My name is Andrew West.
I am a presenter
at ABC Radio National,
but the person that we're most here
to hear and to see
and to argue with and debate with
is our special guest this afternoon,
Peter Hitchens.
"There is no war on drugs."
And there couldn't be, I think,
a more provocative discussion to have
in the final hours of this debate
of this festival.
Peter is a distinguished journalist.
Right now he is a columnist
at the 'Mail on Sunday'.
He is the author of the best-selling
book 'The Rage Against God'.
His latest book is called
'The War We Never Fought: The British
Establishment's Surrender to Drugs'.
Peter has a long and distinguished
history as a foreign correspondent
in Moscow and Washington
and in North Korea most recently.
But as I say our objective today
is to challenge this idea,
"There is no war on drugs."
And the man to make that challenge
is our guest.
-Please welcome Peter Hitchens.
-(APPLAUSE)
I should make it clear here
I didn't actually live in North Korea
and I don't live there now,
though I may choose to do so
after this afternoon's session.
What is a dangerous idea?
To begin with, a dangerous idea is
one which makes conventional opinion,
which I expect most of you hold,
squawk with indignation
and dislike the person
who advances it.
If it doesn't do those things, it
isn't dangerous in the first place.
For instance, saying the F-word
on stage is now so conventional
that it seems to me to be
the opposite of shocking.
Being in favour of same-sex marriage
is so conventional that it's dull.
But saying as I do
that there is no such thing
as the war against drugs
is anything but dull
because immediately
swarms of persons descend on me
shouting rude things at me
and telling that I am an evil person.
Some of you will have the opportunity
to do that later on.
But first of all... You're going to
be asking me questions later,
but I would like to ask you
a couple of questions first of all.
To begin with, is there anybody here
who has a totally closed mind?
If so, will you please
raise your hand?
(LAUGHTER)
Right. OK.
Well, the rest of you
are going to have to prove that.
The other question is this -
how many of you sitting here
have at any time in your life
taken an illegal drug?
Please raise your hands.
(LAUGHTER)
It seems to me that my proposition
is carried in any case.
If there were a war against drugs,
first of all,
you wouldn't have done it
and secondly you wouldn't
dare own up to it.
But let's move on a little further.
A very evil and wicked and selfish
campaign is currently being waged
with a great deal
of powerful money behind it,
which if it concerned fair trade
coffee or sweatshop trainers
would probably energise all of you
in an enraged campaign against it.
But because it's to do with the
legalisation or decriminalisation
or so-called regulation
of mind-altering drugs,
somehow or other
this evil, greedy and cupid...
How should I put this?
..commercially and governmentally
greedy campaign
has very, very widespread support
among the very people
who look down on fast food chains
and on all the other excrescences 
of aggressive global capitalism,
and yet this is one of them.
Why is that?
Why is it that so many people
are now captivated by the idea
that the legalisation
or decriminalisation
of mind-altering drugs
would be a good thing?
Well, let's begin with the problem
which I have first of all
addressed here,
which is the belief
which is very widely held
that there is somehow
a wicked war on drugs,
often characterised as prohibition,
which is cruel and draconian
and ruins many lives unnecessarily.
The reason why I wrote my book
was because this seems to me
to be a severe anomaly.
Huge numbers of people whom I knew
took, take, allow their children
to take these illegal drugs.
The main growth industry
of my otherwise economically
and industrially decrepit country
is cannabis farming.
I am not making this up.
It is an enormous growth industry.
And every single city in Britain has
an enormous number of cannabis farms,
hydroponically grown,
which the police cannot keep up with.
Under those circumstances,
how could one believe that
there was a war against drugs?
Then I began to look into the
procedures in my own country
which have been adopted by
the government and by the police
and by the criminal justice system
to deal with the possession
of illegal drugs,
and I find it - well, obviously
it'll be different in Australia -
I found what had happened was this,
that the authorities have
maintained on paper
laws which officially said that the
possession of these drugs was illegal
and carried certain
quite severe penalties,
but in fact these penalties
were very rarely imposed
and that the police had
almost entirely given up
pursuing people
for possessing these drugs.
It's reached the stage where,
for instance, at major
rock festivals in Britain
or in the Notting Hill Carnival which
takes place in the centre of London
for two days at
the end of every summer,
people can quite openly smoke dope
and nothing at all happens to them
even though police officers are
standing a few feet away,
or 'metres' as I believe
you call them here.
(LAUGHTER)
How was it that...
If these things were true,
how was it
that you could possibly say that
there was a war against drugs?
Then it occurred to me that
there was something very odd going on
because government propaganda
would ceaselessly say that
drugs were wicked and evil
and a great deal of concentration
would be placed upon
supposedly pursuing
the evil dealers and the
evil traffickers in these drugs,
and yet when the drugs were actually
sold and consumed, nothing happened.
Isn't this odd?
Now, what is it that makes
these dealers evil?
If they were trafficking in soap
or scented candles,
then there wouldn't really
be any great difficulty.
The reason why the traffic
is supposedly evil
is because of
the nature of the product
which they are trafficking in.
But when does the nature
of the product become obvious?
When does it actually do the bad
things which we believe it does?
When it is used.
So why is it that the law
looks on trafficking and sale
as deeply evil
and something to be pursued
so that we send naval vessels and
special forces to Central America
to try and interdict supply
when we do nothing whatever at all
to interdict demand.
It doesn't make sense.
When I examined the whole history
of the legal position and the
political position in my own country,
what I found was that there had been
a definite and clearly-made decision
by the British elite
that this is what they would do,
that they would pretend -
mainly so that they could abide
by international treaties -
they would pretend
to maintain laws against drugs,
and also so that they could
appease and reassure
the remaining conservative voters, of
whom there are quite large numbers,
that something was being done
while in practice abandoning
any attempt to interdict demand.
