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Special Report
The Straight Dope: A Telephone Conversation with Peter Hitchens
After Colorado and Washington, an authoritative case against drug legalization.
Peter Hitchens is an English journalist and author. He covered the fall of the Soviet Union and Clinton-era Washington for the Daily Express of London under that newspaper’s former ownership and now writes a column for the Mail on Sunday. His books include The Abolition of Britain, The Cameron Delusion, and The Rage Against God. He has also contributed to a number of other British and American periodicals, including the Spectator, the New Statesman, National Review, and the American Conservative. In 2010, he won the Orwell Prize, one of Britain’s highest awards for journalism.
In his latest book, The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment’s Surrender to Drugs, Mr. Hitchens argues that, despite the harsh anti-drug rhetoric of politicians, it has been four decades since British courts and law enforcement officials treated drug taking as a serious offense. He surveys the impact of this de facto decriminalization and concludes that it has been disastrous. In light of voters’ decision to legalize marijuana in Colorado and Washington, I spoke with him via telephone about his new book, the roots of cultural and moral decline in the Anglosphere, the prospects for winning the war on drugs (hint: he’s not optimistic), and the conservative case against drug legalization.
MW: Mr. Hitchens, the title of your latest book is The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment’s Surrender to Drugs. What do you say to critics who insist that successive British governments have been tough on drug users?
PH: It’s demonstrably untrue. There has been a salami-sliced but observable decriminalization, particularly of cannabis but also of other drugs, stretching over forty years. The decision was made in the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act to treat drug possession differently from trading drugs and treat cannabis differently from other bogeyman drugs like heroin, cocaine, and LSD. Both decisions have been amplified by the practice of the police and the courts. In 1973 the Lord Chancellor Lord Hailsham instructed magistrates to stop sending people to prison for possession of cannabis, even though they have the power to do so. (Such instructions are generally taken pretty seriously by magistrates.) So the official maximum penalties have been slowly pushed down. Now if the police catch you in possession of cannabis, if they bother to do anything at all, they issue you what’s called a cannabis warning. It involves no penalty. There was a rather bad rock singer called Pete Doherty who was actually caught in a courthouse in possession of a quantity of heroin, which he dropped on the floor. He walked free from that building. This is the extent to which drugs have been decriminalized. If the courts don’t impose severe penalties, the police in England, who are terribly constrained by bureaucracy, pretty quickly get the signal that it’s not worth their while to go through the paperwork involved in instigating a prosecution. The act of arresting someone can tie up an officer for an entire day, so you can see why police might be reluctant to proceed with something that will amount to a minor fine.
MW: The subtitle of your book is also intriguing. In what sense have élites “surrendered to drugs” over the years?
PH: Almost all the moral decline in the Anglosphere countries comes from the same source, which is the collapse of Christianity as a major force in public life. It’s not a case of someone actively setting out to undermine the morals of society. Protestant Christianity, with its rules on delayed gratification, self-discipline, and personal responsibility, is very hard to maintain because it inconveniences people. As it declines, the default position not to defer gratification and to pursue pleasure at the expense of others becomes stronger, and this affects politicians, media figures, university lecturers, school teachers, police officers, and everybody else.
MW: In The Abolition of Britain you surveyed the cultural changes that have taken place in Britain since the 1960s. To what extent have these shifts in people’s attitudes towards morality been independent of the state? How much of the blame can be put on politicians?
PH: These changing attitudes were prevalent among a very small intellectual élite in the 1920s and 1930s. They began to take concrete form in the 1960s, but they have their roots in events many, many years earlier in the attitudes of Bloomsbury. Broadcasting in the 1960s enabled these ideas to be spread to a large de-Christianized population. When morality declines people tend to reach for the state to make up for the absence of conscience, and this is the problem that Britain faces. As people have attempted to maintain order in the absence of the morality that used to sustain it, the country has become much more authoritarian. There is more surveillance. So it is what Marxists would call “dialectic”: ordinary people are not more or less responsible than the state. Both influence one another.
MW: The Right Hon. Peter Lilley writes in Prospect à propos of The War We Never Fought that “there are only two logically coherent policies: prohibition and legalisation.” What steps do you think are necessary to put Britain back on the path towards an effective prohibition of drugs? Steeper penalties?
PH: I have absolutely no hope at all. There is no point in suggesting practical steps. It would be quite easy do, but I have no influence whatsoever upon mainstream politics in this country. All I’m doing now is recording my nation’s decline so that when it finally sinks giggling into the sea people will be able to read what actually happened.
MW: Many defenders of drug legalization point to the unmitigated disaster of Prohibition in the United States. Is this a reasonable analogy?
PH: No. There is one parallel: an attempt to interdict supply without interdicting demand. Prohibition in the United States was directed against manufacture, supply, transportation, and sale, but not against possession or consumption of alcohol, just as there is no really effective law against possession or consumption of cannabis in Britain. I don’t think Prohibition could have succeeded. The United States is a huge country with vast internal unpoliced spaces, two enormous seaboards, and long borders with two countries that were not imposing prohibitions on alcohol. Alcohol is enculturated. The drinking of alcohol is part of the central ceremony of the Christian religion. Prohibition was viewed, not unreasonably, by German and Italian Americans as an attack on their culture by Puritans and WASPS. It was doomed to fail. Compare this with the spread of cannabis, which is not a part of our culture and is still only used habitually by a small minority. The use of Prohibition in reference to cannabis is just dishonest propaganda. Most people when they hear “Prohibition” think of Eliot Ness and The Untouchables, chopping up beer barrels with axes and raiding speakeasies. They have no idea just how feeble the enforcement actually was, never mind the difference between alcohol, a substance consumed legally for millennia, and cannabis, which has never been in mass use in either the United States or Britain. Even when cannabis was legal it was not used.
MW: You have occasionally made reference to recent scientific findings about the effects of cannabis use. Would you mind summarizing some of the conclusions at which researchers have arrived?
PH: Well, I’m very cautious about this. Correlation is not causation, and only a very small amount of work has been done in these areas. Categories in mental health are extremely subjective. You can say someone has cancer of the lung or emphysema or degenerative heart disease because of a series of objective tests, which can be repeated by other doctors. The definitions of terms like schizophrenia and psychosis are vague. The only research which is firm on this is a recent study which shows a strong correlation between cannabis use and a decline in measured intelligence among school-aged children. Because IQ is a generally accepted measure of intelligence, this is very nearly objective. There is a huge amount of so-called anecdotal evidence that suggests that cannabis affects the brain, the mental health, of those who use it. It wouldn’t be a huge surprise, would it, if a powerful mind-altering drug had the capacity to affect the brain adversely or to unhinge people’s minds? What research we have tends to be correlative as opposed to causative, but it seems to me that, since we have a drug that has been correlated with mental illness, especially among the young, we should be very cautious about licensing it for widespread use.
MW: Residents of Washington and Colorado recently voted to legalize cannabis. A number of states, including Alaska, California, and New York, punish cannabis possession with small fines. A host of others allow cannabis to be used for medicinal purposes —
About the Author
Matthew Walther is the assistant editor of The American Spectator.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (32) | Leave a comment
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c. j. acworth| 11.13.12 @ 8:51AM
Sorry Mr. Hitchens, I respectfully disagree. I have no interest in putting up a police state to keep self-destructive people from destroying themselves. Even if you could make pot vanish from the earth, they would turn to booze. I would be willing to bet that it would be cheaper in terms of dollars and civil liberty to institutionalize those who afflict themselves with "reefer madness" than to hunt down and prosecute them before they go mad. As a conservative my take on this is to say go ahead, do drugs, die and make room for someone productive. If someone wants help dealing with an abuse problem, I'll do what I can for them.
Alan Brooks | 11.13.12 @ 9:12AM
Besides, we now have 'problems' exponentially more serious than drugs and drug legalisation.
cowgirl| 11.13.12 @ 12:19PM
I completely agree with your analysis. I at one time looked at drug use froma moral and Christian perspective - stop it. Now I can give a rat's A$$. If you want to shoot it up, smoke from every oriface in your body, sniff it, snort it, take a bath in it or be high every day please do so. But you will do all these things in a controlled environment so you CANNOT do damage or harm someone like me who is 100% against drug abuse. Kill yourself and harm your family and friends - Actions have consequences and you must deal with it. Period. End of Discussion.
StanAmSpec| 11.13.12 @ 3:16PM
That will never happen. The price will go down (financial and social) use will go up. Jobs will be lost, students drop out, more rapes occur etc. etc.
