It must be 35 years since I flung an old friend out of my tiny North London flat for bringing cannabis into my home. I was still pretty modishly Left-wing about most things in those days. But I felt (as I feel now) a special disgust against drugs. How could it not be wrong to deliberately dim and dull your senses? If you don’t like the world as it is, then change it. Don’t numb yourself into apathy. I have to say that when I told him to get out, I thought I was expressing a pretty conventional opinion. It only dawned on me later just how out of tune I was with the times.
Not that it’s a bad thing to be unfashionable. In fact it’s more or less a duty, if your mind is alive. People have told me since – and they were only half-joking – that Harriet Harman and I were probably the only two people at the University of York in the early 1970s who didn’t smoke dope. I know directly of several outwardly respectable figures who take drugs and let their children do the same.
And, while I feel a wave of hatred beating against me whenever I walk into a BBC studio, it is never so strong as when I have come there to argue against the weakening of the drug laws. In fact they have pretty much stopped asking me to discuss this at all, since I dared to give a hard time to their favourite advocate of drug law relaxation, Professor David Nutt (how long before he gets his own show?). Drug abuse, you see, isn’t just a minor fringe activity. It is the secret vice of the whole British Establishment. I wonder how many government and media buildings would get through a thorough search for traces of cocaine, for instance.