And it is obviously futile
if you wish to prevent
the spread and use of something
to interdict supply
and to do nothing about demand,
for demand will grow
and it will drive supply.
So the idea of prohibition
is itself therefore unsustainable.
It's factually not the case,
there is no such thing.
As I say, you've demonstrated
here already.
So why should we then care?
I think there is a very powerful
reason why we should care.
And I doubt many of you will want
to buy my book after this -
people seldom do after
they've heard me speak -
but I would like to recommend
to all of you another book
which probably isn't
on sale here today,
which you can very easily obtain,
written by my good friend
Patrick Cockburn,
perhaps the greatest foreign
correspondent of our time.
On this occasion it's not about Iraq
or the Middle East,
things about which he writes
very intelligently,
it's about his son Henry
and it is called 'Henry's Demons'.
And I commend it to you all
because it describes how...
..Patrick's son Henry, whom I knew
before this happened to him,
went to a school - and this is
the case of many schools in Britain,
I don't know whether
it is in Australia -
went to school where
at the age of perhaps 11 or 12
he was introduced to cannabis,
the drug which fashionable opinion
tells us all is soft
and therefore harmless
as soft drink - no alcohol -
a soft cop, a soft option.
'Soft' means nice.
When Henry started using cannabis,
presumably he thought
it was soft too.
The trouble is that a few years later
he became seriously mentally ill.
The descriptions of this in the book
are very harrowing
and the impact of it on the life
of Henry and his parents
and his brother was enormous,
and these are also described
in a gruelling and quite
hard-to-cope-with manner,
but which I recommend you
very much to read
because it is very educational.
After Patrick wrote his book,
what he found -
and since I've raised the subject,
I've found it too -
was very large numbers
of his acquaintances
who previously never said this to him
said something very similar had
happened to children of theirs.
Now, I am not going to go in here
to the enormous argument
about evidence of the connection
between cannabis and mental illness
because it's too complicated
and it's too detailed
and I also am very modest
in my claims.
I will say only this -
that there is a serious correlation
between the use of cannabis
and mental illness
being increasingly observed
by doctors,
and that the form of mental illness
which follows from
the use of cannabis,
if this correlation is indicative,
is one which is very hard
to classify.
So you might say that
somebody who is at school
and is bright and is doing well
who suddenly ceases to do so
and then destroys his or her
career prospects forever
and a lot of other things besides
will never actually go through the
filter of the mental health system.
Many other people will become in many
other serious ways dysfunctional.
Other people will
later in their lives
suddenly suffer serious
bouts of mental illness.
And, again, since I started
writing like this,
I've begun to receive
correspondence from people
describing all kinds
of terrible tragedies
overtaking relatives
or indeed husbands of theirs
who have thought
that this drug was safe.
So we have... At the same time
as the evidence is mounting
that cannabis is actually seriously
dangerous to mental health,
we have a very powerful
campaign to make it -
and I speak of cannabis
mainly because it is the most
commonly used drug of our time -
to make it effectively legal
and therefore to make its use
much more common.
The reason why I make this case
and the reason why
I speak about this at all
is most fundamentally because of
people like Patrick's son Henry,
either those to whom
it's already happened
or those to whom
it is going to happen,
because if the law at
this crucial stage is weakened,
then the argument that
these people have
against the immense peer pressure -
which all of us remember from our
school days and our young years -
the immense peer pressure which
these people face to take drugs
will have no barrier with which they
can defend themselves against it.
If the criminal justice system
can realistically be seen
to be prosecuting people
for possession of cannabis
so that there is a genuine danger of
serious damage to career prospects,
to the ability to travel
to the United States,
obvious, available, present
in people's lives,
then those who come under that
immense pressure
will have a defence against cannabis,
against the fashion
which may well end with them
in a locked ward, their lives ruined
and the lives of those
who love them ruined.
And this is another
very important point
because we are often told that
the taking of drugs
is a victimless crime.
"I can do what I like
with my own body,"
is the slogan, the mantra
of the drug legaliser.
Why should you...
How should you dare to tell me
what to do with my own body?
And the reason is quite simple.
It's not entirely your own.
If you undergo the experiences
which Henry Cockburn underwent,
then many other people are affected
by your decision to take the drug.
If you become seriously mentally ill,
then your family
and ultimately the whole state
will have to take charge of your life
in a way which is both emotionally
extremely painful and draining
and also very expensive.
So there are victims
and we are protecting victims by
maintaining a law against this.
So that's dealt with prohibition
and that's dealt with the idea
that cannabis is a soft drug.
And it seems to me
to deal fundamentally
with most of the arguments
for supposed legalisation.
We are, it seems to me, more or less
at the moment with cannabis
that we were at with cigarettes
and lung cancer
approximately 50 years ago
where it was clear that there was
a link between the two
but it had not been established.
Wouldn't it be extraordinarily
unwise at that moment
to listen to the silent voices of
the legalisers and decriminalisers
and make cannabis as common
in our society as cigarettes
just at the moment when it was
most important not to do so?
If...you want to know why
this is such a major cause,
I think it is because
the taking of the drug cannabis
is absolutely at the centre
of the modern pseudoreligion
which has taken hold of the
generation which began with my lot
when we were at university
in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
I call this 'selfism'.
It is summed up in the view that
the human being is autonomous
within his own person
and it doesn't have to
submit to any rules.
There was something about cannabis,
the ritual of the shared joint,
something about the adventure,
the breach of law,
the breach of convention, the
defiance of the suburban moral system
which made the taking of cannabis
absolutely central
to the cultural revolution
which has overtaken
so much of the Western world.
