We are (still) all guilty!

If the Tories want to convince us that they have realised the error of their ways and have now returned from their memorable excursion to Planet Takenleaveoftheirsenses, they will have to do better than this:

Drug dealers are victims as well as offenders because so many are themselves addicted, the Conservatives’ policy chief said today. Oliver Letwin, chairman of the party’s policy review, warned that ‘enormous numbers’ of Britons remained trapped by multiple disadvantages, suffering from addictions and problems such as poor housing as well as low incomes.
Asked about the extent to which drugs fuelled urban crime, Mr Letwin told the Guardian fringe debate at the Tory conference in Blackpool: ‘A drug [addict] is a victim, not a miscreant, though it may lead to him being a miscreant. The pusher is the person who is the most direct cause [of crime], but many pushers are also victims, because they are parts of pyramids in which they are both users and sellers.’

And as reported in today’s Telegraph:

Efforts to stem the flow of drugs had failed, he said. He argued for a greater focus on reducing the ‘demand side of the equation’ with more rehabilitation as occurs in America, Sweden and Holland. ‘It is absolutely critical to understand that the person who is on what is probably a cocktail of alcohol and cannabis and amphetamines and heroin is the victim not the miscreant,’ he added.

He’s right about one thing: the need to reduce the ‘demand side of the equation’. But the way to do that, as can be seen from Sweden’s far more successful approach, is not by treating drug users as victims but as the criminals that they are. Treating possession and pushing as a crime but users as victims, as English law currently does, is a specious division that lies at the core of our failure to fight drug abuse. The law should transmit an unambiguous moral message: that all drug use is so dangerous to society that it is beyond the pale. English drug law conveys instead a highly ambiguous, indeed incoherent moral message which thus carries no weight.

Drug users break the law. The idea that they are not responsible for their actions is pernicious. They choose to take the stuff in the first place, after all. What next- treating people who commit murder under the influence of drugs or alcohol as ‘victims’? Or treating all criminals as ‘victims’ if they come from abusive backgrounds (the fallacy, indeed, behind the Tories’ much mocked desire to ‘hug a hoodie’ and the criminal justice discourse of the left from which it derives). This is what Letwin should have said: It is absolutely critical to understand that the person who is on what is probably a cocktail of alcohol and cannabis and amphetamines and heroin is the miscreant.

Letwin is also right to say that many users become pushers. Indeed, that is another reason why treating pushers as criminals but users as victims has made drug law so incoherent as to be unworkable. The obvious solution is therefore to treat both users and pushers as miscreants. But Letwin want to treat them all as victims instead.

Oh dear. Tory common-sense score: 0/10.