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

Front Cover
A&C Black, Dec 6, 2012 - Political Science - 256 pages
Again and again British politicians, commentators and celebrities intone that 'The War on Drugs has failed'. They then say that this is an argument for abandoning all 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. This gave cannabis, the most widely used illegal substance, a special legal status as a supposedly 'soft' drug (in fact, Hitchens argues, it is at least as dangerous as heroin and cocaine because of the threat it poses to mental health). It began a progressive reduction of penalties for possession, and effectively disarmed the police.

This process still continues, behind a screen of falsely 'tough' rhetoric from politicians. Far from there being a 'war on drugs', there has been a covert surrender to drugs, concealed behind an official obeisance to international treaty obligations. To all intents and purposes, cannabis is legal in Britain, and other major drugs are not far behind.

In The War We Never Fought, Hitchens uncovers the secret history of the government's true attitude, and the increasing recruitment of the police and courts to covert decriminalisation initiatives, and contrasts it with the rhetoric. Whatever and whoever is to blame for the undoubted mess of Britain's drug policy, it is not 'prohibition' or a 'war on drugs', for neither exists.
 

Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface
Part One The Secret Capitulation
Cannabis is a cause
How to sink giggling into the
Psychiatry is not an exact science
The real purpose of classification a better image for cannabis
No use appealing to God Try John Stuart Mill?
The left casts off its puritan garments
The mysterious spread of cannabis
Jaggerism is invented
Bloomsbury takes over Britain via the airwaves
Steve Abrams steps up to explain
The long march Wootton and after
Widdecombe unfair
Dame Ruth Runciman and the liberal establishment

Cannabis and violence
What about alcohol and tobacco then?
The Cabinet gets it wrong
Enter Richard Crossman
Jim Callaghans last stand
Part Two The Search for Soma
Aldous Huxley
Legislation on the beat Brian Paddick
The great red herring medical marijuana
Freeing up or freeing down?
Some notes on harm reduction and rehabilitation
The demoralisation of Britain
Index
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2012)

Peter Hitchens is a British journalist, author and broadcaster. He witnessed most of the final scenes of the Cold War, and was a resident correspondent in the Soviet capital and in Washington, DC. He frequently revisits both Russia and the USA. He currently writes for the Mail on Sunday, where he is a columnist and occasional foreign correspondent, reporting most recently from Iran, North Korea, Burma, The Congo and China. He won the journalism category in the 2010 George Orwell Prize for this correspondence.