There are many, many people I imagine
in this room who believe that
it is a perfectly reasonable
part of life,
who allow their children to smoke it
and who don't see that there's
anything wrong with doing so,
and who will say as such people often
do, "It didn't do me any harm."
To which my reply is always,
"How do you know?
"How do you know
what you would've been
"and what you might have been
if you haven't done so?"
So those are the most
fundamental points
that I wanted to make about it.
There is another very important
aspect of this as well.
I am often confronted by people
who say to me,
'Well, how is it that
when you are," as I am,
"someone who campaigns very strongly
for the maintenance
"of the traditional liberties of
people in countries such as this,
"how is it that you can
therefore campaign," as I do,
"for laws against
the smoking of cannabis?
"Isn't this an interference
with liberty?"
I would say absolutely the country.
The freedom to stupefy yourself
simply is not comparable
with the great freedoms
of thought, speech and assembly.
It doesn't have the same character.
Worse, the freedom
to stupefy yourself -
which in my view
is increasingly if not exactly
encouraged, not discouraged
by government -
has a very important second aspect.
Aldous Huxley in his great book
'Brave New World' -
which I think increasingly
turns out to have been
a more accurate prophecy of the
future than George Orwell's '1984' -
warned clearly in his depiction
of the drug Soma,
of the thing which he later described
as his great fear
that the people of the world would
come to love their own servitude.
The use of Soma
in 'Brave New World' -
which readers of that book
will recall
was developed at great expense
by hundreds of biochemists
in a deliberate attempt to create
a drug which would control society -
is immensely important in making sure
that there is no serious dissent.
At one point in the book it is
actually used to quell a riot.
And the rioters end up
weeping and hugging each other
in pathetic group hugs
after they've been sprayed with Soma.
It seems to me
to be a very, very good illustration
of the effect of widespread
drug use in society.
And it deals also with
a parallel development
which has gone with the desire
to legalise illegal drugs,
which has been very strongly
increased use in our society
of legal mind-altering drugs.
And I think particularly
of two categories -
one, anti-depressants,
and the other, the pills
which are increasingly given -
Ritalin, Adderall and so forth -
to children in schools
who are diagnosed with
the mythical complaint ADHD.
(SOME LAUGHTER)
-I am glad you liked that.
-(LAUGHTER)
The whole approach of our society
is increasingly...
And let's just a move on for a second
from ADHD to its companion complaint
which is called oppositional
defiant disorder, ODD.
I personally have suffered from this
since the moment
I emerged from the womb.
(LAUGHTER)
And it is alarming to me since
I discovered the existence of ODD
that had I grown up and, indeed,
had my late brother grown up
in the society in which we now live,
it's not entirely impossible that
some genius might have thought that
both of us would've benefited from
a little course of Ritalin
or Adderall to control our ODD.
And this seems to me to be
an immensely sinister development
and one that people should be
much, much more angry about.
So, there is no such thing
as prohibition.
There is no war against drugs.
The alleged war against drugs
is filled with anomalies and
contradictions which make no sense.
It matters immensely to all of us
because the disaster
which could happen to any of us
or any of our children
if this drug does trigger the mental
illness which it appears to do
is limitless in its misery
and desolation.
It's time, it seems to me,
that we examine in any case
the immense selfishness which has
settled over our society,
and this is a very good place
to start.
The final argument which I would
just like briefly to deal with,
which is urged against
any attempt to control drugs,
is the one which says,
"Surely these cruel measures
create huge amounts of misery
"in such countries as Mexico
and Colombia and Afghanistan
"because the attempt
to interdict supply
"is resulting in the creation
of illegal drug gangs
"and a terrible murderous trade
which brings misery to many."
And I agree that this misery is huge
and the disaster, particularly
to Mexico, is almost limitless.
My answer to that is this -
the cause of this crisis
is not attempts
to interdict the supply of drugs.
The cause of the crisis
is the use of drugs
by spoilt Western rich kids
who pour into this trade
in their billions
pounds and dollars and euros,
thereby creating a huge criminal
enterprise which is uncontrollable.
And if you want to know
who the Mr Big is
who lies behind this hideous trade,
it's you.
And if you stopped taking those drugs
which you so casually take,
then that trade would die.
Yes, of course the prosecution
of any kind of law
preventing the distribution of
an illegal and dangerous substance
is going to be difficult.
Of course, the enforcement
of any law is so.
And there is this important sense
in which all crime is caused by law.
And to plead,
as drug legalisers so often do,
that if we would only abandon these
futile attempts to suppress drug use,
the gangs would die, there would be
no crime is doubly absurd.
First of all -
I can't speak for Australia
but I can speak for my own country,
and I've spoken to experienced
customs officers about this -
the major gang activity in Britain
is concentrated on legal cigarettes
and legal alcohol,
which are in one case smuggled
and in one case distilled
to avoid the enormous duties
which are imposed on them.
If any of you imagine that the
British Chancellor of the Exchequer
or the Australian Treasurer
would resist the temptation
to tax legal drugs as hard
as they possibly could,
then I think you're living
in a world of fantasy.
The existence of legal poisons
in society
does not prevent criminal enterprise
getting involved in them at all.
Secondly, the point about law is that
although it is difficult to enforce,
we enforce it because
we think it's worthwhile.
And simply to say enforcing law
is difficult
brings misery to those who are
prosecuted, puts people in prison,
causes policemen to do sometimes
very unpleasant things,
engages us in long and protracted
battles for control of the streets,
that's not the issue.
The issue is - is it worth it?
And my fundamental belief
is that it IS worth it.
That by continuing to fight
or indeed by starting to fight -
because we've almost given it up -
by starting to fight this war
we will save many, many people
from tragedies unimaginable
lasting their whole lives, affecting
many people beyond themselves
and affecting our whole society.
