Drugs

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Man Who Should Be President

It’s not at all fair to call Gary Johnson the pot-candidate but that’s how the former governor of New Mexico is going to be known, to the extent he is known at all, in this depressing, currently-witless, Republican primary. From a personal point of view I give not even half a hoot about marijuana or other currently-prohibited drugs. I don’t favour ’em. But so what? The Drug War must end sometime and sooner seems a better notion than later. If President Johnson were to end the Drug War* and that were his sole achievement in office he’d have done more good than any President in 40 years. Not since Milton

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Ken Clarke contra mundum

What to make of Sadiq Khan and Ken Clarke? As Pete has noted, Khan (and Ed Miliband) empathises with Ken Clarke’s instincts. But, as Sunder Katwala illustrates, Khan’s support is qualified. Khan gave speech last night after which he took questions. One of his answers was as follows: “It’s no use us wanting to cuddle Ken Clarke – I don’t want to cuddle Ken Clarke but perhaps others do – when he is part of a government which has got policies which will see the number of people committing crime going up.” He was referring to alleged cuts to police numbers and devices such as the educational maintenance allowance, as

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Joy Shall Be In Heaven Over One Sinner That Repenteth

Like Doug Mataconis, I confess I didn’t expect to see Pat Robertson come out in favour of legalising marijuana possession. But he has. The British situation is not wholly comparable to the American one but the arguments remain broadly similar. And mandatory sentences are just as grotesque on this side of the Atlantic too.

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Ainsworth has a point

Much ado about Bob Ainsworth this morning, and his views on drug policy. The former defence secretary, and a junior Home Office minister under Tony Blair, has become the most high profile political figure to call for the legalisation of drugs. Or, as he put it: “It is time to replace our failed war on drugs with a strict system of legal regulation, to make the world a safer, healthier place, especially for our children. We must take the trade away from organised criminals and hand it to the control of doctors and pharmacists.” To my mind, this is a welcome intervention. It’s not that the case for legalising drugs

Alex Massie Alex Massie

In Praise of… Bob Ainsworth

Hats-off to the former Home Office Minister and Secretary of State for Defence who will use a Westminster Hall debate today to say: “I have just been reading the Coalition Government’s new Drugs Strategy. It is described by the Home Secretary as fundamentally different to what has gone before; it is not. To the extent that it is different, it is potentially harmful because it retreats from the principle of harm reduction, which has been one of the main reasons for the reduction in acquisitive crime in recent years. However, prohibition has failed to protect us. Leaving the drugs market in the hands of criminals causes huge and unnecessary harms

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Swings and Roundabouts in the Great, Endless Drug War

There’s good and bad news this month. The disappointing news is that the latest surveys suggest only one in five American high schoolers smokes tobacco even occasionally. The good news is that one in five smokes marijuana from time to time. According to this year’s official figures: For 12th-graders, declines in cigarette use accompanied by recent increases in marijuana use have put marijuana ahead of cigarette smoking by some measures. In 2010, 21.4 percent of high school seniors used marijuana in the past 30 days, while 19.2 percent smoked cigarettes. This is good news? Yes it is. For one thing it shows that teenage stoners have a better grasp of

Saturday

Alex Massie

Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the country of country imagine the shame of this. “So what did you do today, honey?” “I arrested Willie Nelson”. How can that* be right? A U.S. Border Patrol spokesman says country singer Willie Nelson was charged with marijuana possession after 6 ounces was found aboard his tour bus in Texas. Patrol spokesman Bill Brooks says the bus pulled into the Sierra Blanca, Texas, checkpoint about 9 a.m. Friday. Brooks says an officer smelled pot when a door was opened and a search turned up marijuana. Brooks says the Hudspeth County sheriff was contacted and Nelson was among three people arrested. Next week: the Pope will be

Monday

Max Chambers

A harmful double standard

Professor David Nutt, the former Chief Drugs Adviser to the Government, has sparked controversy again today by pronouncing that alcohol is more harmful than heroin, crack, powder cocaine and methamphetamine. His findings are based on a paper published today, which builds on a 2007 journal that explored the same issues. So, is Professor Nutt right? If he is, what should the consequences be for public policy and, in particular, our systems of drug classification and alcohol taxation?   To find out, it is worth returning to Professor Nutt’s 2007 academic paper.  The relative harm of drugs is measured according to nine meters, taking into account the various aspects of physical

Monday

Alex Massie

Prohibition Still Doesn’t Work

Stephen Pollard argues that this piece by Antonio Maria Costa, formerly Executive Director at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “simply rips apart the dangerously sloppy thinking from those who argue for the legalisation of hard (and soft) drugs.” Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Alternatively, one can think it profoundly misleading and alarmist. Costa argues that any attempts to introduce sanity (that’s not how he describes it) to the drug conversation will inevitably produce a sharp rise in drug use, and consequently addiction. Leaving aside the philosophical debates about drug-use, this is an argument that while intuitively plausible isn’t necessarily endorsed by the evidence available.

Saturday

Lewis Jones

Blow-out in Berlin

D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little was an unusual Man Booker winner (2003). D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little was an unusual Man Booker winner (2003). Not only was it brilliant, it was also a first novel, and apparently by an American. Holden Caulfield was invoked, and Liam McIlvanney called it ‘the most vital slice of American vernacular since Huck Finn’. It turned out, though, to have been written by a Brit, ‘on the floor of a box-room in Balham’. D. B. C. Pierre is the nom de plume of Peter Finlay, an evolved childhood nickname — ‘Dirty But Clean’, which is evidently his motto as a writer.

