The British Establishment formally surrendered to the drugs culture at a Cabinet meeting shortly before lunch on Thursday, February 26, 1970. It was the quiet end of a war that had been surprisingly brief and gentle, if not actually phoney.
Since that date there has been no serious official resistance to the view that the use of drugs, especially cannabis, is inevitable and not specially damaging.
It is generally accepted that those who use them are either the pitiable victims of others or are pursuing a reasonable pleasure that is no business of the State.
There has been an near-hysterical official hostility to the production and sale of the same drugs. But this hostility is made almost entirely futile by the law’s leniency towards those who buy the very substance whose supply and sale is considered so villainous.
This contradictory, self-defeating hysteria has successfully given the impression – to credulous and ill-informed observers – that a non-existent ‘War against Drugs’ is taking place.
The idea is spread, in debate and in popular TV dramas such as The Wire, that most of the evils caused by drug abuse would end if we legalised drugs.
8)