And what is more,
we will save ourselves
from the considerable threat
of being a stupefied
complacent society
which instead of confronting
the many ills
which are undoubtedly present
in all modern societies -
ills of poverty, of neglect,
of broken families,
of abandoned children,
of corrupt government -
instead of confronting them,
we sink into an armchair
and dope ourselves into contentment.
That's why there ought to be
a war against drugs.
Alright now, Peter,
you're being far too modest.
This is a beautifully written book,
it's very witty,
it's very provocative
and I don't think
people will not buy it
just because they disagree with it.
I think it is real food for thought.
-That's nice of you to say so.
-I've read every word.
You are, after all, a Hitchens
so the writing is magnificent.
We're going to take
some questions soon.
There is only one rule -
you have to ask a question.
They can be as pointed,
they can be as critical -
Peter is always up for a fight -
but you must ask a question.
Before we do that, there is a couple
of questions that I want to ask you.
There'll be a lot
of people here, Peter,
who saw David Simon's
talk last night.
David Simon, the writer,
the producer of 'The Wire'.
He said that the war on drugs
in America, though,
has become a class war
in the sense that the
principal victims of that war
are the poor African-American
communities, people in the ghettos.
They are being jailed
where, for example, the cocaine users
on Wall Street, they get away with it
because partly
it's a matter of class,
partly it's a matter of crack cocaine
being prosecuted in a different way.
-How do you address that?
-Oh, easily.
It's not an argument against
prosecuting people
for possessing illegal drugs.
I am an equal opportunity prosecutor,
an equal opportunity incarcerator.
If you take drugs,
I don't care who you are.
If you are caught in possession
of an illegal drug,
you should be prosecuted for it,
be never so high, be never so rich,
be never so white.
I don't think that criticising
the American state for -
I simply can't answer the charge
because I don't have details to hand,
but assuming the charge is true -
criticising the American state for
failing to prosecute enough people
is an argument against
prosecuting anybody.
It's an argument for
prosecuting more equally.
And I'm all in favour of the law
being above everybody.
And it isn't an argument against
the principle of using the law
to prevent people from doing
something stupid and dangerous.
How aggressive should
the prosecution be, though?
I mean, do you want people
to go to jail?
Do you believe in these "three
strikes and you're out" laws?
I don't want anybody to go to jail.
Jails are horrible places.
I visited a lot of them in many
countries and I would rather that
nobody went to them
if it could possibly be avoided.
But if people insist...
If you say, "This is against the law
"and if you do this,
we are going to punish you,"
and they then insist
on being punished,
then I think they should be.
The due punishment
of responsible persons
is the principle of any serious
criminal justice system.
But you do that not because
you want to lock them up
but because you want
to frighten people
into not doing the thing
that they've been locked up for.
Half the purpose of criminal justice
is deterrence.
And when criminal justice is weak
and deterrence fails,
the amount of crime increases
to such an extent -
as it is doing in
many Western societies -
that crime has to be
reclassified upwards
so that many things which used
to be crimes cease to be.
And the police simply can't cope,
and the prisons and the courts
simply can't cope
with the level of crime that exists
so we simply give up
on large amounts of crime.
And the crime which was created by
the drug trade in many, many forms
is one of the curses
of all modern urban societies.
But we don't want to
get to a situation
like you've got
in some parts of America
where they spend more
on incarceration
than early childhood education
or higher education.
I don't know whether you do
or whether you don't.
Sometimes you have to spend more
on things than others.
And, for instance,
there was a time in my country...
I imagine it's the same here.
There was a time in my country
when people drove around
on the roads drunk
and then we introduced
the breathalyser.
And for a period there were a number
of high profile prosecutions
and people got into
serious trouble for it,
and as a result
they stopped doing it.
To do that, they had to spend a lot
of money in a concentrated period
on the policing and on the courts
and on the punishment
to make it clear they meant business.
They don't need to do
so much of it now
because people have got the message.
That's how you use the law
to discourage antisocial,
dangerous, stupid behaviour.
And that will mean that
sometimes you have to spend more
on one thing than on another.
It's just as it always has been,
a matter of choice.
Do you want to reduce the danger
to the rising generation,
of ending up in a locked ward,
unable to support themselves
for the rest of their lives
and a burden, perhaps, in their late
teens on parents aged 60 and 70,
or don't you?
Alright, we're going to go now.
I think we've got the rich white kids
over here and the Mr Bigs over here.
-(LAUGHTER)
-We'll go to microphone one first.
G'day, mate.
My name is Harley Jones.
I'm the man behind probably some
of Australia's largest rave parties
for the last 12 years.
Upwards in numbers
of 9,500 people per event.
My question to you is, how does
legality define problematic?
Is the legality of a drug defining
the problematicness of a drug,
or does the legality of the drug
just make it blanket outlawed?
Thank you.
I am not quite sure
I understand the question.
Some drugs are illegal and they're
illegal for very good reasons...
Does the illegalness of that drug
make it problematic
or does the problematicness
define the legality?
Particularly
the laws against marijuana
were devised and resulted from
the campaigns of Russell Pasha
in Egypt in the 1920s
who was appalled by the devastation
that widespread use of marijuana
in that country
had had on the state
of young people there.
And as a result he went to
the League of Nations and said,
"Whatever you do make sure that
this doesn't happen elsewhere.
It didn't really matter
until the 1960s
when marijuana began to spread -
publicised greatly by the rock music
industry - began to spread -
which has given it free advertising
for years -
into much more widespread use.
At that point it was a good thing
that we had laws against it
or it would be even more
widespread than it is
and probably completely
uncontrollable by now.
But the law came
after the realisation
that the drug was damaging.
We'll take it in turns.
Microphone number two.
Hello, my name is James.
I respectfully disagree with
quite a few of your points.
