The War We Never Fought · the British Establishment's Surrender to Drugs

Peter Hitchens demolishes the arguments for liberalising legislation on drugs and offers a brilliant critique of the cannabis lobby and its intellectual and moral shallowness. Again and again British politicians, commentators and celebrities intone that 'The War on Drugs has failed'. This is then used as an argument for abandoning attempts to reduce drug use through the criminal law. Peter Hitchens shows that in Britain, there has been no serious 'war on drugs' since 1971, when a Tory government adopted a Labour plan to implement the revolutionary Wootton report. The special legal status of cannabis as a supposedly 'soft' drug (in fact, Hitchens argues, the threat it poses to mental health makes it at least as dangerous as heroin and cocaine) began a progressive reduction of penalties for possession, effectively disarming the police.