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 —
PH: Alleged medicinal purposes. Let’s be very
careful about whether there are any legitimate medical uses for
cannabis.
MW: Indeed. What do you think we can expect the
impact of outright legalization (as opposed to decriminalization)
to be?
PH: I think there will be more mad people.
There will be more people, especially more young people, going
irreversibly mad.
MW: William F. Buckley Jr. is perhaps the most
prominent American conservative to have argued for drug
legalization. Buckley made what looks like a utilitarian case for
legalization. What is the moral case, not only against legalization
but against drug use altogether?
PH: There is a problem here. I could argue from
a Christian position that one should not throw away the gifts of
perception and thinking. I could also argue that you should not put
yourself into such a state that you are no longer responsible for
your own actions. I could say that by using drugs people risk
making themselves a terrible burden upon those who love and care
for them. Certainly baseless is the argument that “I can do what I
like with my own body.” You can by doing what you like with your
own body destroy your sanity and make yourself absolutely dependent
upon the care of others for the rest of your life, which is immoral
by practically any moral code you could devise, with or without
God. Wealthy, comfortably off people advocate the legality of a
drug, which they imagine they might use themselves without harm,
that will undoubtedly destroy the lives of others poorer and less
fortunate than themselves. These people are arguing in favor of the
suffering of others for the sake of their own pleasure. This is
disgusting, and how anybody can call himself a conservative and
take this position escapes me. There is a ridiculous confusion
between the so-called freedom to render yourself insensible and the
ancient, hard-won freedoms of speech, thought, and assembly. I
think it is very much in the interest of any authoritarian state to
have a stupefied, drug-taking population. Freedom to smoke dope
doesn’t seem to me to be freedom for anyone.
MW: Finally, moving slightly away from drugs, I
want to ask you about a recent blog entry in which you wrote that
“For a proper conservative, American national politics is a
desert.” Do you think that conservatism has ever been a major force
in American politics?
PH: I think that America was until recently a
conservative project. That is to say, it was very much an exercise
in leaving people alone to do as they would according to
conscience, which I think, as a conservative, is as close as you
can get to an ideal society. That experiment began to come to an
end before the Civil War. So I think there have been American
conservatives. But certainly since Reagan in America and since
Thatcher in Britain there has been a confusion between economic
liberalism and conservatism, especially in the minds of
conservatives themselves because it has brought them electoral
success.