Don't be respectful,
for goodness sake.
-(APPLAUSE)
-JAMES: I disrespectfully disagree.
Put up your dukes, come on.
Perhaps most importantly, my biggest
reservation against your argument
is that I feel like we can have
the exact same conversation
about any dangerous recreational
activity in our society.
We could be talking about
snowboarding,
we could be talking about people
drowning at the beach.
They teach this stuff
in civics lessons.
-(APPLAUSE)
-It's a style of boilerplate garbage.
It will be one about
alcohol and tobacco next.
-And I'll deal with that too.
-(LAUGHTER)
If you undertake a dangerous activity
such as rock climbing
or riding horses,
you'd take quite serious precautions
against the danger of it.
You learn how to do it well.
In the course of learning how to do
it well, you become a better person.
There is no training
that I know of...
(LAUGHTER)
Well, need I finish this sentence?
The comparison is, as we used to say
when I went to university, specious.
And there's a ruder word too.
This simply is not an argument
for making drugs legal.
There is no comparison between these
acquired, carefully trained skills
which make a person more courageous
and a more fulfilled
and complete person
and taking a drug
which makes you stupid
and quite possibly
will drive you mad.
(APPLAUSE)
You can have a follow-up.
But the difference is that
with other dangerous activities,
perhaps education,
as you quite rightly point out,
is the strategy used
for harm reduction
rather than criminalisation.
Why wouldn't education
be a better strategy for drugs?
-(APPLAUSE)
-Well, we have it.
We have it. And what it says is,
"Once you tell..."
The assumption of harm reduction...
This is also so in the comical
activity known as sex education.
The trouble with harm reduction
is it assumes that people are already
going to do something stupid
and as a result,
they take the message from that
that doing that stupid thing is OK.
And what's actually been achieved by
harm reduction so-called education
is the increasing mainstreaming
of what had previously been
an illegal frowned-on activity.
This is propaganda. It doesn't
actually put people off taking it.
There is no safe way
of taking a mind-altering drug.
You might not be the person
who ends up in the locked ward
but you might be.
There is...any more than there is any
safe way of playing Russian roulette.
You might be the person who gets the
empty chamber but you might not be.
There is no safe way.
The only sensible advice to give
somebody proposing to play
a game of Russian roulette
is "Don't do it."
(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)
Microphone one.
Hi, your definition of drugs is
fairly obviously a very umbrella term
which includes quite
a diverse range of products
from cannabis to pharmaceuticals
to cocaine and so forth.
What I am fundamentally
most interested in, though, is
why do you subscribe
to the accepted notion
that reality
as we currently experience it
is the kind of only...the be all
and end all of a human's experience
and there is no benefit to be had
from the epiphanies, the insights,
the experiences that can be gained
from mind-altering drugs?
-(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
-(LAUGHTER)
Well, I think that...
I mean, this, of course,
is the fundamental moral argument
that we must all face.
For me, it's very simple because
I believe that I'm a created being
given certain faculties which have
been given to me to be used.
And I have senses of immense power
and immense intricacy.
I'm fearfully
and wonderfully made
to be able to see, hear, smell
and understand
without needing in any way
to befuddle my mind with clouds
of smoke or chemicals.
And it is not...
There is no...
-Nothing.
-(LAUGHTER)
It is throwing the gifts
of your existing senses
in the face of those
who gave them to you.
And if you don't believe in God,
then try your parents.
It's throwing those gifts in the face
of those who gave them to you
to toy with your brain,
which you do not understand,
which even the most experienced and
enlightened and advanced neurologists
barely begin to understand
by poking into it in various forms
chemicals whose impact
upon your brain
you have absolutely no way
of measuring or predicting,
and which by taking you can actually
destroy or ruin that brain.
There simply is not any responsible
argument for doing that.
Apart from that, as I say,
reality is given to us.
It's beautiful enough,
it seems to me, as it is.
And if you don't like it, then
the response to not liking it
should not be for a moral person
to turn in on themselves and
dull their own perception of it.
If you don't like what's around you,
fix it, change it, reform it,
help the person you see in trouble,
don't dull your mind to their pain.
That is the simple moral point.
If you don't share
that moral position,
if you believe that the human
has no duty to his parents
to be responsible in the way
that he treats the gifts given him,
if you believe that you don't have
any responsibility
to reform and change reality
for the better when it's bad,
then of course we part company,
but I don't think very highly of you.
(APPLAUSE AND LAUGHTER)
Can I actually just come in there?
I'll come to you in a moment.
Can I come in there
with a question, though, Peter?
I'm a great lover of jazz music,
and it's widely thought
that one of the great exponents of
jazz music, Billie Holiday,
at times her life was wracked
with drug use and heroin,
and out of that pain, though,
came this extraordinary narrative
to music.
I mean, do you acknowledge
there may be occasions
when the pain produced by drugs can
in fact have some artistic merit?
I suppose it's possible.
You'd have to ask Billie Holiday,
really, whether it was worth it.
I don't know when you see the way
in which these lives end
that those who ended them in that way
would, if they'd known where
it would lead them, have chosen it.
Are we prepared to sacrifice
other people's lives
for a little bit
of passing pleasure on an iPod?
I don't know. Not me.
-We'll go to microphone two.
-(APPLAUSE)
I'm with you, by the way,
on the stance of "against drugs",
so just pointing that out.
-Careful on your way home.
-Yeah. Right.
-(LAUGHTER)
-I will. 
I'm going to have
to watch out for these guys.
ANDREW: They'll all be too stoned
to be able to beat him up.
-(LAUGHTER)
-Don't you believe that one.
At the same time,
it's very conflicting
because I am an advocate
for free will.
I guess the problem is
how do we as a society tackle...
