospital.
'They show us into his room where he's on the bed, looking terrible,' she wrote. 'He's scratched all over - especially on his feet, his face, too - the scratches red and sore. He looks at us with such apparent terror that I wonder if he's hallucinating.
'We sit down with him, Patrick with his arm around Henry's shoulders, I at his feet. I touch these gently and he shudders. He weeps and grimaces silently for about ten minutes, then gradually calms down.'
I was always frightened that one day Henry, so often soaked to the skin and without food, would not return from his wanderings. But though he did dangerous things easily, he retained a survival instinct. When freezing or starving, he would seek help.
At least he has survived, which is not true of so many schizophrenics.
And in the past 18 months, in a clinic in East London, he seems, slowly and painfully, to be getting better."
