How thrilling it is when someone finally stages a demonstration against you. All right, it was a very small protest (one person), and it was in Southampton on a wet Sunday morning. But it was all mine. Stretched by the roadside was a dank bedsheet bearing the words ‘Peter Hitchens is a hypocritical racist alcoholic. Spread your bile elsewhere. No one cares what you have to say.’ I don’t accept this as entirely accurate, but, under the circumstances, why quibble? Also, it made me think.
Standing beside it, smirking, was a person in a woolly hat and sunglasses. He had a striking pallor, the sort you might get from spending many months in a basement with a computer, converting sugary drinks into lard. What had provoked this manifestation of political rage and personal scorn? After a brief and unsatisfactory conversation, in which our minds did not meet, I grasped that the problem was my view that we should have laws against cannabis, and that they should be enforced. My critic thinks that this drug is a moral cause. For him, the freedom to take it ranks alongside the freedoms of speech, thought and assembly. There are many like him and a surprising number are conservatives, or write for conservative publications.
This seems to me to be plain wrong, in many ways. Cannabis users may think they are islands of joy. But they often inflict dreadful harm on others, especially their own families. Many of them are far too young to know what they are doing, endangering not just their intelligence and their schooling, but perhaps their very sanity. Those who doubt this should reflect on the painful fate of Henry Cockburn, son of Patrick, so movingly recorded in their book Henry’s Demons.
I had assumed that most thoughtful people would see that a properly enforced law would be the best weapon against the ghastly peer-pressure which persuades suggestible schoolchildren to risk the capricious, irreversible danger to their mental health which cannabis threatens.
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