..the idea of drug use
and acknowledgment of its harm,
and seeing that the harm
is far greater
than its "art creative" benefits.
And governmentally how can we...
There's no legislation, as you said,
it's too hard to regulate,
and formulas are changing so quickly
that it's pretty much impossible
to keep up with it.
This is an interesting
separate issue.
One of the things...
Again, it may be happening here,
it's certainly happening in Britain.
The increasing use
of mind-altering drugs
has led to a change in the way
in which people drink alcohol.
A large number of people,
particularly young people
in modern Britain,
now drink solely to get drunk
in a way which was largely unknown
20 or 30 years ago.
-Once you've established in socie...
-(MUTTERING)
No, no, it is an absolute
measurable change.
If you visit
the city centres of Britain
on a Friday or Saturday night now,
you can see it and nobody
who lived there would deny it.
ANDREW: Well, you can
see it here too.
I can't speak for here
because I don't live here,
but I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
But the point about it
is that the whole..
Once you have allowed into society
the idea that
self-stupefaction is OK,
then you unleash huge numbers
of probably uncontrollable forces -
the supposed legal highs
and all the other things.
Unless you are sending
a very, very powerful signal,
especially to the young, that
deters them from doing this at all,
it will become very, very common.
I would love a society ruled
entirely by conscience.
If I were a Utopian, which I am not,
that would be what I desire.
But because I am not a Utopian
I know it is not possible.
People's consciences fail them.
All of us have consciences 
which fail us,
if we acknowledge that
we have consciences at all,
that's where law comes in.
I would love it if we didn't need
to have these tedious laws
and to prosecute people
and put people in prison,
but where law has failed...
so, where morality has failed,
law must become strong.
And our society is bringing
this upon itself.
It must choose - either
it take steps to control this,
or we will find...
The Anglosphere countries are
immense triumphs of civilisation,
almost unique in human history
in having ordered liberty
and prosperity
on a level previously unknown
in human civilisation.
(MAN SPEAKS)
-Hang on a second.
-(LAUGHTER)
And we see the alternatives
to this in China,
which I fear very much is the future,
which has no liberty at all
but has a sort of prosperity.
But this has been reached
largely as a result
of having a culture
of considerable self-restraint.
If you throw that culture
of self-restraint away...
And drugs are very important
in getting rid of
the culture of self-restraint.
If you throw that away,
do you really think that
this society of ordered liberty
and prosperity will survive?
It's a ticket to the Third World.
Imagine if drug use were
effectively legal and widespread,
how many occupations would have
to be beset by incessant testing?
You couldn't rely on your children's
school bus driver not being stoned.
You couldn't rely on the surgeon
who was going to perform
your operation
or your airline pilot
not being stoned
unless everybody was being
submitted constantly
to compulsory drug testing.
(SCATTERED APPLAUSE)
That is the consequence of this sort
of collapse of moral restraint.
You place immense chains on it.
The less of this we have, the better.
But at the moment if we're
to prevent this becoming general,
we have to mount
a legal fight against it.
Having said that,
it's easier said than done,
encouraging a culture to practise
discipline and self-restraint.
Of course it is,
but nothing worth doing is easy.
MAN: Mr Hitchens, as a polemicist,
you are clearly inspired
by faith and not evidence.
(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)
In Holland where cannabis
taking in particular
and other drug use
is generally accepted
there is no higher instance
of drug taking
than the average throughout Europe.
In Portugal, they've had
decriminalisation for 10 years
aligned with social programs
and health programs
and they have seen
a decrease in drug use.
They've seen a decrease
in the negative health outcomes.
They've seen a decrease in the crime,
the associated crime that
goes along with drug addiction,
and a decrease in
the prison population.
Uruguay has recently
legalised cannabis,
they have set the price of it
to be the same as the previous street
level price to dissuade the gangs.
The evidence is out there,
it has been for many years
and there's increasing
evidence coming.
Will you not look at the evidence
and accept that position?
(APPLAUSE)
Why do you assume I haven't?
Because you don't seem to be
following what it says.
The point that I make
in my book is that -
and which I will make here now
for those who may or may not
be going to buy it -
is that the decriminalisation
of drugs in my own country
is far, far more extensive
than in either the Netherlands
or in Portugal.
And a huge controversy
about Portugal.
There was one report about it
which has a lot of currency on the
web, which is extremely unreliable.
Friends of mine recently visited it
and there is serious pressure
to reverse a lot of the changes.
It's not by any means
as simple as you claim.
What is going on in Uruguay
has yet to be tested.
As I say again,
all crime's caused by law.
You can avoid all kinds of problems
by not attempting to enforce the law,
but then what about the other things
which happen as a result?
Various crimes in Portugal
have gone down,
for instance, the petty theft crimes,
the mugging, etc,
they have seen significant reduction.
If the government mugs the taxpayer
on behalf of the heroin abuser,
which is the case in my country
to the tune of several hundred
million pounds a year,
then of course the heroin abuser
doesn't need to go out
and do any mugging, does he?
Why the government should become
a thief on behalf of heroin abusers,
I don't know.
But that is... The methadone program,
which is the British government's
response to this,
and a largely disastrous and failed
one, effectively does that.
It says, "We will supply you with
a heroin substitute on the taxpayer."
What many of
the heroin abusers then do
is go and sell the methadone
and go and buy heroin.
That doesn't seem to me to be either
a practical or a moral solution
to the problem that people
are ruining their lives.
Do you want them to ruin their lives
or don't you?
I don't want them to.
You don't seem to care much.
(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)
Number two. We're having
a rollicking debate.
-(LAUGHTER)
-Hello, my name is Sam.
I just wanted to ask you
about the alcohol problem
which you say is so easy to address.
My brother works in mental health
and everything that he deals with
is a result of alcohol abuse.