That's what we need more moral decay . . .
cowgirl| 11.13.12 @ 4:12PM
We are already in massive moral decay so your argument there is pointless.
If you make drugs a joke by saying hey here it is all free - you can do want you want (in a controlled place like a lock down warehouse) you take the bad out of it. Just do it until you feel good. If that kills you, when then too bad - one less loser in society. In other words handing out free drugs to those who want it (in a controlled environment) will help get rid of the moral decay. Also, the druggies won't show up on election day to vote because they will be too stoned. That will help get rid of the moral decay also.
PolishKnight| 11.13.12 @ 10:50AM
I call BS especially with this statement: "Almost all the moral decline in the Anglosphere countries comes from the same source, which is the collapse of Christianity as a major force in public life."
Put into perspective that the fastest growing demographic in the USA are the Hispanics and they vote overwhelmingly Democrat and the elephant in the room (pardon the pun) that Republicans refuse to address is that it's due to race preferences and their ideology of invasion and racial supremacy. They are represented by a PAC known as La Raza (The Race.)
The left's political agenda can be broken down into two simple factors: racist privileges and sexist privileges. The right does nothing about the former (and even panders a bit into them) but has truly engaged in cultural suicide on the latter. Feminism and women's equality is the notion that women should enjoy all the hard-won privileges of being a man (voting, high incomes) without the icky responsibilities of getting shot at in war or paying their own way. If men fail to earn a decent income, they either go homeless or wind up alone and childless. If women don't cut it, they can go on welfare and use a child as hostage. And the right ALLOWS that. Then they wonder why traditional two parent families are broken up: They gave women all the incentives to break up two parent families. What went wrong?
Idiots.
Occam's Tool| 11.13.12 @ 10:54AM
PK: yup. I'm buying gold and silver.
PolishKnight| 11.13.12 @ 4:54PM
Yeah, but it's already been inflated. The time to buy was 4 years ago. How about buying real estate? You can't go wrong buying that!
Occam's Tool| 11.13.12 @ 10:52AM
50-70% of my patients who are admitted to my State Hospital are positive for cannabis in their drug screens. If you are susceptible to schizophrenia developing, cannabis will bring it out.
The "bath salts" and synthetic cannabinoids are even worse.
You Libertarian idiots (and I do mean you, Dr. Paul---stick to birthin' babies, it's what you know) have no clue about the trouble coming. Peter Hitchens is superb. The Abolition of Britain is fantastic reading.
StanAmSpec| 11.13.12 @ 3:19PM
People have no idea, they rely on impressions from the media and anecdotes. My guess is that pot will be even worse than alcohol for life destruction. And far worse for driving as it's downright difficult to not get high smoking pot, whereas, most people don't get drunk every time they have a drink.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 11.13.12 @ 4:55PM
OT;
I am aware of your consistent position on this issue, and I remain in general agreement with it. Having spent nearly three decades in the criminal justice system, I don’t think that drug legalization is the direction to move in.
I think The War on Drugs is a non-winning approach, just as I think that a “War” on homicide or forgery are likely to be successful. Nevertheless, I still think a criminal justice approach has the highest likelihood of succeeding. While I find merit in some arguments in favor of decriminalization, and don’t disagree that The Noble Experiment that Prohibition of alcohol represented was a failure, I believe that there are important lessons to be learned about what followed its repeal. Most of those involved in the importation and dissemination of illegal spirits did not become legitimate distribution agents (though a few did). The organized crime infrastructure which was developed moved on to other profitable criminal activity, including union corruption, gambling (both illegal and later, to include the lawful variety), and other activities. One of these other activities involved the creation and/or expansion of the illicit drug market.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 11.13.12 @ 4:56PM
Similarly, if marijuana, cocaine, heroin and LSD were legalized tomorrow, their current distributors are not likely to become licensed pharmacists, distributing only to those of age who are able to afford their wares. That the current primary drugs of abuse are shifting from street drugs to diverted pharmaceuticals and synthetic substances (most of which were not yet illegal) suggests that I might be correct.
atheistrepublican| 11.18.12 @ 7:51AM
What you're missing is that the buyers would prefer to buy from legitimate sources, just as people prefer to borrow from banks rather than loan sharks.
