Heightened sense A critical view of drug laws in the UK and worldwide

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Peter Hitchens argues for strengthening the law to deter "immoral" drug use

Whatever else one thinks of Peter Hitchens’s stance on drug policy, he is at least sincere. His steadfast opposition to any kind of liberalisation is based on puritan moral disapproval of intoxication, whereas one suspects that the refusal of those who could change the law to actually do so is at best expediency and at worst cowardice.

Hitchens’s latest book, The War We Never Fought, argues that drug use is wrong and therefore must be properly punished and deterred by the law, and that current penalties for possession are so soft that the “war on drugs” effectively doesn’t exist.

Hitchens sets out his stall early, the book’s preface rejecting the idea that the freedom to choose which chemicals one ingests is comparable to the freedom of speech, because to use illicit drugs is to willingly become a serf. And yet we are all at liberty to use our freedom of speech to argue for changes that would make us worse off – as the both of us must necessarily believe the other is currently doing.

It’s immoral to “stupefy” oneself, he argues, adding that drugs “break the link between hard work and reward”. The latter charge is also levelled at rock music, which I shall remember with a chortle the next time I buy gig tickets with money from my second or third source of income – or, for that matter, when I next strum the custom Stratocaster copy that I spent six months building. Then again, the same could be said for all forms of entertainment that don’t directly address wider social issues. Hitchens goes on to compare modern society with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: “contraception universal, family relations in many cases abolished, all the inhibitions surrounding sex removed, an ill-educated mass kept content with (legal and illegal) drugs and with sport and entertainment, old age hidden from sight and - increasingly - ended by deliberate neglect or disguised euthanasia, death a process conducted offstage among strangers, history forgotten, Christianity reduced to community singing, reading books a quaint minority pursuit, education indoctrination, the nation state fading into oblivion, science fumbling busily in the womb, sometimes killing, sometimes manipulating.” Sport and entertainment are hardly the greatest evils of our time. Anything that lightens the load on the slow trudge to the grave is fine by me, and each of us has our own tastes and preferences. And however unappealing it may be to Hitchens's ears, even rock music has charms to soothe a savage breast.

The reference to people “stupefying” themselves with drugs seems to be something of an overstatement: most use of illicit drugs is to enhance leisure time, or to aid with relaxation after a long slog at work – just as this blogger’s evening slug of bourbon or Friday-night pub-visit are. (Hey, if I do my best to Make a Difference during the week I’m entitled to wind down with a few beers and the Hollyoaks omnibus at the weekend. Although, actually, I’d be perfectly entitled not to engage with society at all in the first place. Drug use and social activism are hardly mutually exclusive anyway, as I’m confident veterans of the CND and members of the recent Occupy movement would attest.)

So the effects of moderate use of most drugs aren’t as great as they’re made out to be. This is not to say that chemical escape never used to completely detach people from the world around them: it clearly is, and as much as it might pain any of us to witness this witlessness, the casual wasting of the gift of sentience, that still doesn’t make it a place for the criminal law. Madame Justice’s sword is too large and indelicate an instrument to be used trying to whittle the crooked timber of humanity into more agreeable contours, and whenever it’s tried her scales tip the most wildly, ending up as unbalanced as a Mail editorial. It’s wrong to punish someone simply for living their life in a way that we find distasteful. Using the law to enforce personal moral standards is a practice that belongs to Iran or Saudi Arabia, not to the UK. And as as a deterrent, given that the ‘crime’ has no direct victim (a distinction Hitchens fails to make when comparing drug-possession offences to burglary), then sacrificing a handful of those who transgress against an artificial law in order to put off others treats people not as individuals with hopes and dreams and priorities of their own but mere eggs to be cracked to make a more palatable omelette.

That distinction between a direct victim and those who might suffer secondary knock-on effects is an important one. Hitchens rejects liberalisers’ ‘harm principle’, retorting to JS Mill with John Donne. Since we don’t exist in a vacuum, the families and friends of drug users have to be protected. But it seems unlikely that anyone unconcerned about wrecking his own health or ruining his family’s lives will be especially fearful of the law, and that’s quite aside from such a notion making each of us not free people but slaves to the whims and opinions of others – an attitude that, to me, doesn’t seem too many kilometers away from cultures who force their children to marry against their will. If harm, of whatever type, results from drug use then intervention may be appropriate, just as being both drunk and disorderly is an offence but merely being intoxicated is not. But preemptive sanction via the criminal law is disproportionate and the end, in this case, doesn’t justify the means.