I understand that there is a symptom
of taking something could be abusive,
that fact, but surely...
I don't understand how you can argue
completely against,
so prohibition instead of education,
because alcohol consumption
isn't always the problem,
it's the abuse of that through lack
of education and measures to help.
Like, I'm just confused how you can
say it's such an easy thing to solve.
-Let me de-confuse you.
-(ANDREW LAUGHS)
If alcohol were now at the level of
use in our society that cannabis was
and were as new to our new society
as marijuana is,
I think most people in this room
would be in favour of banning it.
It's only because it's been
in use in our civilisation
for thousands of years,
is part of our culture,
is widely accepted
that we put up with it.
Many of us will know from
direct personal experience
the devastating effect
that alcohol can have,
particularly on family life,
and the horrible things
which result from it.
And I yield to no-one
in my dislike for it
and my desire for it to be
very, very strictly controlled.
We threw away in Britain, in the
1980s under the Thatcher government,
we threw away
very sensible laws against it
which had taken 100 years to obtain
and which greatly controlled
the menace.
And we now have
a terrible alcohol problem.
But the problem is that
you can't approach each problem
as if it's exactly the same.
Precisely because alcohol
is so deep in our culture
it would be impossible
to make it directly illegal.
The government of Iran officially
prohibits alcohol use entirely,
but because in fact Persian culture
and much Persian poetry
and all the rest of it
has long sanctioned
the use of alcohol -
it's very deep in Iranian culture -
they have failed completely.
Whereas other measures such as
the strict licensing laws
which some of the Scandinavian
countries introduced
and which we used to have
are quite effective.
It's simply a different level
of response.
But what does seem to me to be
absolutely the case is that
we have in our society
two disastrous legal poisons
in the form of alcohol
and cigarettes.
It would be insane while we still
have the chance to prevent it
to allow a third, a fourth and a
fifth legal poison in amongst us,
wouldn't it?
-(APPLAUSE)
-Microphone one.
OK, so you're seeming to argue that
making these things illegal
will be stopping children
from accessing them,
but I don't think that's the case.
Shouldn't you be looking at why they
are taking them in the first place?
Yeah, sure, they take them
because they like taking them
and because their friends
urge it on them.
That's the...
Also, the idea that 100%
complete success will be achieved
by enforcing the law is futile.
Although murder is illegal
and burglary is illegal
and mugging is illegal,
we haven't, despite enforcing the law
against those reasonably efficiently,
we haven't actually
stamped them out entirely.
They will still happen and people
will still get hold of them.
If a law is seriously enforced,
it will mean fewer people,
considerably fewer people
will take them
and have access to them.
And those who sell them
will find it harder to do so
and will to a great extent
be put out of business.
I don't know whether
you're trying to make some case
that in a country as prosperous
and beautiful as this,
people need to take drugs
because they are so miserable
because I'm sorry, I don't
understand that, complete cobblers.
(SCATTERED APPLAUSE)
MAN: I'd like to touch on something
that you mentioned very briefly
which is about legal pharmaceuticals
like ADHD medication
and antidepressants.
Now, I suffer from depression,
a very dark form of depression
that has led to suicide attempts,
and I'm just wondering
why you would group
ADHD medication
and antidepressants,
drugs which do genuinely help people,
into the same sort of category
as a cannabis or a heroin?
(APPLAUSE)
Because they don't.
I can recommend to anybody here,
and you can take this down slowly,
there are two articles by Marcia
Angell - that's A-N-G-E-L-L -
in 'The New York Review of Books',
which are available on the web,
which describe in detail,
by reviewing serious books
on the subject, how.
First of all, the serotonin theory
of depression is not true.
Secondly, that the evidence that
antidepressants have any effect
is thin to the point of nonexistence
because the major drug companies
actually suppressed -
that they've been forced to disgorge
under freedom of information
legislation -
the full range of their tests,
which in many cases show
that the difference
between the antidepressant
and the placebo was nonexistent.
Thirdly, of course,
there is the other point
that there is, again, a growing
and frightening correlation...
I am not going to comment
on your individual case
because it's none of my business.
There is a growing
and frightening correlation
between the taking, particularly of
SSRI antidepressants, and suicide.
And many of them
in the United States,
the packets in which they are sold
have to carry warnings
of suicidality.
And you will also find, and this is
terribly anecdotal of course,
but it happens to be true,
that in about 80%
of the rampage shootings
in Europe and North America
over the past 20 years,
the culprits were taking
antidepressant medication.
This seems to me to be
a matter for urgent investigation.
I don't know the answer to it
but it would seem to me that
with these facts available,
it's time that we asked very serious
questions about these things.
-(SCATTERED APPLAUSE)
-This is not unscientific.
It's not at all a long time since
psychiatrists and neurologists
were conducting lobotomies on people
in the belief that these were serious
and constructive medical practices,
now found not to be so.
We don't know enough
about the human brain
to do the things
that we're doing with it.
And I would be very wary of assuming
that because the medical profession
and the pharmaceutical companies
claim that these things are so
that they necessarily are.
We want to squeeze in
three more questions.
We'll go to microphone three
and then to microphone one.
Hi, my name is Andrew.
As a police officer
who pretty much sees
the negative effects of drugs
on society nearly every shift,
my first question is
what is the evidence to suggest
that legalising drugs makes it
more prevalent in society?
And what am I doing
to actually help drug users
when I do charge them
and I do prosecute them?
I am not helping them at all.
Like, there's nothing I can do
to actually help them
by actually prosecuting them,
by taking them to court,
it doesn't help them at all,
so I'd like you to comment on that.
-As I understand it, you're...
-(APPLAUSE)
Did you say you're a police officer
or a social worker?
-(SCATTERED LAUGHTER)
-Police officer.