PJ| 11.13.12 @ 10:29PM
OC,
Does pot smoking generally lead to harder drug taking such as heroin? There are some who say no.
Would you be able to cite a scientific reference so that I can read & cite it also. Thank you.
Occam's Tool| 11.13.12 @ 10:56AM
Hey, CJ, I'm all about job security. But our minorities are already getting destroyed by drugs. Open it up, and they will be damaged worse. Actually, preferntially worse.
SUBVET| 11.13.12 @ 11:13AM
Welcome back tool......I thought you were gone by last weeks statement......."take the money and run".
Slacker| 11.13.12 @ 12:27PM
I’m always amused when a prohibitionist refers to cannabis a powerful mind-altering drug. That isn’t even remotely true. I don’t know what to make of his entire argument after a whopper like that.
But, Hitchens’ is right about one thing. The freedom to legally smoke dope is an awfully limited concept of freedom.
StanAmSpec| 11.13.12 @ 3:20PM
I disagree it certainly is, you must be getting scammed and getting cheap cannabis. Or we differ a great deal on what "mind-altering" means.
Slacker| 11.13.12 @ 4:56PM
I think we differ a great deal on what is powerful mind-altering.
From high to low on my mind-alerting scale: LSD, psychedelic mushrooms, DMT, MDMA, some opiates, meth, cocaine, Ritalin, cannabis, cold pills, caffeine, nicotine. I really don’t know where to put booze and I left out the things I have no personal experience with. This was all long ago in another life.
JD is right. People are different. Personally I would not get in a bother if they legalized everything up to and including cocaine, whereas caffeine is too much for Mitt to handle.
I live in CO and voted for legalization but, I don't consider it all that important of an issue.
JD| 11.13.12 @ 3:34PM
I personally am affected by alcohol far less than other people I know, to the extent that I developed a distaste for drinking with friends not because of any distaste for drinking alcohol myself, but because it's unpleasant to be the only sober person in a group of intoxicated people.
By contrast, I know a person who becomes very "entertaining" after a single beer.
People are different.
Quartermaster| 11.13.12 @ 12:55PM
Hitchens is on the money as to the reason for the decline of morality in the anglosphere. He is far from alone in noticing. The basic problem of the US is a lack of morality in the Parasite Caucus. Toqueville predicted that group and said it would mean the end of the Republic.
For some MJ is a powerfuil mind altering drug. For others it does nothing. This is no different than any drug or disease. Some are more susceptible than others.
james wilson| 11.13.12 @ 1:19PM
Hitchens may be right--living as we do in the welfare state. Before 1906 there were no drugs which were illegal, and we were a freer people. This includes freedom to fail. Most drug addicts were middle aged housewives. It may be that there is no going back, but the problem is, there is no going forward.
JimH| 11.13.12 @ 3:01PM
Nothing new here, follow the link to William Hogarth’s 1751 ‘Beer Street and Gin Lane’: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.....d_Gin_Lane
JD| 11.13.12 @ 3:25PM
The UK and US are tough on drugs the way Obama is tough on illegal immigration - they cherry-pick a few half-truths to tell people that they're tougher than ever before when in fact they're de facto legalizing the behavior with active non-enforcement of the law.
JD| 11.13.12 @ 3:31PM
Drug laws are tricky business for a conservative.
On the one hand, it's absolutely true that protecting people from themselves doesn't work in the long run, and if we had less social welfare, we'd pay less for the mistakes of others.
On the other hand, the addictive nature of drugs subverts free will, and it is very hard to enforce things like DUI laws after people are already impaired.
I must confess, I voted against legalizing marijuana in Colorado, though I still can't solidly say why. Conscience is funny business.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 11.13.12 @ 4:28PM
One of the great things (and of course, the worse things) about voting is you don't need to justify your position, and (when done correctly and without fraud) your vote counts just as much as anyone else's vote does.
C. S. P. Schofield| 11.14.12 @ 12:10AM
I have, several times, looked up various years figures on drug use in the United States. I trust the DEA numbers to not understate the case for reasons that I hope are obvious. Using a definition of 'Regular User' as somebody who uses an illegal drug at least once a month, the numbers run to 16-18 million users of all illegal drugs, of which 10 million plus are basically pot smokers.
