Peter Hitchens learnt something from his days as a Trot
In recent years I have noticed that Peter Hitchens, the right-wing columnist who is steadfastly against any relaxation of the drug laws has come up with an eye-catching formulation regarding this policy area.
He claims that there is no "War on Drugs". His argument is that liberal society is turning a blind eye to drug use and the police and authorities talk a good game but essentially pedal softly. His further argument is that until we crack down "properly" on everything to do with drugs then the problems will continue.
It's a neat way of trying to justify why the current policy has failed. It's not because as people like me would have you believe, prohibition of drugs causes many of the problems but because we haven't had enough prohibition. Or at least we've had the wrong sort of prohibition. Do you see? Those of us who are campaigning for an end to our nonsensical drug laws have got it totally arse about face.
Of course I disagree with Hitchens on this. Tell the thousands of people every year who are locked up for minor drugs offences and/or have their lives ruined with a criminal record that there is no War on Drugs.
But the more I have heard Hitchens pedal this line, the more it has reminded me of something from my youth.
In the 1980s as I was coming of age politically, as the USSR was clearly in decline and other countries where Communism had been experimented with such as Cuba showed how such states always seem to degenerate into some sort of Totalitarian dystopia a curious thing happened. Proponents of Communism argued that "True Communism" had never really been tried. Despite the evidence staring them in the face that their One True Way simply did not work they raged against the dying of the light essentially saying that the problem was we hadn't had enough Communism.
It is no surprise to me that Peter Hitchens was a Trotskyist in his youth. And even though he has repudiated much of what he learnt during that phase of his life he has certainly kept some of their rhetorical tricks in his arsenal. He should not get a free pass on this.
There is another interesting parallel here. Those who so passionately argued that we needed more or proper Communism were blind to the fact that the actual outcome of their ideology was what had happened in real countries time and again in the real world. They weren't anomalies, they were the evidence of what happens when you try to follow that route.
Exactly the same applies with the War on Drugs. Country after country after country has tried prohibiting many, many substances. The end result has been an explosion in drug use and violence from criminal gangs across the world in the last 40 years. These are not side effects from the "wrong sort of War on Drugs". They are the end result of the current policy.
Exactly like the solution to the problems with Communism was not more Communism, so the problems with the current drug laws cannot be more of the same, even in a more hard line form. That would simply exacerbate the problem.
What we actually need is Glasnost and Peristroika in our drugs policy where we are honest about what has failed and are open to what we need to do to improve them.
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