Right, your job
is to enforce the law.
You are not supposed to help people.
-(GROANING)
-Your job is to enforce the law.
-No, that's what we pay them for.
-(SCATTERED APPLAUSE)
That's... Certainly in my country
they swear an oath to uphold the law
without fear or favour.
You are not a social worker,
you're not there to help people,
you are there to enforce the law.
And if people break it,
you're there to arrest them for it
and provide evidence for their
prosecution, that's your job.
If you don't like doing it,
then there is always social work.
-(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)
-It definitely is my job.
But by doing what I do - and I have
no shame in doing what I do
because it is my job, I have to
uphold the law and all that -
it doesn't help the individual.
I hope you're not ashamed of it.
The thing is I see drugs
all the time.
I see the effects of drugs
all the time.
However, the actions that police
take, it's not helping society.
It just really isn't.
And the things that
you've said today, like...
You're not on the front,
you're not seeing it.
I don't know, you're reading on it
from a theoretical perspective.
You have no evidence
to actually back up
a lot of things that you've said,
whereas there are people
on the frontline -
social workers, police officers,
people who work in the hospitals -
they see the effects of drugs.
And by making it illegal, or the
fact that it's already illegal,
it's not helping at all.
-You say, "making it illegal"...
-(APPLAUSE)
I don't know why you
are applauding THAT.
You say, "making it illegal,"
and here is the problem.
I don't know the detailed
arrangements
by which this will happen
in Australia,
but I'm sure it does happen.
I doubt very much whether
your force or your courts
or your prosecutors have enforced
the law against marijuana possession
in any serious fashion
for about 30 years.
And no wonder if you do that
that you have an awful lot of people
roaming around the streets
with drug problems.
The decision has been taken,
usually by politicians,
to allow this to happen.
And ultimately a police officer knows
that he is wasting his time
arresting somebody who is not going
to be seriously prosecuted
and not going to be
seriously penalised
so the police withdraw
from the issue.
That's where you are.
You talk quite rightly
if we're going to have a law -
because effectively if a law
is not enforced you don't have it.
The Western countries
by various means -
in the United States largely by
the fantasy and phony red herring
of medical marijuana,
and in my country by actually
officially letting people off -
have given up prosecuting
or enforcing the law
as passed by parliament.
That's why you have lots of people
roaming around your beat,
or whatever it is you have,
who have got problems with drugs.
But you're not there to help them,
you're there to enforce the law.
But I doubt very much
whether your superiors
would be terribly pleased
if you did.
OK, I'm going to have to put on
my radio presenter's hat now.
We have two more questions.
Very briefly, ma'am,
at microphone one.
I'm an obstetrician gynaecologist
practising in Sydney
for over 30 years.
I'd like to support your war on drugs
and know that it does make a
difference if we can keep it illegal.
Because it does, it affects their
abstract thinking on the long-term.
And there are genetic studies that
have shown that certain people
with certain gene problems
have a high risk of depression.
So in the future
they'll be coming to that
where they'll be discovering
more things about the connection
because the brain development,
especially when the baby is forming,
it blunts the astrocytes.
-The other thing was...
-ANDREW: Very briefly.
We had plain paper packaging
brought out by the last government
and it was a wonderful thing.
Anecdotally, education is not enough,
enforcement and social engineering
is required.
-Well, thank you.
-(LAUGHTER AND SCATTERED APPLAUSE)
A final question.
Just with regards
to the regulation of drugs,
do you think that by regulating and
maybe not making things so illegal
that it opens the channels for people
and remove the stigma
for people to seek help
with regards to addiction
or problems they may face
with drug or alcohol abuse?
No, I'm sorry it has come
at this stage
but I have to say I don't believe
addiction exists.
It's an excuse people make
for lack of human will.
-(LAUGHTER)
-But there is no...
You can giggle about it but I doubt
whether any of you could come up with
an objective definition
of the presence of addiction
in the human body
because there isn't one.
And once you've reached that point,
you begin to realise what this is,
it's a philosophical concept designed
to relieve people of responsibility.
I see absolutely no sign whatsoever
that the current state of the law
prevents anybody who wants to seek
what's called help from getting it.
I personally believe if you happen
to believe in the theory of addiction
or even if you don't,
the idea that allowing people to
become habitual users of drugs
before anything happens to them
is a bit of a mistake.
If you really believe that
it's like in 'French Connection II'
where you have a few goes of heroin
and then you're helplessly
hooked for life,
then surely the thing to do
is to prevent people
from ever having any contact
with it in the first place
by deterring them with severely
enforced and believable laws.
But, no, the current state of the
law, unless I am much mistaken,
in this country, certainly in mine,
is that there is no attempt
whatever made
to make legal trouble for people
caught in possession of heroin.
In fact there is a famous supposed
alleged rock star in Britain
called Pete Doherty,
who a couple of years ago
was found in a courthouse -
having just been in court
for possession of heroin -
with some several wraps of heroin
in his coat pocket,
which fell to the floor
of the courthouse
and were observed
by a security officer,
and he walked free from the building.
So there is no...
We're always told that,
"We're going to leave off the soft
drugs to free up the police..."
It's always...
Why don't they free them down?
..to pursue heroin abuse,
they don't do that either.
There is no legal deterrence
for people to seek help.
The problem is that when they seek
help, the help they get tends to be
help which assumes they're going
to carry on taking drugs
because that's the assumption
of our society in general.
We don't actually try to stop
people from taking drugs.
Well, the golden rule of journalism
is the last question always yields
the most revelatory answer.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much
for being part of this debate.
It really has been
a very feisty debate.
Peter's book is called
'The War We Never Fought: The British
Establishment's Surrender to Drugs'.
Peter Hitchens, thank you very much
for coming to
the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.
(APPLAUSE)