To stem this 'epidemic' we have kissed the Fourth Amendment goodbye. We are now supposed to sit passively by, with our hands clasped behind our heads, when a group of government workers kicks in our door at two in the morning, seconds after shouting 'police' (how is someone asleep supposed to recognize that?), and tear our homes apart looking for God alone knows what.
This is ridiculous and dangerous. There is no justification for it, and there would be none if 6% of the population was taking drugs that turned them into lizardmen.
The War on Drugs is a failure. A dangerous failure than exaggerates the States tendency towards bullying.
Rewind the justice system to the point where warrants are not routinely served by commando teams, and I will be willing to talk about continuing the Prohibition on the drugs that are at present illegal. Until that happens, I am more afraid of police playing Gangbusters than I am of Junkies.
aware| 11.14.12 @ 5:52AM
Wonder why "conservatives" are losing appeal? This is a prime example. If 2 states vote for pot legalization isn't that an exercise of the 10th amendment? Isn't that constitutional? Or is it so only when the vote is what you want?
I expect that Holder's (In)justice Dept will soon be coming down on them hard. And you will find yourselves on his side. How are we to take seriously the claim by conservatives of "limited government" and "return to the constitution" if a pet issue easily puts you against what you claim to be for?
I don't even drink alcohol so have no interest beyond the liberty aspect. Conservatives are very inconsistent on these things. And it shows. There is absolutely NO constitutional basis for Federal drug laws. A plainer usurpation of the constitution by Leviathan than the "war on drugs" is hard to find, and yet fully supported by "conservatives".
This "war" has militarized the police and given them the attitude of an occupying army. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and a large part of the 5th too. Drugs were never a threat in the way the "war on drugs" is.
I can say no to drugs and the "drug war". Pet issues have destroyed conservatism and amply displays its contradictions and cognitive dissonance. No way to win new adherents. Movements lose sight of objectives like this and become extinct without the influx of new and young converts. Ironic this article should appear now, just after the severe drubbing of this (s)election(and primaries).
markus| 11.15.12 @ 12:27PM
I couldn't agree with you more. Here is a simple minded hard core fascist speaking about individual rights. Excuse me while I throw up. Of course, the demotards are no better except maybe they are not so self-righteous.
Vasu Murti | 11.15.12 @ 4:09PM
Prohibition led to Al Capone and rising crime, violence and corruption, overflowing courts, jails, and prisons, the labeling of tens of millions of Americans as criminals and the consequent broadening of disrespect for the law, the dangerous expansions of federal police powers, encroachments on civil liberties, hundreds of thousands of Americans blinded, paralyzed, and killed by poisonous moonshine and industrial alcohol, and the increasing government expenditure devoted to enforcing the Prohibition laws.
Prohibition did succeed in reducing alcohol consumption and alcohol-related ills ranging from cirrhosis to public drunkenness and employee related absenteeism. But this was due to the effectiveness of the temperance movement in publicizing the dangers of alcohol. The decline in alcohol consumption during those years, like the recent decline in cigarette consumption, had less to do with laws than with changing social attitudes.
Alcohol prohibition was repealed after just thirteen years while the prohibition of other drugs has continued for over 75 years.
Why?
Alcohol prohibition struck directly at society's most powerful members. The prohibition of other drugs, by contrast, threatened far fewer Americans with hardly any political power.
Only the prohibition of marijuana, which nearly 100 million Americans have violated since 1965, has come close to approximating the Prohibition era experience.
Bob Armstrong | 11.15.12 @ 5:04PM
The creation of the FDA in 1906 with the power to make life and death decisions over citizens' decisions about what they may choose to put in their bodies was the initial gross immorality . The notion of criminalizing particular plants is particularly absurd .
Behaviors should be sanctioned , not excuses .
I personally find THC , along with coffee and a cigar useful in helping me 'getting into' the very mathematical APL computing systems I work in . At 68 I find that , if anything , marihuana may have contributed to my appearing noticeably younger than many of my age peers .
To me , freedom of the individual , with individual responsibility is the highest morality .
atheistrepublican| 11.18.12 @ 7:55AM
Well put! Until well into my adulthood, I inhaled. A lot. That didn't keep me from obtaining a graduate degree, holding down respectable jobs and being a contributing member of society. Other than my use of illegal drugs, I commit no crimes, and scrupulously pay my taxes.
Why, I'd like to know, would society be better with my being in jail?