THE most sinister thing I have heard all year was this week's revelation that British government doctors secretly sought to drug troublesome teenagers in the 1960s and we have only just found out. One of the pills they wanted to use was called Haloperidol. Its side effects include incurable lifelong twitching, delirium and rigid muscles. This plan was stopped, but another worrying substance, Beclamide, was given to boys at a Yorkshire 'Approved School' (a state-inspected home for troubled teens). Neither the boys nor their parents were told of this experiment. [continues 500 words]
THE trumpeted 'ban on legal highs' is a fiction, like the rest of our drug laws. The new Act imposes no penalties at all for possessing these dangerous poisons - except for people who are already in jail. This is an amazing giveaway of the Government's real drugs policy, which is to look the other way while pretending to be 'tough'. In fact, simple possession of cannabis, heroin or cocaine is now hardly punished at all, even though it is illegal. [continues 104 words]
SOME things are unsayable in British politics. One such is the truth that cannabis has been, for many years, a decriminalised drug. The police, the CPS and the courts have given up any serious effort to arrest and prosecute users, just as evidence starts to pour in that it is extremely dangerous. Instead our elite moan about 'prohibition', which does not exist, and the cruel 'criminalisation' of dope-smokers, which would be their own fault if it happened, but actually doesn't. Arrests for this offence are rarer every week, and some police forces openly say they don't do it any more. [continues 211 words]
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. [continues 519 words]
CAN you put two and two together? Have a try. The authorities, and most of the media, cannot. Did you know that the Copenhagen killer, Omar El-Hussein, had twice been arrested (and twice let off) for cannabis possession? Probably not. It was reported in Denmark but not prominently mentioned amid the usual swirling speculation about 'links' between El-Hussein and 'Islamic State', for which there is no evidence at all. El-Hussein, a promising school student, mysteriously became so violent and ill-tempered that his own gang of petty criminals, The Brothers, actually expelled him. [continues 571 words]
THE Sun newspaper, which has in the past been a keen cheerleader and bootlicker for the Blair creature, the Iraq and Afghan Wars and for David Cameron, now wants a 'rethink' on drug laws. Well, you can't rethink till you've thought in the first place. Its pretext for this irresponsible tripe is an interview with Nick Clegg, in which he claims we're too tough on drug possession. The courts, he drivels, are 'imprisoning 1,000 users a year who have not committed a crime other than possession'. [continues 280 words]
The hunt for the Mr Big behind the drug trade is over at last. We have found him. It is you. The urban, educated middle classes of the rich nations, who take drugs or don't object to others taking them, fuel the enormous demand for marijuana, cocaine and heroin. Without their dollars, euros and pounds, there would be no billions to fight over, no gangs, no narcostates or narco-terror. Yet for some reason, whenever we discuss the alleged "war on drugs", we never mention demand. There are evil dealers, whom we all deplore. There are still more evil traffickers and gangs, whom we deplore still more. [continues 634 words]
You ask (leading article, 30 September) how "die-hard supporters of the status quo" will react to the latest call for weaker drug laws, from the Chief Constable of Durham. The question itself and the absurd claim that drug liberalisers are "silenced" by derision show a curious lack of knowledge or observation. Liberalisers are in fact guaranteed a prominent and uncritical hearing in most of the British media. Politicians, it is true, noisily proclaim their supposed toughness on the subject to gullible media. But the status quo - as any police officer should know - is that informal decriminalisation of drugs has been under way in this country for more than 40 years, and many of the ills that we now see are the results of that. [continues 84 words]
SUICIDE is a deep well of grief, reproach and guilt. But it is not an argument. When someone kills himself, we offer our deepest sympathy to those left behind, as I do to the family of Edward Thornber, the Manchester schoolboy who ended his own life after being caught with cannabis. But we must not blame ourselves. In the end, those who take this sad step are the only ones responsible for it. I know that some will accuse me of harshness and cruelty, even for discussing this. Please believe me when I say that this accusation is mistaken. [continues 442 words]
People don't become heroin users by accident. They don't catch heroin as if it were measles or the flu. They go out and look for it, and having once found a reliable supply, they carry on taking it again and again until it is part of their lives. And they cannot really be surprised when it has bad results. The fact that possessing heroin is against the law is a useful clue for would-be consumers that maybe it isn't a good idea. [continues 1205 words]
It seems to me that just one ruined life is too high a price to pay for our weak drug laws. What valuable thing would we lose if cannabis were driven out of our society for ever? Dope has wrecked tens of thousands of lives and will wreck millions more - those of its users and of their families - if we do not find the resolve to fight it. A whole generation sniggers smugly about this issue and refuses to take it seriously. [continues 310 words]
If Richard Brunstrom wants to make life hard for speeding drivers, he has my full support, though I much prefer patrol cars to cameras. The results of speeding are often horrible. If fining people makes them slow down, then fine them. I say this partly because I want to make it clear that my scorn for the North Wales Chief Constable's plan to legalise drugs has no other motive or reason, except that I think he is a dangerous and defeatist person whose approach to drugs is morally deficient, and he is unfit to run a police force. [continues 534 words]
Millions of parents and their children have been betrayed this week by people who ought to know better. An apparently serious report from a grand-sounding body has urged that our anti-drug laws should be weakened rather than enforced. We have a serious epidemic of drunkenness among the young. The attempt to stamp out cigarettes has been a pitiful failure. Now this group of eminent citizens wants to make it easier for the next generation to fry their brains with dope and pills. [continues 808 words]