That’s one reason to suspect that a harsher deterrent wouldn’t work. Hitchens says that, because penalties are so soft, it’s never really been tried in this country, and the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act was the start of a process of de facto decriminalisation. “[B]y 2007, the bulk of cannabis cases that the police even troubled themselves to record would be dealt with by a ‘warning’ that involved no criminal record of any kind, a long way from the maximum of ten years’ imprisonment,” he writes, adding in a later chapter that out of 162,610 cannabis offences attracting the attention of police in England and Wales in 2009, 19,137 were dealt with via cautions, 11,492 with Penalty Notices for Disorder, 86,953 through cannabis warnings, and only 22,478 cases went to court. There are still vast man-hours devoted to trying – around half of all stop-and-searches in the capital are aimed at finding drugs – and in 2009, 1226 people were sentenced to immediate custody for personal possession offences. Try telling them this is a war we “never fought”. Moreover it seems paradoxical both to claim that drugs are already effectively legal and fear that further liberalisation will reduce the UK to a nation of zombies.

The section on alcohol and tobacco actually observes, but doesn’t acknowledge, that culture plays a greater role in choice of recreational substance than the law does: alcohol, and alcoholism, are commonplace in Iran despite severe penalties that begin at lashes and end with capital punishment for repeat offenders. (And its majority Muslim population presumably believe that their punishment doesn’t end with death but carries on after it into eternity.) This, Hitchens says, is because alcohol was a part of Persian culture before the rise of Islam. He adds that, unlike with other drugs, it would be difficult to enact a ban on alcohol in the UK now because it’s already currently legal – but surely it’s really because drinking is an intrinsic part of British life, and people just wouldn’t stand for it. As an example, handguns were once perfectly legal in this country – and Hitchens has previously noted their ready availability up to the early 20th century – but increasing restrictions and then a ban on ownership were accepted because the UK has never had a gun culture comparable to that in the US. Can the law be harnessed to to change the culture? I’m doubtful. It usually works the other way around. Hitches notes, too, that the increase in popularity of cannabis predates the weakening of penalties in the Misuse of Drugs Act and attributes it to a cultural revolution.

The section on how current British drug law came to be as it is is interesting, however. Despite rarely agreeing with him, I rather like Hitchens’s output where it combines history and matters of (actual) morals. (See for example this blog entry on Britain’s participation in the second world war. Favourite sentence: “[T]he fact that we were fighting *beside* one evil empire *against* another evil empire robs our war of any general moral purpose.”) Here he tells of a Labour cabinet divided along class lines between the radical university-educated members and the socially conservative working-class ones.

The former won, obviously, and apparently left Britain "demoralised", unable to exercise self-control without an external shackle in the form of the law. Hitchens writes of "the British people's increasing determination – led by a libertine and selfish middle class – to throw off self-restraint in their personal behaviour". But conduct that primarily concerns only ourselves is fundamentally different to that which inherently concerns others. But a tendency to weekend hedonism doesn't automatically make one a bad person; drug users can still be generously charitable, and the licentious can still give up their bus seats for the elderly and infirm. If they're "immoral" for what they choose to do in private then I don't much care as long as they're not robbing, raping or murdering anyone. To even place them on the same moral axis is to wrongly conflate vice and sin.

But then, cannabis, Hitchens says, is not only immoral – it's dangerous too. He compares those who deny its role in causing mental-health problems to those who once refused to accept tobacco-smoking as a cause of lung cancer, despite the evidence for the latter being much stronger and the correlation far tighter. He does observe, however, that one possible reason for the lack of definitive evidence is that the conditions in question aren’t well-defined in the same way that cancer is – a diagnosis of schizophrenia having much more to do with the judgement of a doctor than it does to, say, a biopsy. It’s an interesting point, one I hadn’t considered myself, and probably bears more research. But to describe cannabis as “one of the most dangerous drugs known to man” seems like the most absurd hyperbole.

In any event, research alone can’t settle this argument, which, Hitchens admits, comes down entirely to one’s moral stance. “Do we think the use of these drugs is wrong?”, he writes. “Do we think the law can be effective in limiting their use? My answer to both these questions is ‘yes’. The crucial moral and cultural divide, which is at the heart of the debate about drugs, lies here.” I simply happen to disagree, and since, as Hitchens acknowledges, personal moral standards are enforced with the weight of the criminal law in virtually no other area of life, then if we “never fought” the war on drugs that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s time to start doing so – it means that the phantom armies should disband and go home, and the two sides agree formal terms.

As one might expect, the book is impeccably researched and entertainingly written. Just take its arguments with a pinch of salt – or perhaps something a little stronger.

Buy The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment's Surrender to Drugs on Amazon