And now for something completely ridiculous…

Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail

Eliot Ness couldn’t stop booze, but he would win today’s war on drugs

[…] If only our policies were actually punitive. But drug use and possession are almost entirely unpunished, which is why they carry on growing.

As for ‘prohibition‰, the drug lobby uses this expression to mislead the gullible into comparing the winnable struggle against narcotics with the doomed war against booze fought by the ‘Untouchables‰ and others in Twenties Chicago. Alcohol had been legal for centuries, part of the culture of Christian civilisation. You might as well try to make breathing illegal. But cannabis, cocaine and heroin are alien to our world, and could be driven out by firm action.

Actually, US Prohibition recognised that the cause was lost before it began. Congress never made it illegal to drink or keep alcohol, only to sell, transport or make it. Our most important drug laws are utterly unlike Prohibition because they rightly ban possession. And if our cowardly courts and bureaucratic police would only enforce the existing law, we would see a swift decline in the use of illegal drugs.

I particularly like the line: “But cannabis, cocaine and heroin are alien to our world, and could be driven out by firm action.” Right — it’s not like they just… grow in the ground or anything. They came in spaceships. We need to be firm and tell the space aliens to load up their cannabis, cocaine and heroin and take it all back to planet Druggie.
In actuality, Peter Hitchens is whole lot more alien to this world than cannabis.
In one way, I would actually like to see Peter Hitchens’ message spread further. I would like to take all the people in jail for drug offenses and put them in a room* with Hitchens and let him explain to the group that the “cowardly courts and bureaucratic police” aren’t enforcing drug laws.
That would be something to see.