Saturday

Francis King

Why, oh why?

In my many years as a judge for the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography, I have been constantly surprised by the high proportion of books that deal with the subject of adoption. It is usually a melancholy story of young people who, as their 18th birthdays approach, become obsessed with the need to meet their natural parents, only eventually to find themselves being entertained by families with which they have nothing in common; of couples who suddenly discover that the children that they had come to regard as their own have now abruptly given precedence in their affections to total strangers; and of women who, having made the terrible

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Fox’s Radical Good Sense

Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of our drug policies, I hope we may agree that they’re much less important than drug policy in the United States or the countries that produce narcotics. Nearly 30,000 people have been killed in Mexico since the “War on Drugs” was re-militarised in 2006. Now former President Vincente Fox is the latest Latin American statesman to suggest that the war is a pointless, murderous folly that weakens civil society while empowering the very people it’s supposed to be fighting: “Legalization does not mean that drugs are good … but we have to see (legalization of the production, sale and distribution of drugs)

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

Same old perversions

Memory Lane always looked so unthreatening to me. But this is Bret Easton Ellis, so a cast reunion for the characters he first wrote about in Less Than Zero 25 years ago is bound to end in tears, screaming and blood. And so it does, with grim efficiency. No sooner has our protagonist, Clay, checked back into his Hollywood apartment complex, than he is plunged feet-first into a swamp of paranoia, sin and violent double-cross. As the doorman says to him on his return, ‘Welcome back.’ So what’s Clay been up to all these years? Becoming a screenwriter would be the literalist’s answer, but drifting further into Easton Ellis’s subconscious

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Ken Clarke Is Right

Actually, Ken Clarke is one of the Good Tories. Indeed, one could spend some time speculating on how the Conservative party might have fared had it chosen him to lead it and not, say, Iain Duncan Smith. (Yes, there’s europe but…) Obviously then, this means some people think he personifies everything that is wrong with the Conservative party and never mind that he was a better Chancellor than anyone who’s held that job since. And so Clarke is right to argue that we should probably send fewer people to prison and thus I disagree – respectfully! – with the Spectator’s editorial on the subject. This doesn’t mean – as the

Tuesday

Max Chambers

Coming clean whilst going straight

Combating drug misuse in our prisons could be one of the best ways to cut reoffending. A prison sentence should, for a drug-addicted criminal with a  chaotic lifestyle, act as a form of respite – not just for the community, but also for the offender themselves. Yes – prison should be a place of punishment, but it should also be a chance to get clean.   An effective strategy to combat drug misuse in prisons means tackling drug smuggling and supply, while ensuring that the treatment regimes give prisoners the best possible chance of getting – and staying – clean.  The previous Government failed to do either. Our new report,

Friday

Alex Massie

Is Lance Armstrong a Cheat?

This is a question of faith and those who believe won’t let anything change their mind, while those who can’t believe in the Miracle of Lance won’t be satisfied until the poor man does something impossible and proves a negative. I’m divided: I think the believers deluded and the sceptics dangerously monomaniacal but I also have much more sympathy for the latter than the former and not just because I think Lance Armstrong a creep. Nevertheless… He cannot ever demonstrate that he has never doped – but that doesn’t mean one has to believe everything Armstrong says.  As readers who are cycling fans and who possess long memories may recall,

Monday

Alex Massie

High Times for Dave and Nick

A good spot by Ewan Hoyle: The Telegraph has gone after Nick Clegg’s support for a more sensible approach to the “War on Drugs”. It seems that when he was an MEP the Liberal Democrat leader supported decriminalisation. This, we are supposed to believe, is a Bad Thing. Which makes it amusing or interesting that way back in 2005 David Cameron also called for “fresh thinking and a new approach” to drugs policy. That, as you know, means keeping at least an open mind about decriminalisation. Now proposals for a sensible drugs policy are, alas, unlikely to feature prominently in the next Queen’s Speech and I don’t expect much from

Monday

Alex Massie

Drug Dealers in Favour of Prohibition

What does left mean these days? And what, for that matter, about right? Increasingly the divide that really matters is between the liberal and the authoritarian. When it comes to drugs, for instance, Melanie Phillips is an authoritarian. Well-intentioned, I’m sure, but an authoritarian nonetheless. This means that, whether she or the other Drug Warriors like it or not, they have more in common with drug-producers than consumers. Indeed, the Drug Warriors might be said, objectively speaking, to be furthering producer interests at the expense of the consumer. This might help explain why marijuana producers in California are appalled that the state might, by referendum, legalise pot this year. Theyre

Sunday

Alex Massie

Nanny State Critics

Cosmo Landesman can’t meet many libertarian-minded people: I notice that right-wing critics of the nanny state never call for the legalisation of drugs on the grounds that adults should be free to choose to be addicts or not. Like Mr Worstall, I do. The rest of Landesman’s article is no better informed than this.

Thursday

David Blackburn

Proscribing legalised drugs

‘My wife says these drugs turned me into a zombie, but the truth is I wouldn’t know, as I have hardly any memory of the past 40 odd years.’ The Mail printed Keith Andrew’s testimony, a 74-year-old retired electrician who has guzzled prescribed benzodiazepines for nearly half a century. Andrew is one an estimated 1.5 million British people who have been addicted to valium and other tranquilisers. Whether addiction is voluntary or not is irrelevant. Anti-anxiety treatment remains a laxly regulated area of medicine: more than 8 million prescriptions are made each year and there are an estimated 100,000 illicit addicts currently using. In a fascinating piece in the Telegraph,