The BBC’s addicted to drugs hype
THE scandalous takeover of the BBC’s flagship Today programme by the drug lobby has just got even worse. You may recall a few weeks ago a drug propagandist giving out the street prices of cocaine (the buying and selling of which are imprisonable offences) quite unchallenged, on this programme.
This is just one of many instances where the arguments of drug legalisers are prominently presented without serious challenge, on this and other BBC programmes. If, like me, you oppose this policy, you are hardly ever asked on.
On Thursday, under the guise of a debate on the Government’s failed attempt to restrict ‘legal highs’, the Today programme invited two people to give their views. The BBC’s charter says it should be impartial on major controversies. So you might think they would have been balanced – one on one side, one on the other. Not a bit of it. The first, Kirstie Douse, pictured left, was introduced as ‘head of legal services for Release, that’s an organisation that campaigns on drugs and drugs law’. I’ll say. Release has been lobbying ferociously for the weakening of drug laws for 50 years.
The second was Mike Trace, described as ‘the former deputy drugs tsar’. This is technically correct. But Mr Trace, just like Ms Douse, is in fact (to put it mildly) a veteran fighter against anti-drug laws. So the BBC’s idea of balance is to invite on two people who completely agree and nobody who dissents. How is this even allowed? Then it made it worse, allowing them to be questioned by a clueless, gullible presenter. John Humphrys has been absurdly attacked this week for an interview about fashion. Who cares? But on this occasion he allowed Ms Douse to get away with the claim that ‘we know that the law enforcement approach in a country doesn’t have any impact on levels of [drug] use’.
This isn’t true. Japan, where drug possession is still treated as a crime, has much less drug use than Britain. But legalisers try to slither out of this awkward fact by claiming (without a scrap of evidence) this is due to Japanese ‘culture’. If so, why don’t foreigners in Japan ignore the law and smoke dope in the street, the way people do in London? Do they too have a different ‘culture’?
Mr Humphrys doesn’t know this because, like the rest of the BBC, he seldom if ever speaks to anyone who disagrees with the billionaire drug-legalisation lobby. We have to wonder, why is the Corporation so sympathetic to that lobby?