The BBC’s finest ... peddling deadly cocaine

I WAS banned from the BBC’s supposedly wonderful Today programme several years ago, after I gave a live on-air pasting to the pro-drug Professor David Nutt. Before that I used to get on quite a lot, but since then, nothing.

I have often wondered since if the programme had a deepseated bias against our drug laws. It always seemed to give prominent coverage to any call to soften those laws.

Well, on Thursday morning, I think we got proof.

Today once essential, has in recent years become so dull and complacent that I often doze off while listening.

It is claimed that its audience has gone up. If so it must be composed of supermarket check-out robots, whose idea of excitement is to shout ‘Unexpected item in bagging area!’ Nobody else could actively want to listen to its lifeless daily rehearsals of Leftish conventional wisdom.

But on Thursday there was an unexpected item in the drugging area. I suddenly realised I was listening to a man giving out the current prices for various kinds of cocaine.

Hang on, I thought, as I shook myself into full wakefulness. The programme normally gives out exchange rates for the US dollar, and the stock market index. But the price of cocaine? This was new. Cocaine is a Class A drug under the Misuse Of Drugs Act 1971.

This means you can get life imprisonment for selling it, and seven years in jail for buying it. To want to know the price, or to give it out, surely condones a serious crime.

And the BBC has a vested interest in being in favour of law enforcement. Its licence fee is collected under the threat of fines and imprisonment.

If the BBC wants that law enforced, it must surely support all law enforcement. I can’t see it being pleased if other media gave soft, wet interviews to advocates of licence-fee evasion.

Yet here was some bloke merrily discoursing on what cocaine costs, which is surely of no interest to any law-abiding person.

Then, wholly unchallenged by an utterly soppy presenter, this character claimed it was ‘difficult to have honest conversations saying you can use lots of drugs with relatively low risks, for most people, if you follow some simple strategies’.

Difficult? Where is it difficult? What’s difficult is to call for the law to be enforced.

Who now denies that cocaine is in common, unchecked use among students, bankers, politicians and, perhaps above all, media and broadcasting types? The guest added (still uninterrupted): ‘Instead of simply saying to people, “Don’t use drugs, they’re dangerous”, that’s not a useful dialogue for people who are making informed decisions to use drugs as a wider lifestyle.

‘That person might also go to yoga and be a vegetarian. You know it’s about a lifestyle choice and we need to help people stay safe with the choices they make.’

I asked the BBC for a response. Not merely was that response useless in the extreme, and nothing to do with the questions I had asked, they actually asked me to use it in full.

Well, I haven’t room to do that, but I will post it on my blog so that you can laugh at it.

Instead of currency prices, we got the current cost of hard drugs