Pubdate: Sun, 21 Oct 2007
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Copyright: 2007 Associated Newspapers Ltd
Contact:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/108
Author: Peter Hitchens
Photo: Richard Brunstrom's approach to policing is incompentent, 
Peter Hitchens argues http://www.mapinc.org/images/RichardBrunstrome.jpg
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/opinion.htm (Opinion)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Richard+Brunstrom
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?207 (Cannabis - United Kingdom)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

MOTORISTS FEAR YOU, MR BRUNSTROM ...SO WHY NOT JUNKIES?

If Richard Brunstrom wants to make life hard for speeding drivers, he 
has my full support, though I much prefer patrol cars to cameras.

The results of speeding are often horrible. If fining people makes 
them slow down, then fine them.

I say this partly because I want to make it clear that my scorn for 
the North Wales Chief Constable's plan to legalise drugs has no other 
motive or reason, except that I think he is a dangerous and defeatist 
person whose approach to drugs is morally deficient, and he is unfit 
to run a police force.

Mr Brunstrom is obviously a publicity-seeking show-off, though that 
is not necessarily a bad thing in a Chief Constable.

I wish we had a few noisy, headline-hungry police chiefs who wanted 
to put constables back on foot patrol, who applied existing laws 
against drug possession rigorously and who refused to discipline 
officers who walloped the occasional lout. But I digress.

He is typical of what I call the demoralisation of the British 
governing classes. He appears to have no clear idea of right and 
wrong. He has swallowed, whole and unchewed, the crudest propaganda 
of the pro-drug lobby.  You can always spot them. Alcohol and tobacco 
are bad, they say. Yet they are legal. So why not make other bad 
drugs legal too?

I just do not know how dim you would have to be to fall for this 
brain-dead false logic. Why does the existence of two damaging legal 
poisons justify the licensing of three more?

The fact that alcohol and tobacco are part of our culture and 
society, and have been for hundreds of years, makes it virtually 
impossible to ban them now.  Even the Ayatollahs of Iran have failed 
to stamp out alcohol.

So it is too late to make them illegal. This is not the case with 
cannabis, that unlucky lottery ticket to the mental ward, nor for 
cocaine or heroin in all their forms. Most people in this country 
have never touched these poisons, and many of those who have, have 
done so only once or twice.

It would still be possible, with courage and determination, to drive 
these things out of our society almost completely, and certainly to 
confine them to a squalid mini-minority, despised, criminalised and 
marginalised, where they would pose little threat to our children.

But that would be difficult, which is partly why it has not been 
tried, and why the alleged "war against drugs" is a fiction, in which 
we have made showy, feeble efforts to stem the supply, while doing 
absolutely nothing to slow the demand. Actually arresting and 
prosecuting and punishing people for possessing drugs would be 
effective. But it would bring the police into conflict with one of 
the most influential lobbies in Britain, that of the Sixties 
generation who think drugs are cool -- and of their children, who 
have been brought up with the same belief.

I do not know if Mr Brunstrom is afraid of these lobbies or has 
simply been captured by them. I do know that the Government, while 
pretending to be firm on the matter, has more or less accepted Mr 
Brunstrom's position. We learned this week that the drug addict's 
"reward" for reducing his intake of brain-rotting filth is a gift -- 
from the taxpayer -- of more toxic filth.

This futile, blackly comic process is called "rehabilitation" and 
"treatment". It does not work.  Punishment and fear would, just as 
they do for speeding motorists. When drugs come into a family, they 
create just as much misery as a car crash. The mystery is why Mr 
Brunstrom understands that punishment and fear work for drivers, but 
denies that they do for drug-takers. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake